Just days after the Facebook movie The Social Network hit theaters nationwide, Facebook held an event at its Palo Alto, CA headquarters to talk about new platform functions.
No, the social media company didn't unveil a Facebook phone as was speculated, nor did Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speak on the movie, which many say portray him in not the rosiest of entrepreneurial lights.
He would have really won the gallery of tech-minded reporters if he would have said: “Seen any good movies lately?” and left it that.
The new functions include allowing people to download their Facebook information and entire history to their desktop in a zip file, and creating a function to build friend sub groups within your friend list.
On the latter, Zuckerberg said this will unlock a lot of sharing people don't do. Referring to this self-censorship, he said “I would post this, but do I really want to bug all my friends about another awesome jog I had this morning?”
He sees the evolution of social media moving into a direction where users want to share in smaller contexts. “You have different social circles, and you want to interact with them in different ways,” said Zuckerberg. “This is an early step in that direction…this is going to take months to play out.”
But “it's really easy to get it wrong and have it be devastating,” he said.
In what seems like more of a symbolic step to pacify the privacy and information sharing issue that's dogged the company, Facebook will allow users to download all their Facebook information and sharing they've done, including photos and links, to their computer into a zip file.
Facebook Places, the geolocation tool the company launched in August, is already the most used application of its kind, Zuckerberg said.