The Facebook Blog

Just over a week ago, we began gradually rolling out gift scheduling for birthdays-helping you celebrate friends' birthdays by planning a gift as many as seven days in advance. Today, we're bringing a similar approach to Valentine's Day, so you can send your valentines something special on Facebook.

When you visit a friend's profile, under the Give Gift tab in the Publisher, you'll be able to schedule a Valentine's Day gift—ranging from a blue rose to a heart-shaped cookie.

The gift will appear wrapped on your friend's Wall until February 14th.... Only then will the contents be revealed. This way, you will know if someone special—or someone unexpected—is planning a Valentine's Day surprise. You'll get the delight of receiving a gift twice, and you'll also have a chance to reciprocate.



We're always exploring more ways to make gifts useful and meaningful for all the special occasions in your life.


Harry can't wait to unwrap his Valentine's Day gift.

Don't you hate being late for friends' birthdays? Well, today, we're helping to put an end to "belated" birthdays on Facebook. Now, on your friend's profiles, you'll be able to schedule the delivery of a gift up to seven days in advance of a birthday.

There are two ways to do this:

1. When your friends have upcoming birthdays, you'll now receive a reminder when you visit their profiles. Here's how: under the Profile Publisher—which allows you to post content directly onto someone's Wall—you'll see a new option in the "Give Gift" tab to hide your... gift until it becomes your friend's birthday.



2. If you subscribe to e-mail birthday reminders, you'll see a link in the email that will take you directly to your friend's profile to give your gift in advance.

Your friends will be able to see that you are giving a birthday gift, but the recipients will only be able to see the gift when the clock strikes midnight on their birthday.



If you don't see these new features just yet, don't worry. We're starting to roll them out today, and they will be available to everyone in the coming weeks.


Harry Wang, a Facebook Engineer, is excited about not having to worry about being "late" ever again.

Facebook's birthday reminders enable thousands of birthday greetings every day. Whether a message, a Wall post, a greeting sent through applications like Birthday Cards, Birthday Calendar, and Birthday Greeting Cards, or an old-fashioned phone call, people have found it easy to keep track of their friends' birthdays thanks to a little box in the right hand column of the home page.

To make it even easier—even if you don't check Facebook every day—this week we released a new feature that can remind you of upcoming birthdays via an email... notification. If you opt in, you will receive an email on the weekend summarizing the upcoming birthdays of your friends for the next week. Here is how to enable it from the Account Notifications page:

1. Under the "Facebook" section, click "Show More"
2. Turn on "Has a birthday coming up"

Harry is a Facebook engineer who will never forget a birthday ever again.

Chances are, you use parts of the Internet that aren't Facebook. You might post photo albums using Flickr or Picasa, for example, instead of on Facebook. There are a lot of good sites out there, unfortunately, that can sometimes mean a lot of switching around for your friends, and it can make it harder for them to discover the very best of your content. With that in mind, we've introduced a way for you to import activity from other sites into your Mini-Feed (and into your friends' News Feeds).

The option to import stories from other sites can... be found via the small "Import" link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us—are available for importing at the moment, but we'll be adding Digg and other sites in the near future. These stories will look just like any other Mini-Feed stories, and will hopefully increase your ability to share information with the people you care about.


Harry, a Facebook Engineer, is bookmarking this post on del.icio.us, reviewing Kanpai Sushi on Yelp, and uploading photos to Flickr.