The Facebook Blog

This morning, we announced plans to give you more control over your information and to help you make more informed choices about privacy. We'll be making a series of improvements that include notifications and information about privacy settings and practices, additions to Facebook's privacy policy, and technical changes designed to give people more transparency and control over the information they provide to third-party applications.

These planned changes are a result of collaborative discussions we've had with the Office of the Privacy... Commissioner of Canada, which has spent more than a year reviewing Facebook's privacy policies and controls. You can read more about their announcement here. If you are a developer, you can read more about the potential impact for applications here.

The improvements we announced today are in addition to the tests we began in July of simpler privacy settings and tools for migrating people to the new controls. Those tests continue and we hope to roll them out to more of you in the coming months.

Giving people more control over what information they share and with whom is at the heart of how we think about privacy at Facebook. As people better understand how information is shared and gain more control over it, they become more comfortable and confident in sharing—whether it be photos of a vacation or a status update about how they're feeling today. As we complete these improvements in the coming months, we'll continue to share more details with you.


Tim Sparapani is director of public policy at Facebook.

The most important part of organizing any event is making sure you invite the right people. For example, if you're planning a birthday party, you might want to invite the same friends who went to a fun BBQ the weekend before. To enable this, we recently added the ability to invite friends to an event based on who was invited to past events you've attended.

This new feature of Facebook Events works by allowing you to filter your friends by recent events. When inviting friends to a new Facebook event, click on the tab labeled "Filter Friends" in... the upper-left corner. The drop-down menu will display the five most recent events you either created or attended in the past month.



When you click on one of these events, you will see all of your friends that were invited to that event, regardless of whether they actually attended. Keep in mind that only your confirmed friends with will appear in this selection. If 50 people were invited to last weekend's BBQ but you are only Facebook friends with 20 of them, you will only see those 20 people.

From this selection, you can invite people individually or click "Select All." Then select "Send Invitations" at the bottom of the field.

With this new filter, we hope you will be able to organize even more events and invite the best mix of people.


Brynn Shepherd, a product design intern from the University of Pennsylvania, is excited that the feature she built this summer is now live.

Many people have asked us to make Facebook and Twitter work better together for those times when they want to share their content as widely as possible. We agree. Over the next few days, we will be releasing a feature that allows administrators of Facebook Pages to publish their Facebook updates to their Twitter accounts automatically. This will only link Facebook Pages to Twitter, not your individual profile.

Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who've created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a... photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible. Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls for help to both their Facebook fans and their Twitter followers, all at the same time.



If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them. If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter.



A number of celebrities and organizations on Facebook are already using this feature to publish the content on their Facebook Page to Twitter and reach a wider audience. They include Dane Cook, LIVESTRONG, The World Wildlife Fund, and the NBA, WNBA and D-League.

We are always looking to make it easy for you to use Facebook with your favorite websites and applications. Facebook Connect allows you to bring your Facebook profile with you across the Web. We recently worked with Yahoo to integrate your Facebook experience into Yahoo's new homepage; we've built our own Firefox and iPhone applications in-house; and we built tools to help you bring your content from YouTube, Hulu and other sites into your Facebook profile.

Twitter was a natural next step to link with Facebook Pages because it is a powerful tool for broadcasting short messages widely.

I was able to build this new feature from start to finish as a summer engineering intern. Next month I'll head back to school, but I'm excited to see my work here live on through all of the people who now will both share on Facebook and tweet on Twitter right from their Facebook Pages.

Let us know if there are other websites you'd like to work better with Facebook. Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to build it when I return next summer.


Michael is getting ready to return to Stanford University for his junior year.

Last month, we began testing new versions of Search with a small group of people on Facebook. Based on the success of those tests, we're rolling out a new version of Search to everyone on the site beginning today.

You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you're a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes,... regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people's profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications.

To search for a particular term, just enter your query in the search box in the upper-right corner of any page. Once you're taken to the search results, use the filters on the left-hand side of the page to view only posts by friends or posts by everyone. If you're searching for a specific person, Page, group or application, you also can filter by those results.

By being able to search more types of content that are being shared on the site, you can easily find out your friends' evening plans and recently frequented restaurants by searching for "dinner," discover which of your friends are following Michael Schumacher's comeback during the "Formula 1" season by searching for the race series, or query "economy" to see if people or your favorite news sources feel that the recession is turning around. You also can search for a company or product to learn what people are saying about that brand.

Earlier today, I used Facebook Search to get the latest about our recent acquisition of FriendFeed, an innovative service for sharing online. When I enter "FriendFeed" in the "Search" field in the upper-right hand corner of any page on Facebook, I get the most recent status updates, reactions and news from my friends who work in technology and people who have chosen to make their content available to everyone. I also can find the official FriendFeed Page on Facebook and user groups related to FriendFeed.



Remember that you can always control what content you're sharing in other people's search results by editing your privacy settings here.

We hope that these improvements to Search will help you connect with and find information about the people and things you care about more easily. We're rolling these changes out over the course of the next few days, so you may not see the new results just yet.


Akhil, an engineering manager, is searching for what his friends are saying about the new Facebook Search.

When I found out this past spring that I'd be a product marketing intern at Facebook for the summer, I was eager to start working on cool projects at one of the most exciting companies in Silicon Valley. I never imagined that in my first week I'd have the opportunity to have an even broader impact by being asked to work with dozens of technology start-ups through the fbFund REV program.

REV is an incubator program for 24 companies building new applications for you on the Facebook Platform, ranging from an application devoted to helping people ...run errands more efficiently to one that is devoted to finding work for people in third-world countries.

Over the past couple of months, I've worked with the companies as they experiment and iterate on the development of new applications and build their businesses— all from one of Facebook's former offices in downtown Palo Alto, Calif. Most importantly, the environment spurs learning and innovation.

For instance, one of the companies in the program, GeckoGo, is building an application that helps people plan their upcoming travel. While designing the application, GeckoGo's founders realized they needed to make it more engaging and turned to other entrepreneurs and advisers in the REV program for advice on how to simplify the design of their product and better solicit feedback from users. After a series of changes, people began spending significantly more time with their application. Another company, Frintro, is trying to find new ways to connect your single friends with one another by asking its users to make introductions from their different friend groups.

Together, we have a small community that provides powerful advice and learnings around product development and marketing, not to mention the daily struggles of starting a company.Along with meetings among the entrepreneurs and developers , the program also has experts from all over Silicon Valley visit REV to share their perspectives on building a company — on everything from funding the business and building user-friendly features to giving a good presentation. Many of the topics I'm studying as a business school student at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, like how to run an operationally lean company and how to market your company's products, were brought to life through the REV program.

I'm constantly surprised by all that I learn from the REV developers and can't wait for you to try all of the applications. For more information about the products that the teams are developing, check out the fbFund REV website and Facebook Page.


Shaykat, an intern for the fbFund REV program, doesn't want the summer to end.