What is your Gender?

12 07 2008

clip_image002Facebook users who haven’t yet specified their gender in their profile will have to do so in the coming few weeks. Under a new gender policy introduced by the Web site, it will start prompting users to choose whether they’d like to be referred to as ‘him’ or ‘her’, ‘he’ or ’she’. Many people came up with the complaint that due to no gender/sex specification requirements, they were ultimately listed under the wrong gender by default thereby leading to a lot of confusion. Until now, those who didn’t specify their gender in their profile have gotten themselves tagged as ‘him’, ‘her’, or ‘themselves’ which may not be necessarily true. Hence the new policy will make translation work easier. For those who don’t want the tyranny of gender, they can remove gender entirely from their account/s, including how to refer to gender in mini-feeds. The reason behind the change is, the fact that many international languages rely much more heavily on gender-related syntax. The complication, however, may arise from transgendered members of the site who don’t identify with traditional gender assignments. That’s why, it appears, and they will be able to manually opt out of the ‘him/her’ classification. It’ll take an extra step in the process, but it will still be possible.



Facebook Releases fbOpen

27 06 2008

Facebook logoImage via WikipediaThis release includes the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags. It also has extensibility points built in so user can add his own functionality, such as the user owns FBML tags, API methods, etc. If the user likes to contribute to Facebook Open Platform, then the user can sign to Contribution Agreement. Facebook Open Platform (except for the FBML parser) is licensed under a Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), which follows the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

It contains the tools necessary to implement Facebook Open Platform including the API, FBML (Facebook Markup Language), FBJS (Facebook JavaScript), and FQL (Facebook Query Language). It also contains libfbml-1.2.0.tar.gz, which contains the essential libraries for parsing and rendering FBML. If the user finds a bug, he is advised to submit it to the Facebook Open Platform product category. The user can thus download it anytime and is easily available in web too. The user can find more information by digging into this link .