Facebook looks to become more transparent

Facebook is moving attention away from the terms and conditions debate

Facebook is shifting attention away from the debacle surrounding its change in terms and conditions on to its employees. Software engineer Alex Moskalyuk said Facebook will become more transparent by collecting all its employees’ personal blog posts into one portal.

Content created by Facebook employees from all across the web, including Facebook Notes, will be divided into three topic areas: Engineering, Platform and Life. Platform and Life are updated the most regularly, with each carrying eight posts this February, while Engineering has been updated about once a month since October 2008.

“Facebook is focused on helping people share and connect and in our work, we encounter some pretty big questions and unsolved problems,” noted Moskalyuk in a post on the main Facebook blog.

“With so many interesting challenges and perspectives, we want to surface all the thoughts, energy and passion of the people at Facebook."

The launch of the new domain follows a change to the company’s terms of service that extended control over user content to profiles that have been shut down. The change had to be reverted after thousands of Facebook users complained it breached copyright ethics.

In other Facebook news, the firm has launched its first social widget for web site owners that use Facebook Connect to authenticate the login of users through their Facebook passwords.

A new Comments Box will allow a web site owner to add social comments to their page “in just a minute with a few lines of code”, said a post by Facebook’s Ray He on the Developer blog.

It will also let users comment on web site content, post their comments to Facebook profiles, and share them with Facebook friends, He said. Non-Facebook users will be able to comment on the site as well.