Dundee-based developer Daynamo Games enter the Facebook games scene with its first title “Soccer Tycoon”.
Like any tycoon games, the aim of the game is to become the richest soccer tycoon.
The game which is in beta, allows Players to create and manage their own soccer teams, build stadiums, acquire talents, attract fans and much more. Players can challenge their friends to matches or shootouts as well as compete against online teams and improve their rank in the league.
Play.tm quoted Daynamo Games MD McNichol, “We are very happy with the progress of Soccer Tycoon in the first few weeks since it’s been released. We received some fantastic feedback from our beta players which has made it into the wider release. We’re talking to all of our players and using their input to continue updating the game, add new features and make it one of the most polished and playable games on Facebook. The range and variety of players who have already signed up is exactly what we were hoping for and we’re looking forward to welcoming more new players and teams as the game continues to grow and evolve.”
Dynamo Games has some popular titles to their credit such as Crystalcraze and Countdown on mobile phones. It is also well known for Championship Manager game on mobile phones and Playstation minis.
We will bring you the game review later.
Facebook Places, which allows users to check in at geographical locations had extend its reach to Canada.
The service launched in August in the U.S. Japan was the first Asian country to get the feature. It was also launched in the U.K. few days ago.
The feature was launched on Thursday in Canada. iPhone users got a taste of it earlier than the other mobile website users who receive the service in the afternoon.
Places allows users to check-in their locations and share them with friends, helping them discover nearby friends and connect with them in the real world. Apart from that, businesses can also use it to attract new customers through through highly targeted ads.
Places also has its downside with privacy concern as the biggest threat.
Two days ago Facebook was completely down for 2.5 hours. This was the worst outage in the past 4 years. It was caused by a database glitch that triggered an infinite loop, crashing the entire site. Facebook’s engineers posted more details on their developer blog.
If you have a hard time getting on Facebook don’t always assume it’s on your end. Although it’s rare, Facebook does go down every once and a while. If you’re having problems logging into Facebook in the future, check here for status updates and help logging in.
Facebook has rolled out a new feature called “Page Browser” that can be used to discover Facebook pages.
The new feature is aimed to help users quickly browse, discover interest-related Facebook Pages and Like them.
The pages are organized into nine categories including music, sports, celebrities, movies and games etc.
Pages are showcased according to your country by default. You can change the country from the country drop-down menu available at the top right corner. The feature might also be taking your recent browsing habits, likes etc into consideration to showcase Pages when you go to the feature.
The page also show your friends who have common interest like “liking” a common Facebook Page. A small statistic to let you know how much or how little common interest you share with your friends regarding Facebook’s likes and dislikes.
As you hover over a Page’s thumbnail, Facebook’s like button comes out and you can like the page from there directly.
“A couple of months ago I found myself online, browsing for movies to rent,” says Facebook designer named Ben Blumenfeld, who came up with the idea, “There are lots of tools to find new movies or rediscover old ones. As I poked around, I thought, ‘People should really be able to do this with Pages on Facebook!’”
Blumenfeld added that Facebook’s Page Browser will see lots of improvement in the days to come as they receives more feedback from members.
Facebook is said to be working with a two smartphones with London based mobile-handset manufacturer INQ Mobile Ltd, according to Bloomberg.
The phones which will be deeply integrated with Facebook features is slated to run on Google’s Android operating software.
AT&T is said to be considering to be the carrier. The phones are expected to launch in the first half of 2011 in the Europe and U.S. in the second half.
“We’ve been working with INQ for a couple of years now to help them build a deeply integrated Facebook experience on their devices,” Palo Alto, California-based Facebook said in an e- mailed statement. “While we can’t speak for their future product development plans, we can say that our view is that almost all experiences would be better if they were social.”
Zuckerberg denied Facebook is building its own mobile hardware or an operating system, which will be a direct competition with Apple or Google. Rather, Facebook is trying to buld a service that become a mobile platform, adding a social layers to mobile apps, according to TechCrunch.
Crowdstar’s Pop Boom is an arcade-style game released last week.
Although the game looks like Bejeweled and is a match-three or more game, you will find that it is different game the moment you click on the first bubble. In Pop Boom, you will be playing around with sticky bubbles 
Like any other game in its genre, the aim of the game is to line three or more bubbles of the same color to pop them. But it isn’t really a casual game since you got only one minute to to get pop as much bubbles as possible, which will translate into score and then in-game coin.
In Pop Boom, you can pick any bubble and place them anywhere to make a popping line sequence. So the game is faster comparing to games where gems, bubbles or jewels are swapped. Also if you can strategically arrange before popping it. Some time bubble bombs will appear and including them in the match will make the bubbles go boom.
There are two powerups available to buy in the game; Bombs and extra time powerups. Powerups can be bought with coins which can be earned or bough with Facebook credits. The bomb powerup offers you a bubble bomb at launch, and the extra time powerup adds an additional 5 seconds to the game.
The game has very few, but competitive social element. You can publish an open challenge to all your friends or challenge a particuler friend. The right section list the top three scorers in your friends network.
Even if gifts cannot be send, you can publish a request for bomb gifts from friends, and they will sent you through the published request.
The dialog for publishing feed does not have the usual “Skip” option. Click on the “Publish” button to publish or hit the “X” on the right-hand corner to close the dialog.
If you want a few minutes of competition with your friends on some new arcade game, give Pop Boom a try.
(Go to the application)
Many people might have already heard about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going to donate to help revamp Newark schools.
The news hit the world yesterday and my first though was “wow.” I looked around for more details and all i got was everyone saying how he is trying to save his image.
Well you got to, looking at the amount of generosity and the timing. This donation is by far the biggest Zuckerberg made so far. He even donated to the anti-Facebook project Diaspora. Facebook’s movie, The Social Network, opens the 48th New York Film Festival, while Zuckerberg discuss about the donation on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Adding to it, Facebook’s outage hit the news all over the globe.
Zuckerberg’s gift will make sure that he is listed not only in the Forbes rich list, but also in the list of generous billionaires.
The bottom line, personally, is that he has done something good even if he harbors a symbiotic reason behind the smiling face. What do you think?
All of you must have experienced Facebook outage yesterday.
The site was completely down. Even the “Like” buttons scattered across the Web were not working, rendering they useless and causing loading error.
The problem, which was apparently due to a glitch in the Facebook’s network’s database software, was so bad that it left Facebook with no choice but shut down the entire site to fix it, according to the company’s official blog post.
“The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition,” said Robert Johnson, Facebook’s director of software engineering the blog post, “An automated system verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed. The software designed to detect and fix errors backfired, and added to the original problem.
This is one of the worst outage of Facebook, since its inception.
Anyway, the problem is fixed now and most users are happily logged into their account as usual, but most advertisers may be pondering about the loss incurred due to the outage, for which Facebook has not mentioned anything.
On my end, Facebook was unavailable for around 2 hours. What about you?
Here’s the response from Facebook about yesterday’s two and a half hour site outage.
Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned.
The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.
The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn’t work when the persistent store is invalid.
Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.
To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.
The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful – we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.
This got the site back up and running today, and for now we’ve turned off the system that attempts to correct configuration values. We’re exploring new designs for this configuration system following design patterns of other systems at Facebook that deal more gracefully with feedback loops and transient spikes.
We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously.
Playing games on Facebook is fun, but the newsfeed it generates is annoying. So in an effort to increase gaming experience and keeping in mind the users who have nothing to do with games on Facebook, Facebook annouced Tuesday night that it will change the way notifications regarding to games are published, making them less intrusive.
“People who use Facebook either tend to tell us that they love playing games or hate them, and we haven’t had the right tools to enable developers to grow their games while at the same time providing a great user experience for non-gamers. We’re building more sophisticated tools that will allow us all to be more successful against those goals,” wrote Jared Morgenstern on Facebook blog.
(Source: Facebook)
The most notable change is, users will not be intruded with newsfeeds of games/applications they don’t use. For example, if you don’t play FarmVille, you will not receive any notifications regarding the game or feeds about who found a blah blah blah, but Facebook may add notifications about your friends and the game they play or have joined, leaving it up to you to join the game. Morgenstern explains “By showing fewer but more impactful News Feed stories based on friends’ activity and social context, we hope to drive new user growth for games.”
Other changes includes displaying full game stories since they are shown uniquely to those play. Game bookmarks will be added and reordered automatically according to usage. Invitations and gifts will be highlighted next to the bookmark.
I feel this is one of the best changes in regard to game feedbacks. Let us know your views on this latest change. Facebook also said it updated its developers policy to make them more flexible instead of putting into force rigid rules. Morgenstern explains about it by an example, “we no longer prevent you from encouraging users to interact with their friends through Facebook’s communication channels when they come back to a game. Instead, we’ve focused our policies to only restrict spammy applications who want new users to invite friends before they’ve even tried the application.”
