… ‘cuz i certainly didn’t!

Today when i logged onto Facebook i saw a little message telling me that one of my friends had changed their phone number and that it had been added to my phonebook. Phonebook you say? Call me slow but i didn’t realise that i had a phonebook on Facebook.

Not that i really understand why people post their phone number on Facebook (unless they have a VERY stringent friends-accepting policy), but it turns out that if one of your friends does then it will be automatically added to your Facebook phonebook (say that fast and drunk) in a handy dandy alphabetical list.

I didn’t realise this page existed, but then again to be honest i don’t personally find that all the settings in Facebook are where they should be. It can sometimes take me an age to tweak a setting.

Anyway you can find the page at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/mobile/?phonebook=&ref=nf and below is a screenshot…

Obviously all the phone numbers are the same and made up so weirdo’s don’t start calling them.

A couple of days ago some strange things were going on with the Digg algorithm which meant that stories managed to hit the front page with only one or two Diggs.

Now today whilst browsing i noticed that 3 stories had managed to hit the front page with 0 or 1 comments. Usually a story gets a good 10 or so comments with a decent amount of Diggs to hit the front page.

I did have a screenshot right here but wordpress fucked up and overwrote it

Since the last little mishap we have been told that Digg have been playing around with the algo, should we now expect that new stories will have a longer life to make it to the front page and a less amount of comments?

I have just been browsing around Digg and noticed that something was a little bit different. It seems that they have updated the comment system on stories into a better format.

I personally think it looks a lot better, its more clear and consice and it also allows you to filter comments to show just yours, or just your friends.

It also seems to make replying and viewing individual comments a lot easier.

All in all a great improvement )

Just i was writing this, the Digg blog post explain all the changes hit the front page.

It’s been in the works for a while, but it seems that today was the mass roll out of the Facebook Chat Application, well i say application but it isnt the usual FB app whereby you install it on a canvas page and then it shows up in your profile, oh no sir e Bob (what am i American?).

Basically you have a little bar that sits at the bottom of the page when browsing Facebook, think of it as kind of a Windows Start bar but at the bottom of the browser.

Anyway, its fairly inconspicuous and to be honest i am pretty impressed by the way the people at Facebook have implemented it, of course you also have the option to turn it off if you feel it is getting in the way.

Lets have a little look at whats on offer…

Above is the little notification section, if you keep this open then you will get notifications even when you are browsing on other peoples profiles. Normally you would have to go back to the home page.

Next we have the chat status tab, obviously you can change whether you are online, offline, sleeping, away, etc. You can also make the chat a popup window, then you can obviously alt tab between your work and your chat window you sneak. Also you have some settings which are pretty thin on the ground at the moment.

Next up is this meat and potatoes of the chat app, your friends who are actually online and who you can chat with. Its basically a list with all their status’s on, also you can see people who are set to away. Pretty much like any standard chat client.

Finally we have the chat window, nothing too special about this, it does support smilies, and if you open multiple chats with people then they will align them self along the bottom bar just like minimising windows in err windows.

So that’s a whirlwind tour, i personally dont think that the new chat app is that much of a big deal. Its kinda nice having easy access to see who is online and I guess its pretty cool to just ping people if you see them, but at the end of the day we have had messenger systems for ages and most people you want to talk too will already be on there.  Obviously if you want to keep chatting with people then you will need to leave Facebook open which could cause some issues with your employer, but i am sure many people will find it useful and i dont doubt that i will use it to quickly ping people who i may not have spoken to for a while.

I am not sure how long Facebook have been doing this but today i finally realised that Facebook are letting users permanently block application requests from those damn annoying applications such as owned or lil green patch.

This is especially welcome to me as having the name Dean Chew means that i frequently appear at the top of the friends list when apps ask you to send to a friend.

Below is screen shot of the joyous occasion…

Images altered to protect the innocent )

I was hanging around on Facebook over the weekend when i noticed a couple of strange wall posts from two of my friends. Both of them included url’s to “ringers” which in English means ring tones. I was quite fascinated by this because i have been playing with FB apps for a while and have been looking to see if something like this could be done.

I know that about 6 months ago there was a way to post to users walls by injecting some code on the canvas page but FB plugged the hole, i am now looking into how people have managed to do it this time.

I’ll update this blog post when i have more info…

The porn industry has always been pretty clever when it comes to creating links and marketing their sites. Obviously it is such a competitive vertical that they are always trying to get one up on each other (No pun intended). Unlike the rest of the SEO world that can game sites like digg.com and reddit.com it is very hard for the porn industry to infiltrate the masses so when they do it is in a very clever way.

Let me introduce to you Professor John Bukkake, what a strange name you ask. Well for anyone who knows what joys Bukkake is all about you will find it even stranger that he is a facial dermatologist at the University of Calcutta. Finding this a little hard to believe i decided to click through the links of the site to eventually find myself transported to an actual Bukkake movie download site.

You see, what those clever porn seo’s have done is to create a page which is so unbelievable that it is funny, the masses over at digg and reddit can’t beleive that something so funny would exist so they digg/vote it up without looking over any of the external links on the site. This generates a great buzz, and some seriously good links in to the John Bukkake page which then links out to the porn sites.

I wouldn’t be suprised if they 301 the domain to the porn site after a couple of days either.

So in closing this is a by the book method of gaming social network sites, you need to be extremely creative but it will pay off.

Edited to add:
I have seen this kind of idea before on a lawyer site. Basically they had the lawyer in question pull a stupid face for his profile picture on his site. After the crowds started linking at such a silly picture being shown on a very professional site they switched it back to his normal profile pic. They generated a ton of back links from authority sites such as digg’s front page.

Edit 2:
Looks like they are cloaking the J Bukkake page so that if your not a human then you 3o1 straight through to the actual err proper content.