# List of Facebook features

Facebook is a social-network service website launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg. The following is a list of software and technology features that can be found on the Facebook website and mobile app and are available to users of the social media site.

## Facebook structure
### News Feed

The news feed is the primary system through which users are exposed to content posted on the network. Using a secret method (initially known as EdgeRank), Facebook selects a handful of updates to actually show users every time they visit their feed, out of an average of 1500 updates they can potentially receive.
On September 6, 2006, Ruchi Sanghvi announced a new home page feature called News Feed. Originally, when users logged into Facebook, they were presented with a customizable version of their own profile. The new layout, by contrast, created an alternative home page in which users saw a constantly updated list of their friends' Facebook activity. News Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. This has enabled spammers and other users to manipulate these features by creating illegitimate events or posting fake birthdays to attract attention to their profile or cause. News Feed also shows conversations taking place between the walls of a user's friends. An integral part of the News Feed interface is the Mini Feed, a news stream on the user's profile page that shows updates about that user. Unlike in the News Feed, the user can delete events from the Mini Feed after they appear so that they are no longer visible to profile visitors. In 2011, Facebook updated the News Feed to show top stories and most recent stories in one feed, and the option to highlight stories to make them top stories, as well as to un-highlight stories. In response to users' criticism, Facebook later updated the News Feed to allow users to view recent stories first.
Initially, the addition of the News Feed caused some discontent among Facebook users. Many users complained that the News Feed was too cluttered with excess information. Others were concerned that the News Feed made it too easy for other people to track activities like changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users. This tracking is often casually referred to as "Facebook-Stalking". In response to this dissatisfaction, creator Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Thereafter, users were able to control what types of information were shared automatically with friends. Currently, users may prevent friends from seeing updates about several types of especially private activities, although other events are not customizable in this way.
With the introduction of the "New Facebook" in early February 2010 came a complete redesign of the pages, several new features and changes to News Feeds. On their personal Feeds (now integrated with Walls), users were given the option of removing updates from any application as well as choosing the size they show up on the page. Furthermore, the community feed (containing recent actions by the user's friends) contained options to instantly select whether to hear more or less about certain friends or applications.
On March 7, 2013, Facebook announced a redesigned newsfeed. In 2022, Facebook's parent company, Meta Platforms, announced it is renaming the "News Feed" to simply be named "Feed".

### Friends

"Friending" someone on the platform is the act of sending another user a "friend request" on Facebook. The two people are Facebook friends once the receiving party accepts the friend request. In addition to accepting the request, the user has the option of declining the friend request or hiding it using the "Not Now" feature. Deleting a friend request removes the request, but does allow the sender to resend it in the future. The "Not Now" feature hides the request but does not delete it, allowing the receiver to revisit the request at a later date.
It is also possible to remove a user from one's friends, which is referred to as "unfriending" by Facebook. Many Facebook users also refer to the process as "de-friending". "Unfriend" was New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year in 2009. Facebook does not notify a user if they have been unfriended, but there are scripts that provide this functionality. There has also been a study on why Facebook users unfriend, which found that differences, especially between ages, and few mutual friendships were the dominant factors correlated with unfriending, all of which mirrors the decline of physical-world relationships.
Facebook profiles also have advanced privacy features to restrict content to certain users, such as non-friends or persons on a specific list.

### Wall

The wall is the original profile space where Facebook users' content was displayed, until December 2011. It allowed the posting of messages, often short or temporal notes, for the user to see while displaying the time and date the message was written. A user's wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see their full profile, and friends' wall posts appear in the user's News Feed.
In July 2007, Facebook allowed users to post attachments to the wall, whereas previously the wall was limited to text only. In May 2008, the Wall-to-Wall for each profile was limited to only 40 posts. Facebook later allowed users to insert HTML code in boxes attached to the wall via apps like Static FBML which has allowed marketers to track use of their fan pages with Google Analytics.
The concept of tagging in status updates, an attempt to imitate Twitter, began September 14, 2009. This meant putting the name of a user, a brand, an event or a group in a post in such a way that it linked to the wall of the Facebook page being tagged, and made the post appear in news feeds for that page, as well as those of selected friends. This was first done using the "@" symbol followed by the person's name. Later, a numerical ID for the person could be used. Visually, this was displayed with bold text. Early in 2011, tagging in comments was added.
In addition to postings by other users, the wall also displayed other events that happened to the user's profile. This included when information was changed, when they changed their profile picture, and when they connected with new people, among other things.
The wall has been replaced by the Timeline profile layout, which was introduced in December 2011.

### Timeline

In September 2011, Facebook introduced "Timeline" at its developer conference, intended to revamp users' profiles in order to show content based on year, month and date. "Cover" photos were introduced, taking up a significant portion of the top of pages, and a redesigned display of personal information such as friends, likes and photos appeared on the left-hand side, while story posts appeared on the right. The new design introduced flexible sizing for story posts in the feed, along with more prominent location and photo placement. The Timeline also encouraged scrolling, with constantly loading story posts of users' pasts. Timeline began gradually rolling out to users in New Zealand starting December 7, 2011, and was made officially available to all users worldwide on December 15. By January, the switch to Timeline became required for all users. In February 2012, Timeline became available for Facebook Pages.

### Likes and Reactions

The like button, first enabled on February 9, 2009, enables users to easily interact with status updates, comments, photos, links shared by friends, videos and advertisements. Once clicked by a user, the designated content appears in the News Feeds of that user's friends, and the button also displays the number of other users who have liked the content, including a full or partial list of those users. The like button was extended to comments in June 2010. After extensive testing and years of questions from the public about whether it had an intention to incorporate a "Dislike" button, Facebook officially rolled out "Reactions" to users worldwide on February 24, 2016, letting users long-press on the like button for an option to use one of six pre-defined emotions, including "Like", "Love", "Haha", "Wow", "Sad", or "Angry" and for a limited time the following reactions, "Care", "Pride Flag", "Thankful". Reactions were also extended to comments in May 2017.
In June 2017, in celebration of Pride month, Facebook introduced a rainbow flag as part of its Reactions options. The design of the reactions was updated in April 2019, with more frames comprising the icons' animations as well as a general graphical overhaul. The reactions were first shown off by reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong on Twitter, with mixed reactions both as replies and on Facebook itself. In September 2019 it was revealed that Facebook is conducting a trial in Australia to hide the like count on posts. In 2020 during the COVID-19 outbreak, a "Care" reaction was added to Facebook.

### Comments

To mark the 30th anniversary of the GIF, Facebook has introduced a new feature enabling users to add GIFs to comments. The eagerly awaited feature can be accessed using the GIF button located beside the emoji picker. Users can choose from the available GIFs sourced from Facebook's GIF partners, but cannot upload other GIFs.
GIFs aside, the comments feature also allow users to attach stickers. Facebook has a standard sticker set, whereby sticker options are categorised according to popular moods and activities such as "Happy", "Eating", and "Confused". In 2020, Facebook introduced "Make Your Avatar" which enables users to customize a virtual look-alike of yourself to use as stickers in comments as well as Messenger chats. Essentially Facebook's version of Snap's Bitmoji, Avatars have been since made available in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Canada.
In December 2015, an indicator was added to the comment area to show when a friend is typing a new comment.

### Messages and inbox

Facebook Messenger is an instant messaging service and software application. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the company revamped its messaging service in 2010, and subsequently released standalone iOS and Android apps in August 2011. Over the years, Facebook has released new apps on a variety of different operating systems, launched a dedicated website interface, and separated the messaging functionality from the main Facebook app, requiring users to download the standalone apps.
Facebook Messenger lets Facebook users send messages to each other. Complementing regular conversations, Messenger lets users make voice calls and video calls both in one-to-one interactions and in group conversations. Its Android app has integrated support for SMS and "Chat Heads", which are round profile photo icons appearing on-screen regardless of what app is open, while both apps support multiple accounts, conversations with optional end-to-end encryption, and playing "Instant Games", which are select games built into Messenger. Some features, including sending money and requesting transportation, are limited to the United States. In 2017, Facebook has added "Messenger Day", a feature that lets users share photos and videos in a story-format with all their friends with the content disappearing after 24 hours; Reactions, which lets users tap and hold a message to add a reaction through an emoji; and Mentions, which lets users in group conversations type @ to give a particular user a notification.
In March 2015, Facebook announced that it would start letting businesses and users interact through Messenger with features such as tracking purchases and receiving notifications, and interacting with customer service representatives. It also announced that third-party developers could integrate their apps into Messenger, letting users enter an app while inside Messenger and optionally share details from the app into a chat. In April 2016, it introduced an API for developers to build chatbots into Messenger, for uses such as news publishers building bots to give users news through the service, and in April 2017, it enabled the M virtual assistant for users in the U.S., which scans chats for keywords and suggests relevant actions, such as its payments system for users mentioning money. Additionally, Facebook expanded the use of bots, incorporating group chatbots into Messenger as "Chat Extensions", adding a "Discovery" tab for finding bots, and enabling special, branded QR codes that, when scanned, take the user to a specific bot.
In August 2018, Facebook discontinued users' ability to post to their Timeline using SMS.
In September 2022, Facebook added the "Community Chats" function, allowing people in a Facebook group to chat between each other on Messenger and on the Messenger app.

### Notifications

Notifications tell the user that something has been added to their profile page. Examples include: a message being shared on the user's wall or a comment on a picture of the user or on a picture that the user has previously commented on. Initially, notifications for events were limited to one per event; these were eventually grouped category-wise. For instance, 10 users having liked a user's picture now count for one notification, whereas in the earlier stages, these would have accounted for ten separate notifications. The number of notifications can be changed in the settings section, to a maximum of 99. There is a red notification counter at the top of the page, which if clicked displays the most recent ones.

### Groups

Facebook groups can be created by individual users. Groups allow members to post content such as links, media, questions, events, editable documents, and comments on these items.
Groups are used for collaboration and allow discussions, events, and numerous other activities. They are a way of enabling a number of people to come together online to share information and discuss specific subjects. They are increasingly used by clubs, companies and public sector organizations to engage with stakeholders, be they members of the public, employees, members, service users, shareholders or customers. Groups can have two different levels of privacy settings:
* "Open" means both the group, its members and their comments are visible to the public (which includes non-members) but they cannot interact without joining.
* "Secret" means that nothing can be viewed by the public unless a member specifically invites another user to join the group.
Previously, in October 2010, there were version 0 (legacy) and version 1 (current) groups. Version 1 or "new" groups can contain the name of the group in their URL if the email address of the group is set. Groups do not have a RSS feed to export the wall or the member list, such as Pages or Events have, but third parties provide such service if the group is set to an "open" privacy setting. All groups have since been migrated to a single design.

## Applications
### Events

Facebook events are a way for members to let friends know about upcoming events in their community and to organize social gatherings. Events require an event name, network, host name, event type, start time, location, and a guest list of friends invited. Events can be public or private. Private events cannot be found in searches and are by invitation only. People who have not been invited cannot view a private event's description, Wall, or photos. They also will not see any Feed stories about the event. When setting up an event the user can choose to allow friends to upload photos or videos. Note that unlike real world events, all events are treated as separate entities (when the reality is some events sit inside other events, going to one event would preclude going to another, and so on).
In February 2011, Facebook began to use the hCalendar microformat to mark up events, and the hCard microformat for the events' venues, enabling the extraction of details to users' own calendar or mapping applications. Third parties facilitate events to be exported from Facebook pages to the iCalendar-format.

### Marketplace

In 2007, Facebook introduced the Facebook Marketplace, allowing users to post classified ads within sale, housing, and jobs categories. However, the feature never gained traction, and in 2009, control was transferred to Oodle, the platform powering the functionality. The feature was then eventually shut down in 2014. In October 2016, Facebook announced a new Marketplace, citing the growth of organized "buy and sell" Facebook Groups, and gave the new version a higher prominence in the main Facebook app, taking the navigation position previously held by Facebook Messenger.
According to Facebook's internal data from 2019, the Marketplace used to only be a C2C platform but now there is a major B2C opportunity for US retailers.
In June 2021, the European Commission and Competition and Markets Authority launched antitrust probes over concerns that Facebook's Marketplace took advantage of data from competing services that advertise on the platform and used it to gain "an undue competitive advantage".