Facebook, Chat Privacy

Facebook plans to roll out new privacy features on Wednesday that will give users more control over who sees the data stored on their profile pages.

The new privacy controls will allow users to choose which of their friends can see information such as their photo albums, mobile phone number or e-mail address. Facebook users will also be able to share information about themselves with a wider group of people, thanks to a new "friends-of-friends" feature that is also expected to be available on Wednesday.

The company demoed a very simple chat client that could be used to connect with other Facebook users, so long as they are logged into the Facebook Web site. Facebook chat appears as a small icon on the bottom of the Web browser that, when clicked, pops up a small chat window. Chat conversations will be archived for 90 days, although users will have the option of erasing them.

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New Facebook!

Facebook introduced a new member to the family, appealing to users in Spain and Latin America through a full version of the Web site in Spanish. This is just one of the steps Facebook is planning in order to expand the users community and catch up with MySpace.

“Our goal has always been to allow people to use Facebook in their native language so we built an application to enable users to participate in translating the site into their local languages and dialects,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and chief executive, according to an official press release.

Approximately 1,500 users combined their efforts to translate the site from English to Spanish through translation tools offered by Facebook. The whole task took about four weeks to complete and starting February 11, all Spanish-speaking countries will benefit from it.

According to Facebook’s own estimations, almost 60% of its users are from outside the United States, and almost 2.8 million users are from Spanish-speaking countries. Starting Monday, users will be able to change the language preferences if they wish to, while for those actually staying in a Spanish-speaking country, the site will automatically display the Spanish version.

This is just the first step of Facebook’s plan to extend its community all over the world. Company representatives have said that similar versions, this time in French and German, are to be expected within the next few weeks.

MySpace is already one step ahead of Facebook, with versions of the Web site in French, German, Italian, and even Japanese and Chinese, and is currently Beta testing versions of MySpace Brazil, Russia and even India.

Facebook could be at least one year behind MySpace, but seems but be more willing than ever to catch up with its rival. Moreover, 2007 wasn’t exactly a bad year for Facebook, as the site’s traffic significantly increased and ranked it 53 places higher, climbing up to number 7.