Facebook Accidentally Shows New Prototype Features
While it feels like we've said this a million times before : Facebook is the world's leading social networking site with over 500 million users
The key attitude towards creating and keeping a site popular is constantly bringing improvements, coming up with new ideas and always offering users something new to appreciate. Facebook has taken exactly this approach and is often making new announcements regarding new services or re-designed features. Sometimes though, the company mistakenly reveals something that’s not yet ready for an official unveiling. According to Mashable, earlier today the leading social networking site in the world accidentally went live with several prototype features. Amongst them is a site-wide re-design of Pages.
Shortly after making the accidental update, Facebook took down the site and reversed it to its previous state. To let people know what was happening, the company even went on Twitter and apologized about the downtime but as usual, that short period of time in which Facebook looked differently was more than enough for users to take snapshots and form an idea of the new feature. While we have no official announcement or description from Facebook itself to rely on most people are of the opinion (formed based on the screenshots that leaked on the web) that the company is working on new Facebook Pages with Questions integration, a new Memories feature which is meant to gather up photos and status updates from previous months and years, a “Switch Accounts” feature for page administrators and an “Outside World” filter for the news feed.
The Tweet from Facebook only mentioned that “Also, some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It’s now back to normal.” Mashable did a good job of gathering up all of the changes (and photos of them) in one single article. We’d like to present them to you as well. You may also add a lightbox UI for photos and a comment box which will no longer include the usual “comment” button to the list of changes.
In any case, we’ll start with the most important re-design, the one that was applied to Facebook Pages. The design is now a tab-free one. Facebook chose to move the navigation to the left side of the Page. The design shown in the screen shots looks more like the Facebook Places Pages and member’s Profiles. Naturally, when Facebook makes a change to the way certain pages look, the next reasonable step is to redesign the rest and give the social networking site a more balanced, unified look. Reportedly Questions is now also integrated into Pages. The thing about this mistaken upload is that people were confused as to why Facebook didn’t announce the changes. Often when we see something changed, Facebook has announced its intentions to release the new feature or look weeks or months before.
New Facebook Pages
When people requested more details regarding these changes a Facebook spokesperson mentioned that the site is always experimenting with new features internally and Pages will not undergo any changes at this very moment. “Organizations invest a lot of time on their Facebook Pages because millions of people find them useful every day. We remain committed to providing ways for Page owners to customize and control the experience on their Page. If we do make changes, we will provide partners with advance notice” the spokesperson explained.
While scouting for changes through the website some users also discovered that a feature called “memories” was present right below Photos, in a left-hand menu on their Profile page. As one of Mashable’s readers discovered the feature would allow people to look back at status updates, photos and new friends for each year that you’ve been a member of the site, basically providing you with a complete history for your activity. Photos are apparently grouped by years as well. A lot of information on the number of friends added each year and the events attended throughout a given year were also a part of “Memories”. This feature sounds quite interesting and would make a lot of sense. Facebook is interested, apparently, in covering every aspect of a person’s life and has recently made some changes to make the profile of users more relevant in terms of information that’s displayed. There’s also a feature that allows you to see what you’ve shared with your friends. Looking back in time and remembering what you’ve done on Facebook in previous years sounds interesting, to say the least.
Another new feature is “Outside World”. The feature is present in the Most Recent filter. Most people believe that this might be added as a RSS-like option for the News Feed. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of information regarding this one so we’ll prefer to keep our mouth shut and wait for something that can clarify what “Outside World” does. Several people also pointed out that a lightbox UI was present for Facebook Photos, even though slightly bugged at this time. This feature was first showcased about two months ago when the social networking site brought some interesting changes to its Photo service. Back then the company explained that any time users click on an image, anywhere on the site (whether in an album or in a newsfeed) there’ll be a black box hovering over the rest of the screen. In the box you’ll get some navigation controls and several relevant social features. The whole idea to this was to allow people to actually enjoy the photos without their eyes running towards the endless amount of information found on Facebook.
Photo from Mashable
Ok so the last change people spotted was the removal of the “Comment” button in the Comment Box. For a short while comment boxes were much like the ones in the new Facebook Groups feature and didn’t include the button we’ve mentioned before. So when a user wants to submit a comment, all he/she has to do is to hit the Enter button.
Since Facebook always upgrades older products to keep them in line with new ones it comes as no surprise, really, that the company is working on all of the changes mentioned above. The only thing we’re not so sure about is whether and when we’ll get to see them live. Chances are, in the first two months of next year but at this time it’s pure speculation without any basis. Feel free to let us know whether you love or hate these changes that were accidentally rolled out to Facebook. If you’d like, you could also mention what you’d expect from the social networking site in the future.
Facebook is the world’s leading social networking site and has so far recorded over $500 million users. The company is about to report a pretty impressive $2 billion revenue report for 2010, some sites seem to suggest. After entering an interesting partnership with Microsoft and time and time again announcing that it still has some ambitious plans for growth, expect to see a lot more from Facebook in the near future.
