Facebook Changes Again — Keeping up With the Updates

September 8, 2011 | Posted by Andy Kutcher

As of last week, Facebook got yet another face-lift. With so many changes happening so regularly, it’s hard for people to keep up with the updates. The change that will probably most greatly affect you as a Facebook user is the new Status Update and Wall features. To help ease you into this new way of using Facebook, we’ve pulled together the top four changes.

1. Who are you with.

A few months ago, Facebook started tagging in your status updates. You know, “I’m having lunch with @tiffany starnes” — and Facebook would tag Tiffany Starnes. Then they phased out the “@” and anytime you started typing something that could be a name, they would feed in you friends. Now you have an option to tell Facebook who you’re with. You can still tag people the old fashioned way, but if you prefer easy listing, Facebook lets you tag people in your posts by typing in who you’re with. Take a look.

2. Where are you?

A couple weeks ago, I gave a presentation on Facebook Places. I started that presentation with “In a few weeks, this will be completely different.” And, I was right. It seems as though Facebook has bowed down to Foursquare. Instead of the “check-in” feature on Facebook that mimics that of Foursquare, you can now tag where you are on your status.

3. Who should see this?

Facebook has always had customizable privacy settings for your status updates, information and more. They were hiding in the account options, though. Now, Facebook allows you to customize who can see your status updates down to individual people. This has been an option on Pages for months, and I’m glad to see it finally come to profiles.

4. Who else can see this?

In addition to allowing you to customize who can see your status updates, you can also see who can see the privacy settings used by your friends when they tag you in photo albums. That is to say that Facebook will show you who can see the photo on your profile (in this case, it’s custom for me) as well as who can see the photo in your friends album (in this case, all friends).

So, there you have it. Four of the recent Facebook changes that you should be aware of. Of course, by the time you get used to using these features, Facebook will probably change again.