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MENLO PARK, Calif. – Mark Zuckerberg announced last month that he was planning to dissociate Facebook from the public square and replace it with a private communication. Now, the Director General is making the first of a series of changes aimed at achieving this goal.
Tuesday, at its annual developer conference, Facebook unveiled a redesign of its mobile application and desktop site. The revisions add new features to promote group communications instead of News Feed, in which people publicly post a cascade of messages and status updates.
With the changes, users can more easily send messages and share news and other items with members of private groups on the site, the company said. Zuckerberg is working on integrating and encrypting Facebook's various messaging services, including WhatsApp and Messenger. The company also plans to continue to focus on its Stories product, which allows users to post updates that disappear after 24 hours. He also unveiled a brilliant white replacement image for Facebook, a difference from the site's largely tinted blue design.
These features, when combined, "will create a more reliable platform," Zuckerberg said in an interview. "Wherever you can see and connect with friends, you will be able to see and connect with groups; this will be integrated into the Facebook structure. "
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The redesign is the most tangible sign of how privacy scandals and user data problems plaguing Facebook are forcing change within the company. The social network has spent the past three years grappling with the criticism that it did not properly protect the data of its users; that he disseminated misinformation and toxic content, and that it was used as a means of electoral interference. Last week, it announced a fine of up to $ 5 billion from the Federal Trade Commission for breach of privacy, which would be a record fine for a US technology company .
Facebook is also trying to catch up with social media behavior change. Questions about the benefits of social media and increased recognition of its ills have spurred many to turn to private communication methods, such as messaging applications.
"The three fastest growing areas of online communication are private messaging, groups and stories," said Zuckerberg. "By 2019, we expect the number of shared stories to exceed the number of shared feeds."
Eventually, he said, Facebook plans to roll out dozens of small product updates in its four main apps, namely WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook.
The new initial features modify the site but do not constitute a complete redesign. Facebook adds a Groups tab to its main menus from the mobile app and the desktop, for example. Recommendations for groups that users may wish to join will be displayed in different areas of the application. Messages for close friends and family will have their own section in Facebook Messenger. Overall, it will be difficult for someone to open Facebook and not see a prompt inviting them to a group chat.
Facebook also revealed other changes. He plans to launch his meeting function in more than a dozen new countries, such as Thailand and Canada; the service is not available in the United States. Instagram has introduced new features for digital shopping and commerce within the app.
And Craigslist's Facebook competitor, called Marketplace, has integrated shipping and payment capabilities for the first time. It allows users to pay and ship items purchased from other Facebook users across the continental United States. Previously, users were required to arrange payment privately, on Facebook.
The Facebook developer conference, called F8, began in 2007 to encourage developers to create applications for the social network. The company has offered developers access to its so-called social graph, its rich web of user connections and personal data.
Last year, The New York Times and others revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a British political firm with a developer access to Facebook's social chart, had collected personal information from millions of dollars. Facebook users without their consent, to create profiles of voters for the Trump presidential. campaign. This revelation caught the attention of the social giant, including how he handled user information.
Since then, Facebook has committed to more closely monitoring the information of its users and has imposed greater restrictions on developers' access. This makes this year's F8 more difficult for developers who have relied on social network data.
"This will make the development of the platform more difficult for many of these people," Zuckerberg said. He added that any short-term fix for developers was worth the long-term benefit of greater user trust in the platform.
The new direction of Facebook's privacy may create other problems. Closed groups and encrypted services will make it more difficult to identify and eliminate dangerous or abusive behavior, Zuckerberg said, although he added that the company's automated systems allow detect illegal activities – such as examining traffic patterns – without analyzing the content of private transactions. messages.
"There is still a lot of work to be done," he said, adding that the company's headlamps had "definitely spurred more introspection about where our services should go."
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