Although many insist on trying to bury it, Facebook never ceases to reinvent itself and add new features to its already complex social network. In recent weeks the imminent arrival of different features has been announced: changes in the privacy policy, a song ID system, new dating options, a reportedly private instant messaging app, and even an integrated antivirus.
Posts will be private by default
Facebook recently has announced on its official blog an important change to its privacy policy. Until now, unless you specified otherwise, your posts would be visible to all users, whether you’d added them as friends or not. Now that situation is changing, and from now on all posts of newly registered users will be private by default and only your circle of friends will be able to see them.
Facebook will integrate its own ‘Shazam’
As of several months ago status updates with extra “feelings” have been available where you can say what mood you’re in or what you’re doing alongside your post. Now the aim is to expand on this idea with a new feature that will soon be available on Facebook’s iOS and Android clients.
When you activate this feature you can use the microphone on your smartphone to automatically share the film, song, or TV show you’re watching. With the audio fragment that the program captures, it can identify what we’re watching and automatically post a 30-second snippet of the song in question or even specify the season and episode of the series you’re watching.
A chat app with self-destructing messages
In 2012 Facebook launched Poke, an app to send text, images, and videos that self-destruct a few seconds after you read them. After withdrawing the app, the company seems to be trying the same thing again, and according to the Financial Times, the social network might be preparing its own version of SnapChat, a service that in recent months has been enjoying huge success in the United States.
According to the source, the app will be called Slingshot and will be launched during the next weeks, with a functioning similar to that of its predecessor: instant sending of messages and multimedia files with the added advantage that they will be automatically deleted as soon as you view them and close the conversation window.
Ask other people about their relationship status
Until now, you could ask your contacts for certain personal data that they don’t share publicly, such as telephone numbers or employment details. Now we’re going to see a similar option to ask about the relationship status for your contacts, with an “Ask” button appearing on the profile of the person so you can make the request. The only requirement is that both users have to be friends already.
Its own antivirus
Facebook has recently reached an agreement with the IT security company Trend Micro to incorporate a virus-detection service into the social network, so that if there are any suspicious links on your wall or you send messages with spam, you’ll be automatically warned by a variant of the online virus-detection system HouseCall. Besides detection, HouseCall can also solve problems and clean your account of any malware.
