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- Introducing the New Profile
  by Josh Wiseman on Sunday, December 5, 2010 at 12:42pm
  Today I'm excited to introduce you to some improvements we've made to the Facebook profile, so now it's even easier for you to tell your story and learn about your friends.
  
  ...
  A New Introduction
  The profile begins with a quick overview of basic information such as where you're from, where you went to school, and where you work—the kinds of conversation starters you share with people you've just met or exchange with old friends as you get reacquainted.
  
  And since there's often no better way to learn about a person than through photos, the profile now includes a row of recently tagged photos of you. In my case, my profile features pics from my engagement and wedding, two of my life's most recent and happiest moments.
  
  Featured Friends
  You can now highlight the friends who are important to you, such as your family, best friends or teammates. Create new groups of friends, or feature existing friends lists. I opted to feature my Ultimate Frisbee teammates, giving the rest of my friends a way to learn more about that part of my life.
  
  New Experiences
  The profile also gives you new ways to share your interests and activities. You can list the projects you worked on at your job, classes you took in school, your favorite musicians and sports teams, and more. You can also share your life philosophy by connecting to the religions, political affiliations, and people you follow and admire. All your interests and experiences are now represented with images, making your entire profile a more compelling visual experience.
  
  Personally, I opted to add this profile project to my work history at Facebook, and I tagged the people who worked on it with me. I also added "Ultimate Frisbee" as one of the sports I play and included a description of my team's victories at the USA Ultimate National Championships and World Championships.
  
  Improved Photos and Friends Pages
  Thanks to the cool new "infinite scroll" feature, it's now much faster and more fun to browse all your photos. The Friends page now allows you to quickly find the people you're looking for: just search by name, hometown, school or a number of other dimensions. I met a ton of new Ultimate players at Nationals, and the new profile has made it so much easier to locate and learn about them.
  
  We're really excited about the new profile. We're rolling it out gradually and plan to get it to everyone by early next year. You can upgrade immediately or learn more about the new features on this page: www.facebook.com/about/profile.
  
  Josh Wiseman, a Facebook engineer, is reassuring his wife Kelly that the wedding was more exciting than any Ultimate Frisbee tournament.
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- Topics: Profile
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- Facebook Chat: Now We're Talking
  by Josh Wiseman on Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 2:33am
  This week marks the launch of Facebook Chat—a new way for you to communicate with your friends in real-time. The Wall and Inbox have been the primary ways to communicate, but when more immediacy is necessary—for example when making plans for lunch in half an hour or arguing over a foul call in the NCAA tournament—they might not be enough. Chat aims to fill this gap.
  
  We'll be rolling this out slowly going forward, but fairly soon you'll notice our new Chat bar at the bottom of your browser—no installation or assembly required. From this bar you... can view your list of online friends and open conversations with any or all of them. There's no need to setup a "buddy list." Unlike the Wall or Inbox, the messages are delivered and displayed to your friend as soon as they're sent, so you should expect a response right away and without any page loading. Of course, Chat has to play nice with the rest of the Facebook experience. You can collapse conversations to get them out of the way, and go offline if you don't want to use Chat at all. Chat is there when you want it, and tucked away when you don't.
  
  We're working on pulling other features of the site into the real- time Chat world. Your notifications will now arrive in the Chat bar, and while chatting you'll see your friend's Mini-Feed activity thrown into the conversation, as it occurs.
  
  Before we jump head-first into this new real-time approach to Facebook, it's worth spending some time thinking about privacy. Conversations are one-to-one, completely private, and only between Facebook friends. The message history is saved from page to page, and even between login sessions, but it is not logged permanently. Should you wish to clear out the history immediately, there's a link provided in each conversation to do so. If you don't want your Mini-Feed stories embedded into your conversations, you can turn off that feature from either the Mini-Feed privacy page or the Chat settings panel. As Chat grows and evolves, we'll continue to make sure that you are in control.
  
  Chat is by no means a new concept, as instant messaging systems have been around for over a decade. But just as other features on Facebook have allowed friends to communicate more efficiently than before, we hope Facebook Chat will make it easier to connect instantly.
  
  Josh, a Facebook engineering lead, is checking who's online.
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- Topics: Chat
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- iPhoto, meet Facebook
  by Josh Wiseman on Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 11:34am
  Nice to meet you, Facebook
  As a Mac user living the iLife and drinking the Kool-Aid, I take great pride in the machine and software I use everyday. So when I come home with hundreds of digital pics on my credit card of a camera, it comes as no surprise how easy it is to import them into my iPhoto library, set a new desktop picture, and maybe email a couple very choice pics to my grandparents. Far be it from me to deny my Facebook friends album upon album of photographic revelation, so I just...drag the photos from the library into a Finder... folder, open Facebook, create a new album, upload the photos with our Java uploader, tag and caption for a while, then save…so much for seamless.
  
  But the dark days are over. It just so happened that we had a Hackathon back in January, and it just so happened that I overheard a Platform engineer mention the new photo upload capability they were about to release, and it just so happened that iPhoto has an API for their export panel, and it just so happened that I knew how to program for a Mac. Checkmate! Thus was born the Facebook Exporter for iPhoto.
  
  Gone are the days of the 10-step photo upload. Now you can export photos directly from your iPhoto library to a Facebook album, complete with captions and tags.
  
  This is another great example of what can be accomplished using the
  Facebook Platform. Any developer could have written this application—I just got to it first. There are plenty of cool products created by the Facebook development community; now that we've added photo uploading capabilities to the Platform, I expect a full gamut of photo-related applications to emerge. There's already some buzz about a Flickr-to-Facebook exporter on the Platform discussion boards, and a Facebook hoodie just might be in store for the first developer to build it.
  
  Josh, a Facebook Engineer, knew deep down that his Cocoa programming talents would find purpose at a web company.
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