Over the last year, the messages team has been working to make it easier to have one on one conversations with your friends. In November, we launched the new messages, which brings together your chats, texts, emails and messages all in one place.

Today I’m excited to introduce video calling and other improvements to chat.

See The Friends You Message  Most

The new chat design includes a sidebar that lists the people you message most. Now it’s easier to find your friends and start a conversation. The sidebar adjusts with the size of your browser window, and it automatically appears when the window is wide enough.

Create a Group Chat Instantly

We’re also launching multi-person chat, which is one of our most requested features. Now when your friends can’t figure out what movie to see, you can just add them to a chat and decide together. To include more friends in your conversation, simply select Add Friends to Chat.

And just like your other chats, the history of your conversation is available in messages.

Bring Your Conversations to Life

Video chat has been around for years now, but it’s still not an everyday activity for most people. Sometimes it’s too difficult to set up, or the friends you want to talk to are on different services.

So a few months ago, we started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook. We built it right into chat, so all your conversations start from the same place. To call your friend, just click the video call button at the top of your chat window.

Talk to friends around the world right from Facebook.

For those of us who have been working on this, it’s particularly exciting to bring video calling to over 750 million people. We’re making this available in over 70 different languages, so friends can stay in touch all over the world.

Video calling will be available to everyone over the next few weeks, but if you don’t want to wait, you can get it now.

Philip Su, an engineer on the video calling team, will be making his first video call to his parents back in Maryland

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UPDATE on Thursday, June 30, 2011: You may have noticed a box appearing on the right of your home page called “Photos are better with friends”. This is a new way of telling you about features we have added to Facebook such as our Photo Tag Suggest. We showed this over 2.7 billion times to help people to learn about the feature and how they can control it.

UPDATE on Tuesday, June 7, 2011: We’ve been rolling Tag Suggestions out over the last several months and this feature is now available in most countries. We’ll continue to post updates here as the roll-out progresses.

Original Post Dec. 15, 2010.

Every day, people add more than 100 million tags to photos on Facebook. They do it because it’s an easy way to share photos and memories. Unlike photos that get forgotten in a camera or an unshared album, tagged photos help you and your friends relive everything from that life-altering skydiving trip to a birthday dinner where the laughter never stopped. Tags make photos one of the most popular features on Facebook.

While tags are an essential tool for sharing important moments, many of you have said tagging photos can be a chore. (Like that time you had to tag your cousin and her fiancé over and over and over again in 64 different pictures of their engagement party, and then go back and tag the guests.)

Since October, we’ve been working to make this process easier for you. First we added group tagging, so you could type one name and apply it to multiple photos of the same person. Now we’re announcing tag suggestions, which will make tagging multiple photos even more convenient.

Because photos are such an important part of Facebook, we want to be sure you know exactly how tag suggestions work: When you or a friend upload new photos, we use face recognition software—similar to that found in many photo editing tools—to match your new photos to other photos you’re tagged in. We group similar photos together and, whenever possible, suggest the name of the friend in the photos.

If for any reason you don’t want your name to be suggested, you will be able to disable suggested tags in your Privacy Settings. Just click “Customize Settings” and “Suggest photos of me to friends.” Your name will no longer be suggested in photo tags, though friends can still tag you manually. You can learn more about this feature in our Help Center.

Now if you upload pictures from your cousin’s wedding, we’ll group together pictures of the bride and suggest her name. Instead of typing her name 64 times, all you’ll need to do is click “Save” to tag all of your cousin’s pictures at once. By making tagging easier than before, you’re more likely to know right away when friends post photos. We notify you when you’re tagged, and you can untag yourself at any time.  As always, only friends can tag each other in photos.

We’ll be debuting tag suggestions to users in the United States over the next few weeks. Look for tags suggestions when you upload groups of photos that feature the same friends, and see how they can help you share life’s occasions—large and small—every day.

Justin Mitchell, a Facebook engineer, is looking forward to spending more time making memories and less time tagging them.

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Day in the Life is a new look at the people behind Facebook. Each one will feature a different Facebooker and ask them to share with you what they do and how it affects your Facebook experience.

Name:   Charlotte

Age:  At a recent external speaking engagement, I was told I was “extremely young for my job.”

Living in:  Palo Alto, CA

Eating for Breakfast:  The Facebook Culinary Team’s red velvet pancakes

Listening to: Sufjan Stevens

Quoting:  “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”  - Ambrose Redmoon

Using mostly Facebook’s: Mobile Uploads, usually photos of food made by the Facebook Culinary Team

1. What do you do at Facebook?

I work on the Safety Team in User Operations. We are on the front-lines of making Facebook a safe environment for the people who use our site.  Many people think you have to code and be technical to work at Facebook, but my team works directly with people.  We help families find missing children, memorialize accounts after death, and try to connect suicidal people with help.  It’s not a job you’d chat about at a cocktail party, but the team is full of positive, optimistic people who are intensely committed to people’s safety and well-being.

2. What is your favorite project you’re currently working on?

My team just participated in the roll-out of PhotoDNA, a new technology from Microsoft that will help us keep the site free of offensive and harmful photos.  We are really excited about the impact this tool will have in getting this content off the site and hopefully resulting in arrests and criminal convictions for the worst perpetrators.

3. What advice would you give the people who use Facebook?

The people who are best positioned to keep you safe online are your friends.  We at Facebook can form relationships with outreach organizations and build new technologies, but we need all of you to help by looking out for your friends and reporting anything that seems worrisome or suspicious.  If someone needs help, let us know.  I am continuously amazed and humbled by the level of care and concern Facebook users have for one another–it is an honor to work alongside them to keep their friends and loved ones safe.   

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Day in the Life is a new look at the people behind Facebook. Each one will feature a different Facebooker and ask them to share with you what they do and how it affects your Facebook experience. 

Name:   Charlotte

Age:  At a recent external speaking engagement, I was told I was “extremely young for my job.”

Living in:  Palo Alto, CA

Eating for Breakfast:  The Facebook Culinary Team’s red velvet pancakes

Listening to: Sufjan Stevens

Quoting:  “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”  - Ambrose Redmoon

Using mostly Facebook’s: Mobile Uploads, usually photos of food made by the Facebook Culinary Team

1.What do you do at Facebook?

I work on the Safety Team in User Operations. We are on the front-lines of making Facebook a safe environment for the people who use our site.  Unlike the Security Engineers, who work on tools, we work with people.  We help families find missing children, memorialize accounts after death, and try to connect suicidal people with help.  It’s not a job you’d chat about at a cocktail party, but the team is full of positive, optimistic people who are intensely committed to people’s safety and well-being.

2.What is your favorite project you’re currently working on?

My team just participated in the roll-out of PhotoDNA, a new technology from Microsoft that will help us keep the site free of offensive and harmful photos.  We are really excited about the impact this tool will have in getting this content off the site and hopefully resulting in arrests and criminal convictions for the worst perpetrators.

3.What advice would you give the people who use Facebook?

The people who are best positioned to keep you safe online are your friends.  We at Facebook can form relationships with outreach organizations and build new technologies, but we need all of you to help by looking out for your friends and reporting anything that seems worrisome or suspicious.  If someone needs help, let us know.  I am continuously amazed and humbled by the level of care and concern Facebook users have for one another–it is an honor to work alongside them to keep their friends and loved ones safe.   

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A few months ago we launched Check-In Deals, to help you get special offers when you check in at local businesses from your mobile. Today we’re going a step further and testing a new feature to help you find fun experiences to share with your favorite people: Deals on Facebook.

Initially, Deals will be available to people in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco and we hope to expand this test to other cities in the future.

Deals get social

While many Deals on Facebook offer discounts, it’s more important to us that you find interesting experiences around you to do with friends.  We’ve worked with partners and local businesses to help deliver the best social activities in your area.  And once you’ve found a deal you like, having the deal on Facebook makes it easy to share, buy and plan with your friends. 

For example, Austin City Limits Live is offering an ‘All Access Experience’ for concerts starting in May. You can buy this deal and get backstage passes, sound check access and a catered dinner in addition to attending the show.

How to find Deals

You can find deals on Facebook in a couple of different ways — for example, you can get deals updates through email and notifications to find out about new deals in your area. You can also check out the Deals tab of your home page. If your friends chose to share this information, you may also see the deals friends buy or like in your News Feed. 

We are working with aDealio, Gilt City, HomeRun, kgb deals, OpenTable, Plum District, PopSugar City, ReachLocal, Tippr, viagogo, and zozi, so you can buy their Deals on Facebook too.

Whether you’re making plans for this weekend or your best friend’s birthday or a big anniversary, check out Deals on Facebook today to find cool things to do with friends. 

Emily White, director of local at Facebook, is looking forward to indoor skydiving with her friends.

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It’s always been easy to share with all your friends on Facebook, but until we introduced Groups last October, there wasn’t a simple way to share with just a few people. Much of what we share in our daily lives is only meaningful to smaller groups of people, like our family, roommates, or co-workers. With Groups, you can create a private space to share with just those friends.

In the six months since our launch, people have created over 50 million Groups on Facebook. It’s grown quickly because of its social design. Instead of making everyone build and manage individual friend lists, one person can create a group for their families and everyone in the family gets to use it.

We’ve received some great feedback about how people are using Groups and what new features they would like to see. Today, we’re happy to announce some new improvements, including integration with Questions, the ability to upload photo albums, and additional membership controls.

How people are using Groups

People are using Groups to communicate with many of the important communities in their lives, like their families, best friends, and teammates. My own family uses a group to stay connected to each other. As a Californian with a brother living in Peru and parents back in Wisconsin, we use our group to update each other about our lives, share vacation photos, and discuss where we’re going to meet up next.

I also have a group with my roommates. Because we have such different schedules, we can go a whole week without seeing each other in person. Our group is where we meet to divide up chores, settle our bills, and make plans for the weekend. 

New improvements to Groups

You’ve always been able to post updates to Groups, but now you can post questions and polls for only members to weigh in on. You’ll get quick responses to questions like “What movie should we see?” and “When should we should hold our next soccer practice?”

Where before you could only upload individual photos, now you have the option to upload entire albums directly to your group, making it even easier to share your photos with the people who most want to see them.

For group owners, we’re also adding a control that lets you approve people before they are added to the group.

For people who were using our older version of Groups, we’ve created a tool that makes it easy to upgrade to the new Groups format. Owners and members of old Groups will be receiving information about how to upgrade within the coming weeks.

Send button lets you share with Groups

In addition to the other new group features, we’re also introducing the Send button.

A year ago, we launched the Like button, which gives you a quick way to share the things you find on the web with all your friends. But there are times when you find something that you only want to share with a few specific people.

Say you’re on Orbitz and want to tell your roommates about a great idea for a summer vacation, or you come across a Huffington Post article that you only want to share with people at work. With the new Send button, now you can share things with any of your Groups or individual friends on Facebook.

Starting today, the Send button will be available on over 50 leading websites, and it will appear in more places soon.

Create a Group today

It’s been exciting to hear about the many ways people have been using Groups to communicate with the different people in their lives, and we hope you all enjoy the new features, which will be rolling out over the next few days.

Ready to start a new group? Visit www.facebook.com/groups.

Elliot Lynde, an engineer on the Groups team, is currently working on scanning in all his old photos to post in his family group.

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Safety has always been a social experience: as friends and family, we look out for each other and pass along advice to help each other stay safe. Safety on Facebook works the same way. By keeping each other informed, people make Facebook a more trusted environment. Today, we’re making it easier to stay safe with the launch of new safety resources, tools for reporting issues and additional security features.

More Resources for Families

During President Obama’s White House Conference on Bullying Prevention last month, we announced plans to expand our existing safety resources with new content for families. Beginning today, you can visit the newly redesigned Family Safety Center. There, you’ll find useful articles for parents and teens and videos on safety and privacy, as well as many other resources. In the coming weeks, we’ll also be providing a free, downloadable guide for teachers, written by safety experts Linda Fogg Phillips, B.J. Fogg and Derek Baird. We hope this guide will help educators with social media in the classroom.

Social Reporting Tools

We also recently unveiled a new social reporting tool that allows people to notify a member of their community, in addition to Facebook, when they see something they don’t like. Safety and child psychology experts tell us that online issues are frequently a reflection of what is happening offline. By encouraging people to seek help from friends, we hope that many of these situations can be resolved face to face. The impact has been encouraging, and we’re now expanding social reporting to other major sections of Facebook, including Profiles, Pages and Groups.

Advanced Security Features

We’re also starting to introduce Two Factor Authentication, a new feature to help prevent unauthorized access to your account. If you turn this new feature on, we’ll ask you to enter a code anytime you try to log into Facebook from a new device. This additional security helps confirm that it’s really you trying to log in.

We announced earlier this year that people could experience Facebook over a secure connection using HTTPS. This feature helps protect your personal information and is particularly useful if you’re uncertain about the security of your network or you’re using public wifi to access Facebook. Today, we’re improving HTTPS so if you start using a non-HTTPS application on Facebook, we automatically switch your session back to HTTPS when you’re finished.

We think that social solutions to safety will become increasingly important to using the web. Tools like social reporting will help make our community even stronger, and we encourage you to use them.

Arturo, a director of engineering at Facebook, is excited about social reporting.

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Friends are often the best source of advice when you’re trying new things: Where should I go to dinner? How do I go buy a car? What new music should I check out? Friends know your tastes, and you have confidence in their opinions.

Like many of our products, Questions originated as people began using Facebook in a new and unexpected way. People would update their status with a question, and their friends would answer in the comments. We saw this and began thinking about how we could make this interaction more useful. Over the summer, we began testing Questions with a small group of people, and today we are beginning to roll it out to everyone.

We noticed that people were frequently asking for opinions (”what are your favorite restaurants in New York?”) or hoping to learn about their friends (”what was your favorite movie as a kid, something you watched over and over?”). For most of these questions, experts weren’t going to be the best source for advice. The answers to these questions are meaningful or interesting because you know your friends and your friends know you.

We wanted to make questions easier and faster to answer. With the updated Questions you can agree with an existing answer with a single click, or you can add a different response. This makes it easy for many more people to respond to you. It also helps us show you the most popular responses.

Questions will also enable you to cast a wider net. Now, when your friends answer one of your questions, their friends can answer it too. For more unusual questions, you can get advice from a broader group of people, but to keep it most relevant we filter the answers to show you first what your friends think. You can see more responses by clicking “others” within the question.

Questions will be available to everyone soon, but you can try it now here and learn more.

Adrian, a product manager for Questions, is wondering, “What’s the first question you’ll ask with new Facebook Questions?”

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Every day, hundreds of millions of people access Facebook from their mobile devices to share and connect with the people they care about, whenever and wherever they want. As this number continues to grow, we want to make sure that everyone has a great experience regardless of the mobile device they choose to use.

To achieve this, we’ve been working with several application developers, operators, and hardware manufacturers from the mobile industry.

Over the past six months, we built the Facebook for Feature Phones app with Snaptu to bring improved Facebook functionality to over 2,500 different devices. We also launched 0.facebook.com as a faster and free way for people to access Facebook around the world, including locations where connectivity is especially costly and slow.

Today, we’re excited to share some of our recent collaborations with two mobile device manufacturers.

Two upcoming Android devices from INQ, the Cloud Touch and Cloud Q, feature new Facebook integrations with single sign-on and easy one-touch access to popular Facebook features. The home screen features your News Feed (including your friends’ updates, pictures, videos and links) and quick links to Chat, Messages, Places, notifications and more. You can also check in to your favorite shops and businesses with Facebook Places, right from the home screen.

HTC’s ChaCha and Salsa phones feature a dedicated Facebook button that gives you one-touch access to your favorite Facebook functions, allowing you to update your status, upload a photo, share a news article and check in to places. Facebook Chat, Messages and your friends are also integrated, so when you make a phone call, the screen displays your friends’ status updates and photos, and even their birthdays.

In addition to these new phones from INQ and HTC, you’ll also be seeing similar deep Facebook integration on dozens of other devices over the course of this year. Some manufacturers will be highlighting Facebook as a part of their phones’ on-screen interfaces, and others will use our brand as an element of the device hardware itself.

We believe almost anything is better when it’s social, and this year we’ll continue to invest in new technologies so you have a great Facebook experience no matter where you go.

Charles Wu is a Facebook engineer working on mobile.

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UPDATE on Friday, February 11, 2011: We’ve begun expanding the rollout of Messages to everyone on Facebook. This will happen gradually over the next few weeks. Learn more about using Messages in this tour.

Originally Published on Monday, November 15, 2010:

Imagine the kind of family you might see in a modern American sitcom: loving parents trying to maintain a family unit with a teenager engrossed in text messaging, a college-aged child who is always chatting online, and various wacky relatives who spend their days sending “funny” emails to the family.

This is an admittedly exaggerated stereotype but one we see every day in movies, TV and advertising because most of us can relate to parts of it. Between mobile devices and the Internet we can be more connected today than ever before, but there is still a feeling that the technology can also act as a barrier between us. When I want to share with someone it should be as simple as deciding who I want to share with and what I want to say.  It should feel more like a human conversation.

Seamless Messaging

Today I’m excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time.  You shouldn’t have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use.  Simply choose their name and type a message.

We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they’re on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.

Conversation History

Messages is built for communicating with your friends, so it made sense to organize primarily around people.  All of your messages with someone will be together in one place, whether they are sent over chat, email or SMS. You can see everything you’ve discussed with each friend as a single conversation.

I’m intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From “hey nice to meet you” to “do you want to get coffee sometime” to “our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight.” That’s a really cool idea.

The Social Inbox

It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It’s not that those other messages aren’t important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder where you can look at them separately.

If someone you know isn’t on Facebook, that person’s email will initially go into the Other folder. You can easily move that conversation into the Inbox, and all the future conversations with that friend will show up there.

You can also change your account settings to be even more limited and bounce any emails that aren’t exclusively from friends.

This kind of message control is pretty unprecedented and people have been wanting to do this with email (and phone calls) for a long time. Messages reverses the approach to preventing unwanted contact. Instead of having to worry about your email address getting out, you’re now in control of who can actually reach you.

The Next Generation

Relatively soon, we’ll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other. We will just select friends by name and be able to share with them instantly. We aren’t there yet, but the changes today are a small first step.

We’ll be launching Messages and email addresses gradually and making it available to everyone over the next few months. Once you receive an invitation, you’ll be able to get started and also invite your friends to join you.

To learn more, take a tour of Messages. Please share your thoughts and feedback with us here.

Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat.

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