Facebook Blogged

PageRage

Silent Observer — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:10:50 +0000

Online social network Facebook is now offering its users the opportunity to preview and test new features and functionality before they are made available to all of Facebook’s 80 million members over the coming days. In development over the past six months, the redesign includes an integration of all of a user’s various feeds in a single stream of updates.

The user is free to make any layout according to his convenience. PageRage currently works with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.x & 3 on Windows XP and Vista, as well as Firefox 2.x & 3 on Mac OS X. The work is going on to make it compatible with Internet Explorer 8 as well as Safari for Mac. Other users who are using PageRage will be able to see the changes one makes to his Facebook page, but in the near future there will be options for users to change things that only will see such as changing the look of all Facebook pages and so that his changes are apply will appear on all the pages a user views.

We can also expect a release of a new version that will enable users to change their view of other pages to enable the ability to add a layout that shows up on all of the pages that a user views, although these layouts will not be visible to anyone else.

Minggl’s Political Wall

Silent Observer — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:03:08 +0000

Image by Kables via FlickrMinggl’s new Facebook application, called the Political Wall. This enables the user to cast his vote for one candidate or the other. He is free to leave a comment explaining why he voted that way and others vote for the same candidate. This is something like online campaigning, and invites others to do the same. There is a comment wall that will appear in the Facebook profile, where the user and his friends can debate the upcoming presidential election.

The Minggl will also display these running comments on Obama and McCain’s websites for users that have the Minggl toolbar installed. Users can then vote on the comments, so the most popular will rise to the top. This will really helps the users to know about their candidates better and hence the best will win.

US08 Election Monitor

Silent Observer — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:56:24 +0000

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeThe US Election 2008 Web Monitor provides weekly snapshots of global Web coverage. Lists of keywords summarize the most important issues associated with each candidate, this helps the user to identify which one is the best and is eligible to e the next president of US. This application provides weekly snapshots of global Web coverage.

It captures the Web sites of international media from the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand, environmental organizations, the Fortune 1000 which is the biggest US companies in terms of revenue, as well as 1000 popular blogs on political issues and reflect the results. From these sites, the system processes more than 800,000 documents each week. It collects the data on Monday and publishes the results on Thursday. It keeps updating the current results which help the user to caste their vote for their candidate.

US08 Sentiment Quiz

Silent Observer — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 01:58:25 +0000

Image via WikipediaWith the Sentiment Quiz, Facebook users and their network of online friends can evaluate whether sentences from an archive of election-related news media articles express positive or negative sentiment. This will really help them to caste their vote to the right candidate and will know them much better. Participants earn points for matching answers, but can also lose them if their opinions differ from the answers of their opponent.

This kind of built in notification system will really help the Facebook users to move in a right path. This will help them to analyze their own decisions and will help them to understand them in a much better way. This phenomenon is really awesome and will really help the users to understand what they are doing and can compare with the algorithms and the statistics which are shown to them.

Marc Andreessen Joins Facebook Board of Directors

Silent Observer — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:24:00 +0000

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.

What is your Gender?

Silent Observer — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:19:00 +0000

Facebook 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.

Swoopin - download, share free mobile games

Silent Observer — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:10:47 +0000

Ubersoft has launched a new Facebook application “Swoopin”. This application lets users choose from 800 free games and either download the titles themselves, or send them to friends on Facebook. The files are side loaded onto phones, rather than sent directly. It’s one of the first ad-funded mobile game services to try Facebook distribution. Swoopin only has 16 daily active users for its Facebook application since it is new. It provides few attractive subscription offers to the user. One day access enables user to view all the stories that were published over the last 24 hours, but it does not include archive access. There is another plan for the one year access. Annual subscription plan allows user to log-in to the website and read all the daily news stories published by Telecompaper. The price depends on how far back user wants to access the archive, which dates back to 1993. The other facility which Swoopin is providing is that it sends free e-mail with most important headlines of the last 24 hrs which is really amazing. The price for the one month archive period is EUR$ 195 and for 3 months is EUR$ 295. These games are 100% free, but the service provider may charge for normal carrier charges (WAP, GPRS, DATA) and taxes may apply to data transfers incurred when the user downloads the game. These games are supported by ads and sometimes connect to the network to download new ads. A typical connection will transfer 5 to 15 kilobytes of data. Some service providers charge on a per time basis and some on a per kilobyte basis.

Technorati Tags: Swoopin,Ubersoft,Facebook

Facebook Mini-Feed Commenting

Silent Observer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:14:00 +0000

Facebook has confirmed that it will launch in-line Mini Feed comments. The feed is a perfect place for personal & public conversation, exactly the type of communication. Updates on friends’ status, application engagement, and new friend connections are compelling contexts for in-feed conversations. The update makes the profile page more like a “room” where conversation occurs. However, comment text does not appear in the Mini Feed by default. User must click the “bubble” to expand the comments. The change expands what people can comment on within the Facebook environment. Though the social networking site already provides ample opportunities to comment on items, this will make it easier for members to comment quickly on what they see. A little balloon shows on the right side for the mini-feed actions that user can comment on. As more comments appear on that item the balloon displays a number of comments. Click on the balloon and the item expands. This is nice, simple and easy. It has the amazing ability to comment something in this area. This will be more important in the new page layouts that are coming very soon. Also worthy of note here is that when people comment on an item (say a video or a note) those comments ROLL UP to the minified. This is absolutely stunning.

Facebook Releases fbOpen

Silent Observer — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:30:11 +0000

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 .

Facebook and Mini feed

Silent Observer — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:29:33 +0000

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.