Looking through the new features of Facebook, I saw this interesting addition:

Edit your profile info straight from your profile.
To edit your “Personal Information” section, just click on one of the fields, like Activities, and edit the section directly from your profile.

Here’s what it looks like:

As some of you might know, I wrote a tutorial on how to do Edit-In-Place awhile ago. User Janos asked:

Any usability test with this method? How many user will recognize that you should go over the text and click to be able to edit the data?

It seems that this recent adoption by Facebook is just one of the many sites that are taking this “Edit-In-Place” approach. We’ve seen this for awhile on flickr and now with Facebook, tons of users are going to become familiar with this web metaphor.

I think it is safe to say that within the next few years of the web, “Edit-In-Place” will become the de-facto standard for editing profile information as well as other kinds of info (like photo names and comments). We only have to wait and see what the applications will be, but I am confident that most web users will become comfortable with this technique. This is great since sometimes innovative and intuitive computer techniques require getting your users to unlearn the unintuitive, older conventions.

What are your thoughts on this? Is “Edit-In-Place” the correct next step? What else is transforming web metaphors?