We’ve discussed before about Facebook’s future: Mark Zuckeberg said in an interview that they are not only focusing in maintaining it as a simple website, Facebook will represent the entire platform that any user will need as for identification, business and relationship, said Zuckeberg. And now they are taking another step towards that goal: Expanding the Facebook Mobile platform, that exists since 2008 for traditional websites and Apple’s iPhone, and now it will be available for any mobile platform.
Henri Moissinac, head of Facebook’s mobile operations, presented in the Nokia World about the implementation of “Facebook Connect for Mobile Web” in a new and simple method. With only 4 lines of code, any site, application and platform can use Facebook’s API, the only requirement: A web browser.
“What we did for photo sharing, we are going to do for mobile applications,” said Moissinac. And they seem that are doing it right, because in last month of August, Facebook Mobile had 65 million users.
And of course, the expansion strategy keeps on going: Facebook’s television interaction it is here already. Moissinac said that one of their ambitions is to start working with games consoles, as they announced previously with Microsoft’s Xbox.
Do you still think that their goal about representing an entire platform of identification, business and relationship sounds too much?
How much is Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google involved in your common day activities? Did you ever ask yourself that? Where would you be if those didn’t exist?
Well there thousands of those existential questions that you may or may not asked yourself, and there’s no need to get real philosophical about this, but we sure can be certain that those technologies, web apps and more have an important presence in most of our days.
About those presences, here’s a very interesting video about the facts of several of these social tools, technologies and media: “Social Media Revolution”
Here are some of the facts that caught my attention:
Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web
1 of 8 couples married in the US met via social media
If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users, Facebook took less than 9 months to reach 100 millions
Ashton Kutcher has more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
35% of books sales on Amazon are for Kindle
“Social media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate”
The mobile market in all of its forms has, indeed, made a big impact around the world within the last few years. The ideas of stay always “connected” whenever and wherever, simplifying your life using a single device were just a few around. Big companies are focusing in these interconnections and technologies because, let’s face it: pays off. And Microsoft it’s no exception, this time presenting an interesting app: OneApp.
What’s the idea? This mobile app will let you access other apps like Facebook, Twitter (TweetLite), Live Messenger, games and more without actually installing them on your phone. Even though the application architecture and functionality are not revealed, seems that the small footprint from OneApp (150kb) will dynamically launch parts of the application and avoid installation or storage requirements; something like application virtualization for web apps, not a bad idea.
OneApp also includes cloud services that help offload processing and storage from the phone to the Internet, improving overall performance. But, as you may think, this mobile app it is only compatible with a few phones (at least in this first stage); here’s the list:
So, after what seemed like an endless few weeks or fights, press releases, rumours and delays the Facebook 3.0 app is now officially released for the iPhone. I think a celebration is in order.
So, what are our first impressions here at Crenk? Well there good. Very good in fact. When I first started up the app I noticed a few things almost instantaneously that had changed from the previous app. For example, up the top left hand corner there is a button which when pressed it will give you a search bar and down the bottom the alerts feature which tells you what your friends are up to and if you need to respond to anything will pop up.
It is also more in touch with the actual web based Facebook. For example, you can RSVP to invitations rather than just being informed of their existence and you can also chat easier with friends.
Of course there are the new features that literally work with the iPhone. You can now call and send texts to your Facebook friends without having to leave the app. I think this is a cool feature and one that Facebook will not regret making as that’s what smart phones are all about – integration.
Finally, there is the web browser. At first I though this was a little unnecessary but then it became clear why they put it there. How many of your Facebook friends send you links or how many times do you decide to follow up a news story you heard from friends? Now you don’t have to exit the whole app and start up Safari just to follow a link!
The Apple App Store is a place where you get pristine apps that are clean of any SPAM or Malware. A great place in my opinion. However, in order to keep this clean environment Apple have built up a wall made out of trained reviewers who scrutinize apps for any violation of policy before they are allowed to go live. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt said on his blog that he wants Apple to remove the screening process to make the App store more accessible to developers.
There is currently a 14 day waiting period for apps so they can be reviewed by Apple. However, this is annoying Facebook as they believe Apple are using this time to block their app from the market. Here is what Hewt said in his blog, almost criticizing the iPhone along with Apple:
Oh, but you say that iPhone apps are different, because they run native code and can do scary things that web pages can’t? Again, you’re wrong, because iPhone apps are sandboxed and have scarcely any more privileges than a web app. About the only scary thing they can do outside the sandbox is access your address book, but Apple can easily fix that by requiring they ask permission first, just like they must do to track your location.
Whether or not Apple chooses to listen is up to them. Tearing down the wall could lead to an influx of Spammers, leaving it up could further delay apps or even put off developers as alternatives become increasingly available.
Last week isoHunt updated its indexing code and performed a thorough re-crawl of the indexed sites, resulting in an increase from 1.65 million to 3.49 million torrents. This week the team tackled another problem, namely, how to find the right torrent more effectively.
isoHunt’s founder Gary Fung mentioned that they made several changes to the search algorithms resulting in a superior quality of the search results. The changes should make it easier for the site’s users to find what they are looking for.
Aside from the improved results, the team also added option to narrow down the results to a specific source, Gary explained on Facebook.
isoHunt is currently the third largest torrent site ranked by the number of daily users.
To be honest, I was utterly shocked when I heard the news. For months, Twitter and Facebook have been battling it out. Both have acknowledged the other as their main rival. Apps, schemes, plans and plots have come about but none have broken the stalemate between then. Now, Facebook are taking the stance of “well, if you can’t beat them, join them.” They’re launching a new app that will combine Twitter and Facebook.
Here is what they said on their blog:
“If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them.
If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will only link Facebook Pages to Twitter, not your individual profile. It will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter”
By coming out with this app, FaceBook are saying “yeah, we couldn’t beat twitter in a straight fight.” However, in my opinion this is great news. Undoubtedly, the two would have spent millions of dollars on plans to take down the other. Well if this app makes the market big enough for the both of them; even if only for six months then we could see some serious advancement in both of their services very soon.
I really love Twitter. I tweet at least once or twice an hour from my phone when watching a movie, playing my xBox, out with friends our just about doing anything you can imagine; including writing for Crenk. I’d hate to see Twitter slip down that slope that few seem to be able to get back up. Kind of like MySpace is right now.
FaceBook’s new iPhone app may be just the thing that pushes it too. Over the past few months FaceBook have tried to match Twitter on all fronts. While FaceBook still markets itself as a social network they have become more twitterish and this is reflected in their new app.
You can have status updates similar to those on the new Windows Live Messenger. You can also blog and surf through your pages more easily. Furthermore, the app incorporates the ‘Pages’ idea which is to coax people to join FaceBook because of the celebrities on there – much like Twitter did…Hmmm.
This app is also really integrated with the iPhone’s call and text features. If you want to call or send a message to a friend you can do so right from your friends list on the FaceBook app rather than closing it and dialling from the phone’s interface.
As an app I think it’s really good but it’s obvious that Facebook are now trying to play Twitter’s game when it comes to status updates, celebrities, micro-blogging and the portability that comes with streamlined apps.
Different surveys have been carried out over the past number of years about how many of us actually like our jobs. The average of these surveys tells us that around 60% of us hate our jobs. It could be the hours, the pay, the conditions, the work or in this case – THE BOSS!
It’s well-known that social networking sites and blogs have cost people their jobs because they said bad things about the company and they were discovered by chance on the web. That’s got to sting. But how about this girl who actually added her new boss on FaceBook and then decided she would virtually tear him to shreds?
Needless to say, she lost her job and perhaps rightfully so – I mean, how stupid do you have to be to do that? She might as well have sent him the link.
I’d imagine there either from the UK or the Republic of Ireland as these are the only two countries that use P45 forms when jobs get terminated.
Here what the post and the bosses reply said. (Obviously their names have been removed).
Only around 15% of all the Twitter users are less than 25 years old, who would know? An official report from Morgan Stanley says that teenagers just don’t use Twitter.
You won’t be surprised if I tell you that people under 25 years are the main Internet users, only this group of people takes the 25% of all population; but they also just represent 16% of all Twitter.
And which age group takes the majority on Twitter? 25-54 years old, they take up to 64% of the Twitter population (me included of course). 20% for people over 55 years and 16% for those under 25. Yeap, you read it right, 20% of Twitter users are over 55 years.
If you start thinking about it (and when I say “thinking” I mean checking your list of followers and following) you would probably notice that you have a bunch of friends, a selected group of celebrities (yes, I know, we all have @aplusk), and would probably see a large number of marketers, companies, brands, channels, journalists or even PR guys. And that’s not exactly the main focus of teens these days.
It doesn’t feel like the teen wave didn’t appear just yet in Twitter? Can we expect a new teen market for Twitter as it was for Facebook?
The United States Marine Corps (USMC) are currently deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting day in day out against insurgency and terrorism under the constant threat of IEDs and enemy Kalashnikov or RPG fire. They bravely soldier on throughout.
However, when it comes to Web 2.0 they’re left quivering in their combat boots. The USMC has just announced that it is placing a network wide ban on Web 2.0 sites such as Twitter, MySpace and FaceBook in an effort to make their systems more secure.
They say that these sites are easily hacked and used by hackers and scammers and indeed those against US operations to post links to malicious sites in the hope a marine on R&R or a USMC staff member might click on them.
This would expose the soft underbelly of the USMC’s network and would lead to disaster. Here is what the USMC order read :
“These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries…”
“The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”
Donating to charity or even volunteering can be tough. You either don’t have the time, the cash or simply don’t want to. However, most of us will want to help a good cause in some way or another. Intel, Facebook, and Grid Republic have teamed up to allow Facebook users to do exactly that with their new app ‘Progress Thru Processors’.
This app, which was launched yesterday and is available to all Facebook users will utilize extra processing power from their computers when it is not in use and use that power on a huge network of other donators to run many different programs on central computers in labs and research facilities. The reason why these labs such as Africa@home and Climateprediction.net can’t simply do it themselves is because the amount of power needed to examine protine particles or predict theretical weather simulations is huge and extremely expensive.
The whole operation could not have been done without Grid Republic who had the technology to link up the PCs with extra processing power and use them properly giving each one a small crumb of the huge task, which will hopefully all come together to solve sciences big questions.
“By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers,” Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager of corporate marketing, said in a statement.
Intel says that the application will not affect performance and thus will not be noticed by the user. Progress Thru Processors is available to download right here.
We’ve discussed before about Facebook’s future: Mark Zuckeberg said in an interview that they are not only focusing in maintaining it as a simple website, Facebook will represent the entire platform that any user will need as for identification, business and relationship, said Zuckeberg. And now they are taking another step towards that goal: Expanding the Facebook Mobile platform, that exists since 2008 for traditional websites and Apple’s iPhone, and now it will be available for any mobile platform.
So, after what seemed like an endless few weeks or fights, press releases, rumours and delays the 
The Apple App Store is a place where you get pristine apps that are clean of any SPAM or Malware. A great place in my opinion. However, in order to keep this clean environment Apple have built up a wall made out of trained reviewers who scrutinize apps for any violation of policy before they are allowed to go live. 
To be honest, I was utterly shocked when I heard the news. For months, 
I really love Twitter. 
Different surveys have been carried out over the past number of years about how many of us actually like our jobs. The average of these surveys tells us that around 60% of us hate our jobs. It could be the hours, the pay, the conditions, the work or in this case – THE BOSS!
Only around 15% of all the Twitter users are less than 25 years old, who would know? An 
The United States Marine Corps (USMC) are currently deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting day in day out against insurgency and terrorism under the constant threat of IEDs and enemy Kalashnikov or RPG fire. They bravely soldier on throughout.
Donating to charity or even volunteering can be tough. You either don’t have the time, the cash or simply don’t want to. However, most of us will want to help a good cause in some way or another. Intel, 
