The Facebook Blog

Facebook wants you...to make your voice heard this November.

In the past if you happened upon Hillary Clinton or Arnold Schwarzenegger on Facebook, you'd have good reason to question the authenticity of the profile. If you search for them today, you're going to see something different.

We've now got about 1,600 profiles for candidates running for House and Senate seats and state governorships this November. These profiles are controlled by the politicians, so they can show you a side of themselves that you'd never see in TV spots or even on live... debates.

Add candidates and campaign issues you support by going to the Election tab on the Edit Profile page.

We wanted to do something to increase the political voice of the people on Facebook, a group that tends to be on the younger side of the electorate and which is often underrepresented in Washington and state capitals. By bringing politicians to Facebook, you can engage with candidates on your turf, in ways that are familiar and meaningful to you. Where better for politicians to meet you guys than on the "series of tubes" where you spend so much time?

The candidates' profiles are visible to all users, and you can easily find the ones in your area by going to the Election tab on the Edit Profile page. You can add candidates you support to the new Election 2006 box in your profile. Also, you can join and create groups dedicated to the campaign issues that affect you most, which will also appear in the Election 2006 box.

Make your voice heard this fall: poke the leaders of the free world.


Ezra Callahan is the product manager for this project.

Last year there were no pretty photos.

If you've been on Facebook for more than a year, you might remember we weren't always called Facebook; we used to be thefacebook.com. And back then you could only have one photo—your profile picture. Before that, we didn't have the wall, just a single box of text. And even before that, we didn't have events, just parties. Maybe if you were here really early on, you might remember a time before we had messages or groups.

The old-style wall. We think the current wall is a big improvement.

A lot has changed,... and we're not done improving the site yet. We have a bunch of good things coming out soon, so we wanted to give you a heads up. When we've made changes in the past, a lot of people have gotten upset and emailed in asking us to change the site back. Change can be disorienting, but we do it because we're sure it makes the site better. It may have felt different at first, but things like photos, events, groups and the wall have all made Facebook a more useful and interesting site.

It's our goal to provide a tool that helps people understand what's going on with the people around them; all of our additions and changes contribute towards this goal. The new things we're going to launch will do the same.



Mark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook.

Now you can write Notes on Facebook. You can also import your blog from another site.

When you tell people you work at Facebook, they want to know more; why we made changes, what we're doing next, what the people are like. We're starting a blog so everyone can get a close-up view of what we're doing every day to make Facebook happen. We'll update it regularly, with different people posting about new features or sharing what's been happening with us. In general, come here to get a better sense of who we are and what we're up to.

We didn't want to... start blogging until everyone else could, so we waited until we launched our own version of the blog — Notes. If you're already blogging, Notes allows you to import your blog from another site, so your blog and all of your friends' blogs are all shown on Facebook for easy viewing. Notes also enables any of you that aren't bloggers to write out thoughts on any topic and incorporate them directly into your profile. If you're curious what your friends have already said, click here.

You can see all your friends' latest posts, and read all the ones about you.

Notes is one more way for you to connect with the people around you and keep up with friends. You can tag your friends so they'll know what you've said about them, and you can upload photos to illustrate just how great — or terrible — something was. We've been working really hard to bring you Notes, so we hope you like what we've done.



Carolyn Abram writes blog entries when everyone else is busy.