I've given a lot of credit to Facebook here in the past for keeping to the mission of relevant social networking. Unlike MySpace, which is too busy monetizing attention, hungry Facebook continues to roll out innovations that focus on social interaction. Facebook is now tapping the social well to solicit feedback -- and perhaps gather grassroots support -- for future innovations. The PR aspect is savvy given their previous debacle with the news feed feature introduction. The feature was a perfectly good service -- perhaps like the Bush administration's sacking of the eight Deputy Attorney's General -- but poorly received in the absence of a pre-launch PR or opinion massaging.

The vehicle for the feedback is the Facebook Sneak Preview group manned by a dozen or so product managers who post images and descriptions of proposed changes. Users can comment under the pictures or post other feedback in the discussion board.

At the moment, three pictures of changes are being presented, two streamlining user interaction with profiles and messaging. There's a lot of mindnumbing details that I won't bore you with here. The last picture deals with the introduction of a page for every network on the Facebook site. The example page is shown for UCLA and includes a number of statistics that was exhibited briefly from the pulled zeitgeist experiment. In that experiment, key stats about gender, relationship status, etc, for the whole system were aggregated on one page. Now, those same stats are compiled and presented for each network.