Facebook is continuing to listen to users, giving them more ownership and control over what they share. Even though this really does not affect our advertisers, I wanted to share these important updates:

Summary of 3 new products

1. New Facebook Groups: The new Groups product makes it easy for you to build a space for important groups of people in your life.

• Groups are simple enough that everyone will use them: you only need to create a group, add friends, and can start immediately sharing with them.
• New Groups includes a number of new features, including Group Chat (one of our most frequently requested features) and mailing list-style notifications with a group email address.
• By default, a group’s content is only available to its members, so people can feel confident about who sees what they post.
• There is no additional ads functionality for the Groups product. Targeting or creating ads aimed directly at a Group is not possible at this time. Read more

There’s a summary of TechCrunch’s Disrupt Conference 2010 on Ad Age this week.

Some pretty cool stuff, notably the 5 trends they saw:

• Social Media is the new direct marketing (ok, for us, this is a “duh”)
• Mobile / Social / Commerce / Location-based marketing mashups – we’ll be seeing these a lot more
• Integration of existing services and features will soon start to trend (eg. not new services)
• Privacy backlash and consumer response of becoming more reticent – and not just in response to Facebook; although FB certainly has something to do with it.
• Lack of women, apparently.  OPPORTUNITY: maybe with RXL’s extensive experience with mom-bloggers (et al.) we should be driving to develop tools to encourage women in the tech sphere? I’m looking directly here at Unilever.

It’ll be streaming for the rest of the day (April 21, 2010) if you feel like watching the whole thing here:

http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive

But I’ve already watched it and have taken notes for everyone.  Lots of good stuff!

RXLdocs_F8keynote_v1 (.DOCX download)

(UPDATE) The breakout sessions are live, too. I’ll link to them in this article as they become available.