As Facebook grows in other languages, we are learning a lot about what the "Facebook Experience" is like for people around the world. One of the first challenges was getting words that are really long in other languages to fit on the screen properly. Recently, we've been figuring out how to deal with a new challenge—grammar.

Ever see a story about a friend who tagged "themself" in a photo? "Themself" isn't even a real word. We've used that in place of "himself or herself". We made that grammatical choice in order to respect people who haven't, until now, selected their sex on their profile.

However, we've gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles. People who haven't selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex entirely in Mini-Feed stories.

For this reason, we've decided to request that all Facebook users fill out this information on their profile. If you haven't yet selected a sex, you will probably see a prompt to choose whether you want to be referred to as "him" or "her" in the coming weeks. When you make a selection, that will appear in Mini-Feed and News Feed stories about you, but it won't be searchable or displayed in your Basic Information.

We've received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting. We have a lot of respect for these communities, which is why it will still be possible to remove gender entirely from your account, including how we refer to you in Mini-Feed.

We hope this change will make the Facebook experience even better across the world. Let us know if you have any thoughts about this on our suggestions page.



Naomi is a Product Manager at Facebook.

At Facebook, we're always trying to find new ways to make communication easier and more efficient. One way we do that is by making it easy to have a conversation about the things that happen on Facebook. In the past, you've been able to comment on photos, notes and posted items, but if there was something else on your friend's profile—an interesting status, or a cool new friendship—you'd need to send a message or write a Wall post to talk about it. But starting today, you can comment on your friends' Mini-Feed stories right from their profile.

Five months ago, we launched the first translated version of Facebook in Spanish. Since then, the internationalization team and its community translators have been busy translating the site into sixteen more languages. We now support—among others—French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian. You can see the full list of languages, or change your language settings, from the language selector in the footer on any page.

This month, we're rolling out Inbox search, a tool which allows you to search through all of your messages either by name of the person who sent it, or by a keyword that shows up in the text. Ever had a friend send you a Facebook message suggesting a good restaurant? Or maybe you were sent an address or phone number of an old friend. Then time passes and your Inbox fills up, and by the time you're ready to go out to eat with your old friend you have to page through hundreds of Facebook messages to find the one you need. Inbox Search aims to fix this problem.

Back in September 2006, we decided to open up Facebook to everyone. Well, almost everyone.

We realized Facebook would be most useful if more people were allowed to join, but we also weren't willing to compromise the security of the site by removing all methods of verification, especially for high school students and minors. Unfortunately this meant that most homeschoolers weren't able to register. For security purposes, users under the age of 18 were required to affiliate with their current high school, but it was nearly impossible to extend this system to homeschooled users.

One thing we spend a lot of time thinking about here is how someone who just joined Facebook figures out what to do next. Almost everything on Facebook centers around friends—sending messages, checking out photos and profiles—all of these things are pretty boring without any friends.

We realized that people who are already on Facebook know who should be friends with whom in ways that we could never figure out. So, for example, if John joined Facebook and became friends with Sally, Sally would probably already know a few people who would want to be friends with John. We built the "Friend Suggestor" so that Sally could do just that.