Facebook Update: New Dashboard, Download Your Info, and Groups

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, spoke today at an event at Facebook HQ in Palo Alto, CA. He explained what the company has been working on over the summer during their "intense" employee lockdown period. After explaining the basics of the improvements and problems facing the world of social networking, he started on the main points of the presentation.

He spoke about the ability to grab all of your content from Facebook. In a feature called Download Your Information, Facebook will gather all the things you've put on Facebook, and provide them to you via a .zip archive. The archive contains a file that shows something like a timeline of all your interactions with Facebook. This feature will be rolled out today.

The second announcement is a newly improved Apps dashboard that integrates all the apps you've used, permissions granted and anything else you've done with an app, and displays it in a way that makes it easy to see where your data is going and how you interact with the social graph in apps. It includes a very detailed access log that keeps track of API calls for future reference. This is great news for all those concerned over privacy, as this is a much more streamlined way to manage the access apps have to your information.

The final announcement is a solution to "the biggest problem in social networking." Zuckerberg highlighted the problems with interacting with of all your friends all at once. Sometimes you only want a few friends to know something. It isn't always all friends or one friend. Facebook's answer to this problem is not lists. According to Zuckerberg, nobody wants to make lists. Even when they do, they rarely make more useful ones. Algorithms aren't good at predicting groupings yet. Facebook claims to have the solution to this problem, using a few simple tools under the name Groups.

A group can be anything: family, sports buddies, work, etc. It works like a mailing list, and you can share content within the group. Adding members works a lot like photo tagging. It enables group chats, communications via email, and introduces document collaboration. The mobile implementation of groups will also be going live today.