Facebook Announces New Dashboard, Download Your Information, and Groups

Facebook held an event today at San Francisco in which they announced three new features- a new dashboard, Download Your Information, and Groups.

A Facebook redesign was not announced, but it might be happening soon.

The first feature announced was Download Your Information, which lets you, well, download your information! It compresses all your stuff – photos, videos, messages etc. – into a downloadable. zip file. This will come in very handy now that high resolution images will be available on Facebook.

A new dashboard was announced, which will let you see all the privacy information concerning what permissions exactly are granted to applications.

Finally, Zuckerberg announced Groups, a feature that helps you make sure you’re connected to the friends you mostly care about. This is a great feature since users are filled up with spam from people they don’t even know that well oftentimes. The way this will work is pretty simple, there’s only three steps to follow- 1. Create your group. 2. Add friends. 3. Start sharing.

You’ll be able to sort out all your friends into different categories; say "Basketball Team", "Cooking Group", "Book Club", "Lolcats Fans Anonymous"; you name it. The group can be controlled by any of its members, and you can send emails and edit documents within it. If you want out, you can leave without a problem, and you can’t be added unless you say it’s okay.

No word on people limit for a group yet, though. Check out this New Facebook Groups video:

What do you think about these new features? Do you think they were thought on only to compete with the New Twitter?