United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) launched a Facebook application called “Help a Child” to aid their various projects for giving food, shelter, safety, education etc. to children in developing countries.
In Help a Child application, users creates, adopts, and look after a a virtual child.
While creating your virtual child, you can choose from various countries of origin, age, sex and the child’s first name and your surname will be given to them.
Your virtual child will need food and other basic items from time to time. You can provide by donating to UNICEF or without donating.
The fund collected through the Facebook application will be use to aid the different UNICEF projects around the world.
If you appreciate all the good and relentless service UNICEF is providing to needy children around the world, then this is a nice opportunity to partner with them and help them out whenever you can.
It doesn’t matter even if you cannot donate anything. You can show your appreciation and support just by creating and caring for a child to show that you care.
(Go To Help a Child App)
FarmVille, the most popular social game on Facebook has been finally dethroned by another Facebook app that has nothing to do with anything called games.
Phrases is an app that allows users to post a variety of content to their newsfeed including quotes, images, and quizzes. Takeoff Monkey takes the credit as the developer of the app.
Phrases was able to edge pass FarmVille barely, but it is surely a great achievement to take down FarmVille that ruled the chart for 15 months. According to appdata, Phrases has around 54.4 million monthly average users, while FarmVille stood with around 53.9 million.
Phrases is certainly making news but it is believed that it doesn’t have what it takes to continue its run. Takeoff Monkey is said to have disabled the app for U.S. users recently without any explaination according to Inside Facebook.
According to Gamasutra, FarmVille is still the top dog with around 16 million daily active users, and Windows Live Messenger with 9.7 million daily users is the closest competitor.
Facebook plans to introduce encryption of user IDs as a move to beef up security and to respond to the concerns raised by the recent privacy breach through Facebook apps.
WSJ recently reported that Facebook apps were transmitting user IDs to outside companies. Such information can be used to identify the users and link actions at other websites.
Mike Vernal, Facebook engineer, said “while initial press reports greatly exaggerated the implications” of sharing UIDs, he assured that Facebook is taking the issue very seriously.
Vernal says the issue of data sharing via HTTP headers is a Web-wide problem, and is not limited to Facebook.
“When a browser loads images or other resources on a Web page, it will sometimes send an HTTP header that identifies the URL of the Web page containing the resource. For one type of application written on Facebook Platform (iframe-based canvas applications), after a user has authorized the application, the URL of the iframe may contain the UID of the user. This UID is included in order to enable the application to build a personalized experience for the user.”
He also added that some Facebook developers are already implementing page redirection or “double framing” to remove UIDs from URLs.
The proposed encryption will prevent the accidental disclosure of information via HTTP headers.
Facebook plans to enable parameter encryption as an option to developers over the next few weeks, before it is bundled with various Facebook SDKs.
Facebook account is a mess at times. Newsfeed and notifications sort of spam your homepage and in the mist of all these, important notifications goes unnoticed at times and leaves you fuming or embarrassed.
Thankfully, Facebook is going to become a little more tidier and less annoying. Now your “notifications” on Facebook will be for things like comments left on your posts or Profile wall.
Facebook announced today that beginning next Monday, March1, 2010, they are not going to deliver application notifications anymore.
Developers and their apps will be required to use less intrusive methods of sending news to users.
Many developers will not be very happy about the decision as it will push them out of the user’s line of sight. Many developers tries to notify all users of anything, at any and all opportunities because those notifications drive traffic.
Facebook have recently given permission to ask app users for their email addresses, which can be use to email app notifications directly. Facebook also advises developers to make use of the recently added Applications and Games dashboards to share lightweight messages.
Nothing have been mention about any affect on the newsfeed.
Personally, i would like it better if Facebook does something about the newsfeed generated by apps. But at least, clearing off the clutters in the notification section is one headache less during my time spend on Facebook.
So, watch out for the changes to go into effect on Monday, and let us know about your views on this too.
Almost everybody knows that the British economy has been affected tremendously by the recession. They also continue to have a hard time getting back on their feet. Unexpectedly, one of the things that are helping this economy is the unprecedented growth of mobile phone and social networking apps.
Facebook is one of those social networking sites that help the British economy. How? Facebook is open to third party developers. So people who are not working for the social networking site can create applications that will be used for there. The apps are free to use but the developers profit from this through online purchases of their gaming items and currency. Currently, the site is probably the best gaming platform for 2009. This is due to the fact that they have approximately 350 million users worldwide and about one fifth of the users play online games.
The British company, Playfish, is one of the third party developers who create apps for the social networking site. They have been made famous by developing games like “Restaurant City”, “Country Story”, “World Challenge”, “Crazy Planets”, and “Bowling Buddies”. However, its most famous Facebook apps are “Pet Society” and “Who has the Biggest Brain?”. In November, they profited $275 million or £172 million when the Electronic Arts, a big videogame company, acquired them.
Another British company, Mind Candy, became very popular worldwide with their Facebook app, Moshi Monsters. Recently, they have gained about 16,000 monthly active Facebook users. This game allows players to adopt their very own pet monster.
Profit from these apps may reach $1 billion before the year ends. This number is expected to balloon up to $1.6 billion next year. The British will definitely have a part of this huge profit.
Below are the top 10 Facebook Applications for the month of November, 2009. The number to the right is the total monthly pageviews.
| 1. |
 |
FarmVille |
Zynga |
63,127,411 |
0.32 |
| 2. |
 |
Causes |
Causes |
35,191,622 |
0.22 |
| 3. |
 |
Café World |
Zynga |
28,336,239 |
1.28 |
| 4. |
 |
Mafia Wars |
Zynga |
25,741,767 |
0.28 |
| 5. |
 |
Happy Aquarium (BETA) |
CrowdStar |
23,110,940 |
1.58 |
| 6. |
 |
Pet Society |
Playfish |
21,587,461 |
0.31 |
| 7. |
 |
We’re Related |
Familylink.com |
20,416,342 |
-0.86 |
| 8. |
 |
YoVille |
Zynga |
19,804,446 |
0.10 |
| 9. |
 |
Texas HoldEm Poker |
Zynga |
18,765,028 |
0.05 |
| 10. |
 |
Farm Town |
SlashKey |
18,483,253 |
-0.28 |
Courtesy of All Facebook.
If you’re an avid gamer on Facebook or visit various application pages, you could be at risk for being hacked. Chief Research Officer, Roger Thompson, has come across a half-dozen Facebook games and application pages that have been affected. Although hacked profiles are not uncommon, this is the first that Thompson has seen application being hacked.
According to Thompson’s findings, these hackers have somehow put “iframes” (small hidden computer code) into each of the pages that users go to in order to use the apps and games. If you’re running outdated Adobe software, you’re vulnerable. If you are running an outdated version of Adobe Reader and its patches are not updated, you could be hacked. Adobe released a new Acrobat version this week which repairs approximately 29 vulnerabilities. In July, Thompson wrote a column, “PC Infections Often Spread To Websites”, and in there he explains how malware can place malicious iframes into the available web page files on the victims PC in order to further spread the virus.
Facebook spokesman Simon Axton released a statement to Security Fix saying “This was a low volume attack affecting a small number of applications with relatively few users. However, we take all reports of malicious activity seriously and quickly placed a moratorium on the applications yesterday afternoon making them unavailable. We also contacted the developers to notify them of the issue so they can fix it. We won’t make the applications available again until the problem has been resolved.”
Make sure you run the latest updates from Adobe to protect yourself. Again, this is an eye opener to the fact that your information is never “safe” out there and third party software can pose a huge risk even though you’re accessing it through a trusted site
