Facebook disabled its site last night for a short time after accidentally revealing a number of prototype features, such as an overhaul of its pages and a lightbox UI for photos.
Facebook admitted its mistake on its Twitter page, which read: “Also, some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It’s now back to normal”, after stating the site was down.
According to Mashable, Pages got a facelift in the leaked prototypes, featuring a tab-free design resembling the new member profiles. Facebook Questions was integrated on Pages, letting Page owners find out more information about users.
Facebook also introduced Switch Accounts for administrators of the Pages.
However, Facebook said in a statement that while the company experiments with new features internally, it is not making changes to Pages right now and will provide partners with advanced notice if they do.
“Memories” was another feature discovered, which apparently shows options for photos to be organised by year. It also offers dated status updates, number of friends added per year, events attended and Facebook places check ins.
There was also a lightbox UI added for Facebook photos, where, when a user clicks on an image, a black box hovers over the rest of the screen to give primary focus to the photo.
Some Irish users claim that Facebook Places was active last night aswell, but was disabled shortly after. It is unclear at this point if that was linked to the prototype leak.
