As you may know, Facebook made three major announcements today: a new Groups feature, a way to download all of your Facebook profile information, and a Dashboard to see how apps are using your data. For as simple as these things are, the company took a great deal of time explaining them and their thought process behind each feature.
Throughout the presentation, there were interesting nuggets, memorable quotes, and random Facebook trivia sprinkled in. Here’s a quick compilation of some of that. Most of these things came from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, though some came from other team members.
Fore more context, you can see the entire presentation here as Facebook loops it:
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Here are a few things we learned from Facebook today:
1. Facebook’s new Groups are the solution to the "biggest problem in social networking".
2. Mark Zuckerberg "thinks" Facebook is the biggest app for events on the web.
3. "In reality, almost no one wants to make lists" on Facebook.
4. "The reality is that facebook is a really hard core technology company".
5. There are "limits to algorithmic solutions." Was that a direct shot at Google?
6. The majority of Facebook users don’t upload photos, but their friends tag them anyway.
7. Group data is considered "very, very high-signal data", which is why it will provide value to third-party apps.
8. Facebook has coined the term" "Social Design" as a new approach to solving problems.
9. There is not a "precise definiton for what a friend is on Facebook".
10. There’s going to be "an increasing number of social problems" and it is Facebook’s job to solve them (while other companies can tackle the algorithmic problems).
11. Facebook Groups are a "a fundamental building block for social networking" going forward.
12. Facebook might one day in the future add a feature that lets you merge multiple Facebook accounts if you have them. This wasn’t announced, but was left open as a possibility during the Q&A.
For more on the new announcements themselves, if you don’t want to sit through the entire video, they are summarized in this article.