Facebook recently updated the Events feature in a bid to make it easier to create and manage Events.
Facebook Events engineer Bob Baldwin says the new invite features will make the experience “feel more similar to inviting someone via SMS/email and getting back their response“.
Changes have been made to four key areas; creating events, inviting, declining, and the Events’ wall.
Setting up is now easier with fewer fields to add. Creators can just add a name, date, and privacy setting to get started. Details, location, and time can be added later, making Events a nice tool for planning casual get-together too. There is now a friends privacy option (public and invite only) and support for timezones.
Changes made to the wall include making the wall primarily for those guest who are attending or might do so. It also works more like the Groups feed. One can follow individual posts and ask questions. Wall posts are now shown in order of engagement. So, posts get bumped to the top when someone comments.
Event creator will now receive notification when someone accepts an invite. Facebook will also show a list of guest suggestion on the right so that hosts can make sure that they haven’t missed out friends. Multiple people can be listed as hosts, so users can expect multiple invitations of an Event (talk about peer pressure!)
Declining is much more personal now. If you decline an event, only the people who invited you will see the declination. Same with your reason for doing so.
Do you use Facebook Events? What do you think about the changes?
Facebook have introduced Interest Lists, which allows users to create personalized public or private lists of subscribers and Pages.
With this feature, users can now have a personalized News Feed that only features Pages and subscribers related to a particular topic.
Facebook says the new feature is “a new way to keep up with the stuff you care about and tidy up your experience” turning your News Feed “into your own personalized newspaper” with special sections for topics that matter to you.
As usual, Interest List will be rolled out to all users in the coming weeks. You will soon find an “Add Interests” link in your left-hand bookmarks. Top stories from each interest will appear in your news feed so you can scan interesting headlines or click through to read more posts.
Only a creator of a list can edit it and choose the privacy settings. Adding more social element to the feature, users can recommend lists to each other too.
If you use other social sites like Twitter or Flipboard, then you will find this new feature sounds like something you already know about.
Still, I am sure am gonna love this Interests List a lot. What about you?
All the rampant speculations about what could be the “something awesome” things Facebook was going to offer was put to rest when Facebook finally announced the integration of Skype into their platform, that would allow users to video chat with their friends.
Google unveiled its own version of Facebook, dubbed “Google+” with video chat features about a week ago. So, by offering video chats, Facebook can not only lure more audience, but also avert user defections.
Facebook also announced that it has more than 750 million users.
The Skype-Facebook integration is relatively simple, compared to the features that Skype offers for PCs. It currently supports one-to-one video calls only.
Video calling will be available to all over the next few weeks, but for those who can’t wait, get it now.
Yahoo Mail recently got a makeover and it is filled to the brim with new features and improvements. Among the many improvements, performance has been boosted to twice as much than before according to the company.
Here is a quick look at the features:
Performance: The Company claims that its mail is now twice as fast. Let’s take their word on it.
Improved Search: You can now filter out emails with different kinds of attachments including PDF files, photos, videos and music etc.
Social Integration: Yahoo Mail is already has already integrated Facebook and now a robust Twitter integration is also been made. You can now read and post status updates directly from the “What’s New” page. Apart from that, the update Yahoo Mail enables you to dock multiple SMS or conversations in one window allowing you to multi task easily like check mails while you easily keep up with any conversations.
Apart from the performance boost and more social integration, the new Yahoo Mail, according to the company, offers better spam protection, unlimited storage, improved slideshows and video streaming that can be now viewed without leaving the message.
However, the new Yahoo Mail is in beta and is not yet integrated with the company’s classic mail service (this is the first time Yahoo plans to redesign its Mail service since 2005). Users will have to opt in to try out this new beta.
(Try the new Yahoo Mail beta here)
Celebrating it’s 6th anniversary, Facebook has rolled out a new layout for the home page. The prominent changes are:
Notifications: All the latest notifications, requests and messages will be accessible from a new button available beside the search bar on the profile home page.
Left menu: The left menu have been organized to make it easier to communicate and discover content from friends, access messages and other features.
Games Dashboard: Games dashboard have been added to make it easier for gamers to find and interact with applications and discover new ones. The dashboard will show the applications that have been used recently as well as your most recent application activity and your friends’ activity. Gamers will also start to see counters next to the bookmarked applications, which will notify when a specific action is to be taken, so that users don’t miss out on their turn in a game or an update from a friend in an application.
If you don’t find anything new on your homepage, do not freak out. The changes are being rolled out to a small number of users initially, and will be deployed more widely and you will be able to see the changes pretty soon.
Despite all the changes, notifications and live feeds about games and applications, if you would rather not have your recent application activity visible in the dashboards to your friends, you can change this through your Privacy settings.
We’ll bring you more updates on these revamped and new updates as we get more information on it. Do let us know about your experience using these new updates.
