At the beginning of January, we talked about our New Years Resolutions—to make Facebook simpler, more flexible, and to make our network structure more relevant. Today, we've fully launched a few changes that are an important first step towards keeping our resolutions.

1. A navigation and profile simplification—Ever feel like you couldn't find what you were looking for on that long left menu? We've redistributed all these menu options into "Core Aspects" on the top menu, "Applications" on the left menu, Settings on the top right, and everything else at the footer of the page. As for the profile, we've added drop-down menus to the top of every user's profile page, making it easier to get to the information you want to see. You can read more about the navigation changes here.


2. The introduction of "Inbox"—The former "My Messages" and "My Shares" pages have been redesigned to make the communication between you and your friends easier. Now you can send a group of your friends a message with or without a shared link, and easily track the ensuing conversation in one "thread" in your Inbox.


3. Network Pages—To make networks more relevant to their real-world counterparts, we've built out pages where network members, events, trends, and demographic info are displayed. Anything visible on a Network page is something that is already accessible to members of that network, and we've added additional "Publicize" options to groups and events that make it easy to distinguish what will and will not appear on your Network page. In addition, each page has a full version for members of the networks, and a public version—with certain kinds of information blocked—for people outside that network.

We think these changes are really positive steps. Stay tuned to the blog over the next few days as our designers and engineers give more detail to the changes and the logic behind them.



Carolyn, Facebook's resident blogger, is still reeling from the number of friend requests generated by the Facebook Sneak Preview group.