While they have been on the receiving end a lot in the past for too many changes, its getting more and more necessary for Facebook to make subtle changes to adapt and keep up with the requirements of the over 500 Million users that are registered with Facebook. Facebook seems to be making these changes to help with privacy, as well as ease of sharing information. This round up of the Facebook features include these :

1. Download your information from Facebook.

Facebook has built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information.

If you want a copy of the information you’ve put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download. To protect your information, this feature is only available after confirming your password and answering appropriate security questions. Facebook has started rolling out this feature, and you’ll find it under your account settings.

2. Facebook Groups

Until now, Facebook has made it easy to share with all of your friends or with everyone, but there hasn’t been a simple way to create and maintain a space for sharing with the small communities of people in your life, like your roommates, classmates, co-workers and family.

Facebook has built a solution that could help you map out all of your communities, that would be simple enough that everyone would use it and that would be deeply integrated across Facebook and applications so you can communicate with your different groups in lots of different ways.

This is a feature that you might have heard of in the last few days being spoken off all over the internet. It’s a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them in a private space. The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group.

From this space, you can quickly post photos, make plans and keep up with ongoing conversations. You can also group chat with members who are online right now. You can even use each group as an email list to quickly share things when you’re not on Facebook. The net effect is your whole experience is organized around spaces of the people you care most about.

3. Privacy control with Applications

Facebook now also had a new dashboard to give you visibility into how applications use your data to personalize your experience. As you start having more social and personalized experiences across the web, it’s important that you can verify exactly how other sites are using your information to make your experience better.

As this rolls out, in your Facebook privacy settings, you will have a single view of all the applications you’ve authorized and what data they use. You can also see in detail when they last accessed your data. You can change the settings for an application to make less information available to it, or you can even remove it completely.

4. One Time Passwords

Facebook is launching one-time passwords to make it safer to use public computers in places like hotels, cafes or airports. If you have any concerns about security of the computer you’re using while accessing Facebook, Facebook can text you a one-time password to use instead of your regular password.

Simply text “otp” to 32665 on your mobile phone, and you’ll immediately receive a password that can be used only once and expires in 20 minutes. In order to access this feature, you’ll need a mobile phone number in your account. We’re rolling this out gradually, and it should be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

5. Remote Sign Out and Account Settings

The ability to sign out of Facebook remotely is now available to everyone just like what GMail had introduced a while ago. These session controls can be useful if you log into Facebook from a friend’s phone or computer and then forget to sign out. From your Account Settings, you can check if you’re still logged in on other devices and remotely log out.

Under the Account Security section of your Account Settings page you’ll see all of your active sessions, along with information about each session. In the unlikely event that someone accesses your account without your permission, you can also shut down the unauthorized login before resetting your password and taking other steps to secure your account and computer.

When people log in to Facebook, the system will regularly prompt them to keep their security information updated. If you ever lose access to your account, having this information helps Facebook verify who you are and get you back into your account quickly.

I highly recommend the last two steps to be able to keep your account safe at all times.

Looks like Facebook is reacting that we want more control over what we share on Facebook—to manage exactly who sees it and to understand exactly where it goes. But is it going to be enough, all over the internet people are talking about the demise of Facebook but Facebook seems to be appearing in more websites, blogs and journals as the login method or the like button. We need to see how things are going to work out in the next year for Facebook.