TechiePost

Click to enlarge. Photo courtesy: Mashable.

One of the most popular and most used feature of Facebook is its photo albums. Apart from updating status, playing Farmville and interacting with others, almost everyone on Facebook takes advantage of Facebook's unlimited photo album feature. Recently, the social networking giant has announced that it now shows larger photo in less time.

Published in Facebook's official blog, Justin Shaffer wrote, "Now, the photos you share on Facebook are bigger (720 pixels to 960 pixels) and load twice as fast, giving you quicker access to more detailed images."

Users don't have to worry about photos that have been already uploaded and share with friends as Justin added that the existing photos will appear larger as well.

Another update in the Photo feature is that Facebook is replacing its black old theater look with a white photo viewer that is significantly larger than previously the theater was.  The Theater look was released back in February when Facebook officially started supporting high resolution photos.

Let us know in the comments if this change means anything to you.

Ever wondered how many page views does the largest social networking platform attract every month? If you're curious, there are information. According to Google's DoubleClick, in June 2011, Facebook attracted as much as 1 trillion page views and 870 million unique visits.



Interesting thing is that, Facebook attracted ten times more page views then the second most visited website, YouTube. According to data, YouTube 100 billion page views (only) and about 790 million unique users on the site. However, the stats were shown excluding sites that don't load properly, ad networks, adult websites and a few of Google's very own websites.

One of the two things the largest social networking site Facebook does is regularly changing its privacy settings (still not being satisfactory to end users). It happened again. As expected, Facebook came up with seven deadly changes on how users are exposed around the world.


The changes are mainly focused on its tagging system and sharing policy. Here is a list of six new features (along with our fancy rating) Facebook is rolling out to its 750+ million users soon:

If you are a social gaming fan and if you have been on Google+, chances are you have already started to miss some games on the site. Lately, the search giant has announced that some popular games are being brought on board with a separate page called 'Games'.

Games like "Angry Birds", "Zynga Poker", "Sudoku" and so on are very popular and well-known in other social networking sites specially Facebook. Google, in a blog post, said that it will bring these games including some other in a separate section inside Google+ called Games. The page, or tab called Games, will be accessible from the top of the page on Google+.

Facebook faced some criticism from its users after few weeks ago it revamped its chat system to show up the most contacted list on its sidebar. Now, the social networking giant is testing a redesigned chat sidebar that is more like the very old way of chatting.

The new sidebar shows up the most contacted friends on top of it and adds a separator called "More Friends Online" below which other online friends from your list appear. Unlike the old chat navigator, the new sidebar goes all the way up to the top of the browser's screen to show as many contacts as possible.

The new feature reportedly hasn't been rolled out to all Facebook accounts yet. But apparently it's going to be stick and permanent chat style for a while.

It's Anonymous again, and this time, it says it's next target is Facebook, the largest social network on the planet.



Hacker group Anonymous has become famous over past months by successful hacking, data theft and website take-downs on many websites including PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, etc. It also successfully took down the entire Play Station Network and hacked into many law enforcement websites including the CIA and police. But this is the first time the hacker group is targeting any mainstream social networking platform.

According to its self theory, the group Anonymous performs 'ethical hacking' for the sake of humanity. For example, last time it took down a Syrian website in its message to remove the Syrian president that they say the Syrian people don't want.

Anonymous said in a video statement (only voice is heard after a fancy animation to Anonymous' logo), Facebook is selling all personal data despite any privacy settings users apply. Anything a user does on Facebook remains on Facebook forever. Even if the uploader deletes certain information, it's stored on Facebook. That said, Facebook is the biggest threat to privacy of general people, and that's why the group is going to "kill" Facebook on November 5, 2011.

Facebook may have the record of accommodating the largest number of users on board, but Google has already beaten the number 1 network with a new record. Latest data from comScore has shown that Google+ is the fastest growing social network ever, and it leaves Facebook, Twitter and MySpace behind in this record.

According to the study by comScore, the firm that tracks and analyzes web traffic and statistics, Google+ has attracted as many as 20 million users in just 21 days. Added to that, 5.8 million Google+ users are from the United States where 2.8 million users are from India. The new player in social networking world has also attracted people from other countries including the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany.

Although the new study shows all positive sides of Google+, an earlier report said that total traffic to Google+ originating in the US had dropped about 3%. Despite anything that's actually happening to the new social networking platform by the search giant, everyone is in fact looking forward to what Google offers next to keep users interested and attracted to its social network. So far the entrance and beginning of social networking journey for Google has been good and encouraging. Now it's up to Google whether they can maintain the flow or lose users' interest.

If you are a regular Facebook user, you may have already noticed that two things change way too often in Facebook: Privacy settings and News Feed. If you loved the current format of the news feed, bad news for you. The Wall Street Journal reported that the social networking giant is working for a new format of news feed.

According to the reports, Facebook is building an unfiltered news feed which will increase the amount of content users see on their homepage (news feed). Not only that, the company is adding severe functionality to its much-appreciated "Like" button. While there are no clear clues as to what the changes might be, a Facebook representative told CNET that the company is testing redesigned News Feed; but the representative didn't comment about changes in the Like button.

However, it is thought that the changes in the Like button will somehow interest businesses as the social giant is now targeting business owners to use Facebook for marketing and other purpose. Facebook has a dedicated a special landing page for businesses that might already be interested in investing Facebook.

Zynga, the developer of the most popular Facebook games Farmville and Cityville has filed a lawsuit against its own shareholder, Google.

In the lawsuit, the company claimed that Google, in its social networking platform called Orkut which is popular in Brazil is hosting a few comes created by Vostu. According to Zynga, the game is a complete ripoff of its own property (game that it developed).

Zynga previously sued Google in California and recently in Brazil. Currently, the Brazilian judge has ordered Google (Vostu) a preliminary injunction in favor of Zynga. According to the judge, Vostu and Orkut both must remove Mega City, Café Mania, Pet Mania and Vostu Poker within 48 hours. Otherwise they will have to pay about $13,000 fine on a daily basis.

However, the most interesting part is that these games are also available in Facebook and Zynga didn't say anything (not even a legal notice to Facebook) to take those games down from the largest social networking platform. These games have plenty of users on Facebook, too. This makes many think that Zynga simply doesn't want Google to be a big player in social networking 'game'.

To embrace the new, old must be gone. Twitter has officially announced that the redesigned Twitter.com is ready for a full release. With that, the old design of twitter will be permanently shut down. In September 2010, the then CEO of Twitter Evan Williams first announced the redesigned version of twitter called "New Twitter."

Users were given the choice to either upgrade to the new twitter or stick to the old version. But soon all users will be upgraded to the new version as the old design will be shut down permanently.

Although Facebook says a person needs to be at least 13 years of age in order to use the social networking site, there are lots of profile belonging to children that are a few weeks old. Now, the social networking giant adds another feature that lets you add your unborn child on Facebook.

The concept is simple. If you have been on Facebook, you already know that you can add/mention other people as Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, Daughter, Son etc family member or relatives. That drop-down menu has a new option called "Expected Child".

With the new feature, you can show your expected child with a name on your Facebook profile. Not to mention the month that you're expecting your baby will be shown on your friends' news feed immediately.

If you are really expecting a child within next year (right now you can't set an unborn child  that is not expected after 2012), you can show it on your Facebook. To do so, simply do the following:

Despite its 20 million active users, among which many have closed Facebook and moved to Google+, the total traffic to Google+ has dropped a bit as users spend less time on the newly built social circling platform by the search giant Google.

From July 17-23, total traffic to Google+ in the US fell about 3% to 1.79 million hits. The percentage is compared to the previous week's traffic (July 10-16). See details analysis here.

Earlier we heard reports that the network was lacking female users as most of the people on the site were males. Some argue that this is happening because the network isn't open to public yet. The actual popularity will begin to rise or fall when the site is open for anyone to register and enjoy just like Facebook and Twitter.

What do you think of Google Plus? Have you used it? Do you enjoy it? How long do you think you will be using it? Let us know in the comments.

Not exactly Twitter, but several brands have been given the opportunity to monetize on your timeline if you follow them on Twitter.

Called Promoted Tweets program, brands can now advertise on the timeline of those twitter users who are following them. To put it simply, if you follow a brand or company who is participating in Promoted Tweet, you are bound to see ads 'spoiling' your friendly timeline.

Groupon, LivingSocial, HBO, Dell, Virgin America and more brands are among the companies participating in Promoted Tweets program.

It's not Facebook's official announcement, but when Facebook's marketing director says so, we feel tempted to say it's said by Facebook.

Randi Zuckerberg's photo from her Facebook album [facebook.com/randi].

Named Randi Zuckerberg, the youngest billionaire's sister and Marketing Director of Facebook argues that anonymity online has to go away in order to stop cyberbullying. She says people put anonymity as their identity to talk and behave like being behind closed door. People behave much better when they use their real name.

Marie Claire magazine hosted a panel discussion on social media this Tuesday evening where Randi Zuckerberg said her thoughts on cyberbullying.

Facebook had launched a new technology that would scan the photos after you upload them and then try to find a match between them and previously uploaded photos, if a person exists in both photos, Facebook would suggest user to automatically tag them in the new photos.

While many have enjoyed the new technology, others are having privacy concerns. Exactly that's why Facebook has made it easy for you to opt out of this technology so that your photo will never be stored under that technology in order to find a match in newly uploaded photos of your friends.

Facebook seems to be constantly suffering from privacy concerns raised by its huge number of users. However, we are quite amazed to see Facebook's quick response this time.

Google+ is Google's latest and apparently a very serious attempt in conquering the social world on the Internet. Millions of people are enjoying Google+ with positive and negative reactions to it. However, there are complaints that Google+ is deleting some accounts simply because of the name of the accounts.



According to ZDNet, Google deleted a large number of plus accounts because the profiles seemed to be fake. One particular Google+ user that ZDNet noted had lost her plus account because of the profile name which was "Ladyada". Google also asked another user to scan his Photo ID and send it over to Google in order to get his Google+ profile back.