Samuel Axon- Mashable.com

Update: 80 million users will have the new design live tonight.

Facebook is celebrating its sixth birthday today with a dramatic redesign of the homepage that millions of people see when they log on every day.

We’ve already seen images of this new design in the past, and all the things we said to watch for are included. It places a new emphasis on search and lets you sort through much more information without ever leaving the homepage. You can even send messages without navigating away.

Facebook confirmed to us that the redesign is already rolling out to users. Everyone will get access to the new homepage shortly, and Facebook plans to post an update to its blog announcing the changes later today. In the meantime, the lucky few who have the new homepage are posting pictures on their blogs, Twitter, and elsewhere. The best repository we’ve seen is Matthew Sanders’ Posterous; it’s where we got the images in this post

A More Powerful Homepage

The pics show a much larger and more prominently placed search bar, which is just another example of how Facebook means business with search.

Facebook added real-time search features several months ago, and many of its recent privacy changes were made in the hopes that users would make some of their updates public so others could search for information just like they already do on Twitter and some other networks.

Many of the items (like groups and events) that were kept in the Applications menu in the bottom left have been moved back to the left sidebar on the main page. Rather than taking you to a new page, these now open within the main window where the feed usually appears.

Notably absent are the Friends lists. These may still exist for the purpose of the privacy features for updates and profile info, but we don’t see them as sorting options for the news feed in the images that have come out. Hopefully they’re still running in the background somehow. If you have a lot of friends, the noise can be too much if you don’t break them out into groups.

Easier Messaging

Instant messaging and the e-mail-like message inbox have been moved out of the periphery as well. Not only can you check your inbox from a dropdown menu at the top, you can send messages from there as well — again, all without leaving the front page. Your IM contact list is no longer hidden in a popup menu in the bottom right; it’s now in the left sidebar.