The Facebook Blog

We've long heard that people would find Facebook more useful if it were easier to connect with smaller groups of their friends instead of always sharing with everyone they know. For some it's their immediate family and for others it's their fantasy football league, but the common concern is always some variant of, "I'd share this thing, but I don't want to bother 250 people. Or my grandmother. Or my boss."

Until now, Facebook has made it easy to share with all of your friends or with everyone, but there hasn't been a simple way to create and maintain a space for sharing with the small communities of people in your life, like your roommates, classmates, co-workers and family.

We set out to build a solution that could help you map out all of your communities, that would be simple enough that everyone would use it and that would be deeply integrated across Facebook and applications so you can communicate with your different groups in lots of different ways.

We approached this problem as primarily a social one. Rather than asking all of you to classify how you know all of your friends, or programming machines to guess which sets of people are likely cohorts, we're offering something that's as simple as inviting your best friends over for dinner. And we think it will change the way you use Facebook and the web.

Today we're announcing a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. It's a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them in a private space. The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what's going on in a group.

From this space, you can quickly post photos, make plans and keep up with ongoing conversations. You can also group chat with members who are online right now. You can even use each group as an email list to quickly share things when you're not on Facebook. The net effect is your whole experience is organized around spaces of the people you care most about.

I'm also excited to share a couple of other new things we've been working on that will give you more control and make it easier to stay connected no matter what you're trying to do.

First, we've built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you've ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information.

If you want a copy of the information you've put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download. To protect your information, this feature is only available after confirming your password and answering appropriate security questions. We'll begin rolling out this feature to people later today, and you'll find it under your account settings.

Second, we're launching a new dashboard to give you visibility into how applications use your data to personalize your experience. As you start having more social and personalized experiences across the web, it's important that you can verify exactly how other sites are using your information to make your experience better.

As this rolls out, in your Facebook privacy settings, you will have a single view of all the applications you've authorized and what data they use. You can also see in detail when they last accessed your data. You can change the settings for an application to make less information available to it, or you can even remove it completely.

We've heard loud and clear that you want more control over what you share on Facebook—to manage exactly who sees it and to understand exactly where it goes. With this new Groups experience and the other tools we're rolling out today, we're taking a few important steps forward towards giving you precise controls. We hope these tools bring you more confidence as you share things on Facebook, and that your experience grows richer and more real as a result.

Today, we're partnering with Bing to give you a way to bring your friends' recommendations to online search. Your friends have liked lots of things all over the web, and now instead of stumbling across a new movie or having to look at a friend's profile to see which restaurants they like, we're bringing everything together in one place.

When you search for something on Bing or in web results on Facebook (powered by Bing), you'll be able to see your friends' faces next to web pages they've liked. So, you can lean on friends to figure out the best websites for your search.

In addition, we're providing improved people search results on Bing, making it easier to find old friends or connect with new ones.  Now when you search on Bing, rather than showing you all the Matthew Kims out there, Bing finds and provides the results most relevant to you based on your Facebook connections—those with whom you have mutual friends will now show up first.  Bing is also making more prominent the ability to add these people as friends on Facebook directly from Bing.

Over the coming weeks, we'll be rolling this feature out in the U.S. As you and your friends like more things across the web, Bing search will become more social and useful for you.  

Learn more about our Instant Personalization program and Bing's new features. You can also become a fan of Bing on Facebook for the latest updates.

Bret, Facebook's chief technology officer, is looking forward to more easily finding the websites which his friends and family recommend.

A few months ago, I began a small project to build a page devoted to friendships. A few interns and I started a prototype during an all-night hackathon, and then one of our designers jumped in. For all of us, it's been a labor of love.

Today I'm excited to be launching Friendship Pages. They contain the public Wall posts and comments between two friends, photos in which both are tagged, Events they RSVP'd for together and more. You'll be able to see a friendship page if you are friends with one of the people and have permission to view both people's profiles.

When it's between two people who share a lot, the page really starts to reflect their friendship. You can find a friendship page from links under relevant Wall posts, under relationship stories and under the main photo on a friend's profile page.

For those of us who have worked on it, the best part is the human side of these pages. They can bring back memories, conversations and times spent together. Browsing just a few friendship pages, I was reminded of a long Saturday when a friend and I made a pie together, a memorable trip to Disneyland where I got dizzy riding a teacup, and the elaborate birthday party my friend threw for his dog--streamers, candles and all.

It's remarkable to see how information can be transformed into something new and meaningful. I hope you enjoy using this with your friends.

Wayne, a Facebook software engineer, is re-reading the friendship page between himself and his friend Irene, who he's known since childhood.

We're working with companies such as Skype to make it easy to find your friends anytime you want to connect. Try out the new Skype with your friends.

Ethan, director of Facebook Developer Network, just spoke with an old college friend, who lives in New York, on Skype.

Simply text "otp" to 32665 on your mobile phone (U.S. only), and you'll immediately receive a password that can be used only once and expires in 20 minutes. In order to access this feature, you'll need a mobile phone number in your account. We're rolling this out gradually, and it should be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

Second, the ability to sign out of Facebook remotely is now available to everyone. These session controls can be useful if you log into Facebook from a friend's phone or computer and then forget to sign out. From your Account Settings, you can check if you're still logged in on other devices and remotely log out.

Under the Account Security section of your Account Settings page you'll see all of your active sessions, along with information about each session. In the unlikely event that someone accesses your account without your permission, you can also shut down the unauthorized login before resetting your password and taking other steps to secure your account and computer.

Lastly, when people log in to Facebook we will regularly prompt them to keep their security information updated. If you ever lose access to your account, having this information helps us verify who you are and get you back into your account quickly.

You don't have to wait for us to prompt you; you can update your security information at any time from this page.  

We're always working to make your online experience more secure, and we encourage you to try these new features for yourself to help protect your account. For more security tips and updates, visit the Facebook Security Page at www.facebook.com/security.

Jake, a product manager for Facebook's site integrity team, is locking it up.

Today, we're launching a new version of Groups that does just that. With new Groups, we made it easy for you to build a space for important groups of people in your life—your family, your soccer team, your book club. All you have to do to get started is to create a group, add friends and start sharing.

When a group member posts to the group, everyone in the group will receive a notification about that post. Now I won't have to guess anymore about whether my parents saw the pictures I posted of their grandkids; when I post in my family group, I'll know that they've been notified about it and that only they will see it. Since information posted in my new groups is only visible to group members by default, I can feel confident about who sees what I post.

We've also added a bunch of new features to Groups to make sharing and communication with small groups of people easier. One of them is group chat, one of our most frequently requested features. Until now, you've only been able to chat with one person at a time on Facebook. Now you can chat with everyone in your group at once.

You can also use Groups as a replacement for mailing lists by setting up your group to send an email to you anytime anyone posts in it. You can even set up a group email address so members can keep in touch when they're not on Facebook—emails they send turn into posts in the group.

By default, new Groups are Closed.  That means anything posted in the group is only visible to people in it. The name of the group and its members are still visible to everyone, so your friends can find the right group. You can also use the settings to create groups that have their name and members unlisted ("Secret"), or create groups that have more public settings ("Open").

Of course, creating a group for my family is just one of the possibilities for Groups. There are as many kinds of possible Groups as there are people on Facebook. Give it a try and create a few groups of your own at http://www.facebook.com/groups.

Daniel Chai, a Facebook engineer on the Groups team, is about to create a family group and make some grandparents happy.