Hopefully by now everyone has used the new Facebook. If you haven't, you can do so now by going to www.new.facebook.com. The new Facebook has been available for opt in for well over a month now, and so far over 30 million people have checked it out, and many are already using it as their full time Facebook.

We've also gotten a chance to hear feedback from over 600,000 people, and we really appreciate all the time you took to write in. We've heard positive feedback, negative feedback, bug reports, and a whole lot of questions. We wanted to take this chance to answer some of the most frequently asked questions and talk a little more about the process that went in to creating the new Facebook.

Here are some of the most common questions we've been getting:

Why did you change everything?

When we set out to update Facebook, we tried to keep three things in mind. First of all, we wanted to make the site clean and simple by reducing clutter; we wanted to give you more control over your profile, and we wanted to focus on the recent and relevant content on the site.

That said, we know it can be hard to get used to things being in different places, which is why we wanted to make it easy for you to switch back and forth for a little while, in order to learn where everything went, and how the new site works.

Where are my applications?

None of your applications are gone, and they are now in a few places. Most of your profile boxes have been moved over to your Boxes tab on your profile. You may have noticed a few boxes on your Wall and Info tabs as well. You can choose up to five boxes from your Boxes tab to move to your Wall tab, but keep in mind that not all application developers have created boxes to fit in that space yet.

Also, some applications have tabs that you can add to your profile. Again, not all applications have this yet, but many developers are working on it.

Lastly, we've seen a lot of feedback that applications were hard to find in the top menu, so we've been working hard on different design iterations to make it easier to get to your applications. We're close to the right solution, so you should see that soon.

Why did you split the profile into tabs?

By splitting the profile into tabs, we were able to make a cleaner, more organized profile. Now similar information types stay together—all of the information you set about yourself on your Info tab, all of your photos on your Photos tab, and your application boxes in the Boxes tab. The Wall tab is how we chose to focus on the recent and relevant. This way when you visit a friend's profile, you can really get a sense of what's going on in their life.

What is the deal with the new Wall?

The new Wall is a compilation of content about you and by you, all in chronological order. With so much information on profiles, we realized that the easiest way to help people figure out what was important was through a stream of information. Instead of needing to look at a million places to figure out what your friend has been doing lately, you can see the photos she's added, or read what his friends have said about last weekend. Additionally, the new publisher allows you to post content straight to your Wall without ever leaving your profile.

Sometime soon, we're going to switch everyone over to the new Facebook. We can't maintain both versions, and we really think you'll like the new Facebook once you get used to the changes. So hop on over to new.facebook.com and give it a try. And don't forget to let us know what you think using the "Send Feedback" links.



Mark is in with the new.

This week, Facebook was part of a conference call arranged by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff with major Internet companies. The unfortunate approach of Hurricane Gustav meant that nearly two million people living on the Gulf Coast had to evacuate their homes. Everyone on the call pledged our support and to do what we could to help. For Facebook, that meant posting a home page message for users in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi, pointing them to the FEMA website for updates, and encouraging them to let their friends and family know they're safe by updating their Facebook status. In addition, the Causes application, which has more than 2.7 million active users who have supported various causes, has targeted Gustav relief efforts. We encourage you to get involved yourself on Causes.

However, even before we got on the phone, thousands of users were already organizing themselves via Facebook. We've seen dozens of new groups with focuses ranging from people offering prayers of support to physical relief efforts, and that's where the real power of Facebook lies, in its users.


Chris Kelly is hoping everyone is safe.

We hit a big milestone today -- 100 million people around the world are now using Facebook. This is a really gratifying moment for us because it means a lot that you have decided that Facebook is a good, trusted place for you to share your lives with your friends. So we just wanted to take this moment to say, "thanks."

We spend all our time here trying to build the best possible product that enables you to share and stay connected, so the fact that we're growing so quickly all over the world is very rewarding. Thanks for all your support and stay tuned for more great things in the future.

Most people use the internet without being aware of the constant threat of hackers, spammers, and phishers. Due to the nature of the internet, and the nature of malicious software, most websites will at some point need to deal with patching a security hole. All good websites take these issues very seriously, since no one wants users to suffer. At Facebook, where people keep so much of their lives and information, we've built an amazing security team solely focused on making sure our users have a safe experience on the site.

The security team at Facebook is dedicated to investigating and auditing our own code for holes, as well as reaching out to people in an extended community to let us know if we've missed anything. If we get a report of a bug or a hole from a user, a security researcher, a reporter, blogger, or anyone, we check it out and fix it as quickly as possible. In fact, we appreciate it when help comes our way from the many security experts and organizations out there. That's why many of us are attending DEFCON this weekend. DEFCON is one of the largest and oldest running hacker conventions, held in Vegas. By going and learning from other people in the online security space, we make keeping people safe online a joint effort.

Even right now, as we're preparing to leave for DEFCON, we spent most of last night working on a fix for a worm, which was targeting people on Facebook and placing messages on Walls urging users to view a video that pretends to be hosted on a Google or YouTube website. We've identified and blocked the ability to link to the malicious websites from anywhere on Facebook. Less than .002 percent of people on Facebook have been affected, all of whom we notified and suggested steps to remove the malware.

As a Facebook user you can help us protect you by doing the following things:

• Report any spam message or posting you see. The more reports we get, the easier it is for us to respond decisively.


• Never share your Facebook password with anyone. Never. No Facebook employee will ever ask for it, and no one else should know it. If you are ever prompted to log in to Facebook, make sure it's from a legitimate Facebook web address. If something looks or feels off, go directly to www.facebook.com to log in.


• If your Windows PC or Mac is ever infected with malware or a virus, check out these helpful sites: http://www.microsoft.com/security/default.mspx or http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222


• Finally, just as in your off line community, be aware of your surroundings in your online community. If a user doesn't seem right, or says or posts something that you feel is threatening or inappropriate, report it to us.

We work hard to keep Facebook as safe as we can. The security team is always happy when we see spammers complain that it is too hard to make a profit from Facebook. We're also happy when we hear from our users that they consider us a safer place to be online.



Max Kelly is Head of Security at Facebook and hopes that if you are attending DEFCON, you will find him (or someone else from the Facebook team) and say hey.

Last year in May, we held a big developer conference, f8. As you may know, we used f8 to introduce Facebook Platform—a development system that enables developers to build applications on Facebook, where all of our 90 million users can interact with them.

Honestly, the fact that applications grew so quickly was a surprise—even to us. We've learned a lot in this last year, and with success also found a new set of problems that we needed to solve. This year at f8, we talked about a lot of our new solutions and how they all fit together. We'd like to share all of that with you, as well.

At Facebook, we want to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. With that in mind, here are some of the big announcements from f8 08:

• The new profile: You may already know about the new profile, and we hope you've already spent some time looking at the new Facebook. By surfacing more recent and relevant information, and by cleaning up and simplifying the site, we think the new Facebook makes it even easier to connect and communicate with your friends.


• Facebook Connect: Facebook Connect is a new way to use applications, on the open web and not just on Facebook. Soon, you'll be able to use your Facebook account to login and connect on websites throughout the web. Imagine never filling out another profile at a new site, or having to find your friends all over again. Facebook Connect will help make this a reality and allow you to use Facebook to share information from all over the web with your friends.


• Facebook Platform across the world: If you're a regular reader of this blog, you've probably read about the unique way we've translated Facebook-asking bilingual users to help us get into more languages more quickly. Now, your favorite applications can also access this framework so that everyone, everywhere, has a full suite of applications to choose from.


• Great Apps: After a year of many changes, we've decided to launch a program that promotes the applications that are meaningful, trustworthy, and well-designed. This means that we'll be promoting applications that help you share information and earn your trust. Our first two Great Apps are iLike and Causes, but be on the lookout for more to come.

Our developers have been a huge asset to our users and we owe them a big thanks. The applications they've developed have added new experiences to Facebook, and we're really looking forward to what is to come, and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for another big year.



Ben is the Director of Platform Program Management.

Starting this morning, more and more users started seeing prompts on their home pages inviting them to switch over and try out the new Facebook. We're also really happy to say that anyone can try out the new site now by visiting http://www.new.facebook.com.

Over the past six months, 100,000 of you have offered to help improve the user experience on Facebook by giving your feedback and suggestions, and we're excited to show you what we've come up with. Here are some highlights:

The Wall now surfaces the most recent and relevant information—in the form of posts of stories—about you. We believe that having a constant stream of information, or "feed" is the most effective way to learn about and keep up with friends. Just as News Feed helps you know what is happening in your social circle, you can use the Wall as a way to give your friends the full story of what's happening with you.

A big piece of the Wall is the Publisher, which enables you to publish content—photos, notes, your status, and so on—directly to your Wall. The Publisher works with most applications so that you have one place to go to add content to your own profile or to a friends'.

The profile is very personal; it's important to us that everyone have control over their own profile. Along those lines, once you've published stories or posted content, you can adjust the size to promote the things you care about most, and demote the stories you don't find as interesting.

One of our key goals of this project has always been to make the site simpler and cleaner. The new tabbed profile should help a lot in this respect, breaking your information into tabs by type. The Wall tab displays most recent and relevant information both about you and by you. The Info tab shows information about you that doesn't change frequently. The Photos tab shows photos of you as well as your albums. The Boxes tab features all of your existing application boxes. You're also able to add tabs for your favorite applications.

Keep in mind, nothing with your privacy is changing with this; in fact, the new story formats should offer even greater control over what and how information is shared. We still respect all the same, trusted privacy controls as before. Thanks again for the feedback, and enjoy the new Facebook.



Mark is the Product Manager for the new profile.

Last August we launched our Facebook iPhone website, and almost a year later it has over 1.5 million people using it regularly. We are thrilled to see so many enjoying Facebook on their iPhones, so we've been working on ways to take our iPhone experience to the next level. Today, Apple has opened the doors to its App Store which features a new application we've created: Facebook for iPhone.

You're probably wondering what makes our iPhone application different from our iPhone website. The bottom line is that applications built for the iPhone have access to more technology than websites. For example, with the native application you can take photos with the iPhone's camera and upload them instantly to your Mobile Uploads album on Facebook. You'll also find the native application is much faster than the website, giving you more reliable access to your Friends, Photos, and Inbox.

As Facebook grows in other languages, we are learning a lot about what the "Facebook Experience" is like for people around the world. One of the first challenges was getting words that are really long in other languages to fit on the screen properly. Recently, we've been figuring out how to deal with a new challenge—grammar.

Ever see a story about a friend who tagged "themself" in a photo? "Themself" isn't even a real word. We've used that in place of "himself or herself". We made that grammatical choice in order to respect people who haven't, until now, selected their sex on their profile.

However, we've gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles. People who haven't selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex entirely in Mini-Feed stories.

For this reason, we've decided to request that all Facebook users fill out this information on their profile. If you haven't yet selected a sex, you will probably see a prompt to choose whether you want to be referred to as "him" or "her" in the coming weeks. When you make a selection, that will appear in Mini-Feed and News Feed stories about you, but it won't be searchable or displayed in your Basic Information.

We've received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting. We have a lot of respect for these communities, which is why it will still be possible to remove gender entirely from your account, including how we refer to you in Mini-Feed.

We hope this change will make the Facebook experience even better across the world. Let us know if you have any thoughts about this on our suggestions page.



Naomi is a Product Manager at Facebook.

At Facebook, we're always trying to find new ways to make communication easier and more efficient. One way we do that is by making it easy to have a conversation about the things that happen on Facebook. In the past, you've been able to comment on photos, notes and posted items, but if there was something else on your friend's profile—an interesting status, or a cool new friendship—you'd need to send a message or write a Wall post to talk about it. But starting today, you can comment on your friends' Mini-Feed stories right from their profile.

Five months ago, we launched the first translated version of Facebook in Spanish. Since then, the internationalization team and its community translators have been busy translating the site into sixteen more languages. We now support—among others—French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian. You can see the full list of languages, or change your language settings, from the language selector in the footer on any page.