The Facebook Blog

Displaying all posts by Peter X. Deng

by Peter X. Deng Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 1:38pm

Last week, we shared our philosophy behind the new updates and changes on Facebook to give you a better understanding of why we make certain product decisions. We explained how we've been mapping out the Social Graph, or the network of connections that exist in the world, by enabling you to share with everyone and everything you care about. As more and more is shared, we want you to be able to find out everything that is going on in the world around you at any given moment, or shape the stream of information most relevant to you.

We set up a tour on Facebook for you to learn more about the product changes and to give you a way to offer feedback. We received over 30,000 emails, and want to thank all of you who wrote in to share your opinions. Today, we are beginning to roll out the new home page. The update will happen slowly, so everyone should have the new home page over the coming days.

We think you'll find that the new home page makes it even easier for you to create content and receive real-time updates from the people and connections you have on Facebook. It also gives you even more control over who and what you see in your stream by offering new filters. Below are some of the features we're most excited about.

Real-Time Stream

The biggest part of the new home page is your improved News Feed, or the stream of content that's most relevant to you. The stream lets you know what's happening right now in your world by showing you everything your friends and other connections, such as celebrities, athletes and politicians, are sharing. The stream also makes it simple for you to comment on content and participate in conversations in real-time.

The Publisher

One of the important things to remember about the stream is that you are a part of it. That's why an improved Publisher now sits on the top of the home page. It makes it easy to add your own status, links, photos, thoughts and more into the stream. The Publisher has been updated across the site, including on your profile. So anywhere you create content on Facebook, you will know it's going into the stream.

Controlling Your Stream

When you're reading the stream to keep up with friends, you'll see everything that's happening. Of course, you may be more interested in certain friends. You might have one friend who posts about local events while you live elsewhere in the country or the world, which is why the left hand column of the new home page is dedicated to filters. We built in some default filters based around location, people you connect with most often, and your existing Friend Lists. Creating new Friend List filters or modifying old ones is easy from the Friends page. You can also filter the stream to show you posts from specific applications.

Discovering Content

The final piece of the new home page is the Highlights section. Highlights shows you what's happening over a longer period of time—as opposed to the stream, which shows you what's happening right now. This section will feature photos, notes and other content you probably don't want to miss: events lots of your friends are attending, links many people have commented on, public profiles your friends connect to and so on. Birthday notifications and pokes will be in this section, as well.

To keep the design consistent across the site, you'll also notice that your profile will look a little different and more like the home page. The main difference is that your profile picture now appears beside the posts on the Wall tab.

If you have any questions, check out our Help Center, or take the tour. And please keep the feedback coming—we want to hear what you think.

Peter Deng, a product manager, is watching content from his friends stream by on the Facebook home page.

Updated about 3 months ago

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Update Your Profile From More Websites

by Peter X. Deng Friday, May 23, 2008 at 11:44am

A few weeks ago, we told you about the new ability to import stories into your Mini-Feed from other sites. Since then, we've been working on increasing the number of sites that work with this feature. We're happy to report that now, you can import activity from YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, and Google Reader in addition to Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp and del.icio.us.

Look for the "Import" link in the corner of your Mini-Feed to connect your Facebook profile to your accounts on any of these websites. Your profile will automatically update when you upload a video to YouTube, rate last night's episode of The Office on Hulu, and so on. If you have a personal blog, you can enter the URL in and a Mini-Feed story will be published every time you write a new post. As your friends start importing activity, keep an eye on your News Feed, it will only become more interesting as Facebook opens up to more sites.

Peter, a Product Manager, created Lupe Fiasco Radio on Pandora and rated Goodbye, Toby (The Office) on Hulu.

Written over a year ago

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