After a brutal 2018 that forced Facebook to admit it hasn't got the best reputation when it comes to privacy, Mark Zuckerberg has big plans for the social networking platform in 2019: Facebook is being redesigned. Zuckerberg made the announcements during Facebook's F8 event near the company's home turf in San Jose, California, where he addressed the past year of issues concerning privacy, security and decreasing trust in the platform. The new version of Facebook, codenamed 'FB5', will be the biggest change the social network has experienced in years: almost every single aspect of the platform is changing in some way. There's a lot of information to process, and we've wrapped up everything you need to know right here. Read more: New web and mobile designs The fifth major redesign of Facebook is incoming, codenamed 'FB5', and it will make communities – known as Groups – the focus, featuring a sleek redesign that should make it faster and more reliable, not to mention more visually appealing. The new Facebook mobile app should now be live too, as a much faster and more immersive experience. Facebook has made finding what you're looking for more convenient, and more importantly claims to have made it safer and more secure. This is the biggest change to the Facebook app in five years – even the Facebook logo is being updated for 2019. There's a new Facebook desktop website, too, and it should be much lighter on system resources, with the same design language as the mobile app. It will be coming in the next few months, with some updates showing up right away. All about building community Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook's focus is shifting to communities both public and private. This means that Groups are going to be the core focus: there are already tens of millions of active Groups on Facebook. Groups will be easier to find, and easier to participate in, thanks to a new, redesigned Groups tab. This will show you a personalized feed of all of your groups, so you can focus on your communities in a single place, rather than parsing them out from the rest of your News Feed. Users will also notice that Group recommendations will crop up in more places, but they'll be more relevant to what you're doing in the app. For instance, you may see more 'buy and sell' groups show up in the Marketplace, and Today in Gaming may suggest a new gaming group for you to join. The News Feed will also be redesigned so that you can more easily share content directly to your Groups; but this new community approach goes beyond Groups. Facebook is launching Facebook Dating in more countries, along with a new feature called Secret Crush. The idea is that you can opt in to this, and name up to nine of your friends who you have interest in. If any of those friends opt in to the program and name you as one of their secret crushes, then you'll be matched; if the secret crush isn't mutual, no one will know the names you entered. Facebook Dating was already live in five countries, and has now been expanded to 14 more. The service will launch in the US at the end of the year. There will also be some new ways to meet friends, through the new Meet New Friends feature. This is also an opt-in feature, so you'll only be exposed to people who are open to meeting new people. This feature will also work with your Groups, so you can easily add new friends from your favorite community. Everything else Facebook's Marketplace is also getting some improvements – in the US you'll be able to ship products across the country rather than just locally, and users will be able to pay for stuff safely and securely through the Facebook app. This should make shopping on the Facebook platform more secure for both sellers and buyers. The Events tab is also getting a makeover, and it'll be easier to explore your city. You can coordinate with your friends, find local businesses, and find a new favorite restaurant based on your own personal preferences. There are many Facebook changes coming in the next few months, and it could transform the way people use the platform day-in and day-out – and at the very least, the hope is that these changes will make the social network more secure, and less divisive. Check out our review of the new Oculus Quest Image credits: Facebook<doc-sep>Facebook announced an overhaul of its main mobile app today that puts more emphasis on two of its most critical features: events and groups. The company says it’s placing groups front and center as a cornerstone of how it wants users to think of the main Facebook app, while events is getting a fresh coat of paint as one of the most-used parts of the app that keeps users coming back day in and day out. “There are tens of millions of active groups on Facebook. When people find the right one, it often becomes the most meaningful part of how they use Facebook. And today, more than 400 million people on Facebook belong to a group that they find meaningful,” the company said in a blog post. “With this in mind, we’re rolling out a fresh new design for Facebook that’s simpler and puts your communities at the center. We’re also introducing new tools that will help make it easier for you to discover and engage with groups of people who share your interests.” Facebook says the mobile redesign will start rolling out immediately on iOS and Android around the world. It’s also working on a desktop redesign that will arrive in the coming months. The biggest change to note is the new groups tab that’s now placed in the middle row of the redesigned menu bar. When tapping in, users will now get a personalized feed of updates from their various groups as well as recommendations to join new groups based on their interests. Grid View Image: Facebook Image: Facebook Image: Facebook There’s also a new feature, called Meet New Friends, that Facebook is seeding throughout the entire app to help people connect with strangers that have shared interests or real-world connections, like working for the same employer or attending the same school. Facebook says it is integrating Meet New Friends into its new groups design to help people meet who may have a shared online interest and a real-world connection that means they can connect in the real world. Facebook is making a concerted effort to ensure groups are visible in every part of the app, so it’ll start promoting groups in areas like Marketplace and Watch. It’s also building specific tools tailored to group types, like a new listing format for groups focused on finding new jobs or buying buttons built into live broadcasts for groups that focus on selling used products. With the new design, the company says you’ll also be able to post to any group you’re a part of from the News Feed as if you were posting to your own profile. As for events, Facebook is putting a big emphasis on helping you find stuff to do in your neighborhood. The new events tab, which now sits next to the groups tab in the new menu bar layout, has a richer map view for seeing where the events you’re interested in are in proximity to one another. There’s also a much more intuitive look and feel to the design that makes it easy to find new events, organize your calendar, and quickly sift through events your friends are hosting and public ones, like concerts, that you may be interested in checking out. Grid View Facebook is in the earliest stages of completely redefining the type of company it wants to be and the products it wants to offer, following CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge last month to transition the social network into a “privacy-focused communications platform.” Part of that process involves knitting together its three massive messaging and photo-sharing apps into one unified service, despite the obvious complications there. The other part of that process will involve establishing why people will want to use the main Facebook app in the future, and how the company can better serve those people as it transitions away from the News Feed. The public feed, which encouraged sharing and tried to incentivize people to connect and engage with as many people as possible, became a core pillar of Facebook that has defined its last decade of operation. Yet the News Feed — and its primary utility as a data-harvesting tool to help Facebook serve ads targeted toward your online behavior — also remains the biggest source of the company’s ongoing problems around data privacy, security, moderation, and platform misuse. The News Feed treated every user as a publisher on the world’s biggest media platform, but Facebook largely ignored or tried to absolve itself of responsibility for the effects that would have on society when it grew to include one-third of the Earth’s population. In the process, Facebook became a tool for violence and authoritarianism in developing countries, an anchor that’s helped tank the news industry, and a megaphone for extremists who are looking to broadcast and amplify acts of terror. The News Feed era is over One of the primary architects of the News Feed, Chris Cox, left the company last month after Zuckerberg announced his new philosophy and planned direction for the company, helping signal that the News Feed era is officially over. The News Feed is far from going away, and Facebook has a lot of work to do to remedy its toxic effects on online discourse, election integrity, and misinformation and fake news. But Zuckerberg has made clear — as did the exodus of users that flocked to Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, and other social platforms — that the News Feed is an antiquated way of thinking about and trying to foster online communication and interaction. With these changes to events and groups, Facebook is staking out a new vision of its core app that’s less dictated by the algorithmic whims of the News Feed and the company’s prior growth-at-all-costs philosophy. (Facebook continues to grow nonetheless: it hit close to 2.4 billion monthly active users as of last week.) The main utility people get from Facebook these days is in connecting with communities both large and small that are largely away from the public eye and centered on a shared interest. Facebook is also great at just being an address book, an events calendar, and — for at least a subset of aging social media users — a way to reconnect with old high school and college friends. For that to work, the company is taking its cues from sites it once considered threats, like Reddit and other community-based social networks, before it grew big enough to eclipse the most populous countries on Earth. As a result, it appears Zuckerberg sees less of a reason to invest in the old, outdated vision of a global town square that treats connection and the power to broadcast to the world as a de facto benefit for humanity.<doc-sep>Yes, the major public clouds offer a lot. But what you may not know are the limitations, and how open clouds make the difference. Elevate your enterprise data technology and strategy at Transform 2021. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg often asserts that AI will substantially cut down on the amount of abuse perpetrated by millions of ill-meaning Facebook users. Today at the company’s annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco, CTO Mike Schroepfer detailed the progress its teams have made toward that ambitious goal. “The challenges we are facing range from things like election interference to misinformation to hate speech,” said Schroepfer. “We have to dedicate ourselves to getting into the details and working these problems, day after day, month after month, year after year.” In the course of a single quarter, Schroepfer says that Facebook takes down over a billion spammy accounts, over 700 million fake accounts, and tens of millions of pieces of content containing nudity and violence. AI is a top source of reporting across all of those categories, he says. A concrete example of Facebook’s AI in production is a new “nearest neighbor” algorithm that’s 8.5 times faster at spotting illicit photos than the previous version. It complements a system that learns a deep graph embedding of all the nodes in Facebook’s Graph — the collection of data, stories, ads, and photos on the network — to find abusive accounts and pages that might be related to each other. Another example is a language-agnostic AI model trained on 93 languages across 30 dialect families; it’s used in tandem with other classifiers to tackle multiple language problems at once. And on the video side of the equation, Facebook says its salient sampler model — which quickly scans through the video and processes “important” parts of uploaded clips — enables it to recognize more than 10,000 different actions in 65 million videos. In fact, on a popular benchmark containing 300,000 videos and 400 actions, Facebook says its computer vision stack can classify video with 82.8% accuracy, with a reduction in error rate compared with the previous leading model of 25%. “I want to take a step back and say, even with these improvements, when we see violent videos that evade our systems, it is clear that video understanding is in its infancy,” said Facebook’s director of AI Manohar Paluri. “[But systems like these] allow us to proactively identify problematic content today.” Facebook is broadly moving toward an AI training technique called self-supervised learning, in which unlabeled data is used in conjunction with small amounts of labeled data to produce an improvement in learning accuracy. In one experiment, its researchers were able to train a language understanding model that made more precise predictions with just 80 hours of data compared with 12,000 hours of manually labeled data. Paluri says that AI models like it are being used to protect the integrity of elections in India, a country where people speak 22 different languages and write in 13 different scripts. “This technique of self-supervision is working across multiple modalities, text, language, computer vision video, and speech,” he said. “It’s a several orders of magnitude reduction in work.” On the subject of fairness and bias mitigation, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Facebook’s director of applied machine learning, said that Facebook is using techniques like miscalibration to detect and address algorithmic unfairness. For instance, it’s studied how the network’s civic content classifier — which detects how likely it is that a text snippet concerns civic issues — comes to different conclusions depending on the language used. One calibration approach involves setting what Candela calls a “decision threshold” across groups; if a threshold is 40% for an abuse-spotting AI, that algorithm will flag content with a score exceeding 40%, for instance. Scores fluctuate across data sets for a variety of reasons, Candela says, and it’s up to Facebook researchers to account for variances to attempt to reach parity. In some cases, entirely new data sets must be created. Lade Obamehinti, Facebook lead of AR/VR software, said that members of the Oculus team designed and collected corpora for hand-tracking models that had various skin tones under different lighting conditions. In the future, they plan to build voice recognition models for Oculus-branded headsets that contain representative samples across the dimensions of dialect, age, and gender. “This is about building the kind of future that we want to live in. We’ve learned a lot of really hard lessons that have fundamentally changed the way we develop and build new technologies,” said Schroepfer. “[They’ve] made us realize the deep responsibility we have to understand not just all the amazing good that can come from new technology, but the bad, the unintended consequences, and the ways in which people may abuse those new technologies.”<doc-sep>
Facebook’s F8 developer conference kicked off today, and the company just finished its opening keynote. Its overwhelming theme, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is that “the future is private.” After a year plagued by controversy over whether Facebook is invading its users’ privacy and encouraging social division, it’s pushing hard on helping people connect with close family and friends. During the keynote, Facebook announced updates to Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook’s core service. We also got more news about the Oculus Quest and Rift S virtual reality headsets — and about a new dating feature that could spark some very intense interactions between you and your friends. Facebook is being redesigned around groups and events Facebook recently said that it would start downplaying the News Feed, and after the F8 keynote, we know more about what that means. In an update that Zuckerberg calls “FB5,” Facebook will highlight groups and events, creating a prominent groups tab and a personalized feed from the groups you’ve joined — rather than a generalized update feed from your friends. Group interaction options will show up while you’re browsing other parts of Facebook, too. The redesign is also supposed to help people expand their social circles. It includes a feature called Meet New Friends, which connects strangers who have something (like a school or employer) in common. And it’s offering an easier way to find events near you as well. Android and iOS apps are getting an update right away; the desktop site will be revamped in the coming months. Instagram has new camera features and less prominent likes Instagram has a reputation as one of the friendlier places on the web, but also one of the most competitively performative. So Facebook is offering more ways to interact with followers while downplaying statistics that might stress people out. It’s updating the camera interface and adding a new “Create Mode,” which makes it easier to share content beyond traditional photos and videos, like quizzes. Instagram is also expanding a feature that lets people buy products from inside the app, opening it to artists, athletes, and other creators in addition to companies. Meanwhile, Instagram is testing a system that will almost entirely hide likes on a person’s feed, so you can “focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get.” The feature will get a trial run in Canada, and if it proves popular, we might see it roll out in other countries. Facebook Messenger will focus on “close friends” Facebook is pushing the News Feed toward the margins in its main app, but it’s also reshaping Facebook Messenger as a way to keep up with your friends. You can set status messages or share photos with people you like and trust, potentially making it easier to arrange offline hangout sessions. Messenger is actually getting a big refresh in general. On iOS, it’s being redesigned to take up less space on your phone; the new version will be under 30MB, about 20 percent of its current size. And if you’re using Messenger on desktop, you won’t have to keep it in a browser tab anymore — Facebook is launching desktop apps for Mac and PC later this year. The Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest arrive next month Unlike last year, we didn’t actually get a VR headset launch at F8. But preorders opened for the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S, two new headsets that replace external tracking cameras with a much more user-friendly inside-out system. The Quest and Rift S both cost $399, and they’re shipping on May 21st in 22 countries. The Quest is a self-contained console that’s aimed at a mass market, and we were impressed by its convenience and performance, but less happy about its price and limited power. The Rift S is an incremental upgrade to the 2016 Oculus Rift, which adds inside-out tracking and a new design... but not a whole lot else. Facebook will help you hook up with your crush Facebook introduced a dating service at last year’s F8. Today, it announced that Facebook Dating is expanding to 14 more countries. And it introduced a feature called “Secret Crush,” which does exactly what you’d expect. You can create a secret list of Facebook friends you’re attracted to, whether or not they have a dating profile. If they’re also using Secret Crush, and they add you to their list, Facebook will notify the two of you that there’s a match.