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Will facebook’s new patent prove to be effective ?

Have you ever noticed how the English word ‘Search‘ immediately sends an image of  ‘Google‘ in your mind? 🙂 With its great search results and interesting search algorithms we people enjoy having an on line dictionary or encyclopedia that is free. Well the thing is now Facebook is being awarded a social search patent that was used by Google earlier.

This is based on the amount of clicks number of users do. That is, the search results pages are ranked according to the number of clicks by its users. This patent’s application was filed six years ago by Facebook people. I do not know whether it was using this thing or not earlier also. Is it so that the users should like or see only those things that are viewed by their friends or friends of friends? Suppose his/her interests do not match in some way but he is bound to see the links what his/her friends in the network like.

What do you think of such a patent? Do you think we will see any important changes to Facebook search or any other thing related to it?

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Facebook wants to own the english word ‘Face’

Guess what Facebook is up to? :). It is recently reported that Facebook wants to copyright the english word ‘Face‘, that is we will never see any other company with a name having prefix as ‘Face‘ in future. Only if he succeeds in filing a law suit and succeeding with it.

Recently Facebook took over the application for trademark of ‘Face‘ from another company of UK named as CIS internet limited. The company operated a site named Faceparty.com. There may be many others but for now a person named Aaron Greenspan who has a company Think Computers that is behind mobile payments application called Facecash is opposing Facebook’s action. If Facebook gets the trademark that would result into trouble for Facecash. So Aaron Greenspan is asking for an extension of time to oppose such thing.

What if he is given that extension or what if Facebook succeeds getting the word ‘Face‘ as its trademark? Companies no matter big or small should they be given personal rights to the common words like ‘Face‘ or ‘Book‘? There were,are and will be many companies starting with the name ‘Face‘ or ending with the name ‘Book‘. It is not advisable to be given such authority to Facebook people. The english words are free and open for all and I think anybody should be able to think or create a name of his choice no matter what.

Just imagine any beauty products company launching with the name Facebeauty. It has no intention to harm Facebook but still it would not be able to keep the name as the company wishes too because words like ‘Face‘ and ‘Book‘ will be copyright for Facebook. Certain products and companies will be facing problems in keeping the desired name. This hamper people’s choice and views. I think Facebook should keep a clause saying only social networking sites with name starting with ‘Face‘ or ending with ‘Book‘ should be asked to not do such thing. Rest if any company which is not related to social networking should be allowed to use such words :).

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Facebook Becomes The Numero Uno Social Networking Site In India

It has finally happened. While there have been numerous discussions on the astronomical growth of Facebook in India, in the latest internet traffic reports released by Comscore, Facebook has taken the top spot as the most visited Social Networking site in India.

The comscore reports throws some really interesting insights into the social networking adoption in India,

  • Indian social networking audience has increased by 43% over the past year
  • India now ranks as the 7th largest market for Social network globally
  • The total internet audience in India has only grown by 13% annually but the social networking audience has grown as much as three times

These facts suggest exciting times for the social networking marketplace in India. The comscore report has also provided a list of popular social networking sites in India

Source

The list features some predictable names like Facebook, Twitter and Orkut. Infact, Facebook is growing at a breakneck speed as is visible in the %change column

The numbers are definitely encouraging from the perspective of adoption of social networking in India. Moreover, these numbers also hint at an increasing target market for digital marketers to tap into. We are already seeing the presence of key B2C brands on social media platforms . Even the B2B brands have boarded the ship and IT Services sector has been increasing its digital footprint through twitter and Facebook. How these brands are leveraging the medium is a whole different story altogether but the growth of social networking in India is happening and its happening real fast.

What do you think the future holds as far as the social networking traffic in India is considered. Where Facebook and Twitter are expected to continue their growth, is there scope for a localized social networking website to cause disruption.

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“This Friend Request Can’t Be Sent”-another irritating feature by Facebook and how to deal with it!!

Most of the people are on Facebook to make new friends, and I am one of them who loves to send request to random people on facebook.com. But this thing isn’t gonna possible anymore cuz of a new feature to prevent the misuse of Facebook. Obviously this is a good feature specially for those who gets hundreds of useless friend requests every week. But trust me, this feature won’t let you to get connected even with even those whom you know personally. Check out the few reasons why Facebook won’t allow you to send friend request.

No Mutual Friends: If you are trying to send a request to a person who doesn’t have any friend in common with you, then that could be an impossible thing from now on Facebook. As in that case Facebook assumes that you are randomly adding that person.

Send too many Friend Requests? Yes, if you send many friend requests to everyone who’s profile seems interesting 😉 then Facebook won’t let you send a request to new profiles even if you know them. You will get the same error message asking that, “Do you know this user personally?”

Too many rejected Friend Requests: Again you cannot send more friend requests if there are many users who declined your friend request.

ERROR MESSAGE:

This Request Can’t Be Sent
Do you know this user personally? To prevent misuse of Facebook, this request can’t be sent. To learn more, please visit the Help Center. If you believe you’re seeing this message in error, you can report the problem.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION:

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If you are getting such type of messages even if you are sending request to the right person i.e whom you know personally then you have to report an error to Facebook. Click on ‘report the problem’ on the popup screen (see the image above). Select option ‘Yes’ and give appropriate reason in comments. They will review your request and you have to wait until your request gets reviewed. 🙁

UPDATES:

  1. Even you can’t send request to those people, who are appearing in your friend suggestions. What’s the use of suggestions then? 😛  [updated-August 16th 2010]

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU: Avoid getting blocked from adding people on Facebook.

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1 in 6 page views in UK are Facebook!

Facebook is still finding it difficult to become a truly money minting machine but when it comes to growth they have surely hit the jackpot. According to Hitwise reports, some page on Facebook is viewed once in every six pages viewed. This is because the traffic to Facebook from UK includes 16.73%.

Here are some stats from Hitwise.

  • As the numbers clearly show Facebook shows 16.73%. This is almost twice as many page views more than Google UK which is at 8.22%.
  • It has been always been assumed that people spend their time looking for thing online and this is what made search engines so popular. Social networks were never ever in that space except now with Facebook which is really grabbing the attention of internet users.
  • The growth of Facebook‘s share of total percentage of the Page Views in UK has grown exponentially. Just look at the image below.

So why do you think this is happening? Do people spend more time chatting and meeting their online friends more than they look for stuff up online? It sure look like it. Do drop in your comments.

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Personal Details of 100 mn Facebook users leaked online

Once again the facebook is in news for leaked details of it’s users. But this time it’s in a very large scale when the information of 100 million facebook profiles is available to download on net. This information was leaked by Ron Bowles, who’s an online security consultant. He used a code to search all the facebook profiles which are not private i.e you can read and access the basic info. He then compiled the list of all searchable profiles in a single file having the info like name and username of the profile.The list of profile is available for download on a popular file sharing website ‘Pirate Bay’ where more than thousands of people have already downloaded it.

On this Facebook said, “No private data is available or has been compromised. The information of such profiles (having lesser private content) is still public and can be access by search engines like google, bing or yahoo.” Obviously the Facebook is right in this case but they got a warning about the privacy of it’s users for future.

“Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it,” Simon Davies, an official of Privacy International, said.

“It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn’t have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there’s an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence, he said.

(via THE ECONOMIC TIMES)

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Ask a question to 500 million people with Facebook Questions

Facebook recently announced a new feature on its blog. This feature is called Facebook Questions. The way it will operate is quite easy. You go on your Facebook account and ask a question to Facebook users. Your question will be answered by other Facebook users.

Below is an image of how Facebook will introduce this feature on our Facebook accounts.

What will Facebook Questions mean to Facebook?

  • It will mean simply that your questions can have a potential of 500 million people answering. This huge number means obviously there are a lot of people who are experts in various fields and can answer all kinds of questions you ask.
  • This will create a great platform for users across the world and expertise to interact in a more dynamic way. It might be interesting to see how Yahoo Answers and Google’s Aardvark will deal with the phenomenon as they also give similar services.
  • This also could open a way for sponsored answers to questions or even consulting charges for very difficult questions which might need considerable research.
  • If Facebook gets this right it will surely be a huge revenue earner for them.

Can you get Facebook Questions?

No, at the moment the feature is still in beta mode and I tried to access it but message I got was “we are still not ready for you” 😛

Keep reading Fbknol for latest happening around Facebook and its new feature. Do comment and let me know if you find the prospect of asking questions on Facebook interesting?

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‘The Social Network’ theatrical trailer

I had written previously about a short trailer of the movie on the Facebook phenomenon called ‘The Social Network’. It has just voices and dialogues which gave a slightly edgy and dark motive to the film.

Apparently the movie is probably a drama with comedy and that comes across with its latest theatrical trailer released. Look up more details of the movie at their official website.

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Facebook Inching Closer To 500 Mn Users, Plans To Announce It With A New Feature

The growth of Facebook has been phenomenal right from the word Go. Even with the onset of another social phenomenon in the form of Twitter, Facebook has continued to grow exponentially in terms of the numbers of users. Putting the growth in sheer numbers, Facebook had close to 250 Mn users around this time last year and now Facebook is certain of reaching 500 Mn users sometime this week.That accounts for a 100% annual growth which is spectacular by any means. What’s more, given the volumes we are talking about, the growth of Facebook is even more applaud worthy.

Facebook is closing on the heels of reaching 500 Mn users in a few days and plans to mark the celebration with a new feature

What is The New Feature Facebook is going to launch to announce 500 Mn users?

Facebook has always been very aggressive about launching innovative applications and has always followed a good strategy to ensure that any new service gets viral. The plan this time around is similar. As Facebook gears up to announce 500 Mn users, a new feature will be rolled out for all the users. The new feature is codenamed “Facebook Stories”

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Facebook Stories will allow users (all 500 million of them) to share just how Facebook has made an impact on their lives

So basically, Facebook Stories is going to allow users to share their experiences with Facebook which according to me would help strengthen Facebook’s connect with users. Moreover, Facebook will indirectly get truck loads of key insights into usage trends of customers. These usage trends could prove very helpful for Facebook in rolling out new features/applications based on user needs. Imagine even a small percentage of users sharing their Facebook stories and then others get the option of liking these stories. The viral nature of the feature could be gauged by the sheer numbers that are involved here.

We had recently reported that Facebook had recently beaten its own traffic record in US a while back. With the way things are going, I am sure Facebook is all set to break many more traffic records and the 500 Mn user would mark one of the great achievements.

Would you be interested to contribute your Facebook story once the feature is rolled out? And how much time do you think Facebook will take to reach the coveted 1 Bn user mark?

(Source: Kara Swisher)

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Airtel Users Can Now Access Facebook Free For 2 Months

Bharti Airtel has  made accessing Facebook free for its subscribers, albeit for a two month period. The move tops almost every other option available for accessing facebook on mobile for free. If you remember, Facebook had recently launched a very basic version 0.facebook.com primarily for mobile access for free. Using o.facebook.com users can access their facebook accounts, view and update status messages without incurring any data charges. However, there was one little problem with this – o.facebook.com does not provide viewing and updating of images. So, if anyone wants to view and update images via o.facebook.com, data charges apply.

However, Airtel has gone one up and actually provided free access to m.facebook.com itself, the mobile version of Facebook. What this means is that Airtel users can get the complete experience including images at no extra cost. The service is free for 2 months and will last till August 31.

How to access m.facebook.com for free on Airtel

If you are already use mobile internet on your Airtel connection, all you need to do is log on to m.facebook.com and start accessing your facebook account without worrying about data charges.

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If you are going to use mobile internet for the first time on your Airtel connection, here are the steps you need to follow,

  • SMS ‘FACEBOOK’ to 54321
  • Enter your e-mail address and password
  • That’s it. You can start browsing your facebook account using m.facebook.com without paying a single penny during July and August

This sure looks like a win-win move for Airtel and Facebook. Facebook has a huge user base in India and with Airtel providing free access for limited time, it can both result in increase in subscribers for Airtel and also increased adoption of its mobile internet services which will go a long way in increasing revenues for Airtel.

Do you have a Airtel connection? Give the service a try and let us know your feedback.