Update 4:00 p.m. EST: Facebook emails to say that this is not one of the leaked products that caused them to shut down the site.
"This is not a new feature," the spokesperson wrote. "This is part of our photos updates we made in early October. It's currently only available to a percentage of users as we continue to test it."
Oh well, still looks pretty cool.
Ah, the ups-and-downs of iterative journalism.
__Original Post:__Yesterday, we told you how Facebook was forced to shut itself down after an engineer made some product prototypes public that weren't ready for prime-time.
Facebook may not have wanted you to catch a glimpse of any new features, but one Wired reader who noticed something different and was quick on the draw shared the above screen grab with us: what looks very much like Facebook's new photo display interface.
It clearly resembles a familiar slide show-style format, with a photo in the center of the page and arrows on either side, presumably to navigate through the slide show. This is, we could say charitably, a "tried and true" display technique which nevertheless would be a dramatic upgrade for Facebook, whose members upload a whopping three billion photos a month, which so far can be seen only in a tired, tiled format.
The user, who lives in Germany, says he got the grab seconds before Facebook shut itself down yesterday, and sent it to Wired with the following message:
Facebook did not immediately respond to a query asking the company to confirm the authenticity of the new photo feature.
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