Facebook: Spinning off Messenger was a good move, and here's why

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Stan Chudnovsky, Head of Product for Facebook Messenger, at the Collision conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
Image: Collision

Some Facebook users hate change — that's just fact.

Roll out a radically revamped News Feed or tinker too much with privacy settings, and a subset of users inevitably cry foul. That's what happened when Facebook made its standalone Messenger app a mandatory download last year for people who wanted to continue sending text-based messages through the social network. This "family of apps" approach, Facebook said, was done for the benefit of users, so that each app could offer a richer, more focused experience.

Facebook's glamorous new headquarters will make you hate your cubicle



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An aerial view of Facebook's expanded headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
IMAGE: FACEBOOK

 The new Facebook headquarters looks like a cross between high-art, 21st century corporate thinking and a child's candy-fueled daydream.

Facebook officially moved to a vast 430,000 square foot campus this week, expanding on its old digs nearby in Menlo Park, California. The office complex was designed by famed architect Frank Gehry and includes modern artwork and furniture, stairwells that look like something out of the Guggenheim museum, a 9-acre rooftop park (hate where you work yet?) and at least one meeting room that looks like the multicolored Chuck E. Cheese ball pit.
It also has what CEO Mark Zuckerberg described in a post on his personal Facebook page as "the largest open floor plan in the world," reflecting a trend in tech and other industries to boost collaboration among employees.
The social media company isn't the only tech giant upgrading its (already impressive) offices. Apple is currently building a large new campus that looks like a spaceship and Google has put out a plan to develop a new space that looks like what you probably see when you exit that spaceship in the future.

Facebook adds 50 new gender terms, as well as preferred pronoun choices, to social media site.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — You don’t have to be just male or female on Facebook anymore. The social media giant is adding a customizable option with about 50 different terms people can use to identify their gender as well as three preferred pronoun choices: him, her or them.
Facebook said the changes, shared with The Associated Press before the launch on Thursday, initially cover the company’s 159 million monthly users in the U.S. and are aimed at giving people more choices in how they describe themselves, such as androgynous, bi-gender, intersex, gender fluid or transsexual.

“There’s going to be a lot of people for whom this is going to mean nothing, but for the few it does impact, it means the world,” said Facebook software engineer Brielle Harrison, who worked on the project and is herself undergoing gender transformation, from male to female. On Thursday, while watchdogging the software for any problems, she said she was also changing her Facebook identity from Female to TransWoman.
“All too often transgender people like myself and other gender nonconforming people are given this binary option, do you want to be male or female? What is your gender? And it’s kind of disheartening because none of those let us tell others who we really are,” she said. “This really changes that, and for the first time I get to go to the site and specify to all the people I know what my gender is.”

 Facebook, which has 1.15 billion active monthly users around the world, also allows them to keep their gender identity private and will continue to do so.
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