6 posts tagged “facebook”

and yeah, Facebook is down

Anyone remember Friends Reunited? Yeah, I bet you signed up once and never went back too. Well, it's had an ajaxy facelift, it's now free to send people messages and such, has pages for photos and video, and.. is a bit Facebooky. (In that you can now add family, friends, aquaintences, not just people you went to school with).

Looks good, but I think it's too little, too late. However, as long as they don't start letting you put zombies on the page, it's still a good alternative to the US-centric Facebook. Even if 80% of the people you know are on FB, and about 5% on FR.

Digsby just added Facebook Chat to its impressive list : MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Gtalk, Facebook Chat, Twitter, Myspace (although just MS updates, not MySpace chat yet)... awesomeness and freebeeness. Download it now! (Windows only for the moment though)

(Better than Trillian, Pidgin, Miranda... hell, even Adium. And thats saying something).

RIP Facebook? Thats the opinion of an article on cnn.money.

Personally, I don't think FB is going anywhere soon. It's traffic is going up and up, especially in the UK. I do agree with certain points in that article though, FB has had a lot of negative press lately and it needs to seriously get its act together. Of course, this won't matter one bit to your average kid, as long as they can send each other zombies... ;)

The article says "what will replace it?". Personally, I think something like Plaxo. Plaxo is brilliant imo, you really should sign up for it.

Why? What does it do? Well, Plaxo is an open-social Addressbook and aggregator. OK, in English. You sign up, and set up your profile. Add your address, phone etc. Similar to Facebook or whatever. Then you import your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo etc. Similar to FB or whatever. Now you have an online address book. The clever part is, if your friends are on there too, and they update their address, or email, it automatically gets updated in your address book. No more searching for someone's number. This addressbook can sync with Yahoo or Outlook (and by association, your mobile phone).

Plaxo also has a timeline, like Facebook. But the Plaxo one doesn't consist of "Al sent a Zombie to Wurzel" or "Al posted a video on funwall!". No, another clever part about it is that it connects to a large number of other websites, Flickr, Livejournal, Delicious, Jaiku etc. (doesn't support Vox yet afaik). So your timeline would be your latest LJ post, some photos you uploaded to Flickr, etc etc Of course there are privacy settings, so you can decide which of your contacts sees what.

Add in the open-social aspect, where you will be able to add widgets that do practically anything, and you have the beginnings of a fantastic replacement for Facebooks of this world.

Try it.

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update: OK, It seems that people have (legitimate) concerns that Plaxo is a friend-spammer. This stems from the system they used to have in place, whereby when you import your contacts, it would email each of them asking for updated contact information. This was removed back last year. Now, if you want updated contact information, you have to go to the specific contact's entry in your Plaxo and request it. However, if that person is already on Plaxo, you don't even need to do that: if they update their details, their details automatically get updated in your book too. They made mistakes, they fixed them. Keep an eye on this service, whether you use it or not.

In contrast to the N-Series PC Suite I wrote about last week, yesterday Nokia  launched the latest version of the plain 'ole PC Suite, v6.85. And it's brilliant, imo.

They've totally redesigned the interface to be more in keeping with the N-Series Suite interface, although it's smaller and to the point. Like it. Also, your text messages now show up on a pane inside the interface, and you can click on them to read/reply. Nice. Don't know whether you get message notifications in a toaster/Growl type pop-up, because no-one has texted me yet. Aaaanyhow...

The whole thing runs faster, and works brilliantly on Vista. Remember I was complaining about the HUGE package that the N-Series suite installed? Well, PC Suite is small and lean in comparison, and just does the syncing/backup stuff I need. So well done Nokia. In the future, I'd like to see the N-Series Suite copy PC Suite, rather than the other way around. Or maybe the best of both worlds, which is what PC Suite is at the moment.

Download PC Suite 6.85 from the usual place.

While we're on the subject of Syncing, I came across a really nice piece of freeware yesterday too. Fonebook is a program to sync your Outlook and Facebook contacts (with a couple of caveats). You run the app, and log into Facebook. It will then download your friends list, open your Outlook contacts, and compare them. Where it finds matches, it grabs the information about that person from Facebook (user pic, birthday, about me etc) and puts it in your Outlook. For people on your Facebook friendslist who aren't in your Outlook, it gives you the option to create Outlook contacts for them. BUT.. and here is the problem.. the software can't copy phone numbers and email addresses from Facebook. It's part of Facebook's current TOS, and mostly based on security/privacy concerns. So if you do decide to create Outlook contacts from your Facebook friends, you will need to go in and manually enter email/phone details for them, one by one. Still, once you've done that, they will automatically get synced next time, with the latest user pic etc. All good.

You have the option of not syncing certain people (if a contact has a picture of a dog on their Facebook pic, you may not want that as their contact pic in Outlook). Also, if you remained signed in to Facebook inside the program, you can schedule it to automatically sync, say weekly or whatever. Brilliant. You can then just sync your Outlook with your Nokia and all your contacts on t will have pics. Very nice.

Download Fonebook from here (Windows only)

I wish there was a desktop/mobile client, that could simultaneously update your Twitter, Jaiku, MySpace status and Faceook status with the same message. Ok, FB and MS probably don't have a way of modifying the presence message outside of the client, but it would be dead handy.

OR

I wish you could set Myspace and Facebook to use your latest Jaiku/Twit. Basically, a way to sync everything up. Maybe someone will use the new OpenSocial apis to make one. Hey, now there's an idea for a "startup". Who wants to invest a couple of million so I can make it?

Looking out the window> the neighbours are putting up their Christmas trees and stuff. In November. Oh dear..