Facebook sends out invites to June 20 event; plans to launch new product

Seems like there’s never a dull moment for the team at Facebook. After a particularly eventful week – during which it introduced hashtag support, started its first servers outside the US and made it okay for post-mastectomy photos to stay, Facebook is reportedly bracing for an out of the blue “June 20 event” at its California headquarters. The social networking giant plans to show off a new product at the event, and sent out invitations to reporters informing them about it. ABCNews received one such invite and has quoted the text in the invite: “A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product."

Facebook sends out invites to June 20 event; to launch new product

ABCNews said the invite was concealed in a white envelope. Interestingly, the report says that the invite reached them via mail, quite unlike Facebook’s usual way of sending invites.

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While there’s no saying as to what the “new product” could be, Facebook may have hinted of its plans earlier this week. One of the bigger Facebook releases this week has to be the introduction of hashtags. A word or a phrase that starts with a “#” symbol will now become clickable on Facebook, taking you to a page dedicated to it. This page will contain all the posts that people have put up, appended with the hashtag. The other social network, aka Google Plus, too uses hashtags in a similar way and so do Tumblr and Pinterest. Facebook Product Manager Greg Lindley put out a detailed blog post on the occasion, and did not miss saying that Facebook will be rolling out more features “in the coming weeks and months”.

All said, June 20 is when the suspense will finally break, and it is only then that we’ll know of Facebook’s plans.