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Facebook Launches New Features Today

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Facebook Launches New Features Today

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Feature # 1 Community Pages

Today, Facebook is announcing the first in a string of product launches that we’ll be seeing this week. We just reported that the site is about to revamp its Interests section. And today it’s also launching a new type of profile called Community Pages, as well as some new privacy options.

Facebook’s somewhat-ambiguously titled ‘Pages’ are what brands and celebrities use to establish a presence on the social network (they launched in their current form early last year). Facebook has been facing a problem, though, as users have created Facebook Pages around topics that are decidedly not brands, like baseball or yoga. Communities, which were first noticed earlier this month and are now launching, are Facebook’s answer to this problem.facebookcommunitypage

Facebook says that Community pages are meant to be “the best collection of shared knowledge on a topic”. When you visit a community page, the first thing you’ll see is an ‘Info’ tab that has a brief description gleaned from Wikipedia, followed by related posts that your friends and the global Facebook community have created (it looks like Facebook is running a search query on the topic and showing the results). There’s also a tab for ‘Wikipedia’, which contains the full entry if it’s available. At launch Facebook has created over 6.5 million community pages, around topics like Cooking, Cycling, and Hiking.

Conspicuously absent are options to actually add content to the page, aside from updating your status with a relevant keyword. There’s no Wall, and there’s no way to post photos or videos. Instead, Facebook is currently inviting users to apply to add content to these pages later on (it sounds like Facebook is still fleshing out how exactly this will work). Facebook intends to eventually allow users to upload their photos to the page.  At this point, though, it seems like Communities have a long way to go before they feel anything like an actual community. Still, it’s clear that these could have a lot of potential in the future.

Source: TechCrunch.com

Feature # 2 New Privacy Section

Today, alongside Community Pages and a revamped Interests section, Facebook is also making some changes to its privacy controls. Facebook and confusing privacy settings have long gone hand in hand, which really isn’t a surprise given the huge amount of connections and data sharing that the site keeps track of. To Facebook’s credit, the site continuously iterates on its Privacy control panel to try to make it easier to use. Today though, Facebook has launched a new privacy section that may leave users scratching their heads.friendtag2 It’s called “Friends, Tags, and Connections.” In short, this section is about the data on Facebook that you can’t actually control. You can make it harder to find, and even hide it from your profile, but you can’t remove it entirely.

Here’s how Facebook explains this:

Friends, Tags and Connections covers information and content that’s shared between you and others on Facebook. This includes relationships (shared between you and the person you’re in the relationship with), interests, and photos you’re tagged in. These settings let you control who sees this information on your actual profile. However, it may still be visible in other places unless you remove it from your profile itself.

privacysetingsshot Content included under this section includes friends, family members, relationships, photos you’ve been tagged in, your current city and hometown, and ‘Things I like’ (formerly known as Fan Pages). If you think about it, it makes sense — whenever you’re somehow associated with a piece of content, be it through a friend connection or a photo tag, it’s possible that someone will discover that content through your friend’s profile, even if it isn’t on yours. In fact, many of these settings have existed for years, just under different portions of Facebook’s privacy panel, so it’s a good thing that Facebook is pointing out that they can’t actually be hidden.

But that doesn’t mean people are going to understand what Facebook is talking about when it says things like “These settings only control the information people can see on your profile. This information, such as your Pages and list of friends, is still public, so it could appear elsewhere…

Souce: TechCrunch.com

Feature # 3bcafan

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“Become A Fan button has been replaced with “Like”

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