Facebook has won a US patent on its News Feed. The American patent summarized “invention” as “a method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment” as quoted by Times Of India.

Since the launch of News Feed in 2006, the website showed a major outburst and popularity amongst various social networking sites. These dynamic updates
about various activities of members of online community made users much more active and community activities were easily traced by the users. This was a huge outbreak which made Facebook popular amongst users.

Facebook said in an email response

“We’re humbled by the growth and adoption of News Feed over time and pleased with being awarded the patent”

quoted by TOI in its article. Well never before 2006 anyone used such a feed, so having such patent will make Facebook a much stronger competetor amongst social networking sites.

Some days back Facebook in collaboration with McAfee decided to giveaway 6 months of free subscription for  McAfee Internet Security.

Before downloading the 6 months subscription package, you must become a fan of McAfee Fan Page. After you have done with this go to Protect your PC tab of the page. In this you have to select your country and get started with the download of your copy. McAfee has also declared special discount for facebook users after the completion of free 6 months.  

This is another example of how facebook is being deployed by various companies to gain huge audience within few days. McAfee for sure will be in profits after 6 months getting attention of 350 million users. Also facebook is making profits out of every download you do, since its redirects you to the mcafee landing page with the tracking URL (referral id) of facebook in it. But unfortunatley this free copy is not yet available for download in India. For now its available in United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada(English), Canada(French), France, Italy, Germany, Latin America, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom.

How to add establish fan page for your blog or website on facebook? Facebook these days have become a medium of sharing your interests with your friends and communicating with them through the use of videos, pictures and wall. But Facebook has many unexplored features which can really help you build your personal brand. It might be your website, blog, product or services. One of the features is the facebook fan page. How to enable a fan page for you brand. Almost any popular website or product today has a fan page on facebook e.g. Mashable, Search Engine Land, Techie Buzz and Tech2view.

1. Before starting you need an account on facebook. (only prerequisite)
2. After you have it the next step is to go here Create a facebook fan page and specify for what purpose you are creating this page (Local, Product, Brand and Organization or Artist, Band or Public figure)
3. After you have done this specify the name you would like to give to this page.
4. This will create the page something like this http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tech2view/223050864764
5. Now edit the setting of this page, add images, info, replace the ? (image) with your brand logo.
6. You can also attach this with your blog or website feeds, so as and when you blog, automated posting are made to this fan page for your audience to stay updated.

Now what after you have made this page? Now you can also place facebook Fan Box on your blog/website so that people (your audience) can join in as fans on this page and get connected. How to do this. ?

1. Go to the Edit page at the top left cornor of you page.
2. Now when you have arrived at this page, in the sidebar at bottom right got to Get your Badge.
3. Now click the Fan Box in the sidebar to get the script that you can then paste on your website/blog to  have Fan Box.

And you are done now. Now you have your product or website identity @ facebook

Last day I was wondering about how to download a facebook album. One way was to open every picture, then right click and then selecting SAVE AS option for every picture, this would be so tedious. Second, option would eb to batch download all pictures in album. Facepad came to the rescue. Facepad is a firefox addon that you can install from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8442 on your Mozilla Firefox browsers.

FacePAD, better known as the Facebook Photo Album Downloader will allow you to download your friends’ facebook albums, events albums, and group Albums, en masse, with the click of a button.

How To use facepad after installing

1. Go to Tools>>Addons In addons select FacePAD and set your language preferences.
2. Then go to any facebook album link and right click it. You will find ‘Download Album with Facepad option’
3. If all goes well you will find javascripts popups for album and it start downloading.

Facebook has now emerged as a main stream Social Media Platform for almost all the people around the world. It popularity can be largely be guessed by seeing its Alexa ranking which is now #3 after Google #1 and Yahoo #2. I guess it will be # 2 after 1-2 years but that’s not the point.

The point is the amount of traffic you will be generating to your site when you use facebook as a platform for promotion of your blogs and websites (not spam it). Imagine the amount of traffic when you blog posts will hit the live activity stream of each of your friends home page on facebook. It has other advantages also beside just creating the buzz, it will help your blog/blog posts to get indexed fast by search engines. It can also help make your posts go Viral among your friends and Fans but it usually depends upon the content. Facebook has become an important tool for Social Media Marketing these days.

In this post I am going to jot down the Ways in which Facebook can be used to spread the word around for your websites and blog posts (blogs).

1. Networked Blogs – It is the most easiest ways to get your blog posts show up in the activity stream of your and your friends. It is a facebook application which can be add to your profile just like the normal apps. It can be found at http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/. After going to this link you will find an option of ADD YOUR BLOG click it and add your blog feed or URL that you want to import in. This app also provides a Widget which you can place on your blog or website to show and gain more fan following. This widget also can be used to declare that you are an author of this blog. You can control which blog posts are shared and which are not. You can also become the fans of other blogs whic you find informative and useful. The benefit of this App. is that it creates a link that refers to your original post on your website.
2. Notes - This is also a good way to import all your blog posts automatically.  It is like a cron job which is run to check the new updates on your blog. This is the default app. from facebook. This has a limitation of only one blog imported at a time automatically. You can manually add notes also to this be clicking ADD NOTES button. You can add feeds to this by going to the APPLICATION SETTINGS menu  under SETTINGS and then goint to NOTES and EDIT APPLICATION SETTINGS. Unsubscribing from a feed is also easy.
3. Fan Pages- You can make pages for your business or website on facebook and then promote those pages among your friends and fans. This is also a default feature that is provided by facebook. You can have fans for your pages. Businesses and websites can show thier information and work profile and share latest news and companies blog posts with the fans.  You can create a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages
4. Links – This is also a default feature of facebook wherin you can share your favourite links which can be beneficial to your friends and fans. You can also subscribe to your shared links. Importing the links from particular blogs is also possible with this app.
5. Facebook Share – This works like normal DIGG IT  and Thumbs UP features on the sites. It will allow you to place a button on you website under blog posts or anywhere and let the visitore cominf to your site share it with their friends on facebook, as a result generating a VIRAL marketing technique. To get started with this click> http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?share
6. Facebook Connect – With this app you will increase traffic, increase registrations and increase activity to your website. You can gain access to User’s Identity: a user’s name, photos, Friends, Distribution: all of the integration points within Facebook, like stream stories and notifications, Integration: profile boxes, profile tabs, and publishers just like apps on Facebook. There is also a wordpress plugin to make this app. integration a Breezer.  To get started with this app click > http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?connect

The most important thing to mention here is not to overdo any of these things as this will make your sharing sound like a SPAM and please please do not make use of these features to promote SPAM. Let me now Promote this post myself.

Are you on Facebook and facing a problem of RSS/Feeds automatically showing up in your profile activity stream in form of notes. I recently had this problem of activity stream. I searched about this and people are actually having problem and are searching for a way to remove these types of Imports. But it seems they are not getting solution to this setting easily. So, I searched for a solution to this on how to stop importing feeds.

Here are a Few Simple Steps:

1. Go to your Profile page on Facebook.
2. Then Under “What’s on your Mind” there is a share button. Under this share button there are Options
3. Click on this Options Link. This will now be changed to Settings.
4. Click settings now.
5. Under Settings you will find Stories Posted by you and Sites Imported.
6. Under Imported Sites your will have feeds that you have imported earlier. From here you can change the feed or simple Delete it.

This is a short trick about how to Remove the notes/rss imports from your facebook profile.
Although I know that Importing Site Feeds from your own site or from your companies website is a good thing to bring in more traffic and generating more audience for your blogs and website, but some websites fail to produce good content and at that point you want to remove them from activity stream notes. Notes is a very popular feature of Facebook.

Update : Under the new user interface of facebook almost every setting is changed. So this update is all about removing the existing feeds or page notes from your facebook profile. Its easy.

1. Type “Notes” in the search box of facebook at top. This will take you to Facebook Notes App.
2. On left hand side you will see all your Notes, Pages and Drafts.  Shown below.
3. Just click “Edit Import Setting” link and it will show you all the feeds and blogs you are importing currently.
4. Just click “Stop Importing” button on the blog or feed you want to remove.

Now the problem here is it does not work for blogs or pages that were imported before the facebook interface changed. To remove those feeds,

• Go to “Pages Notes” link and that will show you all the pages and feeds that are currently being there in your profile.
• Now go to a specific page or feed like By “Dr. Manmohan Singh”  shown in picture above and “Unlike” that page from bottom left menu.

I hope this solves the problems in existing interface. Please tell me if you did not got any explaination.

How to remain invisible in facebook.

Facebook trying out new things for its members in impression of Google.
Google introduced invisible status mode in Gmail Chat (not in Gtalk) and improved privacy options for orkut users, 20-30 days back.
Now facebook also added Privacy Options for its members and users which are very easy to use and control.

Now you can be invisible in Facebook from the rest of the world by using facebook privacy options. You can find this option in profile privacy controls .

You can edit or change your status from “Update your status” on the Home page. Alternatively, you can edit your facebook Status from your profile page by clicking on “edit” in the Status Box.

I think facebook will be trying a lot more new things in a month or so to hold itself strong among users.
Facebook is in fierce competition now from OpenSocial API and other social networking sites.

This is a good news for all the facebook users of France.Now these 1.4 million users can now use French as a medium of social networking.Facebook one of the most popular social netwoking site has launched its French version to people on last Sunday night.For this facebook used the local people of france to help him make them a native platform.Spain and Germany already has its local versions of Facebook.

This step by Facebook will enhance its users and traffic in France multi-fold making it more stronger as a social network,as popularity of social network is determined by number of people using it.

While the United States is unsurprisingly the number one country on Facebook in terms of number of users, today approximately 60% of all the 67 million Facebook members live outside the United States. The most represented countries after the US are Great Britain, Canada, Turkey, Australia, France, Sweden, Norway and Colombia.

Currently France occupies the sixth place in its usage of most popular social network Facebook and by adding the local version of facebook to france Mark Zureckberg hopes to make facebook dominate over Myspace.

This is very strange kind of face-off between Myspace and facebook once again for their dominance as social networking sites.

This is a new kind of poll started out by this fellow blogger at TastyBooze.com
At present Hot Facebook girls are leading the competition and polls.Currently it has done with 7-rounds of its polls with two hot beauties against each other.

But I think Myspace will no longer be lagging considering the amount of users it has which is far more greater than facebook.

And once myspace community knows of such a kind of weird poll they will definitely vote for their myspace hot girls out there.

This poll is based on the pictures and references taken from hottestgirlsonfacebook and hottestgirlsofmyspace.net

I think its quite a late entry but for its my responsibility to introduce u all to this hype about google OpenSocial API. Google on Friday launched OpenSocial, a common platform for developers of social websites apps, in a direct challenge to Facebook.The Internet search leader said it hopes OpenSocial’s set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) will revolutionize the Internet’s social networks.

The web is fundamentally better when it’s social, and we’re only just starting to see what’s possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web, said Jeff Huber, senior vice president of engineering, Google.
There’s a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places, he said.

OpenSocial will also support MySpaceor vice-versa in this project that represents an audience of about 200 million users globally.
Google said a total of 18 sites had already committed to supporting OpenSocial, including Oracle, orkut, Bebo and LinkedIn.

OpenSocial marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers, the company said.”

• Several developers, including Flixster,Ning, FotoFlexer, iLike, RockYou, Slide, Theikos,Paypal and VirtualTourist have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs,but these are not officially launched till now.
• Google launch came after Microsoft and Facebook last week announced they were expanding their advertising alliance and the world’s leading software maker said it would buy a 1.6 percent stake in the social-networking website for 240 million dollars.
• This quick steps came from google to expand its Social network which is loosing its reach in context to facebook which has 50 million active users worldwide.

To get started visit the documentation.
And if u r a programmer u can apply for the sandbox and get started to build your own Orkut application a good Social network .Also see the example applications
In the coming days I will introduce u with the upcoming apps so stay tuned in .
Happy blogging.