Ajax Girl

Facebook held a fairly large press event today around privacy and other new products at 10 am PST at their Palo Alto headquarters. There were a number of announcements made, although live blogging of the event was not permitted. These are my raw notes from the event, which I am posting immediately afterwards. A wrapup post will be posted shortly. We’ll also update this post with pictures.

Summary - two product releases - privacy controls around friend lists (later tonight), and confirmatioin of Facebook chat (in coming weeks).

Matt Cohler, VP Product Development:

Desire for better more personal communication with each other. Facebook wants to give users control over their information: what they share, when they share, who they share it with. Really important to give people the right tools to keep them in control.

Two parts that are important – 1) need for really powerful tools, and 2) really simple/intuitive tools that not just power users can use.

Originally Facebook was only for American college students so product principles were fairly easy, just had to work within a college network. But today, four years later, many more types of users, types of relationships, etc.

Currently there are 67 million active users, 2/3 of which are outside the U.S. Go back 18 months and 90% of users were in the U.S.

When first launched, it seemed to be pushing the envelope to ask users to put cell phones up on their profile, even more surprised that people actually were doing it.

Naomi Gleit, product manager:

Announcing Privacy Settings For Friend Lists

Two changes launching tonight, by tomorrow morning, related to improvements in the privacy interface. Users can now set privacy setting related to friend lists, which were announced a couple of months ago.

Simpler interface to make it easier to find what you are looking for.

New friends of friends privacy options. Can also share information with people you are connected to. Much more detailed options.

Users can create private groups of their friends. Naomi created a co-worker friend list. Easy to send messages to co worker lists, send status messages jut to co workers, etc. But the main announcement today is the integration of friend lists with privacy. You can share information with all friends, some groups, or all friends except some groups.

Friends can be in as many groups as you like.

When you add or create a friend you can decide what friend groups to add them to, or create a new friend on the fly.

Your friend lists are private.

This is not replacing social map details, where you say how you know someone when you add a friend.

If you used limited profiles previously, the friends you set to view that are now grouped under a limited profile friend list.

The new privacy interface and options apply to third party profile boxes

Peter Deng, product manager.

Announcing chat service. They are giving us a preview. launching in the coming weeks. opening up a new channel of communication to allow users to chat. Chat UI on the bottom of the browser. Friends button in the browser, click on friends name, chat in the browser.

can minimize chat conversation, pop out the interface into a separate window. eventually will be able to chat by friends list. works on all browsers.

This is not jabber, but they are working on it. May or may not integrate. If they can support it later, they will. No API support for now.

Just one to one chat now. Chats are archived and history can be cleared. if away, prompts you to send a message to their inbox.

Question to Matt Cohler about beacon issues in the past. “We just screwed it up” he said.

Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer

took questions, did not present. Spoke for a while on use of user images and names in promoting products, says that opt out option is fine legally for users, and that they give permission to use their likeness and name simply by using facebook.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/253782662/