Some Facebook users are seeing a banner above their News Feed encouraging them to update their “acquaintances” list so certain friends appear less frequently in their feed.

The acquaintances list launched along with “close friends” and Smart Lists in 2011. Users can add people to the acquaintances list to limit the amount and type of updates they see from them. Users can also apply this list to improve their privacy settings and prevent certain photos or posts, for instance, from being visible to friends they aren’t as close to. Over the past year we’ve seen Facebook try different ways to get users to update this list, but the prompt reader Matt Navarra saw on his homepage late last week is the most prominent.

When users click “update list,” a window pops up with suggestions of friends that they haven’t interacted with on Facebook recently. Users can click “see all” to select from their entire friend list.

Facebook’s algorithms will automatically start to show users fewer posts from people and pages they don’t engage with, but explicit actions like adding a user to “acquaintances” or “close friends” give the system even better signals about what users want in their feed. News Feed relevance is the No. 1 thing that shapes how much users enjoy and engage with Facebook. One of the most common complaints we hear is that people don’t care about the things they see in their feed, and most often these people have not created friend lists or deleted friends they are not longer close to. Another common problem is that people don’t feel comfortable sharing with all the people they’ve added as friends, and again, these people typically are hesitant to delete friends and haven’t organized their friends into lists. The acquaintances list — and even lesser known restricted list – address both these issues, and so Facebook would be well served by promoting users even further.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Wired in a recent interview that “sharing with smaller groups” is a key trend he’s seeing. With the last major update to friend lists in 2011 and groups being mostly the same since October 2010, the company is likely to refresh either or both of these products in the next year to improve the options for small group sharing, particularly on mobile.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook to buy Opera browser? – Facebook is reportedly interested in purchasing Opera Software, which operates a desktop and mobile browser. Pocket-lint.com and The Next Web have sources saying Opera is talking to potential buyers and Facebook could be among those.

Facebook to open Dubai office – Facebook is set to open its first Middle East office in Dubai next week.

Facebook asks users to ‘star’ their friends -  Facebook is reportedly testing a new way to prompt to users add friends to their “Close Friends” list by suggesting that they “star” them, according to VentureBeat. The “Close Friends” feature, which helps users see more of their closest friends’ status updates, has been around since September 2011. Facebook has recently been experimenting with ways to get users to take advantage of the feature. [Image via VentureBeat]

Pinterest hires Facebook’s Schnitt – Pinterest hired Barry Schnitt, formerly of Facebook and Google, to be the head of communications and public policy.

Microsoft releases Windows Phone update - Microsoft released version 2.5 of its Facebook for Windows Phone app, bringing it more in line with its Android and iOS offerings. Among other usability improvements, Windows Phone users can now Like comments and view threaded messages.

Facebook introduces user restrictions for Open Graph stories - Developers can now limit their Open Graph app stories to users who meet certain restrictions such as age, country or certain kinds of content, according to Facebook’s Developer Blog. For example, a video app can specify that stories published by the app only appear in countries in which they have launched or to users who are over a certain age.

Timeline redesign being tested – Facebook is testing a redesigned Timeline layout that overlays some user information on top of their cover photo and reduces the size of links to users’ photos and map, for example. The redesign seems aimed at making more aspects of Timeline visible at one time without scrolling. [Image from AllFacebook]

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook introduced a new tool for users to add friends to an “acquaintances” list so these people appear less frequently in a user’s feed.

The social network is promoting the tool as a way to “see posts that matter to you,” but interestingly it does not suggest using the list to protect certain posts or information — another key benefit of maintaining lists. In any case, the tool addresses an issue many users have after years of using the service and accumulating friends they don’t know very well.

An algorithm recommends friends to add to the list based on frequency of interaction. We’ve found the suggestions to be quite accurate. Many of the users Facebook suggests as acquaintances are already those who appear sparingly in News Feed. Still, users can deselect particular friends if Facebook miscategorizes them. There’s also an option to remove users from friends completely by hovering over a person’s picture and clicking “unfriend.”

This type of tool is interesting coming from Facebook, which aims to connect people and often prompts people to add more friends rather than delete them. But it reflects the realities of the service and helps people organize their Facebook connections as they do with people offline. When users feel confident that they can control who sees their information, they are likely to share more on the site, which is why it’s surprising that Facebook didn’t call out how users can hide certain posts or photos from their new list of acquaintances.

Nonetheless, the tool serves the other practical need of relevance in News Feed. Helping users indicate which friends they want to see less from will enable Facebook to show more stories that users do care about.

Users can access the tool from the link here or by searching “acquaintances,” clicking on the list result and then selecting “see all suggestions” from the right-hand side of the page.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook for iPhone users now have access to all the new features for in the official Facebook for iPad app that launched this morning. Now available in the App Store, the 4.0 update includes a major redesign of the navigation system that facilitates quick switching between features, and the ability to access third-party mobile apps.

The new features can also be found on Facebook’s mobile sites m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com, which can both be accessed from Android phones that have yet to receive native Facebook app update with the lastest changes.

The update to Facebook for iPhone’s 91 million monthly active users and 51 million daily active users gives developers a huge new distribution channel for their mobile web and iPhone apps.

One of the worst things about the old Facebook for iPhone app was the grid screen navigation. If users wanted to switch between in-house Facebook apps such as the news feed, Photos, Messages, and notifications, they had to exit their currently used app to the grid screen, then dive back into another app.

This process was both cumbersome and sometimes caused users to lose their place — something especially annoying when one went to look for new Messages or notifications, saw they had none, and wanted to return to the previously used feature. The slowness of switching apps through the grid screen contributed to Facebook spinning out Messages as a standalone app, and preparing a dedicated native Photos app.

Facebook for iPhone 4.0 reduces the friction of app switching through a slide-out navigation menu that is accessible from any screen and houses all in-house and third-party app bookmarks. Users can open the navigation menu, but then easily close it to resume their previous activity.

Similarly, a floating top navigation bar gives persistent access to Messages, notifications, and requests. When their icons are clicked, an overlaid screen slides up from the bottom and slides back down revealing the previously used app when a user is done.

The navigation menu also houses a revamped search feature from which users can find friends, Pages, apps, Groups, Events, or any other Facebook property. It replaces the tabbed search that clumsily required users to choose what they were searching for first, and didn’t include live links to apps.

When users click on the bookmark, search result, or news feed link for a native iPhone app, that app is instantly launched if already installed, or the App Store is loaded so users can download it. Bookmarks to web apps on Facebook’s new mobile app platform are launched within Facebook for iPhone’s internal browser, and users merely need to confirm their login — they don’t have to reenter their username or password.

Despite Facebook confirming with us that it would remove the Places check-in feed from its smartphone apps, users can still see the locations of friends through a renamed in-house app called Nearby. As before, users can view the checkins of friends as a feed or as photos on a map, as well as add their own check-ins.

The app does lack some of Facebook.com’s newest features. There’s no way to subscribe to someone’s public updates or edit your Friend Lists or Smart Lists. Facebook has also removed the ability to filter the news feed by Friend Lists, which previously allowed users to select to only see updates from a subset of friends. Hopefully these features will be integrated soon.

Facebook for iPhone hasn’t received such a major redesign since its launch years ago. At first, some users will surely be grumpy about having to relearn how to navigate the app. With time, though, we believe users will grow to appreciate the streamlined navigation and ability to access their web and native apps. By becoming an app portal and reducing navigation fatigue, Facebook for iPhone’s 100 million MAU milestone could be right around the corner.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook Announces Tech Heavy Set of 2011 Fellows – Facebook announced who was selected to become Ph.D. fellows this year. The Facebook Fellowship Program included people with backgrounds in psychology and economics last year; this year the five winners who receive tuition and fees for the 2011-2012 academic year, $5,000 for travel, $2,500 for a computer and a $30,000 stipend all study technical disciplines.

Specifically, Adrienne Porter Felt and Kurt Thomas of the University of California at Berkeley both study computer security, Yinan Li of the Universitiy of Wisconsin at Madison studies databases, Wei Liu of Columbia University studies machine learning, and Marke Olszewski of MIT studies compiler technology.

Facebook to Grow to 9,400 Employees by 2017 – According to public documents in Menlo Park, California Facebook plans to grow its workforce at its new Menlo Park headquarters from 1,400 to 9,400 people by 2017.

Facebook Deals All About Credits – AllFacebook reports that Facebook sources are saying that the company is not initially taking a cut of the revenue from its new Deals program. Instead it reportedly seeks to expand the reach of Credits, the in-Facebook currency.

Facebook to Host f8 in 2011 – Facebook has confirmed that the company will host an f8 conference sometime this year.

Facebook Valued at $70B on Secondary Market - Reuters reports that a group  of investors are trying to sell $1 billion of Facebook stock on secondary markets for amounts that would put the company’s total value at $70 billion; these investors previously tried to sell the shares for a value of $90 billion, but couldn’t move the stock.

Details of Russian Facebook Ownership – Gigaom reported this week that Russian investor Yuri Milner holds a 2.33% stake in Facebook, 1.41% stake in Zynga and a 4.63% stake in Groupon, among other investments and holdings.

Facebook Institutes “Hackamonths” - Facebook Engineering’s Dave Ferugson posted a note to the Facebook Engineering Page this week in which he detailed Facebook’s new “Hackamonth” program for engineers. Essentially the program will allow engineers to temporarily leave their current team to work on a different project; the goal is to have about 10% of the company’s engineerings participating each month. The Hackamonth program could become a recruiting talking point that lures engineers who are tired of working on the same project for years on end at other tech companies.

Details on Facebook’s Messages Server – The Facebook Engineering Team published a note this week that details the internal functioning of the Messages application server.

Facebook Advertises on Gmail – Facebook is running ads on Google, according to this screenshot. [Image via jing]

Some users can now select to see all of their “Friends Not on a List” as part of Facebook’s Friend Lists interface. The new addition helps users ensure that all their friends have been assigned to a list to which content can be hidden from or made visible. For instance, it allows users to see if all of their sensitive family or professional contacts have been added to a list from which they hide their photos or status updates.

However, it’s not clear how many people might make use of the feature. Facebook has stated in the past that only 5% of users take advantage of Friend Lists, and it’s likely that an even smaller fraction of people list enough of their friends for this to be useful. The Friends Lists feature has been steadily hidden away from the home page — you used to be able to sort by all of your lists on the home page, for example — so now with this latest change Facebook has chosen to facilitate the power user experience rather than alter Friend Lists to be more appealing or readily available to a wider audience.

Users part of this test or who are first in this gradual rollout will see the “Friends Not on a List” option below their other lists in the Friend List editor’s left sidebar. Users cannot use it as a friend list though — it can’t be selected as a privacy distribution parameter for their shared content or profile.

Despite their importance to allowing users to share a wider range of content by restricting its visibility to a subset of friends, most users have never made any friend lists. The feature is relatively buried, forcing users to click the somewhat awkwardly named “Edit Friends” option in the Account drop-down menu. Also, systematically categorizing hundreds of friends is an unnatural and laborious chore.

Facebook tried to make this easier by providing suggestions of friends to add to existing lists by displaying one-click add buttons on friends who share characteristics with those already on the list. It also let users sort by characteristics such as school or workplace during the Friend List creation process. However, Facebook hasn’t announced any significant increase in the feature’s popularity since these additions were made.

As an alternate option of restricting content visibility, Facebook released its Groups feature, but this notifies a user’s friends when they’re added, preventing it from being used to secretly hide sensitive information from a specific type of friend.

“Friends Not on a List” is the first noteworthy change to the Friend Lists editor in six months, though Facebook did begin to allow users to display “Featured Friends” as part of the redesigned profile.  It may be a signal of Facebook’s dedication to getting the feature right, even if only through incremental change. Otherwise, it may just be a token to the feature’s few users in advance of a major overhaul or removal of Friend Lists.

Since those who have created Friend Lists may have invested a lot of time crafting them, Facebook may be wary of making bigger changes until it’s sure it has a solution to privacy. How to best empower users to efficiently manage different privacy settings for different friends is a complicated problem. But if Facebook can solve it, users will be able to share more content of varying sensitivity levels, such a emotional confessions, racy photos, or their location, but with fewer friends, and thereby mimic the way we share in real life more accurately.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook is using a new “Member Suggestions” right sidebar module to recommend friends to add to your currently viewed Group. The module displays users who are friends with many of the Group’s existing members, but may have been accidentally left out. The feature should help keep Groups growing, preventing their membership from stagnating after the initial wave of additions.

Just prior to releasing the Groups feature in early October, Facebook updated its Friend Lists product with suggestions of users to add to a currently viewed list. Those suggestions were based on a user sharing similar demographic or interest characteristics with existing list members, such as a shared hometown or employer. Its unclear if Member Suggestions might similarly suggest users who share attributes other than friendships with Group members.

While users are browsing a Group they are a member of, they’ll see the Member Suggestions module in the right sidebar below Docs but above the advertisements. The module shows a user’s name, profile pic, the number of current Group members who they are friends with, and an”Add friend to Group” link, which instantly admits them using the confirmation-less system. As with all new member admissions, a story is published to the Group’s feed stating who added who to the Group.

When Groups was first released, many users flocked to create them and add numerous friends. Friends not added during this initial phase may never have been admitted. If the Group has the secret privacy setting, those users would be unable to find the Group to request admission. Since new friends may join a clique after it’s Group has been created, Member Suggestions should serve to fill out these holes in Group membership.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Today during their event, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg talked about “the biggest problem in social networking“. What he means by this is social sharing. You need to be able to map out all of the real world groups that you have in the social graph. If Facebook can do this, Zuckerberg says people will be able to do all the sharing they want to do. And as we hinted earlier, Zuckerberg believes they have done this with the complete overhaul of Facebook Groups.

“The naive solution is to do something like Friend Lists,” Zuckerberg says. ”Almost no one wants to make lists,” he continues. He’s noted this before. “The most we’ve ever gotten is 5 percent of people to make a list. It’s pretty brutal to have to do this every single time.” He then went into the algorithmic solutions. These are helpful, Zuckerberg says, but it’s also really easy to get these wrong, he notes. There needs to be a social solution, Zuckerberg says.

Zuckberberg says that the idea for this new Groups social solution comes directly from what they’ve done with Photos on Facebook. He says that 95 percent of users on Facebook in tagged in a photo — but most of that is the result of a friend tagging them. This is the same principle that will guide the new Groups.

Zuckerberg invited Justin Shaffer, the founder of Hot Potato (which Facebook recently acquired), on stage to talk a bit more about the new Groups (he’s the product manager on it). Shaffer notes that each Group is controlled by all its members. There’s group chat, group doc editing, and other apps that can be used within these groups. Groups will also be a part of the Graph API, Shaffer notes.

Groups have an icon, and a logo.”It’s mean to resemble a human space,” head of product Chris Cox added.

Groups aren’t replacing Friend Lists, Zuckerberg says. He doesn’t see the value in deleting what people have already worked on — but going forward, Groups is going to be the way this social element is set up.

This is a big part of creating what Zuckerberg calls “a pristine graph.”

Update: Read more in Zuckerberg’s post on the matter.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch