PALO ALTO, Calif.–"The stream of information coming at you can be overwhelming," Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said when asked in an onstage interview what she thinks of social-networking fatigue. "I think people sometimes feel uncomfortable hitting ‘ignore’ (on friend requests), but if you don’t want to connect to someone, that’s why it’s there."

Facebook, after all, is on top of the world. It doesn’t make much difference to the health of that 300 million-member user base if your "social graph" is one degree smaller.

Sandberg, who joined Facebook a year and a half ago… Read the rest

Earlier this month, Facebook released the open-source Web server framework called Tornado, which powers the real-time streaming behind its latest toy, social feed aggregator FriendFeed. And on Wednesday evening at the office that most recently housed the FBFund incubator program, senior open programs manager David Recordon and director of products Bret Taylor held a "tech talk" to pitch Tornado to a crowd of several dozen interested members of the Web development community.

"We had actually been planning on open-sourcing… Read the rest

The new version of the site appears to be much cleaner and simpler. It appears, at a quick glance, to be a better site for Facebook newbies or for anyone who finds the current site overwhelming or noisy. It also pushes the old-school Facebook apps off a cliff, which is just as well for the newest Facebook-connected services. Try it at lite.facebook.com.

The major visual change in Facebook Lite, compared Facebook… Read the rest

"Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who’ve created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible," the post by Facebook employee Michael Gummelt read. "Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls… Read the rest