New Facebook 'Groups' Designed to Completely Change the Way You Use Facebook

Facebook has just revealed a new version of Groups at its live press conference in Palo Alto, California. Facebook Groups are a shared space where members can participate in communal activities like group chat, e-mail lists, document sharing and group photo-tagging.

The new Groups product was built from the ground up; Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Groups is an entirely new product that only shares the name in common with the old Groups functionality. The old Groups will continue to remain in place, but moving forward members will only be able to create new Groups.

Groups are closed by default (but can be secret or open) and are designed to be spaces where small groups of friends share information, with each group controlled by the entirety of its members — an important new direction for Facebook. The group chat feature is just as it sounds; members can participate in back-and-forth IM conversations with everyone in the group at the same time.

Once you start participating in Groups, the most-viewed ones will automatically live in the left-hand navigation of the page for easier access.

Facebook has also released a mobile interface and an Open Graph API for Groups, which means that soon Facebook Groups will be accessible in all imaginable capacities.

With everyone in control, Groups will function much differently than before. Facebook asserts that social norms will govern activity. Ultimately, the company believes the new Groups will fundamentally change the way you use Facebook and give you more control over the distribution of your messages.

From our initial tests, we can assert that Groups is, as Zuckerberg promises, something “so simple that everyone on the site will want to interact with it.” And, by design, everyone will use it.

As Facebook clearly stated during the press event, its goals are to map all real-world groups, to ensure that everyone participates and to build something useful in lots of contexts. What this really means is that Facebook wants to fully understand member relationships (an extension of its Open Graph undertaking), and that the company will use your behavior in Groups to better understand these relationships.

Read More

Facebook Outage - Shown in Graph

ATLAS data to graph Facebook (AS32934) traffic with 80 ISPs around the world between 5pm September 22 and 5pm EDT today. You can see Facebook traffic plummet around 1:30pm and return shortly after 4pm. From a quick glance at the data, the outage appears to be global (impacting all of the 80 ISPs).

We have no information on the root cause (no sign of obvious BGP instability or DDoS).

Lots of speculation on twitter.

Related Articles

"Worst Outage in The History of Facebook" - Facebook Engineer Explains

Read More

"Worst Outage in The History of Facebook" - Facebook Engineer Explains

Facebook Software Engineering Director Robert Johnson was kind enough to explain to a curious public exactly why Facebook went down earlier today, calling the mishap “the worst outage we’ve had in over four years.”

In a brief blog post, Johnson discussed today’s downtime, which began around 11:30 a.m. PST. The site wasn’t functioning again for most users until around 3 p.m. PST.

Today’s outage was unrelated to another period of downtime yesterday, when issues with a third-party networking provider caused problems for some users trying to connect to Facebook.

Johnson said the downtime today was caused by “an unfortunate handling of an error condition” involving an automated system designed to verify configuration values in the cache and replace invalid values with updated values from the persistent store.

Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.

To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued.

The automated system for correcting configuration values has been turned off for now, and Facebook is reportedly exploring more, ahem, “graceful” methods of handling this in the future.

Johnson also notes that getting the feedback loop to stop was “quite painful,” saying that the entire site had to be turned off to stop traffic to a particular database cluster.

We don’t envy Facebook the at-scale disaster the site has just survived; 500 million users and a feedback loop adds up to some nasty business however you slice it. And Facebook’s downtime problems aren’t nearly as persistent and severe as those of other social media staples out there.


Related Articles
Facebook Outage - Shown in Graph

Read More

Fring Challenges Skype With $0.01 Per Minute VoIP Calls

The mobile voice over IP (VoIP) service Fring now allows its users to make phone calls to land line and cell phone numbers anywhere in the world with prices starting at one cent per minute. Not all calls will be that cheap. Calls to Canada start at 0.4 cents per minute, and calls to India start at 1.1 cents, for example. But it’s more competition in a very small space currently dominated by Skype and to a lesser extent Google Voice.

You used to be able to make Skype calls using the Fringapplications for mobile phones like the iPhone and Android devices, but following the launch of the iPhone 4, Skype and Fring got in a bit of a scuffle and Fring users were left in the cold — no Skype access.

Rather than bridge the gap between the two services, Fring has opted to launch its own service to connect its users with outside phone lines. That service is called fringOut, and it’s hard to miss that it sounds a lot like Skype’s own service for that purpose, SkypeOut.

FringOut works on the Nokia N60 phone right now and iPhone and Android support are coming in the near future, according to Fring’s press release. The release doesn’t give a detailed breakdown of costs, but there’s a rate calculator at the Fring website.

If you have a Nokia N60, give it a shot and let us know how it works. If not, hey, at least Fring provided a dorky, silent film-inspired video to keep you distracted while you wait for fringOut to show up on your platform of choice! Watch below.

Read More

First look at the new Twitter Web interface - Facebookification

Take a first look at the new Twitter web interface. Here's what we love, dislike and want more of from the redesigned site.

On Tuesday, Twitter announced major changes to the way users can interact with its Web interface. It is nothing short of a total multimedia makeover.  The new Twitter means a better, more enjoyable user experience for users. There’s more to see, more to do and more to engage with, without having to leave Twitter.
The new Twitter will be rolled out slowly over the next few weeks to all users, but today we can show you exactly what that looks like, as reported by Wired.

Now tweets can be expanded upon in a second column that opens up next to a users Twitter stream. That will display rich multimedia content, from videos (as shown above) to pictures and their location on a map (as shown below).

Not only is this a multimedia makeover, but Twitter is positioning itself to act more like a desktop application. Case in point, the new Twitter incorporates a fancy set of keyboard shortcuts. This is going to be a hot feature for Twitter power users who no longer need to be slowed down by interacting with a mouse. For anyone that has ever used the keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, you know what a coveted features this is.

These changes will undoubtedly reframe the landscape and competitive nature of third-party Twitter applications, now that many of their cutting-edge features are included within Twitter’s Web interface.
The new Twitter interface is also a step in the right direction for companies that are looking to advertise. With content embedded in the Web interface, getting a customer or fan to click on the link should be easier since it no longer involves being directed to a new site.
So what are the drawbacks? Although more user-friendly, Twitter still doesn’t provide analytics to users. It also doesn’t provide conversation threads or nestings of tweets between users. We’d expect to see these features crop up sometime in the near future.
Overall this is a major improvement for users, businesses and information junkies who will soon be able to maximize their experience with Twitter. What do you think of the redesign?


I'll be posting all the latest updates on it ... keep following @ahsantasneem

Read More

Apple Introduces “Ping” Music Social Network and iTunes 10

Steve Jobs has revealed iTunes 10, the newest version of iTunes complete with a new logo, new features and its very own social network for music called “Ping " that he described as Facebook meets Twitter for music.

Ping allows users to follow others, just like Twitter. You can follow artists or your friends to find out what they’re listening or what they’re creating. It has custom song and album charts, a news feed, 17,000+ concert listings, and is available to 160 million iTunes users. Ping will be available not only for iTunes on the desktop, but for iPhone and iPod touch as well.

Jobs also touted the growth of iTunes and the iTunes store. He announced that more than 11.7 billion songs have been downloaded through iTunes. 450 million TV episodes and 100 million movies have been sold through Apple’s music software, along with 35 million books through the iBooks store.

iTunes 10 is available starting today.

Read More