With another round of VC under their belt and still no serious acquisition offers Facebook is looking to beef up its service by integrating some spiffy new features. While none of these features are ground breaking I think they deserve mention as a sort of follow up to my initial article here, which discussed the true worth of Facebook. All of these features begin to show Facebook’s broadening scope moving some of the focus away from the “profile” and more towards the relationships they form.

Status

This nifty little module is tucked right beneath the profile photo and is used in much the same way as an away message. This is big news because it may be foreshadowing some sort of AJAX Google Talk like built in messenger. I wouldn’t be surprised if this feature were released in the next six months, though I have no evidence of this. The status indicator has six presets as well as a custom field to allow any status message you want, it even remembers previous status messages. The interface uses an AJAX interaction to set the status, so it’s simple and quick to do. Setting your status, just one more thing to do besides poking people while on Facebook. Watch for the integrated AJAX chat app though, you heard it here first.

Social Timeline

The social timeline really isn’t a new feature from this latest round of updates but it is interesting to note nonetheless. It uses all that additional relationship info that you optionally give when you add a friend to break down what your life has consisted of in the most shallow of terms. Facebook it moving away from it’s traditional strength, Profiles, and moving towards visualization and novel ways to display your relationship data that keep you coming back. For example, this feature will be useful in 5 years, long after we have all left college and we can see how it all played out socially in a nice clean format.

Facebook Mobile

This is the biggest news from the update bunch. Though facebook has had mobile features for quite sometime, they were very limited and not particularly useful. I did always like getting random “You’ve been poked by really hot chick” texts, but now facebook has taken that to the next level. In a move mirroring Google Mobile and PayPal Mobile, Facebook has a implemented a rudimentary syntax that allows basic functions to be performed from your mobile. These features include: Get profile info, Get cell, Add a friend, Poke!, Message, and Wall post. Using this syntax just send a little message out to FBOOK (32665) and receive a response. Now imagine this cell functionality mixed with the AJAX chat integration I proposed earlier and just maybe you’ve got your self a billion dollar company, at least thats what Zuckerberg and Co. are betting on.

This little roundup doesn’t due this new slew of features justice. Go log in and check it out yourself. But before I close I have a few feature requests of my own…

Feature Request
Facebook, if you are reading this, bring back the vCard export feature, it really let us power users know that you cared.

If you have a feature request for Facebook they have a page here, that allows for user suggestions. Hey, you could think up their billion dollar features for them!