About a year ago, we told you about an upcoming site redesign, and asked you to check out our preview group. We received great feedback from that group, so right now, we wanted to let you know about some changes that we're working on, and invite you to check out some previews in a new Facebook Page.

The big project at Facebook these days is a redesign of Profiles. As more and more information is available on Facebook—more photo albums, more applications, and more history—we've realized that profiles have become cluttered and harder to navigate as a result. We're trying to make profiles more simple and relevant, while still giving you control over your profile and how you express yourself. We want to invite you to keep up with our design and iteration on the new Facebook Profiles Preview Page.

On the Preview Page, you can check out some screen shots of our starting points: tabbed profiles which allow a certain amount of structure for things like basic info and personal info; a Wall tab where your Wall posts, recent activity, and other content can be published; and additional tabs where you can feature your favorite applications.

If you choose to become a fan of Facebook Profiles Previews, you'll receive weekly updates about the current state of the Profile. We'll be posting updated screen shots about once a week as well.

As for feedback, we realized last year that we had trouble keeping up with the discussion boards in the preview group. So instead, we've turned off the discussion boards and are asking that you send feedback directly to us, where we can easily sort through your comments. We'll provide info on what people are saying and try to answer any questions that come up a lot.

Check out the Profiles Preview Page now.


Carolyn is Facebook's resident blogger.

Recently, chain letters have started to spread across Facebook with all sorts of misinformation. Let's get some information out there about how we communicate to you about Facebook. Right now, there are only four ways that we try to get information to users.

1. Home Page Announcements: Home Page announcements are the big boxes that push down your News Feed. These announcements contain information that we really want you to see; changes to your account, big new products we think you might like, and any information that is required for you to use Facebook effectively.


2. Product Stories and the What's New page: You may occasionally see stories about Facebook inside your News Feed. These contain useful tips and fun information about Facebook, but are not of the same importance as Home page announcements.


3. The Blog: Since you're here reading, you know what the blog is. This is a good place to get extended information about what's going on at Facebook.


4. Through Pages and Updates: This is fairly new with the launch of Pages, but notice that these will appear in your "Updates" section of your Inbox, not mixed in with messages from friends. These should be few and far between—the Update you saw from any Politicians you support that came from Facebook is a one-time occurrence.

We will never use any of the following methods to tell you information, or ask for you to take an action:

• Your Wall
• An inbox message from a friend—in other words, chain letters.
• Messages spread through Applications—if an application is telling you that Facebook is about to shut down, report it.

Since there's been a lot of wrong information about Facebook spreading around, we'd like to clarify a few things for the record:

• We are not shutting down accounts that are not "active" enough.
• We are not going to start charging you to use Facebook.
• We will never ask you to send us your password or login information.
• We will never put the responsibility on YOU to send information to your friends. If we have information we need to share, it's our job to get the word out.
• When we do communicate to you about the site (with the exception of posts made on this blog) it will always be from a collective Facebook. You won't hear from me, personally, or from Mark, or from Dustin, or from any of the Facebook bloggers you've seen here.

So the next time you see a chain letter, chain wall post, or chain anything, report it to our User Operations team, and tell all your friends to ignore it. We could make a joke here about passing this entry on to ten of your friends, but that's not cool.



Carolyn is Facebook's resident blogger.

Here at Facebook, we use our product as much as anyone. The day after a company party, you can find us looking at photos from said company party on Facebook. Doing a favor for a coworker might result in a fan group spontaneously appearing. But recently, our attention and borderline obsession has been squarely focused on a one particular platform application: Scrabulous.

Scrabulous lets you play scrabble with friends but without having to be in the same place or play at the same time. Here at the office, it's increasingly become the fodder for trash talking, the subject of many conversations about two-letter words, and the browser window we all scramble to close as soon as a coworker nears our desks.

Early this morning, Facebook hit a new milestone—we now have thirty million active members on the site. Welcome to Facebook, everyone!

You may have heard that we just unveiled the next evolution of Facebook Platform. Our new stuff will be going live sometime tonight, so definitely stay tuned on the site and on the blog for more information tomorrow.

At the beginning of January, we talked about our New Years Resolutions—to make Facebook simpler, more flexible, and to make our network structure more relevant. Today, we've fully launched a few changes that are an important first step towards keeping our resolutions.

1. A navigation and profile simplification—Ever feel like you couldn't find what you were looking for on that long left menu? We've redistributed all these menu options into "Core Aspects" on the top menu, "Applications" on the left menu, Settings on the top right, and everything else at the footer of the page. As for the profile, we've added drop-down menus to the top of every user's profile page, making it easier to get to the information you want to see. You can read more about the navigation changes here.


2. The introduction of "Inbox"—The former "My Messages" and "My Shares" pages have been redesigned to make the communication between you and your friends easier. Now you can send a group of your friends a message with or without a shared link, and easily track the ensuing conversation in one "thread" in your Inbox.


3. Network Pages—To make networks more relevant to their real-world counterparts, we've built out pages where network members, events, trends, and demographic info are displayed. Anything visible on a Network page is something that is already accessible to members of that network, and we've added additional "Publicize" options to groups and events that make it easy to distinguish what will and will not appear on your Network page. In addition, each page has a full version for members of the networks, and a public version—with certain kinds of information blocked—for people outside that network.

We think these changes are really positive steps. Stay tuned to the blog over the next few days as our designers and engineers give more detail to the changes and the logic behind them.



Carolyn, Facebook's resident blogger, is still reeling from the number of friend requests generated by the Facebook Sneak Preview group.

It's been a busy year here at Facebook. We've launched a lot of products, improved upon the existing site, and learned quite a bit in the process. In case you've lost track, here's the highlight reel from '06.

In January, we introduced Friend Details, which let you say how you knew your Facebook friends and build your Social Timeline. This was shortly before High School Facebook and College Facebook merged in February. By the end of February, we'd made search better by giving name, event, group, and profile matches to a word. We began March with our inaugural NCAA Basketball Tournament Pool on Facebook. Also, we redesigned groups and events so people could post photos and write wall posts related to them.

In the spring, we expanded to include work networks, and allowed people to affiliate with multiple college and work networks. We also began offering Facebook Mobile Texts using an SMS-based service. The My Messages page was redesigned, and Browse launched so people could easily look at everyone around them (depending, of course, on privacy settings).

We had a number of upgrades for photos along the way, introducing Mobile Photo Uploads, a My Photos page upgrade, and a partnership with QOOP to power the Facebook Printshop.

During the summer, we added search functionality specifically for former classmates and coworkers. For the first time, Global Groups and Events became possible. We also launched the Facebook Development Platform, which allows developers everywhere to create applications that work with Facebook. Shortly after, we launched Facebook Notes, and with it, the Company Blog. As summer wound down, we launched a third mobile functionality, Mobile Web, and got everyone geared up for Election 2006 by creating Facebook profiles for all the candidates.

September got off to a rocky start when we introduced News Feed and Mini-Feed without the necessary privacy controls. We fixed that mistake within three days and went on to add more privacy controls for your search listing. We added extra spam prevention systems before we expanded in late September so that everyone could join Facebook.

We haven't slowed down since then. We launched Share, added more privacy controls for when you poke, message, and add people as friends. We added News Feed Preferences, introduced the Holiday Center, and released the Facebook Firefox toolbar as an open source project.

Even this week, despite a few desks emptying out for the holidays, we've launched a new poke confirmation box that doesn't require so many page loads per poke, and a new profile picture photo album that automatically keeps a history of your profile pictures.

Stay tuned for more great things in 2007. Happy Holidays from the entire Facebook Team.


Carolyn, Facebook's resident blogger, has resolved to poke less and message more in 2007.

Mark would have written this post himself, but is busy helping out with everything going on right now, so I've been asked to explain why we're launching this expansion.

You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again; here at Facebook, we want to help people understand their world. We started at one school, and realized over and over again that this site was useful to everyone—not just to Harvard students, not just to college students, not just to students, not just to former students. We've kept growing to accommodate this fact.

This includes your friends who graduated pre-Facebook (yes, there was such a time), your friends who don't have school or work email addresses, and your friends whose schools don't give out email addresses. Now you can all connect.

This doesn't mean that anyone can see your profile, however. Your profile is just as closed off as it ever was. Our network structure is not going away. College and work networks still require an authenticated email address to join. Only people in your networks and confirmed friends can see your profile.

We listened to what you guys had to say and built extra privacy controls that we launched last week. If you're uncomfortable with regional users being able to see you on Facebook, you can always change your privacy settings to prevent people from finding you in searches and communicating with you. Also, we've built out a bunch of tools that will help verify new users and prevent spammers from bothering you. You can read about these tools here.

Facebook is still yours, for you and your friends (all of your friends) to connect with each other and share information.

Carolyn, Facebook's resident blogger, is expecting instant notoriety and perhaps a few Facebook groups to arise from this post.

My friend must be a Bird-
Because it flies!
Mortal, my friend must be,
Because it dies!
Barbs has it, like a Bee!
Ah, curious friend!
Thou puzzlest me!

-Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson's take on friendship: kind of obscure to me. Facebook's definition: less so. I just wanted to open with a poem.

Since my last post, I have received and rejected over eighty friend requests from people I don't know. It's not because I'm a terrible person, and it's not because I think all of my would-be friends were sketchy people; it's because I wasn't comfortable with people I didn't know seeing my information.