February 24th – By: Craig Pen

Imagine life without the internet or the telephone. Imagine walking to the next town to deliver a message. Compared to days past, today’s far reaching and nearly instantaneous social networking technology is magic. With the new third party Facebook Chat Messenger integration, the new Facebook photo uploader and the new Facebook privacy settings, the magic keeps getting better.

Right: Chit Chat for Facebook makes it possible to use Facebook Chat from your desktop like you would another instant messenger network like Windows Live Messenger or Google Talk. The Facebook Instant Messenger supports conversation history, emoticons and sign in status alerts.

New Facebook Chat Messenger Integration

The Facebook Chat Messenger interface has been modified to stand out. It displays how many of your friends are online and lists some of their names. The text is small. The options are few. Facebook Chat Messenger requires an open browser window making it inconvenient when multitasking.

A stand alone application like Chit Chat for Facebook allows you to connect to the Facebook instant message network without dealing with the awkward facebook chat box within your browser. Chit Chat for Facebook can load and sign in automatically when Windows starts. It can log chats and alert you when friends sign in or out of Facebook. It even remembers its window size and hides away with a single click, simplifying multitasking. Chit Chat for Facebook will even let you leave a message on a friend’s wall. It is instantaneous message delivery, with no need to walk all the way to the next town.

Uploading photos to Facebook has never been easier or more convenient. The new uploading tool is easy to download and install. It may even look and feel familiar. It allows you to search your computer for the photos you want to share. You can select them by clicking on their thumbnail image and upload them to your profile. More file formats will be accepted to solve much complained about compatibility issues. The new uploader even allows the photo upload process to continue after you have left the Facebook website. This makes uploading last night’s party photos far less of a chore.

New Facebook Privacy Settings

Back before the internet and the telephone, life must have been very private. New technologies like Google Streetview and Facebook threaten traditional notions of privacy. Facebook used to allow any of the friends in your network indiscriminate access to everything in your profile. Facebook’s new privacy features are set up to be the best to date. To protect your privacy, Facebook now allows you to customize exactly who sees what. The new Facebook magic will ensure your boss, your spouse, and your parents see only what you want them to. You can specify who can have access to each individual piece of content. You can allow access to friends only, to friends and friends of friends only, to everyone, or to custom lists of friends. This will return a little more confidentiality to our modern privacy compromised, technological world.

Today it is nearly impossible to imagine life without the internet or the telephone. Tomorrow it may be impossible to imagine a Facebook without apps like Chit Chat, the new Facebook photo uploader, and the new Facebook privacy settings. Modern social networking breakthroughs are magic and the magic keeps getting better.


About the Author: Craig Pen is a freelance writer writing for a living in Niagara Falls, Ontario. When not out hiking and biking, he can usually be found camped out in front of his 106 inch projector screen writing away.

In just four short days an onion ring has been able to accumulate over 1,300,000 facebook fans.  The name of this newly viral facebook page is “Can this onion ring get more fans than Justin Bieber?”. Update: The day after this post was posted the fan page achieved it’s goal. Now this fan page cannot be found on Facebook so I am guessing that the publicist for Justin Bieber bought this group and had it shut down. The last time I saw this group it had over 2,000,000 fans, meaning it was also more popular then Miley Cyrus.

The case of this onion ring serves as an interesting example of how unique humor, when combined with a cause, can serve up a recepie for viral marketing success!

December 21st | By: Garin Kilpatrick

If you go to facebook.com/family/ you will find a nifty directory that allows you to search for people on Facebook with the same last name as you.  Facebook also made the announcement, on mothers day of 2009, that now you can list family information in your profile.  Now, not only can you list the person you are in a relationship with, but also your parents, and any siblings and children you may have.

The We’re Related App

There is also a Facebook app called We’re Related by FamilyLink that allows you to keep track of your relatives, and perhaps discover relatives you did not even know you had.  We’re related also allows you to build your family tree.  A testimonial from FamilyLink.com reads:

“This tool has made it possible for me to communicate with my children whom I have not seen close on nine years now. It has also afforded me the opportunity to keep in touch with my relatives far and near, I have even managed to find long lost friends. This is a really great tool.”

Easily create a Facebook Group for your Family

Facebook even has a custom page that makes it easy to create a group for your extended family on facebook.

Feedback

Do you have your family on Facebook? Do you list your parents, siblings, or children on your Facebook Profile?

By: Garin Kilpatrick

The Facebook App for iPhone was the second App I installed on my iPhone, after TweetDeck. From the start I found the app very fluid to navigate through and easy to use overall.  All of the different parts of facebook are accessible via large icons. The Problem I encountered is a long delay, which is related more to the network than the iPhone itself. Another problem I faced is the inability to successfully search for any of my friends from within the App. I have over 2,000 awesome facebook friends but having this many causes the Search query to time out.

A better way to access facebook on the iPhone is by using the Safari Web Browser built into the iPhone and surfing to: http://iphone.facebook.com/. This version of Facebook is optimized for the iPhone and works great.  The Auto-complete feature even works as I type a friends name in the search box.

I still keep the facebook app installed and I use it when I want to swiftly check my inbox and notifications.  The facebook application is currently shooting up the ranks as one of the most popular applications to date and there are already more than 15,253,000+ users who have installed the app. Although the Facebook app for iPhone is not fully functional one nice thing about it is that it is completely ad free.