Facebook gets drag-&-drop photo uploader & new privacy controls, & changes one iconic feature

Pay attention to your Facebook page over the coming days as the company is in the process of releasing a number of significant (and not so significant) updates to how it works.

Apart from the release of a new security and privacy dashboard yesterday the company has also released a new Google+ inspired image upload system, and has even changed one of its most iconic features.

Security Dashboard

Yesterday we reported on Facebook’s new security dashboard, which it seems to be releasing to users on a gradual basis.  With the new dashboard you can control who can see your posts and who can contact you. It also gives you the option to make directly block someone, if you should have to.

Drag-and-drop image uploader

Facebook has spent some time in 2012 updating and improving its image uploading systems.  Images uploaded to the site are now displayed larger and at a better quality but the company’s latest change is designed to make it easier for you to attach photos to individual posts.

Taking a leaf from Google+’s book of tricks, Facebook now lets you drag-and-drop images from your computers into new posts. Facebook is eager to encourage us to share more images in our posts as these tend to be commented on and shared more often than plain text posts.  And this new image uploader is designed to reduce the number of clicks you have to go through to do so.

Along with the new image uploader Facebook has also released an update to how it manages images that you have hidden from your timeline

This change comes just in time for the Holiday Season when we’re expected to share a record number of images and status updates on the social web.  We already saw that this year’s Thanksgiving in the States set records on Instagram, which recorded its greatest number of image uploads in one 24 hour period.

Last month Facebook copied Google+ again and included automatic image uploading with its mobile app.

What’s on your mind?

The final (small) change Facebook rolled out in the past number of days is this rather subtle one – the site no longer asks “What’s on your mind?”.  But now it’s asking you a number of questions each of which is personalized to your name; these include (assuming your name is Dave) “What’s going, Dave?”, “What’s happening, Dave?”, “How are you doing, Dave?” and “How are you feeling, Dave?”

While it’s not really a big deal the added personalization is probably one of the least controversial changes the company has made recently in recent times.