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.

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.

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.

If you're a programmer, you should check out the Facebook Development Platform Group. You can share your ideas, find people with common interests, and ask questions of the community of Facebook developers. The discussion group has a lot to offer, including the direct assistance of the Facebook team that brought you the development platform.

For people who aren't into programming, the Facebook Development Platform means you'll begin to see interesting applications, both on the web and your desktop, that extend your Facebook experience to anything that you're into. We enforce the same set of privacy rules for your information as when you're on Facebook, but now you can choose to use your information in the applications developed by other people through our platform. To see what people have done, and what you'd like to use, check out the product directory.

Facebook runs because of work done in the development community, so we're really excited to contribute this development platform back to it. Our new site at http://developers.facebook.com also includes some open source projects we've been working on.


Dave Fetterman is the lead engineer of the Facebook Development Platform.