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Facebook unveils new groups to share, collaborate and group chat

A couple of years ago we had Facebook groups. Mostly these were groups started by users with an aim to engage other Facebook users, who were interested in the same things. Groups became more or less defunct with the advent of Facebook Pages.

Today Facebook announced that New Groups is being announced. Now we can create groups made of our friends on Facebook. We can share links, share posts, videos and even group chat.

How to create New Groups on Facebook?

  • Visit the Facebook Groups Page.
  • Here you can easily create a new group. Just add your friends to the related group. For instance I added my work friends in a test group. (see image below).

  • You can make sure the group is Secret or choose to keep only the shared content as private. This will be great if you want to share photos, links and messages with only a small group of friends.

Features of Facebook’s New Groups

  • Facebook’s New Groups allows creating small groups of friends. You can only add only people how are your Facebook friends to the created group.
  • Only group members are allowed to add other friends to the group.
  • A great new feature is Group chatting.
  • Another feature allows sharing documents with members of a group.

I had written about Facebook collaborating with Skype. Such new innovative ways to create small groups of friends can a real asset with Skype integration if it ever happens.

So do you think New groups with Facebook will help with privacy? Do drop in your views and experiences through your comments.

Link: Facebook Groups

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How does Facebook manage its user’s data?

Ever wondered how the busiest site in the world, Facebook with over 500 million users manage itself? Started in February 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room initially with a single server, now has several web servers and storage units in data centers around the world.

Each data center contain a number of computer servers which are networked together and linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables. Every information shared or mentioned on Facebook is received by the servers in these data centers and further distributed all over the network. 🙂

There are more than 690 billion page views each month.Facebook requires huge data storage as Facebookers share more than 100 million photos per day. Regular photo uploads, likes, page views, status updates all these need a big storage. To manage all this Facebook has 9 data centers in United States, and is in process of adding more. With over 70% users outside United States none of the data centers are located outside. What can be the reason of such a thing?

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Facebook always used to lease the data centers from third-party landlords who build the data center including technical space, power and cooling infrastructure and then lease it completely. As Facebook is growing it needs more data centers now. Facebook people are making its first data center at Oregon. It is said this data center will be the biggest of all that is equal to two Wal Marts.

But as Facebook has a habit of being in news , recently Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg due to its coal usage which leads to global warming. Earlier the only data center present there was of Google. Well, Facebook should try to go green and make as many data centers as possible so that we may not face downtimes like 23 september and today’s morning one.

What do you think? Share your views through comments here. 🙂

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Facebook down again!

After the worst downtime two weeks ago, Facebook is down again! The reason for its downtime is not known yet.

I checked online to see if Facebook is down for only me or for everyone else and I saw that its down everywhere. You can see by yourself here. We will let you know of the updates, about its down. Till then manage your social life with twitter. 😉

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Facebook Page Stories get a new look

You must have observed that when your friend on Facebook likes a specific page you get a notification about it. The news is displayed along with the number of people who like it and the comments. Earlier that occupied a lot of space on your homepage because it showed the details and comments. But now, Facebook has changed the way it looks.

In the image above you can see the change.

Now when somebody likes a page, you are not shown the details rather you will only be shown the number of people who have liked it and commented on it. If you wish you can view the details by clicking on the number of comments. 🙂

In my recent post I had mentioned how to get a cleaner Facebook wall, if Facebook continues to do such things we would not need Greasemonkey or things like that to clean your wall. 🙂 I like this feature and would love to see such updates from Facebook.

What do you think? Share your views with me through the comments. 🙂

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Get ready for a Facebook Instant Search now

Ever wanted to search people or a specific post on Facebook without being logged in? Well here is how. 🙂 A 20-year-old student in Dubai named Nour Syron has created Facebook Instant Search. One morning he got up and checked his msn to see his latest messages and discovered about the guy who got job by creating you tube instant. Nour thought how about Facebook Instant now. 🙂

What was the need of creating Facebook Instant Search ?

  • Search Facebook instantly (including posts, pages and updates).
  • Searching in your friends’ posts, status, comments is possible after you login.
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  • Without logging in, you will still be able to search in public posts.
  • No history saved on your disk
  • All the searches and the results are shown in one page!!
  • Easy usage as you just need to start typing and the results will show up instantly.

Wow, hats off to him. You can have a look yourself  here. He still has some issues which need to be solved. Where is Mark Zuckerberg, is he not going to hire him or at least appreciate this person?  In his blog he has also mentioned about some problems with which he is trying to deal alone. Don’t you think he should get some support from people who can help! I think everyone should appreciate what he has come up with and anyone who can help him should come ahead and do so. 🙂

What do you think of it? Feel free to share your comments here. 🙂

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The Facebook story in a theatre nearby

It started long back,sometime in 2003, a Harvard undergraduate and a computer genius Mark Zuckerberg discovered Facebook on his computer. 🙂 After six years Facebook has more than 500 million users and he is the youngest billionaire in history. Some say this success lead to personal and legal complications but I say whatever it was,it is amazing.

The social network movie is being released today, and people are giving all sort of reviews. Facebook people have denied about this story being true. But it surely will get a great response. There will be people ready to go for a movie and just get a look of Mark Zuckerberg’s life. The tag line itself makes it interesting saying “you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies” 🙂

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This could increase popularity of Facebook.This film will prove to be a great marketing strategy for Facebook. Though I dont say Facebook needs marketing I just say that one more feather will be added in Facebook’s hat. According to Mark Zuckerberg early days at his company were much boring than they are being shown and he denies to tell any thing about the movie being true or not.

Written by Aaron Sorkin of “West Wing” fame and directed by David Fincher, nominated for an Oscar for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” the film had already gained a lot of popularity before its release. I don’t care if it is fiction or true this movie does make me interested in it.

What do you say? Any idea when is it being released in India? Who all are interested in watching this movie? Do let me know through your comments. 🙂

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Facebook joining hands with Skype!

There is a big rumor going around the internet that Skype and Facebook are joining hands. This will give Facebook a strong boost for creating a new market. According to Computer World, the deal it almost finalized. It seems like Facebook will soon be entering the voice market.

Skype + Facebook = Google in trouble?

  • Lately Gmail has launched its Talk services which allows people to call each other from computer to computer. It also allows Gmail users to make free local calls in the U.S.
  • Skype will obviously feel the pressure as it does not have the massive following that Google has and hence might struggle to compete with Google.
  • Facebook is troubling Google as it brings out more social friendly features which can be found all over the web. A voice option for its users might be another great way to compete with Google.
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What this means to Facebook?

Facebook rolled into Skype will mean we can voice and video chat with our Facebook friends. This would be much more suitable for Facebook instead of building a new voice and chat service from ground up.

This will also give Skype a ready-made clientage who might opt for their pro accounts for making cheaper international calls. 🙂

So what are your views on Skype and Facebook coming together? I use both and I must say I ‘Like’ it. Do drop in your comments.

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Gamers guide to avoid Facebook ban

Do you have a Facebook account? Yes. Do you play Facebook games? Yes. Do you have a separate account for games? Yes. Caught ya! If you are playing Facebook games especially Mafia Wars and  have dedicated an account for it (like me) you may land up in trouble, because Facebook is  disabling all those accounts that have  been created for game purposes and have no real photographs and details. 🙁

According to facebook-guides.com in a Skype discussion Zynga representative said that accounts are getting banned from Facebook and Zynga is trying to help such people. Facebook will inspect those accounts which are created just for gaming purposes and include no personal details and photos. If you are like me in that case, there are big chances of us getting banned. 🙁

What to do if you get banned?

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Submit a ticket at Security Center saying ” I have been banned for Facebook ,help! ” or something like that and you will get a response with a specific escalation URL for Facebook. Use that URL to appeal your ban to Facebook. If your banned is removed great 🙂 but if not then copy the response you get from Facebook and reply back to the Security Center ticket with the response. Zinga people will then be able to take that information and try to help us. So you need to be extra careful and i will suggest you all to at least make your home page look like you actually use it for networking. 😉

How to submit a ticket?

  • Go to Account
  • Help center
  • Find ‘security‘ under using Facebook
  • Under My account
  • Click Compromised Account
  • Click here to submit your report
  • You can proceed on clicking whether you can receive mails at your email id or not. 🙂

Zynga will track this exchange, appeal on your behalf to Facebook and hopefully restore your account. After all Facebook has included some nice security and game updates so  you can try to play games from your normal account also. This can be a nice opportunity to try such a thing.

What are your views? What will you do continue playing games from another account or love to see your game updates along with your friend’s news feed. Share your views with me through your comments.

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Scribd gets Facebook personalization

Being a blogger I love reading and writing. Sometimes finding what to read or where to read from is a big trouble. Recently I discovered Scribd where we can find articles or books and read or share.

Recently movie reviews on Rotten tomatoes got a Facebook touch by instant personalization. Now it is Scribd, a social reading and publishing site that is making the reading experience personalised with Facebook. As told by Facebook blog, yesterday Scribd has been personalised with reading recommendations by your friends based on their likes and dislikes. Whenever you visit Scribd while logged in to your Facebook account you will see the personalization details.

You can find out what your friends are reading and sharing.

Based on the likes of your friends you can see the recommended books for you.

On the right hand side of the Scribd page you can see your friends activities that is what are they reading or what they wish to read. And when you find something that you enjoy, with a simple click of the Like button, you can quickly and easily share it with your friends. There will not be any privacy issue as it will use only the public information you share with your friends on Facebook to personalize your reading experience. You can learn more about the instant personalization program here.

Main idea behind all the personalization is sharing what you love with the people you love that is your friends. 🙂 People share more than 55,000 items on Scribd every day, exchanging all sort of documents and details. After all Sharing is loving and Facebook wants people to share and love. 🙂

Facebook sure loves to see people share things and enjoy! What do you think of such personalizations? Do share it with me through your comments.

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Windows Live Spaces will be outsourced to WordPress

Microsoft has Window Live Spaces which is basically a blogging platform very similar to Google’s Blogger.com or WordPress.com. Live Spaces has not really caught the imagination of the blogging world. I guess Microsoft has realized that and decided to outsource Live Spaces to WordPress.com.

This basically means if you sign-up to Live Spaces you will be redirected to sign-up with WordPress.com.

This was announced at the Techcrunch Disrupt Event.

What it means for Live Spaces user?

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  • Users will now be redirected to WordPress.com instead of Live Spaces to sign up for setting up their online blogs.
  • Current users will have the option of transferring their blogs onto WordPress.com or do this at a later time.
  • Live Messenger can be connected to the WordPress.com blog. This will enable all our friends on Live Messenger to be updated about a new post through the messenger. 🙂
  • Windows Live Spaces will be killed off in the next 6 months.

I think this is a very good step by Microsoft as it is better for them not to keep competing in areas they are completely lagging behind. On the other hand Live Writer is a fantastic blogging tool and anyone creating a blog from there will now be directed to WordPress.com. Obviously that is good news for the WordPress community.

This transfer will be done between Microsoft and Automattic. According to Automattic this is not a financial deal.

What are your views on this development? Do you think WordPress.com will benefit anything more than just more users from Live Spaces? Do drop in your comments.

Source: Techcrunch