Facebook borrows the idea of Hash tags from Twitter

Recently, Facebook added a new feature of Hash Tags. For people familiar with twitter, this is the same thing that Twitter has been doing all through out.


On Twitter, you can follow conversations using hash tags because there is nothing like posts and comments, no system of organised threads like Facebook. Which makes me come to my point, does Facebook even need Hash tags ??

Its actually very annoying, people will now use Hash Tags for spamming and other purposes. On Twitter, Hash Tags were necessary so as to surface conversations and such is the nature of the micro blogging medium that you can follow random topics. Facebook on the other hand is way too much closed in its approach. You have limited people who you can interact with and whose status updates you can see.

I believe, more than anything, Facebook has earned itself the title of Copycat rather than innovator. It earlier copied the blackberry messenger style double ticks in its chat so as to notify whether the recipient has tread the message or not. Not to mention all the talk surrounding the very idea behind Facebook having been taken from some one else.

Brace yourself for all the mad spamming, all thanks to uncle Zuckerburg.

Why is twitter better than Facebook to promote your Blog/Company ?

Twitter is better than Facebook to promote your blog/company.

Well I'm not really a social media expert or even anything close to that but still I'm writing this post may be because I've been following Jeff Buallas a bit too much lately.

Twitter as we know is a microblogging site whereas Facebook is a full fledged social networking site where you can chat,play games,upload pics and make albums and a host of other things that you cant imagine to do on Twitter. Imagine playing farmville or poker on twitter, funny eeh.

In spite of all these things that you cannot do on twitter, I still say that twitter is better, you must be thinking I'm nuts.

Normal routine of a normal guy who regularly uses facebook would be to log-in and then check for new notifications, check out his wall and feeds from a few friends and then sit down to chat using the sloppy chat feature that facebook provides. Facebook would tell you that this certain user spent a total 1 hour on Facebook, but still thats of no use to you as he still has not checked out your company/blog page on Facebook. This is precisely why I say twitter is better than facebook.

Now coming to Twitter, lets see the daily routine of a tweeple. He logs in and checks his time line. He reads your tweets and even clicks the links in them. People on twitter have nothing to do except for reading tweets and this is where twitter scores against Facebook.

The bonus is actually on the person who writes those tweets to make them more and more eye-catching. Writing tweets that tend to catch the viewers attention is an art in itself.

Re-tweets are one of the best way to get followers on Twitter. The more your twitter handle is mentioned in other people's tweets, more are the chances of you getting new followers.

One more thing that makes twitter better is that recently Facebook has come under heavy attack from spammers. There are new ways to spam everyday, fake apps to fake events, Facebook is fast becoming vulnerable to these spammers. Twitter has fared better in this respect as it is still more or less spam free.

So rather than spending time on managing your company/blog page on Facebook, you should concentrate on your twitter handle.

Happy Tweeting :)

FaceBook Questions finally rolled out

Its been a rather irritating week on Facebook with questions about who is going to win the India-Pakistan cricket match popping on people's walls every now and then.

Well, Facebook Questions is actually a new service started by Facebook. It was actually started in July last year and was only limited to a few beta testers then. now Facebook seems to have ironed out a few things and is finally ready to roll out the Facebook Questions feature.

This is a sort of a fun feature, where-in anybody can start a question and all their friends can answer it. Facebook is promoting it like more of a poll rather than a question.

Rest, you can check out Facebook Questions by going here and activating it fot yourself.

Finally you can tag friends even in comments on Facebook.

Facebook today made a very small but significant change to their commenting system. Now you can tag your friends even on comments.

Earlier you could only tag your friends on status messages by using a '@' symbol followed by your friends name. Now you can do the same on comments too.

Angry Birds Coming to Facebook

Angry Birds is the hugely popular mobile game which recently recorded 1 Million downloads on Android Market. It is a huge hit which first made its debut on the iOS platform.

Recently, there was news that Rovio Mobiles( the comapny that developed Angry Bird) is going to launch a full version(add free) of this game on the Android Platform. Now it seems that Angry Birds is finally coming to Facebook.

Rovio Mobiles had earlier made this game available for Mac and PC's and even wants to launch the game on various gaming consoles.

The developers are currently working to launch Angry Birds for Facebook in April.

How to revert back to the old Facebook Photo Viewer?

Well If you are one of the many people who are searching for an answer to this question, then I can answer it for the time being. If you refresh your page, ou will automatically get back to the classic or the basic facebook photo viewer. To put it in more simpler words, just press god damn F5 and then you can see your pictures the way you are used too.

But let me tell you, Facebook knows how to impose even bad changes. I for once still dont like these new Facebook profile's, but then the people at Facebook made everyone change to these new profiles forcibly and i believe they will do so in this case too.

This new photo viewer looks more like a childs beta photo viewer made for some school project, how could Facebook even release this thing to 500 million odd users. They seriously take us for granted.

Obamas Dinner Meeting With Silicon Valley CEO's

The White House has just released 2 pictures of US President Barack Obama’s meeting with top people from Silicon Valley. The meeting which was held at Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr’s home had the who’s who from the tech world in it.

Seeing this picture we can make out that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Genentech Chairman Art Levinson; Google CEO Eric Schmidt; former state controller and venture capitalist Steve Westly Doerr, and Stanford University President John Hennessy were among the esteemed and honoured guests.

Even though no one knows what this meeting was about, speculations are on. As usual some jokes (some really funny) have started to come up on the topic. I’ll post one really good one at the end of this post. However what strikes me is that the people at White House choose to release one picture where in President Obama is engaged in a deep conversation with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I wonder how the rest of the people who were left out from this meeting would be feeling right now. I don’t see any representation from either Microsoft or even for that matter IBM. Bill Gates should have been the first person to be invited according to me, but what the heck, atleast Im not running a failed government (:p).

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got the best seats besides the president. Mark my word, this seating order would definitely become one hot topic of discussion in the coming days. After seeing Steve Jobs at this meeting, it puts to rest all those rumours about only six weeks being left for him to live.

Ohh ya, so that joke which I told you about. Ok here it goes, it’s a rather long one, but worth reading.

Transcript of Obama tech meeting in Silicon Valley February 17, 2011
John Doerr: Hi everybody, thanks for coming. I just wanted to start out and remind everybody here that you all work for me.
All: Understood
Obama: Thanks John, we all know who’s in charge, but I need you folks to do something for me. I’ve got to figure out how to turn this economy around by 2012. Or you’re all going to be listening to stories about Moose hunting the next time you want to meet with the President.
John Chambers: Don’t look at me. I voted for the old guy last time. Didn’t think it would turn out this way.
Steve Westly: But I want to tell you about my approach to business, based upon my eBay experience
Doerr: Yes Steve, we all know it’s better to be lucky than good, but that’s not going to turn the economy around by 2012
Eric Schmidt: Look, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about. What we need to do is open source government. Instead of hiring case workers to manage welfare and unemployment offices, let’s just ask users to submit ideas about how these underutilized resources can be used better. For example, let’s sell advertising on the backs of shirts of welfare moms and the unemployed, and then have them pick up trash on the freeways.
Obama: Hmm, I don’t know Eric…
Dick Costolo: @Woodside mansion. Pasta delicious!
Schmidt: OK. Another idea. Instead trying to figure this out ourselves, let’s get on an advisory board of a country that’s working well, say, like Sweden. We listen to their ideas, copy them, and then give the ideas away for free. And we sell advertising on the backs of shirts of government workers.
Steve Jobs: Yes, Schmitty, I know that’s how it works for you. But I think we really need to revolutionize the way this country works. Like what if we combine the prescription drug program, FEMA, and the National Endowment for the Arts, into one thing. We’ll call it the iPFArt. Yes, that’s it…
Carol Bartz: $#@! You boys always think you know the answer. What the country needs is tough love. Let’s cut, cut, cut back the federal employees until we have one thing left that works. Who says we need to grow the economy anyhow? This whole growth thing is over-rated. Why, while I was CEO of Autodesk, for the first 10 years, I turned it from a billion dollar company into a billion dollar company. Nobody complained. They just learned to accept the status quo. That’s what this country needs. To just accept it!
Dick Costolo: cant believe i missed the office 2nite. steve carrell ROCKS!
Larry Ellison: Barack. The problem is you are measuring the economy with someone else’s numbers. Instead you should be thinking like Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru. If you don’t like the rules of the game, the change the rules. Instead of publishing numbers about GDP, you need to be measuring the economy with different metrics—how many new jobs there are in bankruptcy law, increases in yacht sales, whatever!
Reed Hastings: I think we need to make army uniforms bright red. It must be hard for you to find all those soldiers. Why not make them wear red so we know what side they are on.
Mark Zuckerberg: Seriously, you guys are wasting my time. I’m sitting here listening to you, while back at the Facebook offices, my colleagues are inventing things that no one in this room will ever be capable of. Look, Barack, if you want to cut the deficit, run all the government’s IT through Facebook. All your employees are spending a couple of hours per day at work using Facebook already, why not transfer all the government functions into Facebook apps, so that that government workers can be more efficient doing whatever it is they do, instead of having to hit the “boss” button to hide Facebook every time they hear footsteps.
And if you don’t like my idea, %*@! It. Look, Tunisia and Egypt were just beta for us at Facebook. We can overthrow your government in a few days. All I have to do is push a button and I’ve got 5 million people protesting on the Mall by Saturday.
Obama: Right, got it. All government functions on Facebook. But only if you can get Russia to do the same.
Zuckerberg. Don’t be silly. I Skyped with Putin this morning. It’s a done deal.

New and Improved Facebook Photos (Finally :p)

It looks like the people at Facebook have finally realised the need to enhance the way we use photos on facebook. In September last year, Facebook announced that it would gradually roll out three big improvements to photos on Facebook.

The first of these was providing for higher resolution pictures. By providing support for better picture quality, without any charges unlike some other providers, Facebook clearly gaines some extra brownie points. Facebook increased the size of photos from a mere 720 pixels to 2048 pixels on the largest edge. The high resolution pics are a treat for the eyes.

The more recently released update of the new and improved photo viewer is again a good step by facebook. The problem earlier was pretty simple(but seriously frustrating to say the least ) that when we clicked on some photos, then we had to hit the back button on our browser again and again, hence loosing track of where we were(frequent users of facebook would know what im talking about). With this new image viewer, images are now opened in the same window in which u click on the pic. Not only this, the images now load much faster than earlier.

The last update was the easier tagging and uploading feature. Now we can tag multiple people easily. You can tag a single persom in many photos pretty easily now. The uploader too has been rebuilt from scratch and is now much more stable and reliable. So it will now be easier to upload, tag and view your pictures on Facebook.