List of Facebook features

Facebook is a social networking website, founded in 2004. This is a list of features that can be found on the Facebook website, as well as technology features on the website.

Chat

On April 5, 2008, Facebook pre-released Facebook Chat. As of April 23, 2008, Facebook Chat was released to the entire Facebook user base. Users are only able to chat with their Facebook friends and on a one-to-one basis, although a user may chat with multiple friends simultaneously through separate chat interfaces. Instant messaging clients that currently support Facebook Chat include eBuddy, Flock, Miranda IM, Trillian, Empathy, Digsby, Adium, Nimbuzz, FIM (Windows Mobile / Windows Phone 7), Palringo (Windows Mobile), Meebo, Tokbox, QIP Infium with a Firefox plugin as well as Pidgin with a cross-platform plug-in. Windows Live Messenger 2011 (Wave 4) can connect to Facebook as well. Facebook Chat can also be run on the desktop using Gabtastik, a dedicated web chat browser. On May 13, 2008, a Facebook developer announced that they are working on XMPP support, allowing hundreds of instant messaging clients to interoperate with the service; this functionality became operational on February 10, 2010. Some Facebook help article containing all the information required to connect most popular XMPP supporting IM clients to Facebook's chat service is available.

Credits

Main article: Facebook Credits

Facebook Credits are a virtual currency you can use to buy gifts, and virtual goods in many games and applications on the Facebook platform. As of July 2010, users of Facebook can purchase Facebook credits in Australian Dollars, British Pound, Canadian Dollars, Chilean Peso, Colombian Peso, Danish Krone, Euro, Hong Kong Dollar, Japanese Yen, Norwegian Krone, Swedish Krona, Swiss Franc, Turkish Lira, US Dollars, and Venezuelan Bolivar. Facebook credits can be used on many popular games such as Happy Aquarium, Happy Island, Zoo Paradise, Happy Pets, Hello City, FarmVille, and Mafia Wars.

As on 30 August 2010, facebook gifts were disabled and from then on, facebook credits are being used for the Games alone.

Easter eggs

The following are easter eggs that Facebook had at one time or another.

• At one time, entering the Konami Code followed by Enter at the home page caused a lensflare-style series of circles to display when clicking, typing, or scrolling.
• Facebook chat supports some unusual emoticons.
• Asking "how is babby formed?" with the Questions feature released September 23, 2010 will Rickroll the user.
• A user can change his/her language to Leet Speak, Pirate language, and upside down English.
• The maximum character limit on status updates is 420; presumably indicating the 20th of April (see 420 (cannabis culture))

Facebook Live

On August 13, 2010 Facebook launched a new service called "'Facebook Live'", a live streaming video channel that is intended to keep Facebook users updated to what is happening on the social networking site. The service, powered by Livestream, will feature videos from Facebook staff members and celebrity interviews, but not designed for Facebook users to showcase their own videos. All the content shown on Facebook Live will have some tie-in with Facebook products, features, or how people are using the site. Facebook said this is not an opening to get them into the video distribution space. The first official guest was America Ferrera, the leading actress in the television series Ugly Betty. She discussed her new independent film The Dry Land, that was being promoted almost exclusively through social media channels.

IPv6

According to a June 2010 report by Network World, Facebook said that it was offering "experimental, non-production" support for IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol. The news about Facebook's IPv6 support was expected; Facebook told Network World in February 2010, that it planned to support native IPv6 user requests "by the midpoint of this year."

In a presentation at the Google IPv6 Implementors Conference, Facebook's network engineers said it was "easy to make [the] site available on v6." Facebook said it deployed dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 support on its routers, and that it made no changes to its hosts in order to support IPv6. Facebook also said it was supporting an emerging encapsulation mechanism known as Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP), which separates Internet addresses from endpoint identifiers to improve the scalability of IPv6 deployments. "Facebook was the first major Web site on LISP (v4 and v6)," Facebook engineers said during their presentation. Facebook said that using LISP allowed them to deploy IPv6 services quickly with no extra cost. Facebook's IPv6 services are available at www.v6.facebook.com, m.v6.facebook.com, www.lisp6.facebook.com and m.lisp6.facebook.com.

Messages and Inbox

Since the website's founding, it has allowed users to send messages to each other. A facebook user can send a message to any number of his/her friends at a time. Deleting a message from one's inbox does not delete it from the inbox of other users, thus disabling a sender to redo a message sent by him.

On November 15, 2010, Facebook announced a new "Facebook Messages" service. In a media event that day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "It's true that people will be able to have an @facebook.com email addresses, but it's not email." The launch of such a feature had been anticipated for some time before the announcement, with some calling it a "Gmail killer." The system, to be available to all of the website's users, combines text messaging, instant messaging, emails, and regular messages, and will include privacy settings similar to those of other Facebook services.

Networks, Groups, and Like Pages

Facebook allows different networks and groups to which many users can join. It also allows privacy settings on basis of networks. Groups are used for discussions and events etc. Groups are a way of enabling a number of people to come together online to share information and discuss specific subjects. They are increasingly used by clubs, companies and public sector organizations to engage with stakeholders, if they are members of the public, employees, members, service users, shareholders, or customers. A group includes but is not limited to the following: the members who have joined, recent news contents, discussion board contents, wall contents, photos, posted items, videos and all associated comments of such items. In this respect, groups are similar to pages but contain more features. Groups are limited to 300 groups per user, though it is possible to find some users with more than 300 groups because it was possible to dodge this limit in a few ways, until recently when they fixed those exploits. The urls of group pages start with http://www.facebook.com/group... and do not include the name of the group.

Individuals or companies can create "Like Pages" which allows fans of an individual, organisation, product, service, or concept to join a facebook fan club. Like Pages look and behave much like a user's personal private profile, with some significant differences. Public Profiles are integrated with Facebook's advertising system, allowing Public Profile owners to easily advertise to Facebook's users. Owners can send updates to their fans, which shows up on their home page. They also have access to insights and analytics of their fan base. Early on, users had the option to "become a fan" of the page until 19 April 2010 when the option was later changed to "like" the page. While an individual with a personal profile can acquire up to 5,000 friends, a "Like Page" can have an unlimited number of "Likers". "Like Pages" can also be customized by adding new Tabs using the Static FBML application. This powerful feature can bring additional functionality to a page such as e-mail collection, specialized content, or a landing page for sales activity. The initial urls of "Like Pages" start with http://www.facebook.com/pages... and do include the name of the page and a Facebook registration number. After a "Like Page" acquires 25 or more fans, the page is eligible to apply for a username at http://www.facebook.com/username... making it easier to share.

News Feed

On 6 September 2006, Farooq Khan announced a new home page feature called News Feed. Originally, when users logged into Facebook, they were presented with a customizable version of their own profile. The new layout, by contrast, created an alternative home page in which users saw a constantly updated list of their friends' Facebook activity. News Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. This has enabled spammers and other users to manipulate these features by creating illegitimate events or posting fake birthdays to attract attention to their profile or cause. News Feed also shows conversations taking place between the walls of a user's friends. An integral part of the News Feed interface is the Mini-Feed, a news stream on the user's profile page that shows updates about that user. Unlike in the News Feed, the user can delete events from the Mini-Feed after they appear so that they are no longer visible to profile visitors.

Initially, the addition of the News Feed caused some discontent among Facebook users. Many users complained that the News Feed was too cluttered and full of undesired information. Others were concerned that the News Feed made it too easy for other people to track activities like changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users. This tracking is often casually referred to as "Facebook-Stalking." In response to this dissatisfaction, creator Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Thereafter, users were able to control what types of information were shared automatically with friends. Currently, users may prevent friends from seeing updates about several types of especially private activities, although other events are not customizable in this way.

With the introduction of the "New Facebook" - in early February 2010 - came a total redesign of the pages, several new features and changes to News Feeds. On their personal Feeds (now integrated with Walls), users were given the option of removing updates from any application as well as choosing the size they show up on the page. Furthermore, the community feed (containing recent actions by the user's friends) contained options to instantly select whether to hear more or less about certain friends or applications.

Notifications

Notifications of the more important events, for example, someone sharing a link on the user's wall or commenting on a post the user previously commented on, briefly appear for a few seconds in the bottom left as a popup message (if the user is online), and a red counter is updated on the toolbar at the top, thus allowing the user to keep track of all the most recent notifications.

Phone

On September 2010, rumors of a "Facebook Phone" similar to Google's Android, circulated in business and tech industry news. In an interview with well-known technology blog Techcrunch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was noted to have said, "Our strategy is very horizontal. We're trying to build a social layer for everything," while denying that they were attempting to compete with the Apple iPhone or the Android.

Poke

The poke feature is intended to be a "nudge" to attract the attention of another user. Many facebook users use this feature to attract attention or say "hello" to their friends. A previous version of Facebook's FAQ gave additional insight into the origin of the feature, stating: "When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose. People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings."

Smartphones

Facebook mobile graphical user interface.

Many new smartphones offer access to the Facebook services either through their web-browsers or applications. The Facebook iPhone-compatible web site was launched August 2007 and as of July 2008 over 1.5 million people used it regularly, at the point when a free application for the iOS named "Facebook for iPhone" was launched. Version 2.0 of this app was released in September 2008 and featured improved services such as being able to respond to friend requests and notifications. Version 3.0 was released in August 2009 and added features such as events, and uploading video with an iPhone 3GS. In the latest update for the Facebook for iPhone app, GPS use is also integrated in the app under the section "places" in which you can discover moments and experiences when you and your friends are at the same place at the same time. This app is compatible with iPhone 3G, 3Gs, and 4, running iOS 3.0 or later.

Nokia offers a Facebook app on its Ovi Store for Nokia S60 devices such as the N97 and contains most of the functionality of the full website.

Google's Android 2.0 OS automatically includes an official Facebook app. The first device to use this is the Motorola Droid. The app has options to sync Facebook friends with contacts, which adds profile pictures and status updates to the contacts list. Microsoft also offers an Facebook application for its Windows Mobile platform, including features such as messaging, uploading pictures and video straight from the device, managing profile information, contact integration allowing users to call anyone in their friends list that has their number in their profile information. It is also possible to add an chat feature to Windows Mobile via third-party software. Research In Motion also offers a Facebook application for the BlackBerry. It includes a range of functions, including an ability to integrate Facebook events into the BlackBerry calendar, and using Facebook profile pictures for Caller ID.

The new Android 1.4 update includes the launch of Places and Groups. With the launch of Places, you and your friends can now check in to your favorite restaurant, museum, business or any other location from your Android phone. Following on the heels of the launch of Groups on Facebook.com less than a month ago, people can now access those same groups from their Android phone. Android 1.4 also includes a refresh to the notifications application, one of the top requests from users. Clicking on a notification now won't initialize the web browser for content. Instead, as long as that notification has an appropriate destination within the application itself, the corresponding application will be opened and will display the notification.

Status Updates

Facebook has a feature called "status updates" (also referred to simply as "status") which allows users to post messages for all their friends to read. In turn, friends can respond with their own comments, and also press the "Like" button to show that they enjoyed reading it. A user's most recent status update appears at the top of their profile, and is also noted in the "Recently updated" section of a user's friend list.

Originally, the purpose of the feature was to allow users to inform their friends of their current "status" (i.e. their current feelings, whereabouts or actions) by referring to themselves in the third person (e.g. "George is happy" or "John is with Robert at his house"). However, users are no longer required to write in the third person. Facebook originally prompted the status update with "Username is..." and Facebook users filled in the rest. However, on December 13, 2007, the requirement to start a status update with is was removed. The question "What are you doing right now?" was introduced. In March 2009, the status update question was changed from "What are you doing right now?" to "What's on your mind?"

In 2009, Facebook added the feature to tag certain friends (or groups etc.) within one's status update by adding an @ character before their name, turning the friend's name into a link to their profile and including the message on the friend's wall.

URL shortener

On December 14, 2009, Facebook launched its own URL shortener based on FB.me domain name. From that point on, all links based on facebook.com can be accessed under fb.me, which is seven characters shorter.

Usernames

Starting June 13, 2009, Facebook introduced a feature that allowed users to choose a Facebook username to make user location easier. The user is able to direct others to their page through a simple link such as www.facebook.com/username rather than an otherwise complex URL. This feature on Facebook quickly spread, with more than 1 million users registering usernames in the first three hours. Usernames are now available to any existing or newly registered user.

According to the FAQ, "Facebook reserves the right to remove and/or reclaim any username at any time for any reason".

Wall

The Wall is a space on each user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see while displaying the time and date the message was written. One user's Wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see his or her full profile, and different users' Wall posts show up in an individual's News Feed. Many users use their friends' Walls for leaving short, temporal notes. More private discourse is saved for messages, which are sent to a user's inbox, and are visible only to the sender and recipient(s) of the message, much like email.

In July 2007, Facebook allowed users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas previously the Wall was limited to text only. In May 2008, the Wall-to-Wall for each profile was limited to only 40 posts. Recently Facebook has allowed users to insert html code in boxes attached to the wall via apps like Static FBML which has allowed marketers to track use of their fan pages with Google Analytics.

Applications

Events

Facebook events are a way for members to let friends know about upcoming events in their community and to organize social gatherings. Events require an event name, network, host name, event type, start time, location, and a guest list of friends invited. Events can be Public or Private. Private events cannot be found in searches and are by invitation only. People who have not been invited cannot view Private event description, Wall or photos. They also will not see any Feed stories about the event [1]. When setting up an event the user can choose to allow friends to upload photos or videos. Note that unlike real world events, all events are treated as separate entities (when the reality is some events sit inside other events, going to one event would preclude going to another, and so on).

Marketplace

In May 2007, Facebook introduced the Facebook Marketplace allowing users to post free classified ads within the following categories: For Sale, Housing, Jobs, and Other. Ads can be posted in either available or wanted format. The market place is available for all Facebook users and is currently free. In 2009, Facebook transferred ownership of the Marketplace to Oodle.

Notes

Facebook Notes was introduced on 22 August 2006, a blogging feature that allowed tags and embeddable images. Users were later able to import blogs from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services.

A recent use of Notes includes the Internet meme - "25 Random Things About Me" which involves writing 25 things about the user that their friends don't already know about them and using the tag function to ask 25 friends to also do so. Nearly 5 million "25 Random Things" notes were written on Facebook profiles in the first week of February 2009.

Places

Facebook announced Places on August 18, 2010. It is a feature that lets users "check in" to Facebook using a mobile device to let a user's friends know where they are at the moment.

In November 2010, Facebook announced "Deals", a subset of the Places offering, which allows for users to check in from restaurants, supermarkets, bars, and coffee shops using an app on a mobile device and then be rewarded discounts, coupons, and free merchandise. This feature is marketed as a digital version of a loyalty card or coupon where a customer gets rewarded for loyal buying behavior.

Available countries: places is currently available in a few select countries (including the AU, US, UK and Japan) with many more on the way.

Supported phones: On October 10, 2010, Places became available on Blackberry, after iPhone. Other users, including Windows Mobile users, must use a HTML5 browser to use Places via Facebook Touch Site.

Platform

Main article: Facebook Platform

The Facebook Platform provides a set of APIs and tools which enable 3rd party developers to integrate with the "open graph" — whether through applications on Facebook.com or external websites and devices. Launched on May 24, 2007, Facebook Platform has evolved from enabling development just on Facebook.com to one also supporting integration across the web and devices.

Facebook Platform Statistics as of May 2010:

• More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
• Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
• More than 250,000 websites have integrated with Facebook Platform
• More than 100 million Facebook users engage with Facebook on external websites every month

Third party companies such as Adonomics, Kontagent and Mixpanel provide application metrics, and blogs such as AppRate, Inside Facebook, and Face Reviews have sprung up in response to the clamor for Facebook applications. On July 4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the "Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund," becoming the world's first Facebook-only venture capital firm.

On August 29, 2007, Facebook changed the way in which the popularity of applications is measured, to give attention to the more engaging applications, following criticism that ranking applications only by the number of people who had installed the application was giving an advantage to the highly viral, yet useless applications.[4] Tech blog Valleywag has criticized Facebook Applications, labeling them a "cornucopia of uselessness."[5] Others have called for limiting third-party applications so the Facebook "user experience" is not degraded.

Primarily attempting to create viral applications is a method that has certainly been employed by numerous Facebook application developers. Stanford University even offered a class in the Fall of 2007, entitled, Computer Science (CS) 377W: "Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook". Numerous applications created by the class were highly successful, and ranked amongst the top Facebook applications, with some achieving over 3.5 million users in a month.

Questions

In May 2010, Facebook began testing Questions, an application in which users submit questions for their friends to answer. It is expected to compete directly with services such as Yahoo! Answers.

Photos

One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums of photos, tag friends, and comment on photos. According to Facebook,

• 50+ billion user photos (in July 2010)
• More than 1.5 petabytes (1.5 million gigabytes) of photo storage used (in May 2009).
• Can determine the gender of a person based on their pictures.
• 220 million photos added each week which take up 25 terabytes of disk space (in May 2009).
• 3+ billion photo images served to users every day (in May 2007).
• 550,000+ images served per second during peak traffic windows (in May 2009).

Videos

During the time that Facebook released its platform, it also released an application of its own for sharing videos on Facebook. Users can add their videos with the service by uploading video, adding video through Facebook Mobile, and using a webcam recording feature. Additionally, users can "tag" their friends in videos they add much like the way users can tag their friends in photos, except the location of the friend in the video is not displayed. Users also have the option of video messaging. Videos cannot be placed in categories, whereas photos are sorted by albums.

Apple’s recently launched iLife ‘11 software suite includes new integrations between iPhoto, iMovie, and Facebook. It’s now easier to share photos albums and videos directly to Facebook. Users can also see Likes and comments on those photos within iPhoto, choose basic privacy settings for photos, or post them to the walls of friends.

Former features

Gifts

File:Facebook gifts.png

Some of Facebook's gifts, as displayed in the website's gift shop.

In February 2007, Facebook added a new virtual gift feature to the website. Friends could send gifts, small icons of novelty items designed by former Apple designer Susan Kare, to each other by selecting one from Facebook's virtual gift shop and adding a message. Gifts given to a user appear on the recipient's wall with the giver's message, unless the giver decided to give the gift privately, in which case the giver's name and message is not displayed to other users. Additionally, all gifts (including private gifts) received by a user are displayed in the recipient's gift box (right above their wall on their profile), marked with either the first name of the user (for public gifts) or the word "Private." An Anonymous option is also available, by which anyone with profile access can see the gift, but only the recipient sees the message. None will see the giver's name, and the gift goes in the recipient's gift box but not the wall.

Facebook users are given one free gift to give upon registering their account. Each additional gift given by a user costs US$1.00. The initial selection of gifts was Valentine's Day themed, and 50% of the net proceeds (after credit card processing fees were taken out, etc.) received through February 2007 were donated to the charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure. After the month of February, the proceeds were no longer donated. Soon after, Facebook began making one new gift available each day, most of which had a limited supply or were available for a limited time.

On 8 November 2008, Facebook changed the $1.00 per gift model to a micro-payment model of 100 points per $1.00, with the existing gifts costing 100 points. They planned to allow a wider variety of gifts in the future.

With the advent of Applications came a way to subvert the required US$1.00 payment; however, the gifts in the Free Gifts application, created by Zachary Allia, are not the same as the official gifts, as they are displayed in a different manner.

The built-in Gifts feature was removed on August 1, 2010, to allow Facebook to focus on more important website features. Existing gift-giving applications can be used as a replacement for the Gifts feature.

Lite

In August 2009, Facebook announced the rollout of a "lite" version of the site, optimized for users on slower or intermittent Internet connections. Facebook Lite offered fewer services, excluded most third-party applications and required less bandwidth. A beta version of the slimmed-down interface was released first to invited testers before a broader rollout across users in the United States, Canada, and India. It was announced on 20 April 2010 that support for the "lite" service had ended and that users would be redirected back to the normal, full content, Facebook website. The service was only operational for eight months.

See also

• All Facebook Chat Smiley / Emotions / Emote