The Facebook Blog

Through the Facebook blog, we share interesting insights and stories that hopefully cause you to think more expansively about Facebook and what it can mean to your life. Many of our posts inspire thoughtful commentary and even spirited disagreement. We're now enabling public commenting and the Like feature on the Facebook blog. You may have noticed that we started doing this as of yesterday.

This is in keeping with our company mission of making the world more open and connected. You can now share your thoughts and participate in... conversations as they unfold. In any discussion, we of course hope you'll keep your comments relevant and respectful. We reserve the right to remove any content that's defamatory, offensive or off-topic. You will be commenting as you, after all, not under some anonymous Internet pseudonym.

You may be wondering why we're choosing to open commenting and enable the Like feature on the Facebook blog now. It's because we believe that when people choose to share more openly, the transparency will help us better understand one another. That's the promise of Facebook. Besides, receiving more of your feedback will enable us to do more good—on the blog and across the site in the way we build products.

We won't be responding to comments directly, and if you need help with your account or have specific questions or ideas for us, please visit our Help Center. We hope to address some of the questions and issues people raise in future posts.


Kathy, Facebook's resident blogger, hopes to hear from you.

Last week, we returned to our previous Terms of Use as we worked on a new set of governing documents that would more clearly explain the relationship between Facebook and its users. Since then, I've been excited to see how much people care about Facebook and how willing they are to contribute to the process of governing the site.

Our main goal at Facebook is to help make the world more open and transparent. We believe that if we want to lead the world in this direction, then we must set an example by running our service in this way.

We sat down... to work on documents that could be the foundation of this and we came to an interesting realization—that the conventional business practices around a Terms of Use document are just too restrictive to achieve these goals. We decided we needed to do things differently and so we're going to develop new policies that will govern our system from the ground up in an open and transparent way.

Beginning today, we are giving you a greater opportunity to voice your opinion over how Facebook is governed. We're starting this off by publishing two new documents for your review and comment. The first is the Facebook Principles, which defines your rights and will serve as the guiding framework behind any policy we'll consider—or the reason we won't consider others. The second document is the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which will replace the existing Terms of Use. With both documents, we tried hard to simplify the language so you have a clear understanding of how Facebook will be run. We've created separate groups for each document so you can read them and provide comments and feedback. You can find the Facebook Principles here and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities here. Before these new proposals go into effect, you'll also have the ability to vote for or against proposed changes.

I believe these steps are unprecedented in promoting understanding and enabling participation on the web. I hope you will take a look at these documents, read them carefully, and share your thoughts.

Facebook is still in the business of introducing new and therefore potentially disruptive technologies. This can mean that our users periodically experience adjustments to new products as they become familiar with them, and before becoming enthusiastic supporters. The launch of News Feed and the recent interface redesign are excellent examples that illustrate why we need to continue to make independent decisions about products in order to push technology forward. While these products must be consistent with the Principles and in compliance with the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, they will not be subject to the notice and comment or voting requirement.

We're honored that so many millions of people around the world have decided to bring Facebook into their lives to share information and experiences with friends and loved ones. We understand that gives us an important responsibility to our users.

History tells us that systems are most fairly governed when there is an open and transparent dialogue between the people who make decisions and those who are affected by them. We believe history will one day show that this principle holds true for companies as well, and we're looking to moving in this direction with you.

Group administrators commonly write into us to change the names of the Facebook Groups they have created. Sometimes the reason is as simple as fixing spelling errors and typing mistakes. Other times, a group's purpose has evolved and it needs a name that better reflects its goals. Now, group administrators can make these changes themselves, at any time.

We recently made this change because we want to give people more control over the groups they create. Whenever there is a name change, members of that group will receive a notification, so be... sure to check your notifications box for group name changes. Of course, you can leave a group if you don't want to remain a member after a name change or at any other time by selecting the option "leave group" below the profile picture of any group that you are a member of. Check out our Help Center for more information.

We're always looking for ways to improve the site and make it easier for people to share—which means giving you more control and choice over how you use our products. Keep your suggestions coming.


Daniel Chai, a Facebook engineer, is checking his group names for typos.

I can't wait for the Oscars this Sunday night. Not only am I going to be tuning in from home, but starting today, I'm also using Facebook's Live Feed integrations on E! Online, Variety and many more websites stretching across the world—including Bollywood sites Zoom and Saavn—to share predictions for my favorite Academy Award nominees. You can now join the conversations leading up to this weekend's big show honoring exceptional acting and filmmaking.

Simply go to any of the participating sites and log in with your Facebook account via Facebook... Connect. You'll be able to post status updates and see what others are saying about the Oscars in real-time, no matter which participating site your friends are on. For instance, if you're on Variety but your friends are posting on E! Online, you will also see their status update in your Live Feed. This way, the conversation occurs across all the participating websites and Facebook.com. You can even do all of this without leaving Facebook by checking out our Live Feed Page.



Not only is Facebook connecting with the participating websites, but all the sites involved will also be connected to each other—leading to an even more open conversation for all of my friends who are excited about the Oscars. Experience all the fanfare and stardom and share your reactions to Oscar fashion, winners and acceptance speeches—all with your friends on Facebook.

Participating sites (as of today) include:

We're always getting asked what people who work at Facebook are up to and how they can find out about it. Facebook is focused on helping people share and connect, and in our work, we encounter some pretty big questions and unsolved problems. Often our work follows us home. With so many interesting challenges and perspectives, we want to surface all the thoughts, energy and passion of the people at Facebook. So, today we're launching people.facebook.com—a collection of the voices of Facebook employees.

people.facebook.com is an aggregation of... employees' personal blog posts. It'll link to content by Facebook employees from all across the Web including Facebook Notes and other blogs. There are three channels—engineering, platform and life, with more to come. You'll discover a bit of everything from an engineer's diatribe on what makes good code to an open letter to the White House on best practices for the President's website and even an explanation as to how the OpenID experience can work within pop-up windows. The aggregator will pick up any new blog posts by our employees, but you can also subscribe to an RSS feed for each channel.

The blogs at people.facebook.com are the personal and unfiltered opinions of Facebook employees and not necessarily those of Facebook's. We'll continue to have our official channels of communication where you should look for news and updates from the company—this blog and those that are focused on engineering and Platform, too.


Alex hopes you'll check out his blog post on why thinking in analogies is dangerous.

A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our... positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

Going forward, we've decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don't plan to leave it there for long.

More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren't just a document that protect our rights; it's the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service.

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

You have my commitment that we'll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we've changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.

If you'd like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we've created—Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I'm looking forward to reading your input.

A couple of weeks ago, we updated our terms of use to clarify a few points for our users. A number of people have raised questions about our changes, so I'd like to address those here. I'll also take the opportunity to explain how we think about people's information.

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they've asked us to share it with.... Without this license, we couldn't help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.

We still have work to do to communicate more clearly about these issues, and our terms are one example of this. Our philosophy that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant. A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you. Over time we will continue to clarify our positions and make the terms simpler.

Still, the interesting thing about this change in our terms is that it highlights the importance of these issues and their complexity. People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people's information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.

We're at an interesting point in the development of the open online world where these issues are being worked out. It's difficult terrain to navigate and we're going to make some missteps, but as the leading service for sharing information we take these issues and our responsibility to help resolve them very seriously. This is a big focus for us this year, and I'll post some more thoughts on openness and these other issues soon.

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.

There's a lot of content my friends have shared on Facebook that's pretty awesome. For instance, in the last few days I've seen photos from a friend's wedding, an article about U.S. President Obama's ongoing transition and status updates from a friend traveling in India.

We've just introduced an easy way to tell friends that you like what they're sharing on Facebook with one easy click. Wherever you can add a comment on your friends' content, you'll also have the option to click "Like" to tell your friends exactly that: "I like this."

Recently, I... had a friend write a note about running her first marathon and another friend upload pictures of his new baby. In both cases, they ended up with over 30 comments, all saying: "Awesome!" "Congrats!" The aggregation of the sentiment "I like this" makes room in the comments section for longer accolades.

This is similar to how you might rate a restaurant on a reviews site. If you go to the restaurant and have a great time, you may want to rate it 5 stars. But if you had a particularly delicious dish there and want to rave about it, you can write a review detailing what you liked about the restaurant. We think of the new "Like" feature to be the stars, and the comments to be the review.



Your friends, and their photos, notes, statuses and more are what make Facebook great. When your friends share something great, let them know you like it.


Leah Pearlman really likes the new "Like" feature.

We want to let you know that today we're updating our Terms of Use—the rules you and Facebook agree to when you sign up to use the site. We used to have several different documents that outlined what people could and could not do on Facebook, but now we're consolidating all this information to one central place. We've also simplified and clarified a lot of information that applies to you, including some things you shouldn't do when using the site.

Most of these things are pretty obvious; you probably wouldn't ever do them. For example, you... probably don't "provide any false personal information in your profile" or "intimidate or harass other users." But in order to help Facebook remain a safe and trusted environment, we think it's important to specifically mention behaviors like these in the "Prohibited Conduct" section.

As always, protecting your privacy and information is of the utmost importance to us, and these updates provide you with the same level of protection you have come to expect from Facebook.

You can check out the updated terms here.


Suzie White, Facebook's Corporate Counsel for Commercial Transactions, is representing, warranting, and agreeing.

Tomorrow is Facebook's 5th birthday. This is a happy occasion for Facebook, but much more significant to the Facebook team is the fact that over 150 million people around the world are using Facebook to connect with the people in their lives. Facebook was founded in 2004 to give people the tools to engage and understand the world around them. We are glad and humbled that so many people are using Facebook in this way.

While we at Facebook make products that enable people to share information efficiently, Facebook is mostly the product of the... people who use it. Without you and the connections you make to others, the products we create wouldn't have much meaning. So we feel fortunate to have all of you with us. To express our appreciation, we've created a "Thank You" gift, which will be available tomorrow in the Facebook Gift Shop for you to to give freely to others. In the spirit of celebrating connections between people, we encourage you to use this gift to give thanks to your friends, colleagues and family members with whom you are connected on Facebook.

Since its founding, one of the constants of Facebook is that it has continuously evolved to make it easier to share. To give you a sense of how the site has changed, we dug up a few images of how Facebook used to look—you can see them here. Building and moving quickly for five years hasn't been easy, and we aren't finished. The challenge motivates us to keep innovating and pushing technical boundaries to produce better ways to share information.

The culture of the Internet has also changed pretty dramatically over the past five years. Before, most people wouldn't consider sharing their real identities online. But Facebook has offered a safe and trusted environment for people to interact online, which has made millions of people comfortable expressing more about themselves.

Why is it important to us to keep building better ways for people to share information? Enabling efficient sharing is important because it makes the world more open, and this gives everyone a voice to express ideas and initiate change.

As we celebrate Facebook's 5th birthday, we continue to work hard to evolve Facebook and make it as simple as possible to communicate with and understand the people and entities that matter to you.