I’m at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, where the social network has invited dozens of press to witness the launch of… something. We’ve learned about at least some of Facebook’s announcements, which will likely include a redesign that makes the site’s UI more consistent with Facebook’s Place pages. But given the number of people in attendence (including members of advocacy organizations like the EFF), we’re expecting much more.

Facebook is livestreaming the event, which you can see above. I’ll also be live blogging my notes.

The setup for today’s event is unusual. There are a half dozen monitors set around Facebook’s large conference room (which doubles as a cafeteria). And Facebook isn’t allowing anyone to take video footage, which I’m hearing is a first.

10:40AM: Zuckerberg has just taken the stage. I promise we’re not talking today about what you think we’re talking about. You may have heard we’ve been in lockdown mode. We had a really intense, 60 day period where people finished all of these things. We had a really productive summer.

Last week you may have seen photos. Got hi-res photos. We’ve also improved Chat. Believe third biggest behind MSN and QQ in China, but only had a few people working on it. So we had a big push where we improved stability, cut back complaints by 60%.

On platform side. Done a lot of changes to groups – oops, games (he may have just let something slip…). App developers have seen a surge in growth.

What we’re actually talking about today: Giving you more control. We want to build asocial platform. It’s hard to get dynamic right, but what’s more challenging is building a platform so you have a set of connections and can bring those connections across all of the applications you want to use in a seamless way.

If you want to play games, only want to do that with people who play games. On a runnign site, only want to share with people who do jogging with you. It’s hard to do a platform that lets you connect across these different things. If we can nail this, then we can enable kind of innovation you see on best platforms.

Over last few years, we’ve been focused on Connect. There are over 1,000,000 sites with Connect.

A lot of times people want a copy with all of their information. Right now there hasn’t been a way to download all the information you’ve put on Facebook (this could be really big — sounds like Data Portability). Have built ‘Download Your Information’. Built on top of your graph API. Allows you download a copy of you information.

Launching a dashboard that shows you all the apps you use, and shows you the last time that that app accessed your information. These are two changes that we think are important for giving people control of their information.

Download Your Information

Facebook’s David Recordon has taken the stage. Today starting to roll out ‘Download Your Information’. You go to FB, get to the page from your account settings. Hit the download button and FB will zip up all of your messages, notes, photos, etc. and send you an Email when it’s ready for you to download. You should understand that this is all of your information. Profile info, friend list, wall archive, your photos and videos, your notes, events and messages.

This is built to be easy for regular people to use. Click it and it wil pop open your web browser.

New Application Privacy Dashboard

Dashboard – combines two previously separate screen for managing app privacy settings. You have full control over platform privacy settings as well as a list of apps you’ve used.

Can manage permissions that an app has over time. You can revoke an app’s ability to post to your wall after initially granting it permission. More granular control.

Also a detailed access log that shows all the API calls apps have been making.

“The Biggest Problem”
Zuckerberg has taken the stage again. Says internally they talk about this as the biggest problem in social networking. The basic issue: one of the great things FB has enabled is ability to stay connected with all of their friends. In a lot of contexts helpful to update everyone at once. But in reality, people’s social worlds is broken up into different groups of people — people you grew up with, family, etc. (this sounds a lot like what Google is supposedly working on with Google Me).

Reality is, just your friends isn’t actually very private. Sometimes you want to just share with a small group of people. Sometimes it’s not just a privacy thing — you just don’t want to send an update to people who might not care about your morning jog. Applicable to other applications in the ecosystem too (Twitter, anyone?).

Live From Today’s Special Facebook Event

Online publishing company Wetpaint has been undergoing a strategic shift in its business model over the past year. Wetpaint began as a simple wiki/social publishing tool but then started to build entertainment sites for big brands, including MSN. And the heavily funded startup succumbed to layoffs last July and December. But today, Wetpaint is taking the company in a new direction: original content. The startup is launching Wetpaint Entertainment; a TV news site that covers news and gossip from over 15 major TV shows, such as Glee, Grey’s Anatomy, and Gossip Girl.

Each show has a dedicated online channel (the site is launching with 15 channels), and will compile the most popular photos, videos, fashion gossip, and headlines to provide one place for all the information about fans’ favorite shows.

Wetpaint’s founder and CEO Ben Elowitz says that each show will have roughly 20 posts of information per day and will include a live updating news feed on the homepage. Roughly 30 percent of the content on the site will be written and curated by Wetpaint editors while the 70 percent of content will be sourced from other sites. However, Elowitz says that editors won’t simply repost another site’s news with a link; Wetpaint will add its own editorial spin to repurposed content.

Wetpaint’s entertainment platform has also created Facebook pages for each show; allowing fans to interact with content and editors via the social network. The company says that 500,000 fans have joined Wetpaint’s Facebook pages over the past few months. In fact, Facebook, says Elowitz, is currently accounting for 40 percent of traffic to the site (which soft launched a few months ago). He believes that the cross platform integration with Facebook will help differentiate the site from its competitors. And with limited exposure during the soft launch, traffic to the site is growing by 50 percent monthly.

Starting today, Wetpaint Entertainment includes channels for “The Vampire Diaries,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “America’s Next Top Model,” “Castle,” “Hellcats,” “Nikita,” “Glee,” “Dancing With The Stars,” “Top Chef,” “Pretty Little Liar,” “Bachelorette,” “The Bachelor,” “Gossip Girl,” “Jersey Shore” and “The Real Housewives of DC.”

The startup plans to launch mobile apps later this year and may eventually move into other verticals in entertainment and arts. At the moment, the site faces competition from many of the entertainment and gossip news sites that cover TV news such as Entertainment Weekly, People.com, and US Magazine.

As It Moves Away From The Wikis, Wetpaint Launches TV News And Entertainment Site