Facebook Watcher

Facebook has rolled out some of the new updates to its users’ profile pages. Two changes I noticed are the mini-feeds and the new feature of adding friend to your Facebook. From now on, mini-feeds is no longer can be collapsed based on one’s preference. It was not merely a tiny column appeared on user’s profile page; it was served as a permanent box for all your stories/history of what you’ve done on Facebook, albeit with stories are restricted to a list of ten (10) maximum to be shown.

Users are allowed to remove any stories that they do not want to show, but not advised to try to remove the whole mini-feeds, as told by Facebook.

Meanwhile, when you adding your friends to your Facebook, the add friend box now featured an advanced friending capability, by directly adding your new friend to a new Friend List. This save you time and effort in categorize your friends into different list after your friends accepted your Facebook friends request.

In addition, one of the Facebook’s high-profile features such as “People You May Know” reflected Facebook’s well known prowess in recommendation technology. Justin Smith of Inside Facebook said that there was a new tab called “Apps You May Like,” however, I still only see my first tab in the Application Directory remained as “Recently Popular.” I’m not sure this new application recommendation feature is only available to the U.S. users, as all the bloggers announced this news are from the U.S.

I’ve been reviewed some of the Facebook clones in China recently. To know the background of these clones, check out these here: Xiaonei, QQ Xiaoyou, and Hainei. Or if you dare to build your own social network, and not willingly rely on the features of the social platforms such as Ning, a software company based in Chennai, India called Agriya Infoway India Pvt Ltd. said that they can help. Agriya Infoway India now offered a software package namely Kootali which cost $399 that will let you to replicate everything, from design to features from Facebook to your own site.

Does this mean that the Facebook clones will become a new emerging trend in the social networking industry? Hardly.

Facebook has quietly released a new search feature for users. Now whenever users type a letter onto their profiles’ search bar, a small dialog box will prompt out and show all their friends, groups, or applications that match those keywords. See the picture below.

Facebook is not the place barely for users to social networking with each other, or making some business contacts. With an application called Causes built by Project Agape, Facebook users can now act as the good social network citizens and help making our world a better place to live.

According to The Tech Chronicles, Causes on Facebook has raised $2.5 million in charitable donations from about 40,000 users to help nearly 20,000 groups. At the same time, it attracted more than 12 million users with a global vision of supporting 80,000 non-profit causes.

In an interview conducted by Contribute Magazine, Causes on Facebook co-founder Joseph Green said, “Nonprofits tend to focus their fundraising efforts just on the wealthy. But cause networking unleashes the power of a multitude of younger, mainstream donors and gives what they care about a way to be heard.” Adds Sean Parker, “Facebook Causes is a way of leveraging the power of your social network to raise money or ultimately achieve a social goal. We’re very much trying to take social dynamics that exist in the real world and represent them online, which wasn’t really possible a few years ago.”

Facebook plans to unveil a new redesign of profile page to its nearly 70 million members. The new profile page will incorporate features that make a member’s profile more cleaner, simpler, and ultimately less cluttered. According to Facebook blog, this new changes in profile pages are coming soon.

From the preview of this new profile page, you’ll find that the new redesign is all about tabs. User’s information will be organized into a better layout, instead of the previous one single long page. There will be few tabs allowed: personal information, news feeds, photos, applications, etc. On the top of the profile page, you’ll see that there’s three different tabs, Wall, where you can post a wall message, About, contains personal information or data such as address, history and Photos, a place where you can browse and upload photos to the profile.

At first glance, another changes will be the organization of the sidebar. At now, Notes and video are slotted into the left hand side, but under the new redesign of profile page, they are in the right hand side, and carefully notice the mini-feed, the new changes will only display five stories, not the ten (10) stories as we getting used to. One thing for sure, those members who created a long one page profile page can no longer view their profile pages in the same way again.

Consider the new redesign of profile page demands the input of feedback from the Facebook users, Facebook plans to introduce changes slowly, allowing a selected group of testers to use it in June next month before making it available to all of its members later. Meanwhile, Web developers that created third-party applications for Facebook will be given chances to step into sandbox and play with the new design this week.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has opened a profile on Facebook, but if you want to add him as your friends, you’ll not sure which one is his real profile. Today Reuters provides a hint in an article entitled, “The real Steve Ballmer has a golfclub on Facebook.”

“If you actually look there’s about 10 Steve Ballmers and I’m only one of them,” Ballmer told reporters on Thursday.

“I’m the one who actually has a picture that looks like me on it and I’ll tell you a hint — I’m hitting a golf ball. That’s the real Steve Ballmer.”

Facebook has announced that its chat service is now available to all of its users. This service is crucial, as its current Inbox and Wall, where your friends posted messages on the space of your profile can’t really appeal to some rabid users. In fact, this chat service was launched incrementally, as some testers have the opportunities to use it before it is fully goes live. However, it isn’t perfect yet, as Facebook promised that they’ll gradually improve this newly global launched service.

For Facebook users, every one of you will see a small tiny chat bar to be appeared at the bottom right hand side of your profile when you first log-in.

TypePad has launched a free Facebook application called Blog It. It is widely considered as a valuable tool to help a Facebook user on update her blogs and Web services from within her Facebook account. One you installed this app (application), you can add different accounts you owned elsewhere, such as Blogger, Twitter, Pownce, Movable Type or WordPress, and with this app, it allowed you to post your latest update, blog post from inside your Facebook profile. I thought it would be cool for a Facebook user to post a blog post, or latest update without leaving Facebook. Consider that an user having to log-in multiple accounts and re-type a same message is trivial.

Assume you’ve a lot of friends on Facebook, simply post to blog will likely to increase the number of people who see your post. It is due to the fact that when you post to your blogs, this activity will also be included in your Facebook’s mini-feed, and your friends will definitely aware of your latest post appeared onto your blogs. However, one disadvantage is that you won’t find all the helpful editors such as Italic, Underline, Tagging, Insert Image to post on this tool. To illustrate this, I’ve inserted a picture in below, and you can see this “Post to Blog”, it was restricted to a simple interface temporarily. On the other hand, if you want to post your latest notification to some micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter or Pownce, you’ll find how useful this Blog It was rendered.

Currently, Blog It supports TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, Vox, WordPress.com, and WordPress self-hosting blogging platform.

Picture 1: Blog It

Picture 2: Post to Blog

via [allfacebook]

Buddy Media, a NY-based startup that well-known for a Facebook application called AceBucks has raised $6.5 million in a round B financing. This round of financing was led by Softbank, and joined by several other venture capital firms such as European Founders Fund, GreyCroft Partners, a Silicon Valley angel investor, i.e. Ron Conway with participation of fourteen (14) of the Buddy Media’s Series A investors. Prior to this round, they’ve also raised $1.5 million at the time of their official launch in September last year.

Meanwhile, Buddy Media also announced the official launch of its Buddy Media Ad Network. This Ad Network is an eagerly awaited products for the advertisers and social media developers. It represents the next major release of an advertising platform that built-in with some notable features which include pricing flexibility, powerful targeting, quality traffic, and etc.

Since Buddy Media’s first inception on the Web, it has been trying to position itself as a Facebook application provider. Other the aforesaid AceBucks, a virtual currency application, it also released some Skyworks games such as Sudoku, Air Hockey, Pub Darts, Mental Blocks, and Corn Hole. However, Buddy Media’s most significant move is that it has acquired two Facebook app companies, ChipIn in January this year for five of its Facebook app (Vampires vs. Werewolves, Pirates vs. Ninjas, Skiers vs. Snowboarders, Santa vs. The Grinch, Cops vs. Robbers) and Crushes in last November.

According to Facebook blog, they’ve released a decent tool called Lexicon. It is a tool which help to track the buzz surrounding different words or phrases posted on Facebook Walls over a period of time. However, Facebook respect the privacy of its users, no personal information have been collected in the process of pulling all these data for Lexicon purposes.

Lexicon has a Web-friendly interface, with back-end Flash Player to display the data compared. An user can compare up to five different words or two-word phrases and see how many people talked about that term each day, or over seven months. I’ve played around it to compare the words Friendship and Networking, as shown in the picture below. One limitation is you’ll never know what is the latest word, phrase that most frequently appeared across profiles, groups and event Walls every day, in spite of it rates high on my wish list at this moment. Again, this is a Facebook’s privacy issue.