It was this very month, in fact this very week of May when Facebook was opened up to my university among others in the UK. Judging from my profile ID (223400006) I’d like to think I was #6 to sign up. Facebook has changed immensely since, and not always for the good. From opening up to general public to releasing the Application Platform, an old school user (I’m not talking about me) wouldn’t recognise the Facebook he/she saw today from the one back then. However this isn’t a post to bitch about ‘features’ I dislike. Instead I’ll talk about where I see Facebook headed, or want to see it headed.

As it stands now, Facebook is pretty popular Social networking platform. I have all my friends on here and I can see what they have been upto in a variety of ways. Their photos, reading their walls, their notes (blog posts), events they are attending and most importantly status updates. I can find out common interests too by looking at their profile or the outlandish groups they join. Communication is done via public wall posts or Messaging, which Facebook hopes will replace email but more on that later.

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I tried Digsby earlier on in March and was quite impressed with it but since I’ve never really used a multitude of Instant messaging platforms I didn’t really care for it. I’m only on Google Talk and WLM/MSN Messenger and running those two clients was perfectly fine by me. However on May 1 Digsby announced support for Facebook chat. I strongly believe Facebook Chat has a strong potential of becoming the biggest IM provider as the approach of building IM around a social network makes more sense than the traditional approach of doing it the other way around. So this made me take the plunge and drop the GTalk client (sorry Google <3).

The feature list is really extensive so I’m not going to go through it all. I will go through some of the main ones though. Firstly, it has supposed for all major IM platforms( MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat). In addition you can configure multiple email accounts in the client, and that’s not just notification , it’s complete control (open, delete, forward, mark as read etc). Facebook stalkers enthusiasts will love the Social networking feature which lets you receive updates from Facebook (other social networks supported too). This can get pretty extensive actually, I ended up unsubscribing from that as it was an overload. There’s a lot more you can do with it, writing about it all will result in a really long boring post.

You can really customize the application and it’s appearance a great deal, right from buddy list to conversation window. The way I’ve set it up now is it connects to my Gtalk account, Facebook account, Twitter account and retrieves email from my two Gmail accounts. Still haven’t given up on MSN because believe it or not, I like the client. However should it exceed my bloat tolerance threshold I won’t have qualms about dumping it.

If nothing else, it’s a good enough client for Facebook Chat. Give it a spin. They have a new build as well.

http://www.digsby.com

After months of bickering, Microsoft and Yahoo did not tie the knot. The decision while celebrated by some, disappointed others, including Yahoo. Aw Yahoo I understand what is to be broken hearted.

Adding insult to injury is the news from WSJ reporting Microsoft’s bankers have informally approached Facebook over a possible acquisiton. Flashback time: Microsoft invested $240m for a 1.6% stake (which valued Facebook at $15bn) and was an all advertisement deal.

Knowing that, what Microsoft stands to gain from this deal is unimaginable. The affair with Yahoo was to try and build up a stronghold in the search and ad market (to compete with Google), and Facebook hasn’t (yet) been a strong ad platform as one would’ve thought it out to be. In fact, it is yet to present a sustainable source of revenue (1$ gifts can’t do it all). And if Microsoft has already locked up the pageviews, where do they go from there ?

I have to say as much as I love and respect Microsoft, Livebook doesn’t sound appealing to me.

I guess we’ll only have to see if Microsoft updates it’s relationship status from ‘It’s complicated’ to ‘In a relationship’, and at what point will Yahoo update its ‘Looking for’ ?

Facebook recently launched a profile cleanup utility which allows users to move applications to their ‘Extended profile’. While application developers are fuming and believe it decreases visibility of their applications, I am welcoming it with open arms. This is a huge pull back on part of Zuckerburg Inc from the MySpace-isque route they were headed on. While none of them started playing music or flash automatically, their presence meant it would take quite some time before you reach the wall. And no, this isn’t just high school users, it’s also people who’re too nice to ‘deny’ or ‘ignore’ requests.

While it still isn’t being used as much as I’d like it to be, there’s been a marginal improvement of some Facebook profiles, and it’s definitely a step forward.

Here’s hoping to cleaner Facebook profiles and lesser loading times.

It was only yesterday I was thinking about my previous blogpost could’ve been too early to point fingers at the Facebook team. I stood corrected and was pretty pleased with the way they had managed to allow third party developers to access the site without making it an annoyance. All flash and music related applications have a strict no auto-play rule to them. And most applications so far had been above par. Peace and order had been restored in the kingdom.

And then it happened. I was shocked out of my mind when I found out a friend of mine had added what seemed to be a Glitter Text. Mustering all the courage inside me, I managed to click on their profile. And conforming to my fears, there it was their name in glittery shiny horrible looking text. Not just that, applications such as Fortune Cookie and Famous Quotes put a line of text on an unnecessary image which is of a ludicrous size. You have to scroll for nearly 17 years to get to someone’s wall. Add to that, applications such as fluffPet and you the ‘Ridiculous meter’ running off the charts. Many would be inclined to blame Facebook’s decision to open the website up to everyone. But the cause of the problem here are the ‘College’ Students. ‘I am disgusted’ would be pretty much an understatement.

B