The Facebook Blog

Over the past few months, we've been testing several different designs of the home page to improve navigation to and discovery of commonly used features. Today, we started rolling out the most recent navigation updates to help you find what you are looking for on Facebook. Now from the top and left menus you can quickly get to what's new and important.

Stay Updated from the Top Menu

In the top menu, you will find your newest notifications, requests and messages. For example, when you receive a Facebook notification about someone writing on your Wall or tagging you in a photo, you'll see a red bubble appear in the left-hand corner near the search bar. When you click on the icon, you'll see a drop-down menu with your most recent notifications.

Notifications drop-down menu

The Home and Profile links can now be found in the top-right corner along with your Account menu, which includes your privacy settings and the ability to log out.

Discover Content from the Left Menu

The left menu has been organized to make it easier for you to communicate with and discover content from your friends. You can now access your messages and other core features all in one place, to the left of your News Feed.

With the Photos dashboard you can browse recent photos of your friends, and the Events dashboard lists your upcoming events along with events your friends are attending. The Friends dashboard will help you find friends, see which of your friends have recently updated their profiles and filter your News Feed by Friend Lists you may have already created.

Photos dashboard

We have also made Chat more prominent by showing you a list of some of your online friends in the left-hand menu. This list is not comprehensive, but includes people who you communicate with frequently. To see a list of all of your online friends, you can open the Chat bar in the bottom right-hand corner or click "See All" at the bottom of your left-hand menu.

Interact with Games and Applications

We're making it easier for you to find and interact with applications and discover new ones, with the new Applications and Games dashboards, accessible via the "Applications" and "Games" links on the home page. The dashboards will surface the applications you've interacted with most recently as well as your most recent application activity and your friends' activity.

You will also start to see counters next to the applications you have bookmarked on your home page. Counters will notify you when you have a specific action to take, so that you never miss your turn in a game or an update from a friend in an application.

You can bookmark your favorite applications using the "Add Bookmark" button in an application, and then you'll have one-click access to them from the left-hand menu beneath the Applications and Games dashboards. Click the "More" link to see all of your newest bookmarks.

Games dashboard

Another way to receive personalized updates from applications will be in the Applications and Games dashboards. News items will appear alongside applications in the dashboards with actions such as "Clean Stinky" in Pet Society or "Joe just beat your high score!" in Bejeweled Blitz.

We think sharing information about the applications you use enriches the shared experience between you and your friends. At the same time, we feel strongly that control is an important element of any information sharing on Facebook. That's why these features are launching with an entirely new privacy setting.

If you would rather not have your recent application activity visible in the dashboards to your friends, you can change this through your Privacy settings . We're also working on a more granular set of controls for specific applications, so that you can turn off activity for certain applications while leaving it on for others. We'll have more information to share on this soon.

We hope the simplified design of the home page will make it easy for you to stay connected with the people, applications and activities that matter the most to you. To learn more about the new design, check out the site tour.


Jing, a Facebook engineer, is moving fast around the site.

Games are more fun when played with friends, which is why they are among the most popular activities on Facebook. We're excited that beginning today the social game experience is coming to Xbox Live, so now you can play Xbox games with your Facebook friends.



More and more services are integrating with Facebook to make it easy for you to connect with friends wherever you are — including websites like Digg, devices like the iPhone and desktop applications like iPhoto.
...
The Xbox Facebook integration allows you to take part in some of the most popular activities on Facebook directly from your living room on your television. With Facebook for Xbox, you can update your status, browse updates from your friends and view photos on the big screen. You also can link your Facebook profile to your Xbox Gamertag to find your Facebook friends and connect with them on Xbox Live. It's never been easier to discover friends you never even knew played Xbox.



Keep in mind that Xbox will respect the privacy you set on Facebook, so you can control who sees your activity. The new Facebook for Xbox can be added to your Xbox 360 through a system update now.

As social gaming continues to grow, we look forward to people playing games with their friends on consoles, mobile phones, the Web and their desktops.


Gareth is on his Xbox viewing recent photos and playing games with his Facebook friends, all from his television.

Here at Facebook we can't build all the features for the site that you want to use to connect with your friends. That's why in 2007, we opened up a platform for people outside of Facebook to create experiences directly on the site for you to interact with.

Since that time we have seen over 350,000 applications built on Facebook Platform, in areas ranging from sports and games to family and education. These applications were built to accompany our core Facebook applications like photos, events and groups. Our goal is to offer you a smooth... experience regardless of what applications you're interacting with on the site, which is why in the next couple of months we're going to roll out some improvements to Facebook Platform.

Here's what the changes will mean for you:

Easier Access to Applications
Soon, the applications menu will move from its current location on the bottom left-hand side of any page on Facebook to the navigation menu on the left-hand side of your home page. This way, you always can rely on seeing applications in the same place and easily interact with your favorites, in addition to discovering new ones. You'll have the option to bookmark applications on the home page so that your favorite applications are only a few clicks away. You'll also be able to see instant alerts from applications that you've bookmarked.

We will be introducing a new Games Dashboard and an Application Dashboard that can be accessed from the home page and will serve as destinations for you and your friends' application activity. These will make it easy to view the latest applications you've interacted with, as well as discover new applications based on what your friends are using. You can also receive updates directly from applications here. For instance, if you're playing a game of Scrabble with your mother, you can visit the Games Dashboard to find short messages about when it's your turn to play, as well as interesting activity from games your friends are playing.

Direct Contact with Applications
With these upcoming changes, you'll have the option to share your email address with any application you use. If you choose to do so, you may be emailed notifications directly from any application. This new choice will give you the ability to control which of your applications can contact you and enable you to leverage the tools of your email inbox, such as folders and routing rules, to manage these communications. Finally, if you no longer want to hear from an application, you'll be able to simply unsubscribe from their mailing list.

The email practices we're developing will be similar to signing up for or creating accounts on other web services, which is essentially what applications on Facebook are. When you do so, those services can email you directly to confirm a purchase, or provide newsletters or updates for which you signed up. Soon, you'll have a comparable experience with applications on Facebook. Keep in mind that applications will never be given your email address unless you explicitly grant them permission, and like other websites you can always choose to unsubscribe if the service is no longer of value.

A Better Facebook Experience with Less Spam
Allowing you to control which applications send you email notifications is just one step we are taking to reduce spam and ensure you don't receive unwanted notifications, requests or invitations through Facebook. We have heard from many of you that you want greater control over how and when you see stories in News Feed about applications. Our upcoming changes aim to improve that experience, by enabling you to only see application requests and invitations if your friends have explicitly chosen to send them to you rather than have the application take that action on your behalf.



If you are interested in staying updated on these upcoming improvements, become a fan of the Facebook Page. We'll be rolling these changes out over the couple of months.


Austin, a product manager, loves that playing games on Facebook is part of his job.