The Facebook Blog

About a year ago, we told you about an upcoming site redesign, and asked you to check out our preview group. We received great feedback from that group, so right now, we wanted to let you know about some changes that we're working on, and invite you to check out some previews in a new Facebook Page.

The big project at Facebook these days is a redesign of Profiles. As more and more information is available on Facebook—more photo albums, more applications, and more history—we've realized that profiles have become cluttered and harder to navigate... as a result. We're trying to make profiles more simple and relevant, while still giving you control over your profile and how you express yourself. We want to invite you to keep up with our design and iteration on the new Facebook Profiles Preview Page.

On the Preview Page, you can check out some screen shots of our starting points: tabbed profiles which allow a certain amount of structure for things like basic info and personal info; a Wall tab where your Wall posts, recent activity, and other content can be published; and additional tabs where you can feature your favorite applications.

If you choose to become a fan of Facebook Profiles Previews, you'll receive weekly updates about the current state of the Profile. We'll be posting updated screen shots about once a week as well.

As for feedback, we realized last year that we had trouble keeping up with the discussion boards in the preview group. So instead, we've turned off the discussion boards and are asking that you send feedback directly to us, where we can easily sort through your comments. We'll provide info on what people are saying and try to answer any questions that come up a lot.

Check out the Profiles Preview Page now.


Carolyn is Facebook's resident blogger.

Recently, a lot of people have been frustrated by applications that inappropriately require you to invite friends. This generates a bad experience for both application users and their friends who receive unwanted invitations. We've been reading all your emails on the topic; there are even Facebook groups and a scheduled protest event devoted to the issue.

We've been working on several improvements to prevent this and other abuses by applications. We'll continue to make changes, but wanted to share some of what's new:

As you may have heard, we've just launched the Spanish version of Facebook. Facebook in multiple languages has been a long-standing request from many of our users, and we're quite happy to be able to take the first step. We anticipate that in the coming weeks and months we will launch other translated versions of our site, with the next ones being in French and German.

Having worked on internationalization at other companies, I can say that the strategy we took at Facebook in translating our site has been quite non-traditional.

Have you ever... been on a site where they've translated the content into your language but it still sounds horribly awkward? Sometimes I am, and I think to myself, "Wow, why didn't they just have a native speaker do a quick review of this stuff? I don't know Russian myself, but even I could fix all this broken English." We wanted to arrange things so you could do exactly that.

We created a feature to allow users to submit proposed translations of the strings we display on our site, and then we implemented a Reddit-like voting system to allow those same users to vote up or down those translations. To aid in creating the most natural flow and context, this feature allows you to enter a special mode where you can view the site with the proposed translations (and the one with the most current votes) displayed in-context. If you're in this mode, you can then refine a translation even further (or just vote on it) if it doesn't quite fit. As you may have guessed, we're pretty big fans of sites like Wikipedia and Reddit.

But how well did it work?

Well, we weren't quite sure ourselves, at first. Everyone's familiar with the possibility of vandalism on Wikipedia, so we wondered if the same might happen on Facebook - that's why we implemented the voting system - but surely, we thought, our users would want to make sure their own experience on Facebook was a good one. To help them out, we hired professional translators to provide glossaries, style guides, and other materials to support our community translators. And of course, we don't publish the translated versions until we do a quick check of the winning translations ourselves. We even shipped off all the strings to paid translators to have it done professionally just in case.

But Facebook users came through.

Before we were even able to finish implementation of the feature itself, Facebook users using a beta version translated our entire set of strings into Spanish in under a week - well before we received the results back from the paid translators. We weren't even ready on our side to launch the Spanish version of the site, but a few short weeks later, we are proud to have Facebook en Español. Quality is very high - as though the site had been written natively in Spanish. We've found that Facebook users are incredibly passionate about finding just the right wording to express Facebook in their own language.

And so, while we're still polishing off some other issues before we launch the French and German versions of the site (to be followed by even more language options), we're really looking forward to being able to offer Facebook to everyone around the world, written in a way that's tailored just for you, by your friends.


Yishan is a Director of Engineering at Facebook