Following on from Yesterday's blog; unsurprisingly there was no Facebook phone and there was no real 'redesign' as such. So what then was announced at the press conference? Basically three new functions were introduced which will be rolling out onto the social network in the coming days.
Zuckerberg's emphasis is on what he calls the 'Social Graph.' I'll let him explain.
“One of the great things that Facebook has enabled people to do is connect with all their friends and stay connected with all of them all at once, but in reality, people’s social worlds don’t look like one big thing. The goal of Groups is to create simple and natural divisions among users’ ‘blob of friends’. It’s an upgrade that will change the fundamental way people use Facebook."
Basically no one in reality has thousands of friends. People you have on Facebook can range from close friends and family to a friend of a friend of a friend's cousins babysitter or even someone you spoke to once outside a night club.
So let's look at the changes individually:
New Groups
Groups aren't a new idea there's hundreds of them. But this revamp changes the way they work. They’re now designed to be used by, well groups, i.e. family members, sports teams, school classes, etc i.e. not for en masse followings like 'Get this obscure song to number one for a laugh.' Facebook encourage users to use fanpages and events for this.
So, now you can’t just join a group; another member has to invite you and membership is limited to 250 people.
New group features include collaborative documents, photo and video sharing, and the ability to invite all members of a group to an event.
Note: old groups currently remain unchanged.
Download My Information
This new feature allows Facebook members to download into a ZIP file a complete archive of everything that they have uploaded to Facebook including profile data, photos and videos, wall posts, notes, comments, friend lists, etc.
In affect you can back up you're Facebook account. It also means you can have your photos offline if you so desire.
Third-party application dashboard
You know how it is, Facebook give you're information out willy-nilly to 3rd party apps or should I say we give out our information willy-nilly by blindly clicking 'Allow.' Anyway in response to these privacy issue, there's now a dashboard for managing which applications have what data permission and there's a log of what data has been accessed by each application.
Let us know what you think of the changes.
Source:CNET,
Media post.com
One thought on “Facebook changes explained: The social graph, New groups, Third Party dashboard”
The dashboard looks interesting.
Keeping all current facebook groups sounds a bit strange if they have changed thw way it works? They could syphon them off into a different area called ‘Old Groups’ or something?
Downloading all of your data is a good idea; to see what crap you’ve upload over the years would be interesting; however if you can do it – does that maan that lovely Hackers could do it when they brute-force-hack people’s accounts? Sounds a bit dodgy to me thinking about it.