Facebook Watcher

Facebook intends to add 22 new languages and integrate these languages to their platform, so that users can open their profiles, add friends, or etc. in their own native languages. Open the Translations application will see there are 22 new languages currently open for translation, this include: Català, Čeština, Dansk, Euskara, Galego, Italiano, 한국어, Magyar, 日本語, Norsk, Nederlands, Polski, Português do Brasil, Română, Русский, Slovenščina, Suomi, Svenska, ภาษาไทย, Türkçe, 中文(简体), 中文(繁體). If you’re interested in doing Facebook a favor, please visit the Translation page.

Most recently, Facebook has launched its German and French versions, with the availability of Spanish and English version as well.

Do a blog need an introduction? I finally feel the need to have one, as posted on my another blog, i.e. TagEdge.com: Introducing Facebook Watcher.

Google has lost another high-profile executive to Facebook in less than a month. Ethan Beard, Google Director of Business Development has resigned from the company and will start work at Facebook. Why Facebook over Google, Ethan Beard told TechCrunch:

I think Facebook is great for a variety of reasons: the company has an innovative product with amazing growth, the team they have assembled is first rate, and the business is at a very exciting time in its development. I am excited to join Facebook at a time and in a role where I can have a significant impact on its core business and bottom line.

Other Facebook high-profile executives that previously worked at Google include Sheryl Sandberg (now COO), and Gideon Yu (now CFO).

via [TechCrunch]

According to Sohu of China, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing has officially announced his investment about $100 million in one of the world’s hottest social networking site, i.e. Facebook, despite TOM Group, a company he holds a majority stake has denied the news before. According to the Sohu news, his mobile phone division, Hutchison-Whampoa’s mobile products will likely be allowed to access Facebook in the near future.

“Facebook is doing very well and we could have some synergy between the 3G services of Hutchison and Facebook, so the customers could use Facebook on mobile phones,” Li said during an earnings news conference for his company Hutchison Whampoa Ltd.

This investment showed that the value of Facebook in Asia is potentially increasing especially in the Hong Kong and China market.

Have you came across the statement of “People You May Know” on your Facebook profile? I came across it few times and it is a new feature that quietly released by Facebook. It will automatically prompt you by recommending few friends that you may know through your existing friends. I think it is a good feature to the users, and good feature must be tabled. With this “People You May Know,” a Facebook user will be alerted by the friends they know but not yet added to the existing friends page. Once you adding those friends that recommended by Facebook, your profile will definitely look differently.

via [CNET]

Since The Washington Post launched its Facebook app (application), i.e. The Compass, it was making headlines and gained favorably acceptance by a huge crowd of Facebook users. You can read the personal blog of Rob Curley, as he wrote:

“Still, the numbers for our Facebook app are very respectable. For the first several weeks, The Compass was one of the Top 10 most-downloaded apps on Facebook, and even cracked the Top 5 a couple of times.”

“As of today, The Compass has about 300,000 Facebook users who have it on their profile page, which still puts it in the Top 50 most-downloaded Facebook apps.”

As of today, The Washington Post Facebook app has reached another milestone, by reaching the 350,000 downloads since its first appeared on the Facebook platform. And thus, Beet.TV has interviewed the Executive Editor of The Washington Post.com, where you can watch the video in the below.

It should be noted that not long ago, in November last year, The Washington Post also developed another application called, newsTracker, a kind of app that allowed users to create their personalized news feeds, according to their preferences on the topics that appeal important to them.

The Compass:

newsTracker:

via [Beet.TV]

Most recently, Facebook introduced the “Friends of Friends” privacy option, and if you’re like me, not familiar with how to customize the privacy options available on your Facebook profile in the first place, you should watch this video, and of course, I’ve also embedded the video in the below.

This video demonstrate how to create a Friend List, from the Friend List you created, you can group your friends to the aforesaid list and work from it, such as share your information with them or restrict them from accessing your certain information.

According to AP, the private photographs of celebrity Paris Hilton and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg have been exposed by a Vancouver, Canada computer technician namely Byron Ng. Ng was reported that he has started to look for the Facebook security weaknesses since last week and surely he found his way to access to some Facebook private photos that were supposedly be protected. It was a serious blow to Facebook as they just launched two new security features which include a “Friends of Friends” privacy option last week. It seemed like for some unscrupulous hackers, the tricks they’re manipulating could helped them in divulge personal information of all the Facebook users, including you and me. That is sad, and identified as a predictor that Facebook is still not at its best to protect the valuable users’ data.

Though Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said Facebook was patched the bug after the security alert within an hour, this is neither the first time nor the last time a Facebook photo flaw can be found on the Web. A blog called laatedaa has published a post on the issue of Facebook private photos code in January, on that blog, an user can simply follow the instructions and enter the Web address, she is allowed to access to somebody’s Facebook private photo albums. (Update: A most latest comment showed that the code doesn’t work anymore)

Nonetheless, that such security flaw happen is alarming. We, as the Facebook users didn’t have much choice in preventing the revelation of data.

via [AP]

Last week, a video-sharing community site Vimeo has launched its Facebook app. By adding this application, Facebook users can showcase the videos they uploaded to Vimeo site to their friends directly on their profiles. It seemed likely that this is a big news for existing Vimeo users, with a great chance to share their videos in a totally different channel.

By late 2007, there are so many video related applications listed on Facebook application directory. However, Vimeo would not viewed as an inferior product compared to other similar type of applications as it was distributed videos with a resolution of 1280 pixels by 720 pixels, the standard for high-definition. According to New York Post, Vimeo is the first Web site to make high-definition available for user-generated videos. Don’t count them out.

Today I was reading a brief description of an article that Facebook U.K. users have been fell to historical 8.3 million in February. According to that article, this is a survey done by Nielsen U.K. Though I can’t access to the full details of that survey, issues on the continual weakening of Facebook particularly in the U.K. can be easily found on the Web. On the business side, with the huge popularity of Facebook, it is undoubtedly Facebook has became a research focus for all the market intelligence firms. But isn’t that Facebook hasn’t really done its jobs in the U.K., but at least Hitwise said Facebook was still very strong.

In January, Hitwise research director concluded that Facebook has attracted one user out of fifty (50) in terms of Internet visits. Moreover, Facebook’s market share has increased 10-fold over the past 12 months. Maybe we had a question on our minds, February is not equal to January, Facebook U.K. is not really perform that well, but the latest Hitwise data makes us clear that they’re still growing. As another Hitwise data showed that Facebook’s U.K. market share has been increasing again since the start of February and is now at its highest level since the middle of December.

Source: available at http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/03/is_facebook_on_the_decline_in_the_uk.html, accessed 21 March 2008