Facebook updating homepage yet again

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After the disastrous launch and eventual user acceptance of Facebook’s news feed and profile pages last year, you would have thought that the company wouldn’t mess with the site too much more for a while. But no – it doesn’t want users getting too comfortable, so next Wednesday there’ll be a new homepage.

It looks like Twitter. There’s no two ways about it. With the status box massive and front-and-centre, there’s a definite homage going on. The feed below is now real-time too, so you can see stories appear as they happen. That feature’s been around for a while but previously it wasn’t the default option.

But one feature that Facebook’s adding to the mix is filters. If you’ve got friend groups set up then you can choose to view the updates from just one group or another. That could definitely prove useful for power users, or those with very distinct friendship circles. You can also view feeds from your friends in specific Facebook groups that you’re a member of, which is quite nifty.

This is a definite improvement to the site, and should help it compete against the attention draw from Twitter, especially as Facebook’s biggest asset is that almost everyone you know is on it – something not true of its media-darling competitor.

It’s a bit of a blatant copy and should probably have been rolled into the previous update, but I suspect that many mainstream users will hardly notice the change and as a result, there won’t be the mass user revolts that have characterized previous changes to the world’s favourite social network.

(via Business Insider)

FarAwayFish.com: using the web to communicate with loved ones once you've gone

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Though the Internet is near-ubiquitous and social networking is skyrocketing in popularity, there’ll inevitably come a point when every one of us can no longer update our status, post a tweet, upload a Flickr photo or write something pithy on our blog.

How would the friends and relatives you usually only see online know if you dropped off the end of the world? Sometimes, your friends and family will pay tribute to you online, but you can’t always rely on technophobe relatives to do that.

One solution, according to FarAwayFish.com, is to set up a special online profile that only gets unlocked and sent out once you die. Messages, photos, videos and audio can be recorded and stored for up to ten years after your death so that friends and relatives can log in and remember the happy times…

.tel launches today

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.tel – the domain name service that I got all excited about back in October, launches to the public today. To briefly recap, it’s a global contact database that stores contact info in the DNS. For a much more detailed explanation, check the earlier post.

Today, the services becomes available to the public. I could buy duncangeere.tel. I could probably wait a while though – because it’s not exactly a common name. If you’re John White, though, I’d get moving. Right now. Here. Go.

.tel (via ShinyShiny)

Related posts: Exploring .tel – a communications profile parallel to the internet | Internet Explorer 8 release candidate now available

Twitter ramblers targeted by all-new data-mining trojan

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Users of Twitter, the minutiae-documenting waffling programme with no discernible purpose whatsoever, have been coming under attack recently thanks to a fake profile offering, predictably enough, free porn.

Some poor people have, while in the process of telling precisely zero readers what they had for breakfast, been sent messages from this fake account and then – here’s the stupid bit – clicked on the links supplied. Then they also clicked on “YES” to install…

Man awarded £22,000 over fake Facebook profile "libel"

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Mathew Firsht has won a sensational and trend-setting court case today, against a friend who set up a fake Facebook profile with loads of personal details – and sex-based lies – about Mathew’s life.

The former friend, cameraman Grant Raphael, also set up a Facebook group called “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?” – a group which stayed online for 16 days…

Piczo launches Piczo Zone to give users even more artistic license

piczo-zone.jpgPiczo’s always been praised for allowing the creative juices to flow in teenagers, with users able to fully customise their profiles with colours, glitter and all manners of appealing-to-teens pixels. With the launch of Piczo Zone, however, the kids can really turn themselves into 21st-century Van Goghs.

This new feature allows users of the social networking site to share their content which they’ve created across various sites. The creative content designed by the young users can be found by searching the various…

Novel idea for a Facebook group: let's knit Facebook!

let%27s%20knit.jpg Facebookers tend to be a strange bunch. Knitters, well, even more strange, let’s be honest here! But when the two collide, it’s time to start looking up The Priory’s phone number in the Yellow Pages.

A group of knitters on the ‘book from the UK, US and Canada are collaborating on a big knitting project, each creating a section of a profile screen. Confused? Bewildered? You should be – each knitter will create a small part, send it off to the organiser, who will then sew all the pieces together to form a big badass Facebook blanket…