Over the past few weeks Facebook have made a few announcements, They made a huge announcement on the 6th October where they invited a ton of press to their HQ at Palo Alto in California.
The announcements they made on the 6th October were:
- New Facebook Groups
- The Ability to download all of the information you have uploaded to facebook
- A New Dashboard for applications.
New Facebook Groups – Your probably thinking well we already have facebook groups whats the difference? They’ve added a lot more social interaction to the New Groups , You can update your status and only the members of your group ‘Sunday lunch club‘ will see the update. You can post photos and keep up with conversations all within that group and none of your family or your church friends will see those status updates or those photos that you uploaded to the group. Another new features is the ability to have a live group chat with all the members that are online at the time. I have embedded Facebooks own video that show all of the new features in action.
Download your own information from Facebook – Every bit of information you have ever added to Facebook can be downloaded now with one click, as a security messure you will have to re enter your password and answer a security question before the download starts.
A New Dashboard for applications – This is a new Interface to show you how applications are using your data and what they have access to. It will also show you the last time an application accessed your data. As well as seeing what they applications can access you can also take away parts of an applications access you can also remove the application completely.
Bing Partnering with Facebook
Bing and Facebook have come together to bring your friends to bing search engine, so now when you search using bing you will see what your friends have liked. They are also providing a improved people search on Bing, It will make it easier to find friends you went to school with, When you search on bing now for “David Batty” instead of showing you all the David Batty’s in the world they will find and show you the most relevant results based on your facebook friends so all the David Batty’s that you may have mutual friends with will show up first.
Bing will be adding the ability to add people as friends on Facebook from the Bing Search results. Heres a video from Facebook showing the new integration with Bing.