Social networking site Facebook is one of those sites that tends to churn out a steady stream of small updates and modifications rather than releasing massive "2.0" and "3.0" revamps. It looks like they've recently gone through a few of them, too:
- Easier "wall" posting. (See image at left.) Instead of navigating to a different page to post on someone's "wall" (basically a free-for-all bulletin board at the bottom of a Facebook profile), there's now a cool little text field that lets you post right from the profile page. On a similar note, Facebook also modified its "poking" feature a few weeks ago so that it would no longer require navigating to a new page. These are both great for us Ajax addicts who consider page reloads to be soooo 2003.
- No more "Pulse" feature. According to a post on Mashable, Facebook has quietly removed this feature, which was akin to Google's Zeitgeist and showed what Facebook members from an individual network were displaying on their profiles in terms of movies, books, TV shows, music, etc. I thought it was really cool: Pulse confirmed that a whole lot of students at my preppy northeastern alma mater were all about declaring their love for the Dave Matthews Band, F. Scott Fitzgerald's books, and Good Will Hunting. But now Facebook has ditched Pulse, and no one's really sure why. I've put an inquiry in to Facebook's press line and will keep you all updated on this as we know more.
- E-mail notification of Facebook messages? Facebook's "Messages" service has traditionally not sent any notifications to members' e-mail accounts when new messages appear in their inboxes. (It keeps members logging in on a regular basis, I suppose.) But when one of my friends sent me a message via Facebook today, a notification appeared in my Gmail inbox to alert me of it. The message itself was not contained in the e-mail--just a link to it. I'm not sure if it's a permanent feature or just a glitch.
UPDATE: Looks like Pulse isn't gone after all. Facebook spokesperson Meredith Chin informed me that the feature has been temporarily pulled for revamping.