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Facebook Inc. is preparing to launch a major new feature next week. Andrew Bosworth, Facebook director of engineering, told The Times this week, "We are working on a number of exciting things that we have not yet announced, but stay tuned for next week. " On Wednesday, Facebook's chief executive and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, told reporters during a visit to the company's Seattle office that Facebook planned to "launch something awesome" next week. The project was developed at the 40-person office that is Facebook's only major engineering hub outside of its Palo Alto headquarters, Zuckerberg said.

  Facebook has launched its fourth individual iPhone app, and this time it's a camera, the company announced Thursday. Facebook Camera is an app intended to enhance the Facebook photo experience on smartphones, a company spokeswoman said. The app will allow Facebook users to view a feed that focuses solely on pictures. It will also allow them to upload multiple photos at the same time as well as edit the pictures with captions and filters. "When you launch the app, you'll see a feed of just great photos from the people you care about," the company said on its site . "You can swipe to see more of any album or tap to enlarge an individual photo" The app is supposed join Apple's App Store later Thursday and will be available for free.

MENLO PARK, Calif. - For some users, Facebook's front page used to grab their attention with the latest news from friends but had become a jumbled morass of random updates and photos. Their attention had increasingly begun to wander to shiny new offerings from Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. Now Facebook is hoping to get people to stick around with a sweeping face lift to its most popular feature: News Feed, the steady stream of updates that users see when they log on to the social network.

Facebook just added three new security features for its mobile users, but more likely than not, you'll have to tap the mobile site instead of your apps to use them. Among them are tweaks to login approval codes, more control over questionable content in your news feed, and account recovery. If you have an Android phone, you can now get login approval codes through the Facebook app instead of via text message. The code refreshes every 30 seconds. Facebook said it's working on expanding this to other devices.

MENLO PARK, Calif. - Mark Zuckerberg has set into motion his most ambitious plan yet to make Facebook Inc. the world's dominant form of communication. Facebook's chief executive on Thursday unveiled Facebook Home, software that transforms smartphones and tablets into devices ruled by the giant social network. It digitally shoves aside every other app on the device and allows Facebook to take over the home screen with status updates, photos and messages. For years it was rumored that Facebook - spurred by a firestorm of doubt about its ability to make the business leap to mobile devices - would design and manufacture its own phone.

Facebook wants to make it easier and quicker for you to upload photos taken with your smartphone or tablet, and it's now testing a feature that may just do that. Photo syncing, as the feature is called, uploads your phone's pictures instantly after you take them and puts them in a private section of your Facebook account. By having your pictures in Facebook's servers, you can share them very rapidly when you're ready, or you can also keep them private if you don't want to post them.

NBCUniversal and Facebook reportedly are set to announce a partnership involving coverage of the 2012 Olympics. The two companies will be marketing each others' products as well as working to infuse NBC's Olympic coverage with discussions happening on Facebook about the Olympics in various ways. NBC will show a "Facebook Talk Meter" throughout its broadcasts in order to show what people are saying about the Olympics on the social network. On Facebook, NBC will have exclusive content on its Olympics page as well as promote daily polls.

Facebook Inc. introduced a revamped Events feature Wednesday, complete with a new Calendar view. The Menlo Park company announced the change in a Facebook note, saying it was created as a result of a hackathon project. Along with the new Calendar view, which uses your friends' profile pictures to display their birthdays, the Events feature also includes a redesigned List view, which makes it easier to respond without going into its page. ROUNDUP: The freshest Facebook features To toggle between the two views, two new buttons are placed at the top left of the page that users can use to switch.

Facebook has officially announced Facebook Home to make Android-powered smartphones more Facebook-centric. It's a free interface Android users can download as of April 12. "With Home you see your world through people, not apps," Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday at the Facebook Home launch. LIVE DISCUSSION: Join us as we talk about Facebook Home at 2 p.m. With Facebook Home, users see the latest content shared by their friends on the lock screen of their phones.

Facebook has acquired Face.com, an Israeli start-up that specializes in facial-recognition software. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. But the acquisition had been speculated in recent weeks, and some reports said Facebook could have spent anywhere from $80 million to $100 million for the start-up. Among Face.com's products are Face Tagger, a Facebook app, and KLIK, an iOS app. The start-up also has a public API that it hosts on its site. News of the acquisition was reported by Bloomberg and was confirmed by Facebook.