From the monthly archives:

April 2009

What is the Facebook Beacon?

April 21, 2009

There are so many interesting things happening on the Internet. Of course many of those take place in Facebook, but there are a few other places where similar incidents take place. Through mini feeds and news feeds, you get to know almost all the interesting things happening, but what about those that happen elsewhere? As the answer for this, Facebook Beacon was introduced for integrating events that happens elsewhere and notifies them to Facebook users.

Let’s take an example, you have an eBay account and you want to sell something. You post your ad there and use Facebook Beacon to notify that event to your friends in Facebook. All your friends will be notified by the post in eBay and updates about the subsequent bids. Isn’t this a great way to centralize all your online activities?

Not anyone can just post these external activities to your news feed. First of all, they need to get your permission doing so. This is because the external interaction with Facebook is highly controlled by various security settings. In addition to that, Facebook never shares personal profile information with any third party sites or entities.

In case if you are not interested in this features, you can completely opt-out of it by selecting ‘Don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile’ option in ‘Privacy Settings for External Websites’ page. Using the same page, you can further change the privacy settings for controlling Facebook Beacon behavior on your Facebook account.

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What is the Facebook News Feed?

April 16, 2009

News feed is the unique concept introduced by Facebook to the domain of social networking. News feeds regularly keep you up-to-date with what’s happening with to your friends and what they do. As an example, when one of your friends do some action, it will be notified to you if it passes a certain evaluation done by Facebook. For this evaluation, Facebook uses an algorithm which considers a few factors such as actions your friends do, the privacy settings of the all the parties involved, the frequency of the interaction between the friend and you, and the News Feed References.

When it comes to news feed updates, some users experience high frequency compared to the rest. If you have many friends in your Facebook account and if they are highly active, then you should get your news feeds flooded.

If you think that you get too much or too little news feeds, you can always customize the news feed behaviors. Use ‘Preferences’ to adjust how you would like to read and get updated. Same way, you can control what others see about you through privacy settings.

If you get your news feeds flooded by actions of a friend and if you want to remove him/her from the news feed, you have two options: First of all, you can set the preferences to show fewer stories from that user and Facebook will only show you a handful of activities the user does. If you are still irritated, then you can completely remove the user from your friends list, so there won’t be news feeds from him/her.

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What is the Facebook Wall?

April 14, 2009

With the wall features as the center of your Facebook profile, you can add many things such as photos, videos, and other application content to your profile through the wall. It simply behaves as a platform for the applications that support wall posting. The top of the wall is called ‘Publisher’ and it allows you to post various kinds of postings.

When your friends perform a social action, it will be notified to you and you can make a comment to that using the wall. This way, the wall is one of the main ways of interacting with your friends.

Wall-to-Wall is one of prominent features related to wall, which allows a third party to see the history of wall postings between two users. Since wall is the screen for giving you all the information about what’s happening around Facebook, it can fill you with unnecessary information quite easily. To avoid this, you can filter the wall posting display as; All posts (which shows you all the posts done by you and your friends), Posts by Others (posts by your friends), and Posts by You.

Users can always decide on what they prefer to appear on the wall. This can be done through the preferences easily. In case if the user doesn’t like what he/she sees on the wall, then the wall postings can be deleted permanently. Facebook Wall can simply be considered as the core of Facebook and without the Wall, you will never experience current Facebook!

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What is Web 2.0 / Social Networking?

April 12, 2009

social network 300x225 What is Web 2.0 / Social Networking?The older generations of the Internet users have witnessed the evolution of the Internet and World Wide Web from the mid 80s. The younger generation was lucky enough to take the full advantage of the next version of the Word Wide Web or Web 2.0 which is the next step over the first version of Web.

Web 2.0 has many significant differences over its predecessor. In the previous version of Word Wide Web, the website sponsors were in total control of the content. Most of the content were static and later became dynamic with the advancements of the technologies. With the introduction of Web 2.0 the end users of the web sites were given the authority over the content, so they are the authors, editors, and publisher of the information in the website. This way, the sponsors of the website reduces the overhead of maintaining the content while; many users are attracted to the website as it can be customized by the users.

After reading the above paragraph, doesn’t it cross your mind that this concept is best suited for social networking? Yes, social networking is a brain child of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 adopted many recent trends due to the advancements and demands of social networking. Therefore, social networking platforms such as Facebook became one of the first experiments of Web 2.0.

If you go to Facebook, all what you see is Web 2.0 features giving the end users more flexibility over the content they maintain.

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Who Is Mark Zuckerberg?

April 10, 2009

Mark is the force behind Facebook. He is the founder and CEO of Facebook who has achieved masses of great success at an early age. Mark started Facebook back in 2004 with his college roommates Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz.

Currently Mark holds the responsibilities of defining the product strategy for Facebook and also technically involved in designing Facebook services and development and enhancement of Facebook infrastructure. Synapse, a music recommendation system, and Wirehog, a peer-to-peer client (such as Limewire, uTorrent) were also Mark’s project that he abandoned for the success of Facebook.

Mark is a graduate from Harvard University (Computer Science). In his student life, Mark has always been a creative student wanting to do new experiments. Facemash is one of the creation of Mark which he developed while in the university. It was a website which compared students’ dorm photos with similar features of HOT or NOT. Unimpressed Harvard University administration then took disciplinary actions against Mark for the website he created. With the determination, he worked towards his next big thing and launched Facebook within three months of Facemash incident.

Started as an ordinary website in 2004, Facebook evolved in to different stages such as a website with news feeds, dynamic applications, and eventually a platform for development. That’s why you now see a lot of third party developers developing applications for Facebook.

According to Forbes, Mark Zuckerberg is ranked as the 321st richest person in the Unites States, with a net worth of $ 1.5 billion.

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