Facebook held a live-stream just moments ago on Facebook Live where Mark Zuckerberg highlighted two things coming up. He also explained the “lock-down” that the press has speculated about which gave the Facebook dev teams 60 productive days wrapping up projects.
He also highlighted the recent changes to photos with Photozap, making things look more professional by trimming down spam, game updates to only those interested, and making sure users have real names. They have also rolled out Facebook Places, available on mobile and on the iPhone. Facebook Questions also came out.
The bigger meat of the presentation was discussing releases coming out over the next month:
Facebook is trying to build a social platform, not just a social application. Application = one use case. Platform = a set of connections across all applications you want to use. A platform gives you more control over your information in all those context.
3 things:
Make it so people can safely take their information to other sites, take it down, whatever they want. Facebook Connect has over 1 million sites utilizing.
But to take it with you and have a back up, there’s a product coming out called “Download Your Information”. It zips up your information, photos, videos, and allows you to download it. David Recordon spoke at length of this feature include demonstrating how the downloaded file is more useful for everybody, not just files for developers.
The second thing, an “Applications You Use” Dashboard allows you to review permissions you’ve previously allowed with Facebook Connect. Carl Sjogreen explained that feature.
The final thing Mark Zuckerberg discussed was a selective updating feature that allows people to map out real-world groups, or sub-groups so everyone is assigned. They use this for filtering information so you don’t bug your friends, more granular control over sharing. Mapping out sub-groups would be less tedious than using the Friends List every time. The Facebook Groups is built from the ground up. Old groups will be kept around but New Groups will be the new way moving forward. The New Groups allow more predictable control to keep groups from becoming too noisy. Using Groups won’t require others to use the feature but getting people mapped allows others to share information. Groups allow smaller, more specific sharing. You can also leave any Groups that others place you in or make them silent.
The rest of the time opened up to a Q&A session, going on now. You can check it out if it’s still going on or see if a recording is posted later at http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive/.