Facebook introduces video clip profile pics

San Francisco - Facebook rolled out updates to mobile profile pages to enable users to better personalise their profiles and more easily control their privacy settings.

Facebook has sought to improve and ease its mobile profile experience as it makes more of its $10bn-plus in annual ad revenue off of phones. The updates also come during New York City's 12th Advertising Week, where Facebook is courting the world's largest advertisers and companies.

Among the new features are profile videos, or a short looping video clip that users can create in place of a static profile picture. The feature is similar to Vine, a video sharing app owned by Twitter.

Users can also set a temporary profile picture that reverts to their old picture at a specified time. Those who want to support a sports team or charitable cause for a specific week, for example, can choose a picture to display for a short time period.

Facebook also introduced more ways to control privacy settings so that users can curate what pieces of information are public and which are only viewable to "friends," or people that they have allowed to view profiles.