The Facebook Blog

Technology is giving more and more people a voice in the electoral process and Facebook is doing its part to empower U.S. citizens in the upcoming presidential election. Since we launched the first version of U.S. Politician Pages in 2006, people have been sharing information about politics and their favorite candidates in a number of different ways. People can become supporters of the politicians like Barack Obama and John McCain, start groups about issues they care about, and express opinions through status updates and Wall posts. This... election has already generated unprecedented interest among all of you, with millions of people coming together to communicate their thoughts with others.

As much as your candidate appreciates your support on Facebook, the most important thing is showing up to vote on November 4th. Facebook strives to help people share and make the world a more open place; and on election day, the ballot box is the way to make your voice count. If you are over 18 (or will be by November 4th) and a U.S. citizen, you can register to vote at facebook.com/Vote08.

Starting today, you may see ads encouraging you to register to vote, as part of our ongoing commitment to politics and civic engagement. We're proud to announce that in the few hours since launching this initiative, thousands of users have registered to vote through Facebook.

With the help of you and your friends, you could make this the highest voter turnout in the history of the U.S. Please take a moment, register to vote, and tell your friends to register, too. Then make sure to get out to the polls on November 4th and turn your voice into a vote for the next President of the United States.



Jeff wants to help get everyone registered to vote.

Today we're excited to preview the next version of Lexicon. With over 100 million active users on Facebook, Lexicon graphs are a powerful way to understand the trends in what people are talking about. We've introduced a number of new ways to play with the data in this version, and many of the enhancements are based on your feedback over the last couple of months.

Lexicon only gathers text from Walls and never accesses messages, Chat, searches, or other private data. All the information is aggregated so it is never tied to a specific person.... This gives you the ability to hear the diverse voices of Facebook without singling out individual people.

One of the most frequent suggestions we received was to show exactly how many times each topic was mentioned, so we now show you a Dashboard with the total number of unique users who mentioned a topic, as well as the percentage of our user base that mentioned the topic and the total number of posts. You can use the Demographics feature to follow the trends over time between users of different ages, genders, and countries. The Maps feature shows you where people are talking about a topic within different countries.

The Sentiment feature shows how much people like or dislike a given topic. You can compare two topics to see how the sentiment about each topic matches up. The Associations feature allows you to see words and phrases that are closely associated with a topic in different points in time. Finally, the Pulse feature highlights keywords that frequently show up in the Profiles (Interests, Music, etc.) of people who are talking about a topic on Walls.

After months of hard work, we're at a point where almost all 100 million people around the world on Facebook are using the new design. As we continue to roll this out, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what we've built and why I think it's an important step for us.

Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. In the last four years, we've built new products that help people share more, such as photos, videos, groups, events, Wall posts, status updates and so on.

As people share more,... sometimes we need to change the site to accommodate how much information people are posting. Back in 2006 we launched News Feed, which brought all of the most recent and interesting activity from the people you care about right to your home page. Similarly, the new Facebook design replaces all the big boxes on profiles and brings all of your friends' most recent and interesting activity to front and center.

We realize that change can be difficult though. Many people disliked News Feed at first because it changed their home page and how they shared information. Now it's one of the most important parts of Facebook. We think the new design can have the same effect.

With this release, we've worked harder to get more feedback about what we can improve. Starting in March, we created a Page where we gave updates on the changes we were considering and more than 150,000 people joined and participated. We also wanted to give people a chance to try out the new design before launching it for everyone. More than 40 million people tried it out and 30 million continued using it.

It's tempting to say that we should just support both designs, but this isn't as simple as it sounds. Supporting two versions is a huge amount of work for our small team, and it would mean that going forward we would have to build everything twice. If we did that then neither version would get our full attention.

That said, Facebook is a work in progress. We constantly try to improve things and we understand that our work isn't perfect. We appreciate the thousands of you who have written in to give us feedback. Even if you're joining a group to express things you don't like about the new design, you're giving us important feedback and you're sharing your voice, which is what Facebook is all about.

Thanks for all of your support as we work together to make Facebook better and give everyone around the world a new way to connect and share. The active community on Facebook makes it possible for us to build new things and make them great, and that is why Facebook has been successful so far.

Facebook is growing...fast. As we welcome new users and as our users become more active, we face new challenges, and we need great people that like working on hard problems to help us out. With 700 employees and over 100 million active users, each person working at Facebook has the chance to have an enormous impact.

Over the coming year, we'll be visiting 20 universities and 5 business schools searching for talented students to fill both full-time and intern opportunities. Throughout our travels, we'll be looking for people that are passionate... about Facebook, that aren't afraid of complicated questions, and that like to just dig in and figure it out as they go. We value working hard, smart, and fast, and following that up with some good fun. If that sounds like you, then we'd love to talk to you while we're on the road.

We've got an area on our Jobs site devoted entirely to University candidates. There, you'll be able to stay up-to-date with information regarding the available opportunities, when we're visiting campuses, and any plans that we have to participate in other outreach events. If you're planning on attending one of our events, do us a favor and RSVP via our Facebook events (there are links to these on the University page) so that we'll know to expect you—and also feel free to invite your friends. Finally, if you don't see a visit planned to your school, fear not. Just submit an innovative solution to one of our puzzles, and someone from University Recruiting will be in touch.



Marcia works on the University Recruiting team and is excited to meet all of you this fall on campuses across North America.

A few weeks ago Facebook announced a Partnership with ServiceNation, an exciting new initiative to increase volunteerism and service in America, as part of our ongoing commitment to connect people with the world around them.

Today, more than 60 million Americans volunteer their time and energy to worthy causes and ServiceNation aims to increase that to 100 million by 2020. To this end, ServiceNation has assembled a coalition of organizations large and small, from City Year to Mobilize.org, and Facebook is proud to serve as their lead social... media partner.

Tonight, ServiceNation hosts a Presidential Forum on Service with Senators McCain and Obama, where the presidential nominees will discuss their plans and vision to increase service and volunteerism in their potential administrations. It is an event of special significance in New York City on the anniversary of September 11th and will be broadcast live on several television networks.

Tomorrow, the ServiceNation Summit will bring together leading experts from the government, non-profit, military, and private sector to discuss how to best achieve their goal of increased service. The summit will kick-off a year-long campaign for service, including a National Day of Action on September 27th with more than 2,239 events in all 50 states.

Millions of Facebook users are already donating their time to worthy groups and causes across the globe. Just type "volunteer" into the search box to see thousands of groups, events, and pages.

You can learn more about how to get involved by visiting the ServiceNation Facebook Page at http://www.facebook.com/ServiceNation.



Adam is inspired to volunteer more.

We are just beginning the process of moving people over to the new Facebook and saying goodbye to the old Facebook. The new Facebook has been available for a few months for general use, and we've been iterating on it for a long time. We set out to make Facebook simpler, cleaner, more relevant, and easier to control. With your feedback and participation—over 30 million people are now using the new site—we believe we've gotten to the best Facebook yet.

Even if you've already adopted the new Facebook, you'll notice some updates to its look. ... Based on your feedback, we've simplified the top navigation. We also heard that people were confused about how to find their applications, so we are moving the Applications menu to the menu bar at the bottom of every page. This will make it much easier to get to your favorite applications whenever you want.

The new design is different, and we understand that some people will be uncomfortable with the changes. But over time, we think people will appreciate the advantages of the new design and the new features it offers. Thanks to everyone who took the time to write in and report bugs, give suggestions, and offer their thoughts. It's helped us create something we are really proud of. Please explore the site and keep letting us know what you think.



Mark is the Product Manager for the new Facebook.

Hopefully by now everyone has used the new Facebook. If you haven't, you can do so now by going to www.new.facebook.com. The new Facebook has been available for opt in for well over a month now, and so far over 30 million people have checked it out, and many are already using it as their full time Facebook.

We've also gotten a chance to hear feedback from over 600,000 people, and we really appreciate all the time you took to write in. We've heard positive feedback, negative feedback, bug reports, and a whole lot of questions. We wanted to... take this chance to answer some of the most frequently asked questions and talk a little more about the process that went in to creating the new Facebook.

Here are some of the most common questions we've been getting:

Why did you change everything?

When we set out to update Facebook, we tried to keep three things in mind. First of all, we wanted to make the site clean and simple by reducing clutter; we wanted to give you more control over your profile, and we wanted to focus on the recent and relevant content on the site.

That said, we know it can be hard to get used to things being in different places, which is why we wanted to make it easy for you to switch back and forth for a little while, in order to learn where everything went, and how the new site works.

Where are my applications?

None of your applications are gone, and they are now in a few places. Most of your profile boxes have been moved over to your Boxes tab on your profile. You may have noticed a few boxes on your Wall and Info tabs as well. You can choose up to five boxes from your Boxes tab to move to your Wall tab, but keep in mind that not all application developers have created boxes to fit in that space yet.

Also, some applications have tabs that you can add to your profile. Again, not all applications have this yet, but many developers are working on it.

Lastly, we've seen a lot of feedback that applications were hard to find in the top menu, so we've been working hard on different design iterations to make it easier to get to your applications. We're close to the right solution, so you should see that soon.

Why did you split the profile into tabs?

By splitting the profile into tabs, we were able to make a cleaner, more organized profile. Now similar information types stay together—all of the information you set about yourself on your Info tab, all of your photos on your Photos tab, and your application boxes in the Boxes tab. The Wall tab is how we chose to focus on the recent and relevant. This way when you visit a friend's profile, you can really get a sense of what's going on in their life.

What is the deal with the new Wall?

The new Wall is a compilation of content about you and by you, all in chronological order. With so much information on profiles, we realized that the easiest way to help people figure out what was important was through a stream of information. Instead of needing to look at a million places to figure out what your friend has been doing lately, you can see the photos she's added, or read what his friends have said about last weekend. Additionally, the new publisher allows you to post content straight to your Wall without ever leaving your profile.

Sometime soon, we're going to switch everyone over to the new Facebook. We can't maintain both versions, and we really think you'll like the new Facebook once you get used to the changes. So hop on over to new.facebook.com and give it a try. And don't forget to let us know what you think using the "Send Feedback" links.



Mark is in with the new.

This week, Facebook was part of a conference call arranged by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff with major Internet companies. The unfortunate approach of Hurricane Gustav meant that nearly two million people living on the Gulf Coast had to evacuate their homes. Everyone on the call pledged our support and to do what we could to help. For Facebook, that meant posting a home page message for users in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi, pointing them to the FEMA website for updates, and encouraging them to let their... friends and family know they're safe by updating their Facebook status. In addition, the Causes application, which has more than 2.7 million active users who have supported various causes, has targeted Gustav relief efforts. We encourage you to get involved yourself on Causes.

However, even before we got on the phone, thousands of users were already organizing themselves via Facebook. We've seen dozens of new groups with focuses ranging from people offering prayers of support to physical relief efforts, and that's where the real power of Facebook lies, in its users.


Chris Kelly is hoping everyone is safe.