Facebook Unveils New Site Design

Facebook® yesterday released a new, cleaner and simpler design, along with the opportunity for users to preview and test the next-generation features and functionality. The company is inviting people to use the new design and try out the improved features by navigating back and forth between the new and current versions of the site. Access to the new design will be limited at first and gradually become available to all of Facebook’s more than 80 million users over the coming days.

“We’ve made the changes rolling out today in order to highlight the most recent and relevant information that users value, give users even more control and ownership over their profiles and simplify the user experience,” said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Facebook’s new design makes it a lot easier for users to share information, and we encourage them to check it out.”

The company has been developing the new design since early this year. Over the past six months, more than 100,000 Facebook users offered constructive suggestions on the layout and features, many of which were included in the final version.

The Power of Feeds

Facebook uses feeds to deliver people news and information in a social context. The evolution of the site design focuses on integrating powerful feed technology and the Wall, a forum for users and their friends to post comments, photos, videos and more, including content from third-party applications. The Wall now surfaces more current and pertinent information, or “stories”, about a user and their friends’ on Facebook.

New Types of “Stories”

Users have complete control over the stories published on their profile. They also have the ability to adjust the size and prominence of stories and can choose between having one-line stories, short or full stories. One-line stories are one sentence long, while short stories include thumbnail photos or content, and full stories display large, noticeable images.

Publish More Content

Located on the Wall tab, the Publisher feature enables users to create more content than ever and in a centralized place. From the Publisher, a user can add photos, upload video, or write notes, rather than navigating to each individual application. Similarly, users can add content to their friends’ profiles through the Publisher on their profiles.

Easier Site Navigation with Tabs

The top menu is similar to the old design and allows users to access their Profile, Friends, and Inbox. The left hand applications menu has been moved to the ‘Applications’ link on the top of the menu screen. The Profile is now split out into tabs:

• The Wall tab displays the most recent and relevant information both about the user and by the user;

• The Info tab shows information about the user that doesn’t change frequently;

• The Photos tab shows photos of the user as well as their albums;

• The Boxes tab features all of a user’s existing application boxes.

Users are also able to add individual tabs for their favorite applications. This gives users greater control over their own profiles and makes navigation faster and easier.

Applications and the New Design

Third-party applications are more tightly integrated into Facebook in order to make using applications simpler and more seamless. Users will have the option to interact with an application before adding it, grant it access to their information, and decide where they want it placed, if at all, on their profiles.

Privacy Controls

On Facebook, users choose what information they put in their profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups they join. And they control the users with whom they share that information through the privacy settings on the Privacy page of their profile. The new design does not change any of the privacy settings previously selected by the user. The new Facebook design will be made available to users at http://www.new.facebook.com. In the coming weeks, all Facebook users will automatically default to the new site design when logging in at http://www.facebook.com.

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New Facebook Profile Design Focusing More On Feeds

Recently facebook released it's beta sandbox to all users so they can start testing their applications with the new profile design. One of the most significant changes to the profile - the greater focus is on Feed.

The Feed tab is the first tab users will see when viewing their profiles and represents their recent activity. So creating compelling Feed stories that relay your users' engagement with your applications becomes even more important. It is giving you new options to create richer Feed stories that will appear front and center on your users' profiles.

Feed stories come in three sizes: one line, short, and full.

One line stories say what they have to say briefly and concisely, in just one line of text, like "Jan reviewed a movie."

Short stories are more involved than one line stories. Short stories are rendered in various predefined layouts; currently there's one default layout, but more are coming soon.

Full stories provide you with the opportunity to make your stories as expressive as possible with few limitations, similar to how Wall attachments work today. But given their size (500 pixels wide by up to 700 pixels tall), users will probably display short stories in many cases, so make sure your short stories are just as engaging.

All Feed stories are template based. You need to provide at least a one line story template, but it is good to create templates for all three sizes for the best user experience. This way, your users can decide how big of a story they want to show on their profiles. If you don't supply a story size, that size never appears as an option to the user.

It will aggregate one line and (if possible) short stories, but due to their nature and size, full stories won't get aggregated.

Creating Templates

Once you have ideas for the kinds of stories you want to create, you should create the templates for them. You can create a template for each of the three sizes and register them all ahead of time with one call (feed.registerTemplateBundle). This call returns an ID for the template bundle, and when you publish a Feed story, you just supply this template ID.

You can create and register as many template bundles as you want. After you register your templates, you publish user stories with feed.publishUserAction, specifying the template bundle ID at that time.

Mandatory Changes for Your Applications

Once the redesigned profiles go live, It will begin deprecating the existing Feed publishing API methods (feed.publishActionOfUser, feed.publishStoryToUser, and feed.publishTemplatizedAction). The existing API methods will continue to work during the transition period to the new profiles, so you can publish stories using either the existing API methods or feed.publishUserAction.

During the transition period, you should only publish the story once, so you should make use of the old methods or the new methods, but never both. If you are still using the existing Feed methods once the new profiles are launched, stories posted via those methods will only appear as one line stories to News Feed and the Feed tab on the new profiles.

Cut-off date will be announced soon - after that date, the existing methods will no longer be able publish stories to Feeds. You will have plenty of time to update your applications to use the new Feed API calls.

More detailed information is available on the Facebook Developer Wiki. You can read about Feed stories in general and the new API calls in particular.

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The Sandbox For New Facebook Profile Design Is Now Open

Facebook today opened up it's beta sandbox for the new profile design. It is expected to come out of beta next month. Users have enough time to test the new design with their applications.

"We believe that the new design makes profiles cleaner and simpler, gives users more control over their profiles, and emphasizes recent and relevant information. We hope that as you try out the new application integration points, you'll start thinking of ways you can engage your users more meaningfully. We expect applications that engage users with rich content and great experiences will thrive with the new design.

We'll be announcing several related changes over the next few days. Plus we'll be giving you greater insight into the various integration points and user migration details, so stay tuned to this blog for more details." said Pete Bratach.

Accessing the Sandbox

The sandbox is located at www.new.facebook.com/profile.php.

To start testing, you need to download the new version of the Facebook PHP client library. It's available from

svn.facebook.com/svnroot/platform/clients/php/branches/redesign-changes/.

If you want to take the new design out for a test drive before changing your own applications, you can tinker with the MySmiley application. With it you can test all the new integration points (like create different-sized Feed stories, use the Publisher to create Feed content, add an application info section, place a box on the Boxes tab or left column, and create a custom application tab). You can use the test application at apps.new.facebook.com/mysmiley and view the application source code at svn.facebook.com/svnroot/platform/samples/smiley/.

Remember this is a beta sandbox for the new profile only, so some features are not necessarily enabled and others are still in flux. So you should expect some changes from what you see right now before this goes live. However, the features that are relatively stable and ready to test, explore, and comment on are the specific APIs and integration points, including:

• New Feed story sizes and types – including the template bundles
• Adding application tabs, and how application tabs function
• Publisher integration
• Setting up the new “main profile section” and adding those to profiles
• Application info sections

You can check the status of known issues and changes in the sandbox on the Facebook Developers Wiki.

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Facebook acquires startup Parakey

Facebook, the Internet’s leading social utility, announced on july 19 that it has acquired Parakey, a startup run by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Mozilla Firefox, an open-source and non-profit web browser. Ross and Hewitt will join Facebook’s team to work on the development of Facebook Platform and the company’s website.

Ross and Hewitt are best known as the co-founders of Firefox, which has been downloaded more than 300 million times by people worldwide. Hewitt went on to build popular web development tools such as Firebug. In early 2006, Ross and Hewitt founded Parakey to build a platform bridging the gap between information on the web and the desktop.

About Parakey

Parakey is a platform for building applications that merge the best of the desktop and the Web. Like desktop applications, these applications work offline, offer more privacy than pure websites, run quickly, and integrate with your computer and its devices. But like Web applications, they are also more creative, visually alluring, accessible from anywhere and potentially accessible by anyone. In short, Parakey apps are designed to be both useful and social, a combination that is too rare today.

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