Chris Cox, Facebook’s 28-year-old vice president of product, manages the teams of programmers and designers behind last week’s unveiling of the social network’s newest feature–the ability to sort small groups of friends–as well as other recent additions like check-ins at real-world places.

In a company filled with often reclusive programmers, Mr. Cox is an extrovert who plays in a reggae band. His top job is deepening Facebook’s role in the lives of its users while toeing the line on privacy concerns by making the site hew to real-world social norms.
A Stanford-trained software engineer who joined Facebook in 2005 after dropping out of a graduate-degree program, he takes a social approach to designing products. Humans, not computer formulas, Mr. Cox insists, can make Facebook and the Internet more useful.

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Pages, Apple’s word processing application, is also getting a bit of an update. Pages ’09 offers a full-screen view for the easily distracted writer, dynamic outlining, mail merge with Numbers–Apple’s spreadsheet program–and 40 new templates. Not the most exciting stuff, here, but decent additions nonetheless.

In Numbers, Apple (AAPL) has added some new categorization features–Table Categories, and, answering user requests, some 250 new formulas and functions. New charts, trend lines and other advance reporting options as well.

iWork is also migrating from the desktop to the cloud–in a sense. Via iWork.com, users can easily upload documents and share them with collaborators. Docs are viewable online. They can be downloaded. And collaborators can comment on them online. iWork.com is cross-platform (Mac and PC) and cross-browser. The online suite looks very much like the Mac-based suite.

iWork will run you $79, $49 if you purchase a new Mac. “This is the beginning of a new service,” Schiller noted, adding that it’s a beta and launches today, solo and as part of a $169 box set that includes iLife and Leopard.