New Facebook Features Leaked

Facebook went out of service for a brief period Thursday after an accidental leak out of some upcoming features of the social networking website.

In a Twitter feed, Facebook has apologized for the outage by tweeting Some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It's now back to normal.

Facebook, which is said to be working on a new design for its website, suddenly went down for about an hour Thursday and several new features were reportedly leaked accidentally.

Facebook's new brand pages will feature Places check-ins prominently and allow people to manage several pages at once without logging in and out, according to Mashable.

Pages now match Profiles and Place Pages in style and design, there’s a new left-hand menu that has been introduced to replace tab navigation and Facebook Questions have been integrated into the experience, Mashable said.

Facebook's new feature lets Page admins quickly switch between accounts. The Account menu option in the upper left-hand corner now includes a “Switch Accounts” option. Administrators can click it to pull up a menu to log in to any of the other Pages they have access to, Mashable added.

Also, Facebook is said to roll out a new Photos product called Memories which will allow people to browse photos by year.

The latest redesign effort by California-based Facebook is seen as its strategy to strengthen its holding on the booming social-networking space and has been increasingly become people's default destination on the Internet.

Facebook, which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.

As of July 2010, Facebook has more than 500 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was named the TIME Person of the Year for 2010.