I’m at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, where the social network has invited dozens of press to witness the launch of… something. We’ve learned about at least some of Facebook’s announcements, which will likely include a redesign that makes the site’s UI more consistent with Facebook’s Place pages. But given the number of people in attendence (including members of advocacy organizations like the EFF), we’re expecting much more.

Facebook is livestreaming the event, which you can see above. I’ll also be live blogging my notes.

The setup for today’s event is unusual. There are a half dozen monitors set around Facebook’s large conference room (which doubles as a cafeteria). And Facebook isn’t allowing anyone to take video footage, which I’m hearing is a first.

10:40AM: Zuckerberg has just taken the stage. I promise we’re not talking today about what you think we’re talking about. You may have heard we’ve been in lockdown mode. We had a really intense, 60 day period where people finished all of these things. We had a really productive summer.

Last week you may have seen photos. Got hi-res photos. We’ve also improved Chat. Believe third biggest behind MSN and QQ in China, but only had a few people working on it. So we had a big push where we improved stability, cut back complaints by 60%.

On platform side. Done a lot of changes to groups – oops, games (he may have just let something slip…). App developers have seen a surge in growth.

What we’re actually talking about today: Giving you more control. We want to build asocial platform. It’s hard to get dynamic right, but what’s more challenging is building a platform so you have a set of connections and can bring those connections across all of the applications you want to use in a seamless way.

If you want to play games, only want to do that with people who play games. On a runnign site, only want to share with people who do jogging with you. It’s hard to do a platform that lets you connect across these different things. If we can nail this, then we can enable kind of innovation you see on best platforms.

Over last few years, we’ve been focused on Connect. There are over 1,000,000 sites with Connect.

A lot of times people want a copy with all of their information. Right now there hasn’t been a way to download all the information you’ve put on Facebook (this could be really big — sounds like Data Portability). Have built ‘Download Your Information’. Built on top of your graph API. Allows you download a copy of you information.

Launching a dashboard that shows you all the apps you use, and shows you the last time that that app accessed your information. These are two changes that we think are important for giving people control of their information.

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Authors: Jason Kincaid

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