New profile layout pulls Facebook offline

California, Dec 17: The social networking website with more than 500 million active users, Facebook, was gone offline for few hours on Thursday, Dec 16. Media reported that Facebook accidentally rolled out a prototype of new profile layout and to roll back the new profile, site was taken offline.

According to the reports, new profile layout provided all tabs in a list of text links below the Page"s picture. The option to set a default landing tab in the Page admin interface was also not present.

Later, the new layout was rolled back and Facebook tweeted, "Facebook is available again after being down for a brief period. We apologize for the inconvenience… Also, some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It"s now back to normal."

Meanwhile, Facebook has unveiled a new registration tool to make it easier for users to sign into other sites to see what their friends are doing across the web. With the new registration tool, users can sign-in to an outside website using your Facebook account.

The new registration tool works like an auto-fill tool. If users have a Facebook account, it automatically fills the registration form with user's Facebook information, like name, email address and location.

"By minimizing the friction associated with signing up for a new account and making it easy for people to bring their friends with them, we've seen that people are more likely to complete the sign up process, stay on sites longer, share more content, and come back more often. For example, in beta tests with FriendFeed, Facebook sign ups increased 300 percent," said Facebook.

OneIndia News