Facebook update hits Windows Phone 7

On Wednesday, Microsoft made available an update to the Windows Phone 7 Facebook application, which is available for free on the marketplace. Before today, Windows Phone 7 users have had a frustrating time using Facebook on their phones. The application was slow, non-responsive and lacked many features. 

The update comes with some noteable new features, including Facebook Places (with your GPS, too), in-app photo tagging, as well as allowing the application to continue running under screen lock (A feature we couldn't live without), as well as a massive performance increase.

The update also features a slightly different interface, with larger fonts, and the application is responsive to the touch while still loading. Even so, we aren't quite sure why the keyboard still doesn't match the application though -- when the dark theme is selected, the keyboard shows up black even though the entire application is white and blue.

With the Windows Phone 7 marketplace surpassing 4000 applications and Microsoft announcing that they had shipped 1.5 Million devices, it's been a big week for Windows Phone 7. To get the application, go to the applications page on Zune; or visit the marketplace on your phone to grab the update.

Office plays a part in new Facebook messaging system

As part of Facebook's new messaging system, Microsoft's Office Web Apps will enable people to view Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents attached to their Facebook messages.

The integration allows people to view Office documents within the Facebook website, Microsoft said. Microsoft has already integrated Office Web Apps and Facebook with Docs.com, which allows for document editing and sharing within Facebook.

This morning, Facebook announced a revamped messaging service that integrates e-mail, including the availability of @facebook.com e-mail addresses to all of its users. More information is here. (The AP will continue to update that article -- the news conference just ended.)

Also, here's more information on The Big Blog, from Facebook and from Microsoft.

Report: Facebook worth $41b; third largest Internet company

Facebook may be the third largest Internet company in the United States, with an estimated value of $41 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Facebook's privately held shares are trading at $16 a share, which puts its estimate worth at about $41 billion, higher than eBay, which is currently worth $39.3 billion. Facebook is still trailing behind Amazon, worth $74.4 billion, while Google still maintains the top spot worth $192.9 billion.

However, analysts won't know exactly how much Facebook is worth until their shares are available in a public offering. Currently Facebook only trades on SecondMarket, which does not publicly release trade values, but one man who did not want to be identified said Facebook is trading at $16 a share, which is almost up 50% since last month.

The massive jump could be due to Facebook's big announcement, Project Titan, an email service offering from Facebook. The "Gmail killer" is expected to have a strong social network integration embedded in its email service, a serious threat to Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

Facebook announces Facebook Email - @facebook.com

Today Facebook held a press conference for their latest announcement. The company announced that they will be launching an email service for Facebook, but with a twist. The new email service will have a chat-like service so users can communicate between one another.

Facebook announced that there is 350 million active users using the service today, that is an astonishing number, compared to the 550 million registered users the site contains. People share up to 4 billion messages on a daily basis, through the chat feature.

The new Facebook Email service won't be your traditional email service, but with a social networking, immediate chat twist. The new email service will be able to help speed up how users communicate with one another, through email.

The three main features to the service will have seamless messaging, conversation history and a social inbox. Users will be able to have an @facebook.com email address, and with that email, they'll be able to have instant inbox alerts, the same concept as Google Instant Search, with conversation history and a social inbox, using an algorithm to filter out all the messages you don't want.

The email address will use your public vanity url. If you currently have a www.facebook.com/yournamehere, you be able to register your yournamehere@facebook.com vanity. The email service is completely optional to users, and isn't forced onto users.

Adjusting your Facebook email settings is easy. You'll be able to move your favourite contacts into your direct inbox, getting instant alerts from your top friends. You'll also have a second message center, with contacts that aren't on your priority list.

Microsoft will also play a role in the Facebook email inbox, with Outlook Web Apps. With Web Apps integration, users will be able to use Microsoft Office documents like Word, Excel and PowerPoint to share with friends and family, a feature already integrated with Facebook and docs.com.

Users will also get to connect their account with Windows Live SkyDrive, offering up to 25GB of online storage for school work, photos, and personal documents you can share across computers, friends or use as additional storage.

The Facebook iPhone application will receive an update very shortly, with the new inbox messaging system. Users will also be able to send and receive messages via SMS, so you'll be able to text your friends, and have it appear on their Facebook page instantly.

Facebook also explained their reasoning for purchasing fb.com. Media contacts and staff at Facebook will use @fb.com email addresses, while every user will be able to use @facebook.com.

 

Update: You are now able to request an invitation here, though there is no word of when you will receive one.

Windows Live Messenger logs 1.5 billion minutes on Facebook

Windows Live Essentials 2011 launched only a month ago, including Windows Live Messenger with Facebook Connect. The partnership has paid off very well for both Microsoft and Facebook, as Windows Live Messenger has become the second most popular application on a daily basis on Facebook.

ReadWriteWeb took notice today that Messenger has taken second place, and later confirmed and updated with more statistics by Windows Team Blog. Messenger has over 9 million active users daily, and over 11.5 million active users every month. There has also been 250 million chats between Messenger and Facebook, logging 1.5 billion minutes.

Windows Live Messenger is second to FarmVille, which has over 16.6 million users daily, but still a success for Microsoft and Facebook. As the relationship between Microsoft and Facebook continues to grow, we can expect greater integration of your Facebook account with Microsoft products.

To activate Facebook chat through Windows Live Messenger, login with your Windows Live ID on this website and enable "Chat with my Facebook friends in Messenger." This does require a Facebook account and Windows Live Messenger 2011.

Facebook tests smaller font size in News Feed

Users logging onto Facebook today may notice a subtle change; the font size of items on a user's News Feed has been dropped. At this point, it appears only the News Feed is affected, with font sizes remaining unchanged on pages, events and messages. Facebook has made no announcement about the change.
Unsurprisingly, many users are upset at the change and have vented their anger on Twitter.

Facebook users are notoriously fickle when it comes to site redesigns, and previous changes have been met with open hostility.

The font size change comes just hours before an event at the company's Palo Alto headquarters at which Facebook will make an announcement related to its efforts in the mobile space, though there is no suggestion the two are linked. The social networking giant has refused to give any details about the nature of today's announcement, leading to speculation about a so-called ''Facebook phone''.

Update: Techtickle have posted instructions on how to use the Greasemonkey Firefox add-on and a script to restore the News Feed font to its previous size.

Facebook buys content sharing service drop.io

It looks like Facebook has plans to continue branching into areas of the social networking world that the company has yet to penetrate. Over the weekend, drop.io, a popular private content sharing platform, announced via their blog, that Facebook has made an acquisition deal with them that would effectively shut down the service as is. It is as of yet unknown what plans Facebook has in store for the new assets.

Drop.io is a content sharing service that allows users to set up “drops” for a specified amount of time and for a specified group of users to share various types of content. Free drops allow 100MB of storage, but you can pay for more. According to the blog post, as of this week, users will no longer be able to create new drops. Currently active drops will stay active until December 15, at which point the entire service will go dead.

Facebook’s acquisition of the company has analysts wondering what the goal really is with drop.io. The recent announcement of Facebook Groups had users jumping for joy at the prospect of sharing social media with only a specific subset of users in a meaningful and streamlined way. While the current groups solution isn’t ideal for many, and the opt-out structure of the service definitely can get irksome, the idea of sharing multimedia content with specific groups is something that could conceivably result from this purchase. According to PCWorld, Facebook looks like they may be more interested in the developers rather the actual IP that the company offers, offering another argument for an integrated media sharing technology rather than a standalone Facebook service.

Twitter adds 30 million users; Growing as fast as Facebook

Twitter seems to have exploded in the last few months, making an impressive amount of headway in the social network realm in the past year. Twitter has added over 30 million users in the past two months, according to TechCrunch.

Since the launch of the new Twitter home page two months ago, the site has acquired over 30 million users. The new design could explain the massive increase in users over the last two months, as the sites re-design is much easier to use and navigate, not to mention it actually looks nice.

What's more surprising is Twitter is actually growing as fast as Facebook, the number one social network in the world. Both Facebook and Twitter are growing by 15 million members per month, as more and more users are joining on the social network bandwagon.

Twitter is now 175 million members strong, but Facebook is still far ahead of pack with 500 million users announced back in July, and an estimated 545 million users as of today.

Facebook’s master plan to poach Orkut users in India and Brazil

Over the past six to seven months, Orkut has faced a severe downfall in many countries. People have slowly started loving Facebook and its awesome features such as apps, question & answers, unlimited HD photo sharing and many more.

Currently, Orkut mainly has its userbase left only in India and Brazil, and maybe a few pockets here and there.  So to capture that market, Facebook has launched a ‘master plan’ of sorts! It is promoting a new application for their users located in India and Brazil.

If you’re a person residing in India and Brazil, when you log in your Facebook account, you can see a small app hovering over the top of the page which highlights and allows users to connect their Facebook account with their Orkut account. As I already said, to capture the market, the whole idea is to get users to migrate from Orkut to Facebook completely.

Facebook has already overtaken Orkut in India, their only target is now on Brazil. This app would allow users to share their Facebook content over to Orkut automatically. Once you authorize the Search Orkut friends in Facebook app,  and give it access to your Google account, you will be able to import all your Orkut friends and then you can find who are all available on Facebook and give them a friend request.

Once you’ve done with it, for people who are in Orkut and not in Facebook, you can send them an invite to join Facebook.

This is the master plan that Facebook uses here!

Facebook to offer user ID encryption

In response to a scathing article in the Wall Street Journal last week that revealed Facebook apps collecting and selling user information to ad networks and other data mining outfits, Facebook posted today in its blog that they would be offering encryption services for user IDs in the near future.

The blog post acknowledges the existence of UID sharing, but reminds readers that the media coverage of the situation was blown way out of proportion and that the implications of UID sharing are not nearly as heinous as the WSJ would have you think. Nevertheless, Facebook is staying true to the demands of the users, and Mike Vernal details the technical implementation of the new encryption functionality in the blog post. Since the problem is stemming from http headers on apps that contains the UID  of the app user, the encryption will affect only the passed parameters that contain UID data.

This will be an opt-in service at first for Facebook users, but Vernal claims that they want this to become more widespread as time goes on. Eventually, it will be integrated into the official Software Development Kit, and developers can start coding UID encryption into their apps.

While Vernal may be right in saying the media dramatized the idea of UID sharing to ad companies, it still goes against the TOS for apps. Vernal claims that the vast majority of these UID leaks are inadvertent and happen because coders don’t always realize that the UID get passed to the http header referral field.

Facebook for Windows Phone 7 appears in Marketplace

Windows Phone 7 sports some pretty heavy social integration. Among all of this is its ability to connect with Facebook. The platform does this natively, leading us to believe that a dedicated Facebook app may not be necessary. However, despite the integration, many people across the blogosphere have complained that they'd rather have a separate Facebook app, just like other platforms provide.

Well, according to 1800PocketPC, an official Facebook app has made its way to the Marketplace. Confusingly, the publisher shows up as Microsoft. However, the report seems to imply that it's the official app, as it's branded with Facebook's logos. The app will give Facebook users the ability to:

"post status updates, check your news feed, review your upcoming events, manage your inbox, upload photos, publish notes, accept friend requests, and look at your friends' photos, walls, and info."

With the above in mind, it sure seems like a pretty feature rich version of Facebook for a first release. Back when Facebook launched for Android, some of the biggest gripes were its horrendous interface, lack of inbox, friends, notifications, and chat. Most of these seem to be neatly bundled into this beautifully architected Windows Phone 7 Metro UI template. Assuming it works as it should, WP7 users are sure to be quite happy with the app.

10 Crazy Stats About Facebook and Those Who Use It

just came across these statistics on the All Facebook website and wanted to share them with everyone – they really are mind blowing stats:

• 53% of Facebook users play games
• 19% say they are addicted
• 69% of Facebook gamers are women
• 20% have paid cash to get benefits in their Facebook game
• 56 million people play daily (more than the population of England)
• 290 million play monthly (almost as many people as live in the US)
• Average time spent per month on Facebook 421 minutes (7 hours, 1 minute)
• 50% of Facebook logins are to play games
• 265 million Facebook gamers multiplied by 210 minutes (game time per gamer, per month) equals 927 million hours of gaming per month on Facebook
• That is 105,878 man-years of gaming on Facebook

So how do all these people live and eat every day spending this much time on line and in Facebook?

Facebook Adds 3 New Security Features

Facebook on Tuesday announced three new security features that could help you defeat account hijackers.

The first feature, a one-time password, is meant to help keep your account from being hijacked in the first place. To steal your password, hijackers often plant malicious software on poorly maintained public computers in places like cybercafés and hotels that can collect your keystrokes. To sidestep these “keylogger” programs, Facebook will now allow you to have a one-time password sent to your cellphone that you can use instead of your real password.

To use the feature, simply send a text reading “otp” to 32665. In reply, you will get a code that’s good for logging in only one time and that must be used within 20 minutes. Note that you must have previously registered your mobile phone number with Facebook.

The second feature could help you throw a ringer into a hacker’s evil plans. If you suspect someone is using your password to access your account, you can avail yourself of a feature called active sessions logout, which was announced last month but is now available to all, that lets you view information about active sessions on the site for your account. If you see that an unfamiliar device is accessing your account or that someone has logged in from a geographic location other than yours, you can end that suspicious session – and then rush off to change your password.

Find this feature by clicking “Account” at the top right of any page, then “Account Settings” and then the “change” link beside “Account Security.” (In this section, you can also register the computers and mobile devices that belong to you and request alerts be sent if a device that’s not on the list accesses your account.)

And finally, Facebook has added a feature to help you recover your account quickly if it has been a stolen and the password changed so you can’t get in, a growing problem for users of online accounts that Gadgetwise covered recently.

Following in the footsteps of Gmail and Hotmail, Facebook will now periodically ask people to provide or update their phone number, alternate e-mail addresses and security questions and answers so they can easily prove they are the rightful account owner and regain access to their account quickly. To get a jump on the program, go here to provide your details. Expect an e-mail asking you to confirm your changes

Microsoft, Facebook team up on social search

Microsoft is starting to incorporate what your friends do on Facebook right into its Bing search engine.

The software maker began rolling out a new feature Wednesday that can show what someone's Facebook friends "like" on the search results page.

On Facebook and sites around the Web, people can click a "like" button to show support or share information with Facebook friends.

In the coming weeks, if you use Bing to search for a topic in the news, articles that friends have shared on Facebook might appear, along with their names and Facebook profile photos.

Restaurants and movies that friends have "liked" could help you decide what to do on your next date.

Microsoft also added Facebook profile results to people searches. In the past, a search for an old friend from elementary school who shares a name with a celebrity would leave Web surfers swimming in search results for the celebrity. Now, if that friend is part of your extended Facebook network, a link to his or her Facebook profile might pop up at the top of search results.

The new features were unveiled at a media event at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices in Mountain View, California.

As these features trickle out to Bing users, those who are also logged in to Facebook will see a small notification asking if they want to see Facebook friends' information incorporated into search results.

Bing is using Facebook's existing "instant personalization" feature, which customizes websites based on the likes and interests of Facebook members and their friends.

Restaurant-review website Yelp and the music site Pandora also use instant personalization.

Tailoring search results based on what friends do online is not a new idea. Google, the most-visited search engine, has added ways for people to recommend certain search results or re-order the list of links on a search results page. But neither feature has really caught on.

The tie to Facebook could help No. 3 search provider Microsoft nab more Web searches.

Not only is it competing with Google, Microsoft is racing against Yahoo.

Microsoft is currently providing search technology to Yahoo, the No. 2 search engine, but the companies are still making separate decisions about how to display results.

Microsoft gets some search-ad revenue from queries made on Yahoo, but searches on its own site are more lucrative.

Privacy concerns have plagued Facebook over the years as the company has encouraged members to reveal more details about themselves. The site has a history of introducing features that people must then remove, or opt out of, instead of waiting for members to actively sign up for the new features. That approach has riled privacy advocates.

Facebook has responded with more granular controls so users can decide exactly who can see their photos, status updates and other details.

Privacy questions dominated a question-and-answer session after the announcements.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that Bing only taps into information that Facebook users have already designated as public.

Microsoft has been working with Facebook since 2006. In 2007, the Redmond, Washington-based software maker invested US$240 million in Facebook in exchange for a 1.6 percent stake.

The companies said more integrated features will be coming to Bing in the future.

Facebook keeps 'deleted' photos for years

Even if you delete incriminating photos on your Facebook profile, the company is keeping them accessible to anyone online for up to 30 months.

The social networking site admitted it had been keeping deleted photos for a "limited" amount of time.

But users who have kept the direct link to photos that were originally uploaded to the social networking site have been able to still gain access to them months, even years after deletion.

In one report, a Facebook user said they had deleted an image from the site 2.5 years ago (30 months), and that it was still available to see on the site. Another said a photo from April 2009 was still accessible after it was deleted.

The revelation comes as encryption expert and author Bruce Schneier slammed the site at the RSA Conference in London overnight, saying social networking companies were deliberately killing privacy for commercial gain.

The Facebook photo matter centres on what is known as a content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), which stores multiple copies of content on servers around the globe so that it can be accessible more quickly in your region than it would take to access it from another country.

Facebook uses such a delivery method when you upload a photo to the site. However, when you delete your photos from the site, despite them being removed from view, if you still have the image's direct URL it may still be accessible for a period of time after its removal.

Facebook spokesman Simon Axten told technology site ArsTechnica that the company was actively working with its CDN on this issue. His statement was confirmed with Facebook's Australian public relations firm.

"It's possible that someone who previously had access to a photo and saved the direct URL from our content delivery network partner could still access the photo," Axten said.

"However, again, the person would have to know the URL, and the photo only exists in the CDN's cache for a limited amount of time. We're working with the CDN to reduce the amount of time that the photo remains in its cache."

He said the company was "currently working with the CDN on a fix that will delete photo and video content from the CDN's cache shortly after it's removed on Facebook.

"The fix is already in place for videos, and we hope to implement it for profile pictures and photos in the coming weeks."

Bing and Facebook making a search announcement tomorrow

Microsoft has been working hard the last year and a half to promote Bing as much as possible, even making a multi-million dollar deal with Yahoo! to make Bing its default search engine. It doesn't appear Microsoft is going to be slowing down any time soon, as they will be making a major announcement tomorrow with Facebook, the world's largest social networking website.

The details are still very limited, but according to Allfacebook.com, we could see more integration of Facebook on Bing.com. What we do know is that Microsoft plans on deeply integrating Facebook within Bing's search results, making your results more social. This could possibly mean using your own Facebook data to anticipate what exactly you are looking for, providing better search results.

Sources familiar with the new search deal said that features such as the “like” button on Facebook will be tightly integrated within Bing's search results, a major feature to help aid Bing in taking more market share from Google.

The anonymous data taken from Facebook Links could be populated into Bing, allowing for users to find top shared links, without the need to browse through dozens of search results.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's announcement, as Bing and Facebook plan on announcing their deeper partnership together.

Facebook may have your private phone number

In today's cutting edge world of technology, there have been ongoing battles about privacy online, and privacy features. Facebook is no exception to this, as they have had numerous privacy related concerns. Now users will be struck with paranoia once more by a "feature" in Facebook's iPhone and Android apps.

Facebook Sync is to blame for this apparent privacy blunder. The service attempts to sync your friends' profile pictures with the contacts in your phone. To do this, Facebook will upload all of the numbers in the address book and essentially do a quick comparison, according to The Guardian. The information gets uploaded to Facebook's Phonebook app, which is essentially a place where you can find all of the numbers of your contacts on Facebook. That's fine if you're happy with that but the warning was not clearly present on previous versions of the Facebook iPhone app. If you enabled this functionality previously then you may want to check this page to see if any phone numbers are listed.

You may be surprised at the plethora of numbers found. Some of the users added themselves, however if there were any blanks, Facebook Sync will fill these in. This isn't even just for your friends only, this applies to everyone in your address book. You are shown a warning (shown above), but still if you agree, which most people will, then privacy goes right out the window. What's not clear at the moment is how the algorithm works out and shares your numbers and if it's sharing your numbers to others.

Perhaps the more scary part to all of this is that via the Facebook API, all of this information can be easily accessed. Tom Scott's EVIL page demonstrates this incredibly well. While he anonymised the phone numbers, Scott still has shown just how easy it is to exploit this.

Facebook Update: New Dashboard, Download Your Info, and Groups

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, spoke today at an event at Facebook HQ in Palo Alto, CA. He explained what the company has been working on over the summer during their "intense" employee lockdown period. After explaining the basics of the improvements and problems facing the world of social networking, he started on the main points of the presentation.

He spoke about the ability to grab all of your content from Facebook. In a feature called Download Your Information, Facebook will gather all the things you've put on Facebook, and provide them to you via a .zip archive. The archive contains a file that shows something like a timeline of all your interactions with Facebook. This feature will be rolled out today.

The second announcement is a newly improved Apps dashboard that integrates all the apps you've used, permissions granted and anything else you've done with an app, and displays it in a way that makes it easy to see where your data is going and how you interact with the social graph in apps. It includes a very detailed access log that keeps track of API calls for future reference. This is great news for all those concerned over privacy, as this is a much more streamlined way to manage the access apps have to your information.

The final announcement is a solution to "the biggest problem in social networking." Zuckerberg highlighted the problems with interacting with of all your friends all at once. Sometimes you only want a few friends to know something. It isn't always all friends or one friend. Facebook's answer to this problem is not lists. According to Zuckerberg, nobody wants to make lists. Even when they do, they rarely make more useful ones. Algorithms aren't good at predicting groupings yet. Facebook claims to have the solution to this problem, using a few simple tools under the name Groups.

A group can be anything: family, sports buddies, work, etc. It works like a mailing list, and you can share content within the group. Adding members works a lot like photo tagging. It enables group chats, communications via email, and introduces document collaboration. The mobile implementation of groups will also be going live today.

Facebook receives patent for location-based social networks

Facebook has just received a patent for location-based social networks, also known as checkins, which could potentially spell disaster for similar services like Foursquare and Gowalla. The patent was filed on February 28, 2007, and has just been approved by the US Patent Office.

Facebook started up their location services, called Facebook Places, just over two months ago, and has already received a patent titled “method of sharing locations of users participating in a social networking service at a geographic location.”

The location of the user is determined by a GPS identifier, posting the information to a users status. In other words, checkins. The patent also covers users sharing their information with a secondary user of their location:

A method of sharing locations of users participating in a social networking service at a geographic location, the method executed by a computer system and comprising: receiving location information and status information from a mobile device of a first user of the social networking service, the location information representing a geographic location of the first user, the status information manually provided by the first user on an input module of the mobile device; associating the location information with the status information of the first user in a database; and sending the status information and the location information of the first user to a second user for display.

The patent was spotted by Bnet.com, and as the patent reads, is pretty broad in terms of what it covers. There are some restrictions and limitations to the patent, like the data must be held in a database - something any website would potentially want to keep, i.e., status updates - the system has to send the information to a second party, such as your friends.

As Facebook has just received the patent, it's unclear if they will use this to eliminate the competition or to prevent other social networks like MySpace from starting up any form of competition.

Facebook overhauls photo features, offers HQ photo sharing

On Friday, Facebook announced an update to the photo's component of the social network, bringing a much-needed large overhaul to Facebook's Photos. The site has started upgrading three areas, offering the ability to upload higher quality photos, releasing a new photo viewer to the site, as well as a new uploading tool.

Facebook has always lacked the ability to store large photos, forcing users to downsize their photos to a mere 720 pixels, but in the near future will be able to upload photos up to 2048 pixels on the largest edge. This brings the photos up to "print quality" or around 3 megapixels in size.

To see an example of high resolution pictures on Facebook, view the National Geographic's "top shots" album. In addition to the hi-resolution option, Facebook will allow users to download photos in high resolution, as seen below.

In addition, Facebook will be rolling out a "light box" style photo viewer, so you can view photos without leaving the page you are on. The post also claims that photo viewing will be much faster, and says that "[Facebook] also rewrote all the code for the viewer from scratch, so paging through photos will be noticeably faster."

Finally, Facebook is updating the photo uploader tool to use the "latest flash technology" and will now offer the ability to upload your photos in the old "standard" quality or the new "high resolution quality" which warns it may take "10x longer" to upload.

The photos team say that all users should start receiving the features "over the next month." The upgrade is well needed, and should be received with open arms from users. Facebook even points out in the post that "unlike on many other online services, you don't need any kind of premium or paid account."