The Facebook Blog

Originally Published on Thursday, September 30, 2010:

Photos are one of the things people love to share, and they are often the most meaningful. Sometimes it's snapshots of the ordinary—your new haircut, a homemade cupcake. Sometimes it's bigger, more profound—a high-school graduation, a first tooth, a newborn! Photos often bring us the best news of the day.

When we originally got started on Photos, we only had two people working on it. We didn't build out a lot of features; we just focused on making sure photos were easy to share and this made Photos a great social experience. But we also wanted to give people on Facebook the best quality photo product on the web.

So I'm excited to announce three big improvements to Photos: high resolution images so you can store bigger pictures, a better viewer for browsing photos, and a simpler uploader when you have lots of images. The team has been working hard to get these done, and we'll make these available to everyone over the next month.  

Higher Resolution

Starting today, we will be rolling out support for print-quality, high-resolution photos. And unlike on many other online services, you don't need any kind of premium or paid account.

We're increasing the size of the photos stored from 720 pixels to 2048 pixels on the largest edge, for an 8 times increase overall. I'm really excited to be launching this feature. To see the quality of these pictures, you can view National Geographic's "Top-Rated Your Shot Photos (September)" album or Sports Illustrated's "Football Across America" album. Download high-resolution photos by clicking the "Download" link.  

A Better Photo Viewer

The new viewer makes it simpler and faster to navigate photos. You can now view photos and even whole albums without even having to go to a new page. Instead, the photo opens in the center of your screen, and you close it when you're done. There's no need to go back and forth between pages or reload the page.

A new light box (the dark frame around your pictures) makes viewing photos a richer experience. We also rewrote all the code for the viewer from scratch, so paging through photos will be noticeably faster.

Easier Tagging and Uploading

We also wanted to make it easier to tag photos. When people upload a set of photos, they are often of events like weddings and birthday parties where people are with the same group of friends and family. With our new uploader, you will be able to tag multiple photos in the same album all at once, as well as tag photos of the same person with a lot less effort.

Lastly, we've completely rebuilt our photo uploader to be more stable and reliable. It now uses the latest Flash technology, so that your experience getting photos onto Facebook is an easy one—especially when you have lots of them. While this change is mostly behind the scenes, we think you'll notice a big improvement.

All of us on the Photos team at Facebook are excited to make the experience of sharing photos the best on the web. Enjoy.

Sam, product manager for Facebook Photos, is now tagging Beau, Dan, Iain, Jun, Justin, Makinde, Paul, Roman, Rong, Stefan and Tom in team photos.

Over the past six months, we built the Facebook for Feature Phones app with Snaptu to bring improved Facebook functionality to over 2,500 different devices. We also launched 0.facebook.com as a faster and free way for people to access Facebook around the world, including locations where connectivity is especially costly and slow.

Today, we're excited to share some of our recent collaborations with two mobile device manufacturers.

Two upcoming Android devices from INQ, the Cloud Touch and Cloud Q, feature new Facebook integrations with single sign-on and easy one-touch access to popular Facebook features. The home screen features your News Feed (including your friends' updates, pictures, videos and links) and quick links to Chat, Messages, Places, notifications and more. You can also check in to your favorite shops and businesses with Facebook Places, right from the home screen.

HTC's ChaCha and Salsa phones feature a dedicated Facebook button that gives you one-touch access to your favorite Facebook functions, allowing you to update your status, upload a photo, share a news article and check in to places. Facebook Chat, Messages and your friends are also integrated, so when you make a phone call, the screen displays your friends' status updates and photos, and even their birthdays.

In addition to these new phones from INQ and HTC, you'll also be seeing similar deep Facebook integration on dozens of other devices over the course of this year. Some manufacturers will be highlighting Facebook as a part of their phones' on-screen interfaces, and others will use our brand as an element of the device hardware itself.

We believe almost anything is better when it's social, and this year we'll continue to invest in new technologies so you have a great Facebook experience no matter where you go.

Charles Wu is a Facebook engineer working on mobile.

Originally Published on Monday, November 15, 2010:

Imagine the kind of family you might see in a modern American sitcom: loving parents trying to maintain a family unit with a teenager engrossed in text messaging, a college-aged child who is always chatting online, and various wacky relatives who spend their days sending "funny" emails to the family.

This is an admittedly exaggerated stereotype but one we see every day in movies, TV and advertising because most of us can relate to parts of it. Between mobile devices and the Internet we can be more connected today than ever before, but there is still a feeling that the technology can also act as a barrier between us. When I want to share with someone it should be as simple as deciding who I want to share with and what I want to say.  It should feel more like a human conversation.

Seamless Messaging

Today I'm excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time.  You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use.  Simply choose their name and type a message.

We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they're on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.

Conversation History

Messages is built for communicating with your friends, so it made sense to organize primarily around people.  All of your messages with someone will be together in one place, whether they are sent over chat, email or SMS. You can see everything you've discussed with each friend as a single conversation.

I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea.

The Social Inbox

It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It's not that those other messages aren't important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder where you can look at them separately.

If someone you know isn't on Facebook, that person's email will initially go into the Other folder. You can easily move that conversation into the Inbox, and all the future conversations with that friend will show up there.

You can also change your account settings to be even more limited and bounce any emails that aren't exclusively from friends.

This kind of message control is pretty unprecedented and people have been wanting to do this with email (and phone calls) for a long time. Messages reverses the approach to preventing unwanted contact. Instead of having to worry about your email address getting out, you're now in control of who can actually reach you.

The Next Generation

Relatively soon, we'll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other. We will just select friends by name and be able to share with them instantly. We aren't there yet, but the changes today are a small first step.

We'll be launching Messages and email addresses gradually and making it available to everyone over the next few months. Once you receive an invitation, you'll be able to get started and also invite your friends to join you.

To learn more, take a tour of Messages. Please share your thoughts and feedback with us here.

Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat.