TECHCRUNCH
MICHAEL ARRINGTON
18 MARCH 08
Facebook announced new privacy controls at a press event at their downtown Palo Alto headquarters today, and also demoed their new chat application - called Facebook Chat - that has been rumored since last week. Our real time notes and pictures from the event are here. See CNET
for more.
New Privacy Controls
The new privacy controls, which will launch on Wednesday morning, allow users to do more with Friend Lists. Users can now set specific privacy controls for different friend groups, said Naomi Gleit, a Facebook product manager. Users can create a friend grouping for co-workers, for example, and share different profile information, updates and other information such as photo albums with that group. Users can put friends into multiple groups.
VP Product Matt Cohler said the new controls are needed. Four years ago, he said, Facebook was perfect for students at private college networks. Today, though, Facebook has 67 million active users, and 2/3 of them live outside the U.S. The privacy controls needed by this wider group are different, he said.
Late last year Facebook started allowing users to group friends, but there was little customization that could be done after the grouping. That effectively made it a useless feature. Now, users have tools that they can use to make those distinctions meaningful.