Facebook Blogged

News Feed provides the user the necessary information regarding what’s happening in your social circles on Facebook. It updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so that user will know when someone adds a celebrity or his idol to his Favorites.

Whenever user logs in, he’ll get the latest headlines generated by the activity of your friends and social groups. He can now see the latest happenings from your social circles on Facebook with News Feed on your homepage. This will keep user in touch of the rest of the world on Facebook and will never feel aloof and neglected. News Feed is also growing faster and smarter all the time. It has gone from processing an average of 100 MB of data each second when it was launched to over 300 MB/s now. News Feed has been so successful it has even been getting involved with real estate; it started out in a 19 server apartment, has now signed the lease on a 109 machine house in the suburbs, and already has plans for expansion. It’s like a friend who knows us so well it can show us stories we didn’t even know we wanted to see. Stay tuned to your Home page for improvements as new stories begin to bring together more data and we build systems to let News Feed get an even better idea what kind of stories and news you like.

The feature also lists the actions that Facebook will never inform the user friends about. User can remove profile information, photo comments, group discussions, wall posts, added friends, and your relationship status from both of the feeds.

The flood of applications has caused problems in Facebook right from the start. Facebook has repeatedly changed the rules, but always seems one step behind the creative moves by developers to spam their way into gaining new users. Most recently, limits were put in place that limit the number of invitations users could send out. The more people who ignore requests from a particular application, the lower the limit for that app.

Facebook is now a little tired of beating questionable developer tactics away with a stick. So now they will try the carrot approach as well - by rewarding developers who play by the rules and build useful, popular applications.

The new program is being called the Preferred Application Program. It has different rules, like allowing application users to invite more than the normal number of friends per day. But there are an almost unlimited number of other ways that Facebook can promote preferred developers. Preferred apps can show up higher in search, for example. And Facebook can give them a badge or other sign of endorsement that they can add to their application pages.

A more subtle, but possibly more powerful benefit, may be to change the rules on how and when user activities through these applications can show up in the News Feed. Finally, new Facebook users could be presented with a set of default third party applications to add when they create an account, perhaps tailored to their stated interests..

Last week Facebook unveiled more ways for 67 million members to restrict access to their personal profiles.But the added protections weren’t enough to prevent from Palo Alto pulling up the most recent pictures posted by Facebook members and their friends, even if the privacy settings were set to restrict the audience to a select few.After being alerted Monday afternoon, Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said the Palo Alto-based company fixed the bug within an hour.

The latest lapse serves as another reminder of the perils of sharing sensitive photos and personal information online, even when Web sites pledge to shield the information from prying eyes.Before the fix, Ng’s computer-coding trick enabled him to find private pictures of Paris Hilton at the Emmy awards and of her brother Barron Nicholas drinking a beer with friends and photos of many other people who hadn’t granted access to Ng.

Using Ng’s template, a reporter was able to look up random people on Facebook and see the most recent pictures posted on their personal profiles even if the photos were supposed to be invisible to strangers. The revealed snapshots showed Italian vacations, office gatherings, holiday parties and college students on spring break. AP was able to click through a personal photo album that Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted in November 2005.

Facebook just announced new, personalized way for people to communicate. Really important to give people right tools to enable people to communicate as much as possible. This means giving users control over their information, what they’re sharing, when sharing, and with whom. This also helps the promotion of the site too. Today, Facebook has 67M active users, 2/3 are outside the US - 18 months ago, it was 90% US.

The vast majority of users are not US college students now; there’s a great diversity in types of relationships. Facebook privacy is based on social proximity - you can now choose to share information with friends of friends, all friends, and some friends, only me, specific networks, everyone on Facebook - and user can exclude friends or friend lists Friend lists are “private groups” of your friends. No one can see the friend lists you make.

Today we’re integrating friend lists and privacy - you can now include or exclude friend lists. It also contain new ways to create friend lists. When you share photos with specific friends, you’ll be prompted to save those people as a list list, and when you send or confirm a friend request, user can in-line add friends to one or more friend lists. Facebook chat is launching in the coming weeks. A new communication channel will be opened soon and enable real time conversation on the site.