Facebook Blog

Hey folks - as people have pointed out, this is actually just a hoax. Facebook is not launching a "Pro" version. This blog's author has a page at http://cd34.com/facebook/ which explains that the idea is a joke to get media attention: "Please set your profile picture active prior to 9am EST December 11th so that I can do a quick check and submit the article to the 'news media'." For information about Facebook product launches, you can follow our official blog at http://blog.facebook.com/. Matt Facebook Security

Keep in mind that these "groups" are different from the previous version of groups that facebook use to have. You get a notification when added to a group and can easily leave with one click. Groups are private by default which means that nobody outside of the group can see your private groups or any of the content. This has made facebook a lot more interesting for me. Essentially it's a great way to have private discussions between my close group of friends without broadcasting to all my "friends". The facebook blog has a video overview: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=434700832130

"Mr Zuckerberg said that developers had "worked weekends, camped out in the conference centre" in order to overhaul its privacy settings." Just like they did back in september 2006 when Zuckerberg said: "I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls." http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130 Maybe they should reiterate first, listen to feedback and suggestions (like youropenbook.org), draw out, a/b test privacy settings pages, offer more transparency in the process and -then- start finalize coding their 'best' way to control these.

I think Charles is right to be concerned about the current state of privacy in social media, but I take issue with his statement that facebook is deliberately making it harder to make your content private. If you click on Privacy setting in facebook today the first thing you're greeted with is a big control asking you if you want your profile to be public /friends/custom. But first you have to care enough to click on it. Building social network privacy controls is not an easy problem b/c people don't want to do the extra work that's involved in setting privacy on things that they post AND it's confusing. Most people just don't want to choose a circle for their 300 fb friends. Facebook has gone through many iterations of privacy controls - https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=391922327130 goes into some of that history. Some of them even included google circle-like functionality for privacy. No one used them. I'm not saying that these controls couldn't be improved, but the point here is that privacy controls take work from users. Until society as a whole is aware of these issues (and Girls Around Me does a great job of it :), people aren't going to invest the time to do it. TL;DR - building privacy controls are hard. The industry as a whole needs to improve them, but society also needs to learn to care about their privacy so they actually use what's available to them.

Interesting. I wonder if Swiftype uses Apache Lucene/Solr/Nutch as backend. Facebook is listed as Client. They have a contract with Microsoft (Bing) and have at least two internal search engines. One of them is the type-ahead one as explained there: https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=369584442130 https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=389105248919 I assume FB uses Swiftype not for the main FB website, maybe the developer documentation or some PR sites. (They use(d) even some SharePoint sites for business pages). EDIT: Yes, Swiftype is based on Lucene et al: http://www.quora.com/Swiftype/What-is-the-technology-stack-behind-Swif…

Facebook blog: "Growing Beyond Regional Networks (June 2 2009)" https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?topic_id=216284525139 Facebook joined PRISM on June 3, 2009.

> Facebook also failed to implement some sort of craigslist, which is something that would really serve a big purpose for people in general (advertise for any sort of stuff, jobs, dating, help needed, local announcements...). I don't understand why they don't do that. Facebook introduced Marketplace in 2007: https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2383962130

This has also been confirmed by Facebook themselves: https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=248766257130

Or facebook. http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2356432130

In case you have a feeling of deja vu: Last Call for Facebook Gifts (https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=405727117130)

The social graph is not secret. Apps don't need to ask any permission to get it. https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130

https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=405727117130 "Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of the people who have given millions of gifts, but we made the decision after careful thought about where we need to focus our product development efforts." "We'll be able to focus more on improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day, such as Photos, News Feed, Inbox, games, comments, the "Like" button and the Wall."

Looks like you're absolutely correct - there's FB blog post from a while back talking about how this is something that they will not do: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=110636457130

Here is Mark's blog post reference in the article. https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150378701937131

According to Facebook, they've been testing it on their Developer and Facebook blog. I remember seeing it last week and thinking, "Oh, I've never seen that Facebook commenting system before". Example: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=486790652130

Facebook's language translations are actually crowdsourced. It's funny that so many people would approve errors like this. There is a brief blog post about it: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10056937130 The whole system is pretty interesting. They maintain a mapping of every token on the site to every language and only user translators verify portions.

And FB's blog post on this: https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130

There was a comment that struck me as a little odd, and a lot revealing, in the official Facebook announcement by Joel Seligstein (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130): I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea. Cool, yes, but also a little spooky.

Clickable: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=443390892130

Facebook uses PHP for the user-facing portion of the site. Here's a link where they discuss some of what they do http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2356432130

Original post here: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=403838582130

Because they don't care about a spammer joining fb, they have spam prevention system on the publishing and friendship actions. I see the re-captcha very often while publishing stuff (but I'm connected 24/7 to the fb chat with pigdin), also I've heard that people who try to add too many friends in a short period of time, get a message from the spam prevention. also: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=403200567130

We've been here before: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130

Here's another one: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7584397130

I deleted my response to this by mistake. Here's what I'd posted, in essence: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=382978412130 Users can edit which connections they want to add to their profile. They can also hide some connections on their profile, and remove others if they so choose. Disclosure: I work for Facebook. My opinions are my own.

I believe this has to do with the privacy changes last month, which made it so that Friends Lists can no longer be hidden. After an initial backlash, Facebook made it relatively easy to remove your friends list from public search results, but it sounds like it isn't actually blocking access to them — they're just harder to find. From Facebook's blog post ( http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130 ): "In response to your feedback, we've improved the Friend List visibility option described below. Now when you uncheck the "Show my friends on my profile" option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won't appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications. "

Facebook is cash flow positive (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=136782277130), so the accounting related to the judgments probably has little or no impact on their profitability.

Sure you can. Set status permission to "Everyone". Facebook introduced the feature here: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=98499677130

I find it funny that no one freaked out when facebook did this exact same thing: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=43712967130 Is it because posted items are used too infrequently for anyone to care? Is facebook's bar somehow useful? There is a curious distinction between reactions.

Nevermind, apparently they've "reached out to respected organizations to get their input". http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130