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Facebook today announced that Web pioneer and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has joined its board of directors. Currently co-founder and chairman at Ning, Andreessen is an investor in several Internet startups. A prominent Silicon Valley veteran, Andreessen co-founded Ning as a complementary platform to Facebook that allows people to create their own social network with any design, any feature set, and in any language. He also authored early Web browser Mosaic and was co-founder of Netscape Communications. Andreessen’s experience also includes his work as CTO of AOL, as well as chairman and co-founder of Web infrastructure company Loudcloud, later named Opsware and acquired by Hewlett-Packard. According to Zuckerberg, Andreessen joins current Facebook board members Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital and Founders Fund. Facebook board observers are David Sze of Greylock Partners and Paul Madera of Meritech Capital Partners. Andreesseen is involved full time at Ning , a platform for the creation of social networks and arguably a direct competitor to Facebook. But Andreessen is known to be a mentor to Zuckerberg, who calls on him often for personal advice. It isn’t surprising that Zuckerberg would ask Andreessen to have a formal involvement with the company. Andreessen will reportedly remain with Ning full time and retain his Chairman title. Andreessen will become the fourth member of a Facebook board that includes Zuckerberg and venture capitalists Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel.

Image 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 .

The feed feature has been expanded on Facebook to make it friendly for users to publish a social stream of their activity outside of Facebook and publish into their mini-feed. On the facebook profile page, the user can see at the upper right side of the mini-feed and click on the import link and select the services user wants to import. The Facebook mini-feed continued its expansion on Friday, adding YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, Google Reader, and personal blog to the list of sites that can share data to Facebook. The import feature already included Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp and del.icio.us.
By expanding the amount of info in the mini feed, and giving users as much exposure to it as possible, Facebook increases the value of advertising in the mini feed. It is pretty simple and straightforward to use. This is yet another step in facebook’s mission to try to centrally aggregate the activity from other websites. Many users will find this useful as this is yet another way to publish their blog content automatically into their mini-feed. For example the user’s profile will automatically update when the user to upload a video to YouTube or any updates with links it has been linked to. The user will also start to see more of these types of social activity showing up in the News-Feed.

The flood of applications has caused problems in Facebook right from the start. Facebook has repeatedly changed the rules, but always seems one step behind the creative moves by developers to spam their way into gaining new users. Most recently, limits were put in place that limit the number of invitations users could send out. More people who ignore requests from a particular application, the lower the limit for that app. Facebook is now a little tired of beating questionable developer tactics away with a stick. So now they will try the carrot approach as well - by rewarding developers who play by the rules and build useful, popular applications. The new program is being called the Preferred Application Program. It has different rules, like allowing application users to invite more than the normal number of friends per day. But there are an almost unlimited number of other ways that Facebook can promote preferred developers. Preferred apps can show up higher in search, for example. And Facebook can give them a badge or other sign of endorsement that they can add to their application pages. A more subtle, but possibly more powerful benefit, may be to change the rules on how and when user activities through these applications can show up in the News Feed. Finally, new Facebook users could be presented with a set of default third party applications to add when they create an account, perhaps tailored to their stated interests.

Image via WikipediaAmerican Airlines Inc. is hoping to win customers by becoming the first major airline to launch an application for users of the social networking Web site Facebook. American, owned by Fort Worth-based AMR Corp. (NYSE: AMR), said its application, called Travel Bag, lets Facebook users share travel experiences with friends, offer and read reviews on restaurants and shops, and create countdowns for upcoming events or trips. In addition, Travel Bag will link to American’s Web site where Facebook users can make reservations, view frequent flier miles and check flight information within their own profile page. For more information log on to www.aa.com & www.facebook.com\

Image via WikipediaLast week Facebook unveiled more ways for 67 million members to restrict access to their personal profiles. But the added protections weren’t enough to prevent from Palo Alto pulling up the most recent pictures posted by Facebook members and their friends, even if the privacy settings were set to restrict the audience to a select few. After being alerted Monday afternoon, Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said the Palo Alto-based company fixed the bug within an hour. The latest lapse serves as another reminder of the perils of sharing sensitive photos and personal information online, even when Web sites pledge to shield the information from prying eyes.

Before the fix, Ng’s computer-coding trick enabled him to find private pictures of Paris Hilton at the Emmy awards and of her brother Barron Nicholas drinking a beer with friends and photos of many other people who hadn’t granted access to Ng. Using Ng’s template, a reporter was able to look up random people on Facebook and see the most recent pictures posted on their personal profiles even if the photos were supposed to be invisible to strangers. The revealed snapshots showed Italian vacations, office gatherings, holiday parties and college students on spring break. AP was able to click through a personal photo album that Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted in November 2005.

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.

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.