Facebook Blogged

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.

RedBoxBlue is a British Pop Rock band originating from South London. The band formed in 2007 and its members are Jonathan Haselden who is a specialist in vocals, and guitar, Sam Harrop on keyboards and vocals, Rob Bohner plays guitar and vocals), Timo Simpson (guitar, vocals), Dominic Gianetta (bass) and Tom Marrow on drums. This group is now planning to do the live gigs o Facebook. The fans can catch them live at 4 June, 2008 at 7 pm GMT. The gigs are planned to be performed at a place in London but will be shown live on Facebook. The networking Site will provide the fans the five consecutive rocking nights and few more at different regions and zones across the world. This has been done especially for their fans in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Hong Kong.

All will play the rocking music and the fans are just advised to bring their speakers at the loudest volume. The shows have been scheduled and the band is just ready to bring their fans at their feet. The user has to become a fan and has to invite as many friends he can. If 50 or more of his friends become fan then the user will be presented an exclusive track of the band. So come and be a part of this concert at Facebook.

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