I'm facing an anniversary soon: I will have worked at Facebook for four years. I was originally drawn to the company for the opportunity to help build a technology that enables people to model their social network and interact with it online. Equally as important, it was my first opportunity to work alongside my best friend of nearly two decades. Together, we threw ourselves into the task of building something we both believed in, working 18 hours a day, seven days a week with a small team of 40 people at the time.

About six weeks after we both started, my best friend was killed in a tragic bicycling accident. It was a big blow to me personally, but it also was difficult for everyone at Facebook. We were a small, tight-knit community, and any single tragedy had a great effect on all of us. I can recall a company-wide meeting a few days after his death, where I spoke about what my friend meant to me and what we had hoped to do together. As a company, we shared our grief, and for many people it was their first interaction with death. To this day, I still have strong emotions when I think about that gathering.

The question soon came up: What do we do about his Facebook profile? We had never really thought about this before in such a personal way. Obviously, we wanted to be able to model people's relationships on Facebook, but how do you deal with an interaction with someone who is no longer able to log on? When someone leaves us, they don't leave our memories or our social network. To reflect that reality, we created the idea of "memorialized" profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who've passed.

We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it's important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialized. For instance, just last week, we introduced new types of Suggestions that appear on the right-hand side of the home page and remind people to take actions with friends who need help on Facebook. By memorializing the account of someone who has passed away, people will no longer see that person appear in their Suggestions.

When an account is memorialized, we also set privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. We try to protect the deceased's privacy by removing sensitive information such as contact information and status updates. Memorializing an account also prevents anyone from logging into it in the future, while still enabling friends and family to leave posts on the profile Wall in remembrance.

If you have a friend or a family member whose profile should be memorialized, please contact us, so their memory can properly live on among their friends on Facebook.

As time passes, the sting of losing someone you care about also fades but it never goes away. I still visit my friend's memorialized profile to remember the good times we had and share them with our mutual friends.


Max is weary of eucalyptus trees.

Do you know any friends that could use a little help on Facebook? For example, maybe they recently joined the site and are having trouble finding their friends. Or maybe they've been on the site for awhile but never completely filled out their profiles or uploaded a profile picture.

Today, we're introducing new Suggestions in the right-hand corner of your home page so you can easily help those friends. Facebook is only useful and relevant if you can connect with friends that matter to you, and so we already use this space to show you other people that you may know and want to share with. Now you also will begin seeing new Suggestions about people with whom you are already friends, including those who are new to the site. For instance, we may suggest that you help a friend by suggesting friends for him if he's only connected with a few people so far.

At Facebook, one of our main priorities is helping you stay on top of what is going on with the people and things you care about most. That's why today we are beginning to roll out some changes to the home page that simplify your experience by offering two views of News Feed: a summary view of the most interesting activity that's happened in the last day and a real-time view that shows you what is happening right now.

You will be able to catch up on what you may have missed while you were away from Facebook and then easily switch to the real-time stream when you want to see posts as soon as they're shared. Here's how it works:

News Feed
When you log into Facebook, you'll see the most interesting things that happened in the last day in the "News Feed" view. News Feed picks stories that we think you'll enjoy based on a variety of factors including how many friends have liked and commented on it and how likely you are to interact with that story.

Live Feed
Once you've caught up on what you missed, you can click through to "Live Feed" to see what's happening right now. As long as you remain logged into Facebook, you'll continue to see posts and activity from your friends in real-time. You can edit what appears in this view by clicking "Edit Options" at the bottom of the home page.

We're continuing to enhance the Facebook Gift Shop so you have more ways to express your appreciation for the people in your life. A couple months ago, we took a first step by testing new types of gifts created by developers, including e-cards, charity donations and even real-world gifts where you can buy a friend a physical gift along with a virtual one.

We now are unveiling a newly stocked and redesigned Gift Shop, with new categories of gifts and additional gifts for charity, music and sports from developers. With so many gifts available, we also introduced a new design to make it easier for you to browse and purchase gifts with different gift categories. We will be rolling these changes out to everyone in the coming weeks, so don't worry if you don't see them just yet.

Remember, in order to buy Facebook Gifts, you must purchase credits on the site using a major credit card. Credits cost 10 cents in U.S. currency, and they are available for purchase in 15 currencies. After you select your gift, click "Buy," and we'll walk you through the rest.

Graeme Menzies is the director of online communications for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC), to be held from Feb. 12, 2010 to March 21, 2010. He works with a passionate team to extend the Olympic games experience through online media. In honor of the Olympic flame being lit in Greece this Thursday, Oct. 22, we've asked Graeme to discuss how VANOC is connecting people worldwide through online communications.


When Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympic movement over a century ago, he sought to create a moment where athletes and spectators could experience the positive and transformational effects of sport — values of friendships, respect and excellence. At the beginning of the 1900s that experience was a social experience, but one that was largely limited to those who had the resources and time to travel.

By the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan was already predicting that the evolution of electronic communication media would significantly reduce barriers of time and space. In effect, he said, the planet would be reduced to a "global village." Both visions now live side by side.

More than ever before, the most successful games are not only those that provide the most outstanding physical infrastructure for athletes and spectators, but also the most outstanding online experience for virtual fans and spectators.

The Torch Relay

This Thursday, the Olympic flame is being lit in Olympia, Greece. Canada's Olympic torch relay will be the longest ever held in one country, covering 45,000 km (or nearly 28,000 miles) on a 106-day journey by some 12,000 torchbearers carrying the torch through over 1,000 communities and landmarks across the country.

In the past, traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television, would record and tell the story of the relay. Now, citizens are telling the story themselves by sharing their photos, videos and thoughts on their Facebook profiles, their blogs and other social media. This new reality is what led the Vancouver 2010 team to reach out beyond its website and engage significantly in the social media space.

In Canada, where Facebook is already extremely popular, we've actively encouraged local Olympic torch relay celebration communities to use Facebook to build local engagement, enthusiasm and momentum. Communities such as Sydney, Nova Scotia, and Red Deer, Alberta, are using Facebook to communicate local torch relay news, stories and photos on Facebook Pages.

Anyone can follow the torch route as well. We've complemented our website with a Vancouver 2010 Olympics Page. It includes links to the interactive torch relay map, as well as a 2010 video that will give you a taste of the experience we're trying to build for the world.

Facebook Groups have long been a part of the Facebook experience as a way for people to organize and discuss particular issues of interest. However, until now, Group activities have been isolated to the group page and it was often difficult to find out what currently was going on within a group. We have received feedback from many of you saying that you want to know more about what is going on within your Facebook Groups, in the same way you know what is happening with your friends and other connections on the site — on your home page.

Starting today, we're transforming Groups to make it easier for you to communicate with other members and create a smoother experience as you browse through Facebook. If you don't see the new design just yet, you will soon. We're currently testing it with a small percentage of people on the site and will roll it out to everyone in the coming days.

First, we revamped the design for Groups so that they look similar to other parts of the site such as profiles and Pages. This means that groups will now have a Wall that summarizes all the recent activities of people within the group and a Publisher that enables members to share their content.

Second, group activities, which previously only appeared in the group, will now be delivered to your News Feed. To ensure that you get the most interesting and relevant content from groups you've joined, you only will see stories when one of your friends posts within a group rather than when all members post. For example, you now will see a story when your friend uploads photos from a recent party at your high school alumni group or when one of your friends posts a message on the Wall of your pick-up soccer group saying that there is a special game this week.

While only a small fraction of people on the site ever experience abuse such as bullying, harassment, unwanted contact or offensive behavior from others, we're constantly improving our processes to better respond if you do have a problem. By providing us with accurate and detailed information, you can help us locate and remove abuse on the site as quickly and efficiently as possible. That's why we recently made it possible for you to send us more specific and detailed reports of abuse as part of our efforts to make Facebook a safe and trusted environment.

Specifically, we created much more granular reporting categories for you to classify the issues you may come across including bullying or unwanted contact from other people on the site. We also added new fields where you can detail the location of abuse that occurs in videos or text. For example, if you want to report offensive content in a video, you now can tell us the specific time during the video when the abuse occurs. Or if you're reporting a note, you can copy and paste the offensive text directly from its source. The information you provide helps our international team of professional reviewers prioritize reports and know what they're looking for when reviewing the content.

Joe Green is the co-founder of Causes, a Facebook application that empowers anyone to mobilize their friends for social and political causes. Last week Causes began the second America Giving Challenge in partnership with the Case Foundation —
a nonprofit organization that encourages the use of technology in that sector — and Parade Magazine. For 30 days, causes compete to win cash prizes for their organization based on the number of donations they receive. We've asked Joe to share his perspective on how activism is evolving on the Internet.


People are adopting "Facebook Babies," but they aren't virtual infants with a penchant for online social networking. They are the nearly 30 orphans in China that have been given life-changing surgery and foster care by a nonprofit organization called Love Without Boundaries with money they raised through the Causes application on Facebook.

Amy Eldridge, who directs this U.S.-based nonprofit in Oklahoma, relies on volunteers to recruit, educate and mobilize supporters. When someone has a question, volunteers are ready to reach out and personally respond. When Amy shares the story of a baby who needs help, her supporters respond not just by donating but also by committing to raise money from their friends.

Amy's volunteer-focused approach is classic grassroots organizing — maximizing people's impact by empowering individuals. "Any smart nonprofit realizes that none of their work gets done without their supporters," Amy recently told me. "We now have 170 volunteers in 9 countries with a designated job."

When you learn how Amy runs her small nonprofit, it all sounds very logical and probably a bit unremarkable — but this is not how most nonprofits operate.

If you are one of the 75 percent of Americans who donated to a nonprofit last year, chances are you were solicited through direct mail or by a telemarketer. In addition to leaving individuals disengaged, top-down marketing tactics have high overhead costs that prevent smaller nonprofits from growing and driving innovation.

It was not always this way. Until the 1970s, typical involvement with nonprofits looked a lot more like Amy Eldridge and Love Without Boundaries. People joined local chapters of charitable organizations whose members were friends and whose leaders were volunteers. They worked through their social connections to do everything from cleaning parks to raising money, but this shifted after the 1970s. Nonprofits began focusing on top-down marketing tactics in response to a broad societal shift away from membership in voluntary associations of all types.

Now, the Internet — and social media specifically — is rebuilding the social infrastructure that has been crumbling underneath nonprofits for decades. As David Smith, director of the National Council on Citizenship, explains: "God, friends and Facebook provide a civic safety net." Facebook, with its representation of people's real identity and relationships, presents an unprecedented opportunity to bring the ideals and techniques of grassroots organizing to a massive number of people online. In doing so, the playing field has been leveled for individuals and organizations of all sizes.

A paradigm shift is under way in the nonprofit world. Through the Causes application alone in just over two years, 85 million people are now involved in more than 300,000 user-created causes that educate, advocate and fund nonprofit work.

Last year, in partnership with the Case Foundation, Causes started America's Giving Challenge to help nonprofits discover the potential of online organizing. The competition allows any U.S. based cause to enter and win cash awards for their nonprofit based on the number of different people that get involved through donating. We designed it so that the amount donated was irrelevant, instead focusing on the number of people who got engaged.

More than 26,000 people donated nearly $600,000 to mostly small grassroots organizations. Love Without Boundaries, the 2008 winner, was awarded the $50,000 grand prize and used the money to help 10 orphaned children with heart disease. More importantly, they were able to capitalize on the momentum of the Giving Challenge to continue to develop a vibrant organization of engaged supporters.

With this year's Giving Challenge in full swing, I want to encourage you to jump in. As grassroots organizing teaches us, an individual can have a large impact. There are so many ways you can make a difference — from donating any amount no matter how small to inviting your friends to participate or sharing information about the causes you support and joining discussions. Become a leader in your cause, and influence the people around you to do the same and discover what you can achieve when you organize.


Joe is addictively refreshing the Causes page to track the challenge leaders and to challenge you to get involved for your favorite cause.

Every day, through Facebook status updates, people share how they feel with those who matter most in their lives. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing. They're brief, to the point, and descriptive of what's going on this week, today or right now.

Grouped together, these updates are indicative of how we are collectively feeling. At Facebook, we're always looking for ways to help people better understand the world around them, and we're interested in how people express their emotions with one other and the world. So earlier this year, data scientists at Facebook started a project to measure the overall mood of people from the United States on Facebook, based on the sentiment expressed in status updates.

The result was an index that measures how happy people on Facebook are from day-to-day by looking at the number of positive and negative words they're using when updating their status. When people in their status updates use more positive words—or fewer negative words—then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual.

Though more countries or languages may be added later, the current result is notable since it is based on the updates of all English-speaking U.S. Facebook users. In this sense, it can count as an indicator of "Gross National Happiness," a metric only measured currently via Gallup polls and national surveys in countries such as France and Bhutan. To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.

For our Gross National Happiness index, we adapted a collection of positive and negative emotion words built by social psychologists. Examples of positive or happy words include "happy," "yay" and "awesome," while negative, or unhappy words, include "sad," "doubt" and "tragic." We also did a brief survey of some Facebook users, which showed that people who use more positive words, relative to the number of negative words, reported higher satisfaction with their lives.

Over time, we've seen spikes in the index for different days of the year. Some of the happiest days include U.S. national holidays like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, social holidays like Halloween and religious holidays including Christmas and Easter. Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008—when the U.S. was celebrating the election of President Barack Obama—was over twice as happy as the average Wednesday.

Most of the time when we stumble upon a Latin phrase, it's etched in stone: carved in the hallways of universities, chiseled on facades of government buildings or carefully imprinted in cathedral foyers and churchyards. The language seems almost immovable. Yet beginning today, Latin — the staid and reliable language — springs to life on Facebook.

Latin has joined the more than 70 languages we've made available on the site in the past two years, including some which have launched just today — Azeri, Faroese, Georgian and Nepali. Some of these are languages that millions of people speak across the globe. Others are dialects that specific communities use in select geographic areas. Still others are just for fun: "Pirate" may not appeal to everyone, but for those nostalgic for the days of Blackbeard and Captain Hook, it's there for you in Facebook's language drop-down menu.

To students of Latin, the availability of the language on Facebook may be just what's needed to narrow the distance between themselves and the venerable language. After all, the experience of studying Latin can frequently seem somewhat far and away. Even the readings prescribed by Latin teachers have an air of detachment about them: Cicero and Demosthenes, Caesar and Virgil. While students of "living languages" practice on subtitled films and in conversation groups, on vacations and with exchange students, Latin scholars soak in rare living breaths of their studied language, satisfying themselves with the occasional legal phrase, nursery plant, benediction or school motto. Recognizing verb stems and identifying vocabulary roots just somehow aren't quite the same as ordering off a menu or asking for directions.

Though Latin has been long out of use, for some of us, it never loses its intrigue. As a native English speaker, I enrolled in Latin to supplement my study of Romance languages. I still remember reading a translated copy of "Winnie the Pooh" in Latin, and gradually working my way through state speeches and philosophic commentary dating from the Roman Empire. When I joined Facebook a year ago, I chose a Latin phrase, "dictum meum pactum" ("my word is my bond"), as the phrase that currently appears on my Facebook business card.