My love for blogging has pretty much all but disappeared hence the very limited updates on this blog, it just seems that each time I want to sit down and write something I have 10 other things that are more important. Anyway Esrun said I should blog about this, so here goes.

Recently Facebook gave users the option to switch to a new profile layout, at the time of writing this is entirely opt in so not everyone will see it. You need to visit a friends page who has switched to the new profile and then click the button and confirm that you also want to switch to the new profile. The jury is still out on whether this new profile is better than the old one, but it does have one major flaw at that is as follows.

My 5 images which i spent 4 hours cycling through so I looked popular and cool

At the top of each person’s profile are 5 pictures, there is no direct way to chose which pictures you want or the order that they appear in, basically Facebook thought it would be a great idea to just have the last 5 recently tagged photos of you appear in this line up. Aside from the fact that you may be smashed at a party and someone tags an unflattering photo of you, causing it to be right there at the top of the page, it is also open to some creative abuse.

As I said, it takes the last 5 tagged photo, so i decided to create a new album with some alphabet letters and then send some messages to my friends. You must remember to tag the last letter first, and then work backwards.

Here my good friend Mikey is reminded of what I think of him

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Here is a message for a girl i have been stalking, err i mean, talking to.

So those are just two messages I came up with really quick, I am sure there are much more funny and creative ways of doing this but it seems a really stupid idea by the developers to just let the last 5 tagged photos appear at the top of the page. Of course the user has the choice to change the images, but its a long process where you click an [x] and FB cycles through your last tagged images. Here is what I would like to see to make the top 5 images better…

1. Allow a privacy setting which stops third party tagged photos appear in the top 5
2. Allow me to select which images i want in the top 5 from my albums
3. Allow me to rearrange the order of the images

Maybe they will make some changes, but i doubt it, in the mean time, go have some fun, and post any good ones you make in the comments below

As per usual, this is a super quick blog post, but i downloaded the latest Facebook application for the iPhone and noted some new changes. Firstly you get the ability to sync your contact images with that of your friends on Facebook. Could this mean the death of apps like FriendSync? However you still cannot copy the entire Facebook phonebook to your device, which doesn’t bother me but i am sure a lot of people would like it.

Secondly you can know get push notifications for Messages, Wall Posts, Comments, Tagged pictures and a couple of other things.

Mashable has a pretty good write up which i have blatantly stolen and pasted below…

Up until now, the Facebook iPhone app [iTunes link] had everything but push notifications. The launch of version 3.1, however, remedies that ill. The other 3.1 biggie is the ability to sync your Facebook friends with your phone’s address book contacts — photos and all.

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Push Notifications

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When 3.0 came out this summer, there were some vocal complaints that the Facebook () iPhone () app didn’t do push notifications; it seems like basic functionality for any post-iPhone OS 3.0 application. Now when you start the app up after updating, you’ll be prompted asking if it’s okay to do notifications. Once you’ve said yes, it follows the standard iPhone notifications rules. You can customize what you’ll receive in settings.

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Address Book Syncing

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Right after you allow or deny notifications at the beginning, you’ll be asked if you want to sync with your address book. It will sync personal data, and change your contacts’ listed homepages to their Facebook profile URLs if they didn’t list anything themselves. You can choose whether or not to sync profile pictures, but that’s the only customization option you have. Still, it’s a very welcome feature.

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A Minor Quibble

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You’ll probably want to customize your push notification settings right away, because we quickly discovered that all notifications options are on by default: messages, wall posts, friend requests, friend confirmations, photo tags, events and comments. It can get a little spammy, and if you already have e-mail notifications set up (and push e-mail on your phone) you’ll end up getting double notifications for some things. It’s a small hassle, but easily sorted out.

Let me know what you think )

*Blows dust of keyboard*

Its been a long time since i blogged here. Its kinda weird ya know, if i get a nice little run going then i really get into blogging, but if i stop for a month or so whilst i am trafficking small children across the globe it kind of ruins my stride.

Silly jokes aside though, i just read a post on Mashable which reaffirms what I have been saying for ages when i have been championing technologies like Facebook connect. Users who visit your site from Social Media websites are loyal and they will return, why? Because they probably found your site through a friends recommendation, and people are friends because they have things in common, well either that or they have lots a chocolate chip cookies that they like to give out.

Since i am lazy and i have said all i want to say at 17:24 on a Tuesday afternoon, i am just going to quote the Mashable post about this…

That’s the subject of a new study by ad network Chitika, who analysed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September.

According to their findings, Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.

In the realm of search engines, Yahoo provides the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by Google and Bing with around 12% each.

So just remember, it is always worth having a presence on social media sites, just make sure you do it properly.

If you haven’t logged into Facebook tonight then you may not have had a chance to see the new notice which explains that on Saturday 13th June at 05:01 (GMT) you will have the chance to register a URL for your Facebook page. Obviously this makes it a lot easier for people to find you after you meet them at a party or something. Instead of having to search through all the people with the same name to add you as a friend, people will simply be able to type www.facebook.com/yourname

Basically, what will happen is when you login after the above mentioned time, you will get a message asking you to register a URL There are a number of different suggested options and also the chance to pick your own name. Now i imagine that a lot of the big company names are not allowed, however if Facebook aren’t too strict then i wonder how many people will register competitors names. giving us a new form of cyber squating? Will Facebook take steps to stop people registering trademarked names? What happens if you do, will they take that name away from you? These are all questions that are left unanswered that this time.

The above image from the Facebook blog shows how you will be able to select your name, i feel sorry for all the people with common names who are probably going to end up with bobsmith1982 or something alike. Still, i am sure that many people probably wont be that fussed.

So get your alarms set for 05:01 if you want the choice of the so coined ‘vanity url’ that you have always wanted.

Microsoft today announced that they would be including a pretty tight integration of Facebook connect into the XBox live system. There are two parts to this story, one is that all future XBox games will allow users to post back information to their Facebook Streams and walls based off achievements in games, high scores etc. Facebook connect will also be used to pull in friends and marry them up to your Xbox live account.

The second part is that there is going to effectively be a Facebook application on the XBox which will allow you to see friends photos, comments, videos etc.

All this news came from the Gizmodo Live stream which is following the E3 conference, where by the big names in the gaming industry show off whats new. I am very surprised that Nintendo haven’t jumped on the Facebook bandwagon as it would seem to fit very well with the Wii.

Edit: At the Nintendo conference in the afternoon, they announced that the DSI would integrate with Facebook to allow users to upload photos straight from the device.

There are some suspected 20 million + XBox live owners, and since Facebook connect now integrates with 3rd party websites, iPhone applications, the XBox, and now DSI we should surely see it grow and grow into a monster application.

A while ago i wrote a post about Facebook stalking and how Facebook had created a news feed preference page so that you could adjust what sort of stories you see in your news feed. One of the most interesting things about this was that you could specify friends who you would ‘like to see more of’ and of course friends who you would ‘like to see less of’, however i am convinced that after the recent roll out of the new news feed that none of these preferences even work.

Hi, we no longer work

Here’s the deal, i have some rather annoying friends, people who i love dearly in real life but cannot stand the junk they post on Facebook. I can’t really remove them as friends because they are friends in real life, so i wanted a way to not see the crap they post unless i specifically go to their profile page. After the introduction of the feed prefs i added these people and sure enough they literally NEVER appeared in my news feed. Since the new home page roll out though, these people are continually in my feed and literally doing my head in. On the feed prefs page, it states…

You can select up to 200 friends that you prefer not to see in your News Feed. You will only get stories about these people if nothing else is available

Now i have over 600 friends (yes i am a whore and, yes they are not all real friends) and the people that I have added to the ’see less of list’ are still appearing. Are you trying to tell me that out of 600 people, there isn’t enough ‘news’ that it has to show me MULTIPLE news stories about people i don’t want to see anything about? I think not.

To me, it seems quite apparent that the whole news feed prefs is broken and simply doesn’t work, i don’t know if Facebook know about this, or even if they care. But it definately needs looking at. Whilst they are at it, there should be away to stay friends with people but not show anything about them at all on your news feed.

Go ahead and try it, add someone who you know is a big Facebook user to the ’see less of’ list’ and then watch as it changes absolutely NOTHING!

Facebook, please fix this, some of us ‘power users’ would like functionality that you offer to actually work, thanks.

We all love Facebook, well most people did before the new layout change. If you read my blog you know that i spend a lot of time writing about new Facebook features etc. I thought i would lighten up the mood and create my first blog list, and what better place to start than with Facebook and the parody videos that people have made.

Lets get straight into it…

5) Facebook Song

The Facebook Song, umm song sounds like something from a country and western convention, that being said it’s not without its charm and good for a laugh in a couple of places.

4) Facebook Anthem

This is actually quite well put together and would be higher up my list if it wasn’t for the girl reminding me of Hannah Montana, who i literally can not stand.

3) The Facebook Skit

This video involves some Indian guy (i think he is Indian) singing along to a parody of Enrique Iglesias’ song Hero, need i say more?

2) Facebook Off

The guys from College Humour create a brilliant parody of the Nick Cage film, Face Off. Really well done and full of laughs, would of been 1st if it wasn’t for…

1) Facebook Gangsta

By far the best Facebook Parody, these guy encapsulate pretty much all the white guys who sit behind their computers thinking they are Gangsters, and yes, that includes me.

Super Bonus completely unrelated parady video

Totally unrelated but a great example of how to parody something from the guys a Cracked.com, if you actually watch Star Trek this is 100 times better.

I was checking out the hitwise blog, and came across an interesting post centered around the traffic growth of *shudders* Perezhilton.com… and no, i am not linking to it!

Anyway, the interesting thing about the post is that it states that according to hitwise numbers, Perezhilton.com now generates more traffic from Facebook than it does from Google searches.

Apparently…

Last week, 8.70% of visits to PerezHilton.com came from Facebook compared to 7.62% from Google. The switch happened the week ending December 27th, 2008.

then in the comments, someone else confirms that…

It’s a similar situation in the UK: 2.5x as many searches for Perez than Paris last week. 19.1% of Perez Hilton’s traffic from Facebook, just 12.0% from Google UK and 2.3% from Google.com

Now what else is interesting is that Facebook now accounts for about 3.3% of all traffic driven to video sites, Hitwise have provided the following handy dandy trend graph.

So to sum up the point of this post, whilst it may still be difficult to attract Facebook users to buy products from your site, it should certainly not be overlooked as a means to generate traffic to information based sites or blogs. I imagine that this trend will continue to rise, especially as Facebook look to launch its new real time homepage later today

The Facebook Connect world just keeps on getting better and better, not only do we have the wonderus Facebook connect core, we now have widgets for nearly every blogging platform and on top of that FB have released a new comments widget that can plug directly into your site with little effort and code.

With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via their APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together.

The Comments Box comes with additional social features:

• Fully customizable: Specify background color, text color, and other attributes by providing your own custom CSS to incorporate this best into your site.
• Access to raw data: Query all comments via the comments.get API method or the comment FQL table.
• Administration and moderation: Manage the privacy and permissions of your comment boxes on an individual or global basis.
• Integrates seamlessly regardless of whether you do or don’t have Facebook Connect already on your site.

So as you can see it is pretty powerful, and you can get more info, plus the code from the Facebook Blog

Well now you can with Zembly

What the hell is Zembly may you be asking? Well according to their website…

Using just your browser and your creativity, and working collaboratively with others, you create and publish Facebook apps, Meebo apps, OpenSocial apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications.

At Zembly, you can easily and instantly…

• author social applications using your browser
• participate and collaborate with others around live, editable code
• use the richness of popular web APIs to create your applications
• publish your social applications to multiple social platforms with a single click

So as you can see Zembly gives you a way to generate applications for a number of platforms without having to learn the code for each of the said platform. So how do you go about actually creating them?

Basically you have an online editor which allows you to take sample code snippets from other projects that people have made and then insert them into your application. For example you may be trying to work out how you can build a voting system, you would search using the inbuilt search function for “voting” and then it would return you all the code snippets which you could then plug straight into your application.

Once you have your application built you can then save it onto the Zembly server so you don’t even have to sort out hosting or setting up your server to handle applications. Once done you can submit your app’s to say, Facebook and watch the millions of $$$ roll on in You can already check out a Facebook application which has been made using Zembly called Capitol Punishment, as you can see it is pretty robust.

Zembly is currently in private beta so keep an eye on their site for when it comes available.