Facebook announced new privacy controls at a press event at their downtown Palo Alto headquarters today, and also demoed their new chat application - called Facebook Chat - that has been rumored since last week. Our real time notes and pictures from the event are here. See CNET for more.
New Privacy Controls
The new privacy controls, which will launch on Wednesday morning, allow users to do more with Friend Lists. Users can now set specific privacy controls for different friend groups, said Naomi Gleit, a Facebook product manager. Users can create a friend grouping for co-workers, for example, and share different profile information, updates and other information such as photo albums with that group. Users can put friends into multiple groups.
VP Product Matt Cohler said the new controls are needed. Four years ago, he said, Facebook was perfect for students at private college networks. Today, though, Facebook has 67 million active users, and 2/3 of them live outside the U.S. The privacy controls needed by this wider group are different, he said.
Late last year Facebook started allowing users to group friends, but there was little customization that could be done after the grouping. That effectively made it a useless feature. Now, users have tools that they can use to make those distinctions meaningful.
When users now add information to Facebook, they can choose among seven whitelist settings: everyone on Facebook, friends of friends, all friends, some friends, only me, and certain networks. They can also choose to blacklist certain people and friend lists from seeing the content.
There will now be a ubiquitous blue lock icon around the site that will indicate when privacy settings can be used to control who sees a particular piece of information.
Facebook Instant Messaging Confirmed
Facebook is also launching a web chat product called Facebook Chat “in the coming weeks.” We first wrote about the new feature last week. Users will now see a chat bar on the bottom of all Facebook pages, showing which of their friends are online, who they’re chatting with currently, and other controls. A screen shot is above (pardon the quality) - see a video of the demo here.
Chat will currently be one-to-one only, although there is no limit to the number of chat sessions that can be open at any one time. Conversations are archived, and messages to people who are set to “offline” (either not on Facebook or explicitly not using chat) will be sent to their Facebook inbox instead.
For now the chat feature is not Jabber compliant, meaning it cannot be accessed outside of Facebook on clients like Trillian or Adium. They are also not yet adding API or platform functionality to chat, so third party applications cannot access chat and build on top of it. The product will be enhanced over time, though, said product manager Peter Deng. No integration of AIM, Gtalk, or any other protocol yet either.
Users won’t have to install chat as an addition application; it will automatically show up at the bottom of the screen for everyone and there’s no way to completely remove it, although you can minimize it substantially when not in use.
There’s no “away status” - just online, offline, or “idle” (which is triggered after an unspecified amount of time not doing anything on the site).
this will be good to have a little more control over it.
Certainly very nice and much needed improvements… needs a lot of patience in going thru the flat and no-groups friend lists [of so many friends who in turn have so many friends] one by one.
Wow, thanks for that picture giving me such a better idea of what Facebook chat will look like.
Totally better than nothing.
Will they have smart groups? Like an iTunes Smart Playlist that will enable live updating of groups based on certain criteria?
Is no live blogging going to be a new trend?
Do you know when Facebook’s multi-tabs are going to be released?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....-profiles/
@ET - Facebook declined to say when the new profile layouts would roll out
@Zach - They suggested that next time they hold one of these meetings, they’d let us liveblog
@Zach - No mention of any auto-updating friend lists, so not yet
Well so much for Facebook IM wars. I guess facebook won…
http://www.myphillynetwork.com.....ok-im-wars
hmm. wonder what would happen to social.im
Goodbye LinkedIn…LinkedIn should have taken the News Corp’s less a billion dollar deal. It will be downhill from now on for LinkedIn.
I guess when a fbapp becomes appears lucrative facebook will decide to enter the market and compete with individual developers.
Will this stunt app development?
I don’t see the chat function on my Facebook pages…?
LinkedIN still needs to advance to higher stages, it will. Facebook will advance but I don’t know how much of a share in market Facebook will command with the number of people online at every given time in comparison with AIM where you constantly have many millions of people online at a time, where everyone Everyone uses the client.
One mistake is that it won’t be API or Jabber compliant which will kind of put a damper on things in the beginning until the network effect takes hold and people will want to chat with everyone else on Facebook from their friends list.
Good idea, I can’t wait to see this implemented, I just hope they monetize on the traffic as much as possible.
No Jabber support? That’s contrary to what I read earlier and definitely a huge disappointment. Not all of us want to keep a Facebook tab open all the time.
I agree that this will help facebook compete with LinkedIn. If I can target the display of my information I don’t really see the need for keeping the content in two different places.
If there’s no Jabber/GTalk/AIM integration yet, this is going to be useless for most of us right now.
linkedin has a unique opportunity to cater to business-only users and develop content and business information profiles that bear no relevance to facebook’s audience (en masse) - i still believe linkedin has a lot of unexplored opportunity.
Great, a chat system I won’t use that Facebook will mislead my friends into thinking I use?
The Circle of Friends application already allows people to group their friends in circles or friend lists. They have pretty large distribution (somewhere between 5 and 7 million users according to adonomics) I wonder if Friend Lists will kill them just like Facebook Chat killed Social.IM.
@4 and @8 - Seems like Circle of Friends already has smart groups based on interests and other attributes…
We have some screen shots of the new facebook privacy controls here.
http://facereviews.com/2008/03.....sneak-peek
Cheers!
Time to start grouping your friends. A funny fact: only 25% of facebook members have ever changed these friend grouping settings.
@Rodney - Where do you get your stats on friend grouping? I have a few FB apps that, combined have a few million users and saw very different results.
Using my base, I polled FB and saw that somewhere between 1 and 2% of my user base had changed a friend list setting (1.6% to be precise).
Unless my user base is radically skewed, your numbers are way off…
John,
I got that number from their press room page. Actually that 25% is representative of the privacy controls and not the friends grouping. my bad.
per Facebook: “All users use our privacy settings through the network and friends architecture of the site. About 25% percent of users have changed their settings from the default.”
Little late to the chat bandwagon, aren’t they?
The evolution of facebook remains of huge interest. It is about time that one is given the option to differentiate between the different circles of acqaintances, co-workers and friends, as some information / pics one doesn’t necessarily want to share with everybody out there!
Hey, that’s Peter MacaDengDeng’s Profile!