Facebook Lets You Announce That You’re Expecting A Baby

That Unbaby.me extension for scrubbing infants from your feed is about to get a lot more useful. Today Facebook launches a new Timeline event that lets you share that you’re expecting a baby, the due date, and whether it’s a boy or girl. Baby announcements appear in the Celebration sidebar beside birthdays on the day the kid is expected to pop out, along with showing up in the news feed. This new life event for babies is another sign that Facebook is maturing as its original user base of college kids in 2004 start hatching users who can join Facebook 13 years down the line.

You can add a baby life event by selecting the announcement from the Life Events drop down in the publisher on your Timeline.

Then on the due date it will appear in the Celebration sidebars of friends.

Today’s feature release follows the added ability to announce the date of your upcoming marriage on Facebook. And who knows, maybe the push is Zuck’s subtle way of saying him and new bride are expecting.

Facebook's Director of Engineering explains how you're part of the dev team

Ever wondered why those crazy fools at Facebook think it's a good idea to meddle with the timeline, or how you chat? Well you can blame yourself. Probably. The social network's Director of Engineering, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, reveals all in a recent blog post. By first explaining that the site evolves in a two-step process, "technology pushes people to move forward and then people move past technology and it has to catch up," we can start to understand why constant user testing of new, often multiple, solutions is required. Boz goes on to explain that by using select groups, or even nations, the efficacy new features can not only be quickly, and solidly determined, it can actually supplant the need for weeks of boardroom debate. He goes on to say that the odds are that everyone on Facebook has been part of a test at some point. Curious to know more about the process, or just feeling a little bit used? Head over to the source link for the full post / comment thread.