Facebook Lite: Is it a move to counter Twitter?

Finally, Facebook opened its Lite version for public preview this week. Since I was not in the testing phase, I couldn’t write anything definitive about it earlier on.

Anyway, now that I have explored it in depth, I couldn’t help establish that it is an ambitious move to counter the rising popularity of Twitter.  Facebook Lite provides twitter-like functionality and is really a stripped down version of the original Facebook. Basically it has a wall, a mail box and a capability to post photos and videos. Apart from being skinny, it has the added advantage of privacy by limiting access to a well-defined social circle.

With the recent acquisition of FriendFeed, Facebook’s most likely course of action would be the complete integration of FriendFeed technology with its Lite version in the months to come.

However, this should not come as a shock because this was rather anticipated. Given the recent media attention to Twitter, it was only natural for Facebook to come up with something to retain its user base.

Facebook continues to battle against cyber criminals, as they now launch “new verification procedures” to get rid of spammers. Yesterday on their blog, Facebook announced the new tool to Secure Compromised Accounts. Now, if you have ever had your Faceboook account taken over by someone to spam your friends, or if you have been the exclusive spam victim yourself, you should be happy to hear that Facebook is doing something about it.

Facebook also describes how they will handle such accounts. Each time an account is suspected to send spam, the user will get an email from Facebook which will take them to a new verification page to confirm ownership of their account by asking them to pick a new secure password.

This new feature will not only help users but also Facebook in enhancing their web site security. Security is being the next big issue for all sites right now. After hacking of Twitter, ImageShack and various such sites, this issue has to be taken seriously.

There are two ways you can Download Facebook Videos, Using the browser Mozilla Firefox or Safari. Lets do it using Mozilla Firefox first.

1. Go to www.firefox.com and download the latest version of Mozilla Firefox if you don’t already have one.

2. Open your firefox toolbar and click on the option “Add-ons”, a small add-ons window showing you any currently installed extensions will open.

3. Click on the tab that says “Add-ons” located at the extreme left side.

4. Now in the displayed search box, search for extension “Facebook Video” and press the search button next to it. An extension list matching your search will appear there, click on “Facebook Video” extension which looks exactly like the one in picture.

5. Click on “Add to Firefox”, an small prompt window showing you the install button will appear. Click on “Install Now” button and installation will start.

6. After the installation you will be asked to restart Mozilla Firefox.

7. Click on “Restart Firefox”

8. Make sure “Facebook Video” is enabled so go to tools, click add-ons and click enable on facebook video, if it isn’t already enabled.

9. Now logon to your Facebook account and this is how your account would look like:

As we reported earlier, Facebook is about to launch some new privacy features.  These features are being considered very good for the users and will further help enhance new upcoming search feature on Facebook.

The Company today ran through the changes with members of the press on WebEx this afternoon, but now slides from that presentations have been made publically available to all.  These slides elaborate quite well the upcoming changes with the screen shots.

The interesting part these slides include is the admin view i.e. How Facebook Views them

Related Posts: New Facebook Status Publisher

Facebook application development entails a very small learning curve. It has its roots in the contemporary Internet markup and scripting technologies. As a matter of fact, if you are a web developer, you only need a few more skills to develop your applications in Facebook. The required front-end skills include XHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Facebook uses its own markup and scripting languages known as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FBJS (Facebook Javascript) respectively. For backend, Facebook has its own version of SQL known as FQL (Facebook Query Language).

Other than technical skills, developers have other challenges when it comes to the social networking paradigm. In order to make their applications reach more users, developers have to come up with innovative ideas and marketing strategies to engage their users.

More to follow…

One of the most popular features of the facebook is your status box – aka, the “what’s on your mind?” box on your homepage, this box lets you share almost everything, links, videos, photos and much more….

Yesterday Facebook announced a new enhanced functionality with this status, which will let users control the privacy settings around each status updates they post to Facebook. Now everyone will be able to specify whether they want to update the world or just a select group of friends from status drop down.

This new status publisher will have a lock icon in the lower right hand corner, where users can select to share updates with everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends, just friend or anyone from your custom created list.  It’s important to note that the share with everyone option is essentially going to make your Facebook status updates public domain, and this has major implications for the upcoming facebook search.

So, why facebook has added this feature? According to Facebook’s blog, “You may have some posts you want to share with a wide audience, such as whom you voted for or how great the weather is today. Other times you may have more personal updates like your new phone number or an invitation to join you at your favorite restaurant for dinner that is meant for only close or nearby friends.”

But this new added feature may also happen to be a groundwork being done for upcoming Facebook Search. By giving users this option to share content publicly, privately, Facebook now can easily distinguish between unwanted appearances of search results. This will help some Facebook users looking to use their status for advertising as well Facebook themselves to build a better Search Product. Also as Facebook are looking to compete Twitter Search so it should be a part of that strategy too.

Related Topics: Learn Facebook Privacy Settings

Facebook lets us share photos, videos, information, updates, links and much more on a single platform. Everyone likes their privacy young people usually do

There are variety of purposes for which friend list can be used, but the biggest draw for a normal user is the label they can use for different friends for easy adjustments of profile privacy settings. Creating Friend Lists may sound harsh or strange to some readers but you also do that in your real life, you decide which friends should know how much and to what level about you.

Facebook also lets us share photos, videos, information, updates, links and much more on a single platform. Everyone likes their privacy young people usually do not mind sharing even every bit of their information but a big number still does.

But the question is publicly posting all this minutiae really such a good idea? Knowing what you had for lunch is hardly ever going to be interesting, unless you’re a chef, and seeing your drunken antics very well may get you fired. So where do we draw the line, and for whom?

Most Facebook users find it difficult to deal with their profile security options, their friend lists and restrict certain people. But its really important that you know which options are available to you by facebook to filter certain contents before they get published on your Facebook news feed.

Almost all of facebook users must have some security filters defined for profile but still a lot of stuff e.g tagged pictures are vulnerable to others. So its important that everyone knows the full use of security features provided by Facebook.

The beauty of Facebook’s many features is that now you can choose what you show and to what type of people. By using friend lists and playing with your privacy settings, you can create different views for each segment of your profile.

Segmenting your friends into lists

There are variety of purposes for which friend list can be used, but the biggest draw for a normal user is the label they can use for different friends for easy adjustments of profile privacy settings. Creating Friend Lists may sound harsh or strange to some readers but you also do that in your real life, you categorize and priortize different friends, right?

So, Facebook also allows you to put it to a good use.

The labels or names of Facebook Friend list depend on your use of facebook and overall purpose of that filter list. If it’s personal, I suggest “People You

Don’t Know,” “Real (offline) Friends,” “Work People,” and “Online Buddies” for effective tweaking of privacy settings to control each list’s level of profile access.

Also there is no limit to how a certain friend list when discussing privacy settings; however, if you want to use lists to batch invite, message or tage people, you will need to create smaller, more trageted lists.

You can create a list from the Friends page, or choose them individually by name while working on the Privacy Settings page. Simply choose a feature you want to limit, like your Wall, and select “Customize” from the drop down. Then enter the name of the person or list you want to keep from seeing that feature. You will be prompted to create a list if you enter multiple names by hand. Privacy settings can be adjusted by hovering over “Settings” in the upper right corner of Facebook and clicking on “Privacy Settings.”

So what should you share?

It totally depends on you, what would you like others to know and what not. But a basic breakdown for your friends list would be like this:

1. People you do not know
2. Your Real friends
3. Coworkers
4. Online Buddies
5. Family

Final Tips

A word of warning: don’t click links to “Ligromind [dot] com” or “Killselfz [dot] com” if they turn up in your Facebook mail. These both links are spam which seem to be spreading quickly through out the social network.

These scams usually propagate themselves by downloading malware to your machine, then blasting messages to all your friends – either to spread the malware further, or to drive traffic to spam sites, or both. You must have seen such scam already on Windows Live Messenger. When anyone from your buddy list generates an automated spam message with links. You click on the links it then propagates ahead towards your buddy list.

Facebook has become increasingly good at blocking these URLs as soon as they become an issue, hence the “link” you’ll receive (seemingly from a Facebook friend) isn’t hyperlinked, but has a space between the site name and the dot-com.

In case you also happen to receve such e-mail, just delete it without opening it.

Also if you find your account is sending these mails to your friends, do run a full virus/malware scan, clear your browser cookies and change your Facebook password.

Have you received one of these Facebook spam mails today? Let us know in the comments.

Ligromin Scam Looklike

What is twitter? What is so good about tweeting? Why it is popular? Is twitter the future? These and many more are normally the questions  my friends are very keen to know these days and when I explain them the tweeting concept, they ask start comparing it to facebook

Well, the answer is not as simple as many of you may aspect. Both have very strong impact on social media. Facebook therefore is superior I would say right now as compared to twitter.

Facebook has a bigger picture; friends and family members use it to reconnect with each other, share pictures, videos and what they are doing whenever they want!

Twitter on the other hand, encourages you grab ideas in byte-size chunks and use your updates as jumping off points to other places or just let others know what you’re up to at any given moment.

• Twitter is social marketing
• twitter is news reporting
• twitter is social messaging
• twitter is blogging

Why People Love Facebook

Facebook is definitely the one which brought heaven to social animals that are addicted to make new acquaintances and stay in touch with people. People now don’t even bother to write emails, they just do facebooking!!!

Facebook addicts prefer a single social platform to stay in touch as compared to other social portals, AIM, Yahoo, Windows Live Messenger, Gmail etc This largely explains the explosive growth Facebook continues to experience and why the company reportedly invested $200 million in data center upgrades last year to keep up with demand!

Why People Love Twitter

Twitter is not readily as obvious to some people as facebook but trust me its more addictive once you get the taste of tweeting you get response more quickly and it seems to live somewhere between the words of email, instant messaging and blogging. It builds up constant linking between people. People like to update their status more on twitter than they do on facebook.

But if we compare both in terms of the fame, twitter has grown faster than the facebook. Actually in a way, anyone with something to promote seems to find twitter extremely valuable. It can be a cause, business or anything!

Twitter addicts claim it’s like the old fashioned water cooler, where people can gather to shoot the breeze on whatever topic is on their minds. Twitter is like a communications stream you dive into for an invigorating swim.

So Which Social Network is the Best?

Well as different people have different opinions about both of them so it’s very hard to decide which one is better. It depends which one suits your mood more….Both have some advantages and disadvantages which I am going to discuss in this blog later.

Twitter started as a very simple concept of sharing status and staying in touch with friends in august 2006.  So Which Social Network is the Best?