Facebook Gives More Control Over Groups, Downloads, and New Dashboard

[engine]

Facebook Gives More Control Over Groups, Downloads, and New Dashboard [blog.facebook.com]

Today we're announcing a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. It's a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them in a private space. The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what's going on in a group.

I'm also excited to share a couple of other new things we've been working on that will give you more control and make it easier to stay connected no matter what you're trying to do.

First, we've built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you've ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information.

Second, we're launching a new dashboard to give you visibility into how applications use your data to personalize your experience. As you start having more social and personalized experiences across the web, it's important that you can verify exactly how other sites are using your information to make your experience better.

As this rolls out, in your Facebook privacy settings, you will have a single view of all the applications you've authorized and what data they use. You can also see in detail when they last accessed your data. You can change the settings for an application to make less information available to it, or you can even remove it completely.

[phranque]

this is a step in the right direction.
i wonder if the timing of the movie had any affect on this development.

[creative craig]

As this rolls out, in your Facebook privacy settings, you will have a single view of all the applications you've authorized and what data they use. You can also see in detail when they last accessed your data. You can change the settings for an application to make less information available to it, or you can even remove it completely.

I think this will surprise alot of people - alot of apps use your personal data in ways the general public never dream of!

[freejung]

Watching the watchers, that's awesome.

[graeme_p]

This is the best things Facebook have done in a long time. It completely changes my view.

It will also, hopefully set a standard: websites, and even some software you install on your own machines, tend to treat our data as theirs, and now that FB is demonstrating it does not need to be like that, it might change expectations.

[phranque]

the part that they got wrong in typical FB fashion was that groups are opt-out rather than opt-in.
there's no way that i can find that to prevent you from being added to a group or groups without your consent.

[autoreg]

Thanks for the interesting informatuin. Really helpful

[eljefe3]

I was hoping that you could simply manage your friends into various groups, something like different folders on your computer.

It would be nice if you could for instance, simply create family, fantasy football, co-workers etc. and then drap and drop all of the current friends into these groups, but it doesn't look like this is the case, unless I missed it somewhere in setting up a test group.