Friend Groups and More Control Over Your Profile in Facebook

Today at an announcement at Facebook HQ broadcasted live, Mark Zuckerberg & team announced three pretty big updates to Facebook. These updates includes new Facebook Groups, Download Your Information, and the Apps That You Use Dashboard.

Read on to find out more.

 

Download Your Information

This function allows you to export all of your data from Facebook in a zip file. This includes profile information, friends list, comments, photos, videos and more.

Security is built into the application to ensure your data remains safe.

Once it is downloaded, your profile is available in what looks like is a plain HTML/CSS format, which should make this information available to import into other social networks.

This feature is perhaps a direct response to Facebook’s critics concerned about the platform being ‘closed’ with your data being locked with no way to export or back it up.

Note: Once the feature rolls out to your account, all you need to do is head to Account > Account Settings > Download Your Information. From there, you can download a zip file containing all your profile information, including your photos, wall posts, messages, videos, friend lists, and other content. If you unzip the file, you can actually view a simple HTML page of your profile, with simple links to all of these things. 

Apps That You Use Dashboard

This new feature allows you to have a finer-tuned access to how an external application will access your data. The granular controls give you the ability to enable and disable specific features like the ability to post to your wall, while allowing full access to other functions.

A second part of this feature is an ‘audit log’ to see what exactly an App is doing with your data.

Facebook Groups

This feature helps to mitigate the problem with having disparate groups of “friends”. It will aim to map real-world groups that share information to an area on Facebook which has similar features.

Facebook has discovered that “people don’t want to make lists” quoting that only 5% of Facebook users made at least 1 list. But they also discovered that doing it algorithmically isn’t a great solution either, because who you interact with doesn’t necessarily indicate who you think should be in a certain group of friends.

The new Groups aim to solve this by simplifying how you add friends to groups. Facebook hopes that making it as simple as tagging a photo will help to increase the adoption of creating separate lists of users. Groups is not replacing Lists (or old Groups), but is meant to augment small group communication. Think of it more like Google Wave functionality.

Group features will include:

• Group Chat
• Group Messages
• Wiki-like document editing

The features will be rolled out over the next few days. If you don’t see it now, be patient, it should be there soon.

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