IDGNS: So it's like a control panel on which you're consolidating the ways to perform various actions and create content?

Slee: Yes, that's correct. Part of the rationale behind this at a philosophical level is that we're watching what the trends have been on the Internet around content creation and what we're seeing is that users across all sorts of sites are spending less time making big single pieces of content. Instead, they are making a lot of little pieces of content, like status updates, writing messages on Twitter, uploading single videos to YouTube. This is the paradigm we want to capture with the publisher, where it's really easy to frequently communicate with these little pieces of information.

IDGNS: So is this an internal authoring tool for members or an external-facing feature for friends, or both?

Slee: It's both. The Publisher Box is integrated directly into the profile so it's right there on the Feed tab of the profile and you'll be able to use it in both ways: for when you're on your own profile, to add content onto it, and also you'll be able to go to your friends' profiles and you'll still see the publisher interface to let you take actions to communicate with them, with like Wall postings. If I want to post on a friend's Wall, that'll be done through a Publisher.

IDGNS: Are all these changes going to take effect at once or will you introduce them gradually?

Slee: We're phasing the rollout of this. This week we're setting up a sandbox for developers to give them access to the new functionality and they'll be able to begin building against these new integration points. In a few weeks we'll do the same for users, so they can opt in to try out and see the new functionality before it's fully rolled out.

IDGNS: So for end users you'll provide for a while the ability to toggle between the new and existing profile designs?

Slee: Yes, that's our current plan.

IDGNS: Will you give people the option to stay on the old design or will there be a cutoff date when everyone will be on the new design?

Slee: The current plan is to fully migrate over to the new design but we're in a dialogue with users about this so as we roll it out we'll try to get a lot of user feedback.

IDGNS: And you're shooting for some time next month to do the full changeover?