The Facebook Blog

Don't be the last to know about what's happening with your friends, family or co-workers just because you're away from your computer. You now can subscribe to receive text messages of your friends' status updates directly from their profiles.

Click on the "Subscribe via SMS" link below your friends' profile pictures to get their latest news while you are mobile. You can also comment on your friends' status updates directly from your phone by replying to the text messages you receive. You can even subscribe to mobile updates from the Facebook... Pages of your favorite celebrities, public figures, businesses and organizations.


If you already have Facebook Mobile activated for your phone or device, then you will begin receiving the text message updates after confirming your subscription. If you haven't yet set up Facebook Mobile, you will be taken through a series of steps to activate it before receiving text messages.

While Facebook does not charge for this service, your mobile-service provider's standard text messaging rates will apply so be sure to check with your provider. You can stop receiving text message status updates from your friends and connections at any time. Unsubscribe in one of three ways: reply directly from your mobile phone with "unsubscribe," return to a friend's profile and click the "Unsubscribe from SMS Updates" link or edit your mobile texts settings from the Mobile settings page.

If you're not able to sign-up yet, keep checking back. We're working to expand this to more and more people around the world. As of now, we're able to offer this service in 18 countries, where we have existing relationships with mobile service providers, like the U.S., U.K., South Africa, Indonesia and New Zealand.

We're constantly working to add new mobile features for Facebook. Learn more about all of the mobile options on Facebook, from device-specific applications to our m.facebook.com mobile site, on our Facebook Mobile page.


Phil, an engineer, loves getting status updates texted to his phone in real-time.

Starting today, we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook. We're expanding search so that people can see which of their friends are on Facebook more easily. The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we're not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing.

In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users' individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc. We think this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data.

As always, if you do not want your public search listing to be visible to people searching from outside of Facebook, you can control that from the Search Privacy page. Please note that you will only appear in searches outside Facebook when your search settings are set to "Everyone".
Phil Fung, a Facebook engineer, has found what he was looking for.

Facebook is composed of networks: communities of people based around your school, workplace, or region. The rules of interaction with people in your network on the site are similar to how they are in real-life: they're not quite your friends, so a lot of communication is restricted (like writing on their Wall and seeing them in your News Feed), but you can see their profiles, kind of like how you pass by them in the hall or on the street everyday in real life.

Networks are (and have always been) a really important baseline for privacy and... visibility rules on Facebook. But beyond that, we realized people didn't really understand the value of joining a network. Now, we've built Network pages, where you can go to find out relevant information about your networks.

On these pages, you can browse upcoming events publicized by people in your network, watch the most popular videos they've posted, groups they've joined, and notes they've written. You can chat about issues on the network discussion board, and yes, even check out the male/female ratio of your network (in addition to stats about popular movies, political views, etc.). Hot.


Phil Fung, the tech lead for network pages, is mildly disturbed by how many people like the movie "Dirty Dancing" in the London network.