The Facebook Blog

Notifications let you know when people take actions on Facebook related to you, so you can quickly check out a photo you've been tagged in or read a new posting on your Wall. They already are available from your home page or from the notifications icon within the Facebook Chat bar at the bottom of your browser, but we want to make sure you know immediately when your friends are sharing something new with you.

Beginning today, when you are online with Facebook Chat, entire notifications will appear automatically and in real time above the Chat bar as pop-up alerts. For instance, if a friend has written on your wall, you'll see a new notification appear like this:



After a few seconds, the notification will automatically disappear, but you'll still be able to see a list of all of your notifications when you click on the notifications icon. You'll also continue to see a count of all the notifications you've not yet viewed, indicated in red.



A common use of notifications with applications on Facebook is for multi-player gaming. For example, when you're playing a game and take your turn, your opponent receives a notification so they know to take their turn. The immediate notifications can help you play a game faster.

You can turn off specific types of notifications if you don't want to receive them. When a notification appears, click the "X" to close it. You then will be asked if you want to permanently turn off future notifications of that same type. For example, if you choose to permanently delete a notification about posted links, you won't receive any future notifications about posted links from your friends.


Arjun, an engineer at Facebook, can't wait to see what pops up after this post.