Facebook just announced new, personalized way for people to communicate. Really important to give people right tools to enable people to communicate as much as possible. This means giving users control over their information, what they’re sharing, when sharing, and with whom. This also helps the promotion of the site too. Today, Facebook has 67M active users, 2/3 are outside the US - 18 months ago, it was 90% US. The vast majority of users are not US college students now; there’s a great diversity in types of relationships. Facebook privacy is based on social proximity -

User can now choose to share information with friends of friends, all friends, and some friends, only me, specific networks, everyone on Facebook - and user can exclude friends or friend lists Friend lists are “private groups” of your friends. No one can see the friend lists the user makes. It also contains new ways to create friend lists. When user share photos with specific friends, user will be prompted to save those people as a list list, and when user send or confirm a friend request, user can in-line add friends to one or more friend lists. Facebook chat is launching in the coming weeks. A new communication channel will be opened soon and enable real time conversation on the site.

Blackboard has launched their own application which is as robust as the Coursefeed application. Blackboard lets students share information with each other (and professors) in an online manner. It’s usually informational updates, class notes, slides, assignments, discussions and messages to the professor.

This is a free application, for students who elect to use it, allows them access to information only from courses they are registered in, and that information cannot be shared. Schools that license Blackboard’s platform, however, can choose to block the Facebook application entirely.Students can have a new assignment posted to one of their courses? Now they can read about it within Facebook. User will receive a notification with a link to the corresponding page within Blackboard.

User can also navigate through all the top level information pertaining to each course. This includes links to the profiles of other course mates. The application appears to be well built aside from a Java error that I received when entering false information into the fields. This is really amazing !Since the Students are increasingly demanding cutting-edge tools to communicate and collaborate online, and Blackboard Sync can be prove to be a part of the  effort to meet that demand. Quarterly earnings at Blackboard, announced May 7, sunk to a loss of $3.3 million, or $0.11 per share, in the first quarter 2008. Blackboard attributed the loss to rising costs and receivables, as well as the company’s recent acquisition of The NTI Group Inc. However, both earnings and sales outpaced management’s expectations, with revenue growing 24 percent year-over-year to $68.5 million.

Blackboard shares were up Wednesday 46 cents to $36.63 in afternoon trading. Blackboard Sync is available for students attending institutions using the Blackboard Learning System, version 7.1 and higher. If the user’s institution is using a version of Blackboard not supported by Blackboard Sync, or if the institution has blocked the application, user will receive an error message ,when the user will try to install Blackboard Sync. The student can talk to the Blackboard System Administrator on campus if this occurs.With the Facebook application, all of this information comes in the form of a news feed, letting user to keep track of the courses.

The application is connected directly with the actual Blackboard account at school, so there’s not much extra work user need to do, like re-entering data for use on Facebook. CourseFeed’s Facebook application is currently only available at a select number of schools, but more will be available in the future,which is going to change the education system a lot.

Facebook have created a shift in corporate culture that could save the sector billions of dollars.the sites are now thinking the best way to make software, favoring a group of enthusiastic who will let anyone use their software free. The issue, which often raises passions among software makers around the world, is over whether free software created by volunteer coders known as the “open source” community should be trusted by large companies. This will not only provides the site the cheap and reliable softwares as these companies that we in the past have spent tens of thousands of dollars on buying their software but this will also provide some work and experience to the young and enthusiastic software makers.

The corporations are willing to consider working with open source developers instead of buying their software from tech bosses such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. As a result BT is now moving all its internal enterprise systems to open source software. Since the corporations were rapidly adopting wikis which is proving to be a good way of sharing the intellectual efforts of internet users to make web encyclopedias and other online information sources inside their own team or organisations. As the number of wikis used within BT had grown from a handful to more than a thousand in the course of a year. Therefore social networking sites were becoming a valuable tool to encourage collaboration in enterprises.

This will provide the tech world with new brains and innovative ideas which will definitely is going to serve the society. But somehow the companies are actually blocking these amazing software minds, which is discouraging them and as a result their creativity will be lost soon. The companies should encourage these talents and should make them grow for more development in the software sector as since these are the users themselves therefore they know what is necessary and useful for the common users like them.

Facebook is going to be redesigned. It is expected to be cleaner, organized, vastly bigger and more diverse user friendly. This will make the user to explore more in this amazing social networking site. This redesign should hit the Web browsers of Facebook’s 70 million worldwide users in the next few weeks. The core profile pages are going to be changed soon. This change is will make the site more popular and more users friendly. There are many users who are not comfortable with the current design and face some problems with its cluttered design. Since now many users are using it successfully too but according to the reports the design team is working on the project and is trying to make it so that the user can adapt himself as early as possible.

The change will be such as neither will it be going to affect the users nor the popularity of the site will be hindered. Therefore the design is expected to be more simplified. The various applications currently are usually seen on one page. It makes the page more crowded and untidy. Thus, it is expected that these applications will be on the separate pages and will be accessible through tabs. This change is set to make the users more free to use this site and the other reason is to prove few critics wrong that Facebook is becoming like myspace. Since a lot of changes are expected but the critical elements of the site’s identity will be remain untouched which includes its typography and color palette. The changes will only be made to provide the user more options without changing the look as it can affect the brand. Facebook’s designers have been open about changes, publicizing their proposals through the company’s developer blog and wiki.

Designers also created a Facebook Profiles Preview group within the site, which has about 55,000 members who are monitoring the redesign and commenting on new features as they are developed. Facebook’s designers are trying to make a balance between the site as a form of entertainment and on the one hand a useful tool to use. The designers are also trying to maintain the simplicity while maintaining popularity. This is really has become a challenge for these developers to reform a well settled site, maintaining its popularity and meeting the users expectations

Recently Facebook has announced Facebook Connect, which will allow the company’s almost 70 million users to port their identity and friends list securely to other Web sites. This can be seen as an answer to the MySpace unveiled Data Availability, which allows users to move data to eBay, Yahoo, Twitter and Photobucket, and a couple days before Google will announce its own data portability move. This has been already done just a day before the Facebook announcement. Facebook helps the user to maintain their real identity.

Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more. With Facebook Connect, users can also take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. The innovative Developers also will be able to show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites. This also maintains the dynamic privacy.

As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that user’ information and privacy rules are always updated. As if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website. Users will have total control of the permissions granted, like whether sites that agree to host Facebook data get to see basic profile information, including users’ pictures, names, friends and photos. Users who make an update to their profile information will see those changes in a partner Web site.

Users will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method. Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted.

Facebook is about to launch a web chat product called Facebook Chat. Users will see a chat bar on the bottom of all Facebook pages, showing which of their friends are online, who they’re chatting with currently, and other controls. Chat will currently be one-to-one only, although there is no limit to the number of chat sessions that can be open at any one time. Conversations are archived, and messages to people who are set to “offline” will be sent to their Facebook inbox instead.This is simply great.

When Facebook first announced its new instant messaging features many were disappointed to discover that the company had opted to use its own, closed chat system rather than an open protocol like Jabber/XMPP.the chat feature is not Jabber compliant, meaning it cannot be accessed outside of Facebook on clients like Trillian or Adium. Also not yet adding API or platform functionality to chat, so third party applications cannot access chat and build on top of it. Just hope this product will be enhanced over time.

The best thing about this feature is Users won’t have to install chat as an addition application; it will automatically show up at the bottom of the screen for everyone and there’s no way to completely remove it, although you can minimize it substantially when not in use. By providing Jabber/xMPP access to developers, Facebook Chat becomes easily extendable and has the opportunity to become a more mainstream IM option. For example, it wouldn’t be hard for Google to integrate Facebook Chat into GTalk, and the same goes for any other multi-protocol chat client that supports Jabber. The new instant messenger application will allow the user to chat with friends wherever he logs on to Facebook; it will be nested at the bottom of browser, ready to access at any time.

Like the GTalk sidebar in GMail and the user can also “pop-out” a chat window for any conversation , allowing user to do other things within Facebook in the browser window while carrying on the conversation unperturbed. User will also be able to receive notifications from the mini-feed and applications if he chooses to, but that is only an option, so the user don’t have to be swamped in application invitations if the user don’t wish for them.