The Facebook Blog

Groups on Facebook seem to be used in two entirely different ways. First, groups are used to organize around a real-life interest or group, and members of these groups visit the pages to find out new information about its happenings. On the other hand, groups can be great just to declare an affiliation, such as my obsession with Thin Mints. As we grow and develop groups into more usable features, we don't want to lose the many "Just For Fun—Facebook Classic" groups. Thus we're trying to make ways to allow you to keep both, but keep their... purposes separate. Here are two recent features we've added that may help:

• Group update information on the My Groups page. These summaries of information can help you keep track of active groups where you may want to participate. Check out the My Groups page to see how many Wall posts, board topics, member changes, and profile updates have happened recently.

• Group admins can create related events directly from group profile pages. This makes the group the host of the event and allows the admin to invite all group members to the event automatically. When events are created, the summary (see above) will show 'Events' as being updated. This allows you to see new events for groups without having to visit every page or weed through the various Thin Mints groups (they tend to not host events).

We're working hard to extend groups to make them what you want. So, if you have an idea of something to add to groups or a way to show your devotions better, let us know. We'll be happy to listen.



Joel, a Facebook engineer, actually prefers Tagalongs, but couldn't find a group in support of them.

Have you ever had a day where you log into Facebook and something looks different, but you can't put your finger on it? Not that you should anyway, your monitor will get all smudged. The reason for that feeling is that something probably is different.

To help keep everyone in the loop, we added a brand new page that chronicles what's new on Facebook. You can always get to it by clicking that link to the right of the Facebook Blog. Periodically, we'll slip a few of these "what's new" stories into your News Feed so that when something changes,... you'll get the heads up about it.

We at Facebook are probably among the most avid users of Facebook. In fact, it's hard to think how our company would function without it. Well, obviously, if Facebook didn't exist, we wouldn't have a company, but beyond that the site plays a vital role in our company culture.

Our new hires browse the Facebook work network to friend and get to know their new co-workers. We make Facebook Groups centered around office inside jokes. All of our company events and parties are organized with Facebook Events, and the pictures taken at those events are... posted on Facebook all too soon afterwards. Our e-mail chat list has grown quieter these days because most of us opt to post funny links to our profiles via Facebook Share. We write Facebook Notes to spread gossip about our fellow co-workers' love interests, and we have some of the most intense poke war rivalries known to man. My favorite application of Facebook in the workplace, however, has been using it to organize Facebook Games.

Immunity Challenge #9: Team photo in team color.

Most often, when we release something new to the site, you can read about it here on the blog and, at the same time, find the new feature or change on the site itself. However, pretty soon we're going to release some updates to our design, and instead of waiting till the day we launch, we wanted to give you a chance to see what we're doing ahead of time.

We've created a Facebook group called "Facebook Sneak Preview", where we've posted screenshots of the upcoming changes. We'd like to invite everyone to join.

The Facebook Sneak Preview group... is where we'll show you our plans before they're final. This gives you a chance to offer feedback, and us a chance to respond. We will update and add pictures as we make changes.

Here are the three biggest aspects of the upcoming change:

We don't keep exacts stats for this sort of thing, but approximately a bajillion people have asked us to add the ability to sort photos within a photo album. It's a pretty sensible request – it sucks trying to get photos in a specific order on Facebook. And probably about once a week, someone around the office would say, "Hey, we should add photo sorting." If they were lucky, they might just get a bunch of people rolling their eyes; unlucky souls would get a gruff reply along the lines of, "Yeah, so build it..."

"Dustin, come take a look at this – the graph is crashing."

Sure enough, our active users count was dropping off like a rock shortly before 6pm PST. But I wasn't worried. The same thing happens every week at this time: hundreds of thousands of people tune out of Facebook to tune in to Grey's Anatomy. The dip two weeks ago was actually much sharper than normal, due to a cliffhanger the week before, which enticed more people to start watching on time.

By the end of the episode, nearly 200,000 people had built up a Facebook craving: the graph comes promptly back up at the end of the hour.

A more granular view of activity: the number of users who have taken an action within a 60 second period. It’s easy to see 10-15k people taking Facebook breaks during each of the commercials. Not Pictured: Another 20k viewers took more traditional bathroom breaks, and 12k made a snack.

At this point, almost ten million different users sign into the site every day, or more than half the user base. During our biggest peaks - Sunday & Monday night around 10EST - more than one million people will be simultaneously logged into the site. So, when something occupies a big portion of the population's attention, we notice.



Dustin, a Facebook co-founder, watches Grey's Anatomy each week solely to keep in touch with Facebook users and definitely not because he's dying to see if McSteamy can handle Addison's bet.

Last year we really messed up—turns out 'first annual' is terrible grammar. The rest of our inaugural Men's College Basketball Tournament feature was pretty cool though, and I'm proud to announce it's back and better than ever.

1. We'll be giving out lots of cool prizes as the tournament progresses. For starters, first place overall will receive a prize valued at $25,000. ... There are many other prizes along the way - check out the details here.


Constantly updating content from the good folks at the Associated Press and STATS LLC. This means there'll be articles, live game stats, and photos, all on Facebook.


News Feed stories! Make sure to post on your friend's bracket when his or her championship team takes a dive in round 1. Trust me, News Feed makes smack talk that much more fun.


Facebook mobile integration. Live updates via SMS (text messages for you lay folks) about the teams and games you care about.


You can invite your friends who aren't on Facebook to participate really easily. (They'll have to register to join the pools and enter a bracket, but really, who _isn't_ on Facebook these days?)


Statistically speaking, I'll probably score more than 15% of the possible points this year.