1. Adding Location: The new feature lets you add location to any image while viewing it, which was previously not possible after an image was already uploaded. You have to do it from the maps feature. But now you can alter the location of any of your uploaded images at time you choose directly from the image viewing screen.

2. Specify a date to show it on your timeline: Since the new timeline has launched and has constantly being promoted, you can add any image to your timeline from the timeline page of your profile. With the new theater mode you can add any image to your timeline right from the interface you are viewing it. That’s neat.

Apart from these all the older features are still present there which are rotating images, tagging people or choosing them as your profile picture. The new change looks more tidy and the left to right positioning of the elements (comments, location, date, description etc) offers complete viewing without you needing to scroll down through the page.

It’s hard to tell if the new layout is live for everyone but quite a few people have it already activated on their profile as far my connections go. Well my guess is this is still in beta phase and live for a few people only. Here’s a sneak peek before you can try your hands on it.

Update: The new photoviewer is rolled out for all users.

Facebook Rolls Out New Layout for Theater Mode Picture Viewing originally published on Ampercent

Timeline – The Way You Wanna Share Your Life

A complete new approach to tell your story. Story of your life (or the life you lived after you joined Facebook). With all places you’ve been, the movies you watched, the songs you listened, the food you ate/cooked, the mood swings you’ve had and even the trails of your morning walk, it’s a complete new look at who you are. Archiving every detail of your life you’ve shared on Facebook is what the new Timeline is introduced for. The whole idea is based on the idea of Information Designing. An Infographic of your Life.

With all the apps at your service the story you tell will be more of a visual experience for the friend who’s interested.

Interesting. Isn’t it?? Try out the new Facebook Timeline.

The “More” Social Apps – The Reason You Are On Facebook

With a better Open Graph, the future Facebook apps are going to make your Facebook experience more *social*. As Spotify CEO Daniel Ek truly remarks, finding music is best while browsing through friends’ collection. That is what Facebook social apps is all about. No more liking a book, a movie, a song. The experience is more real, more human. You can now read a book, watch a movie or listen to a song. Or in easy words, say what actually do. Not just saying, with the new range of apps, your friends can do the same things with you. They can too listen to the same song you are listening now, share their views on it or recommend you a better one. That is the power of networking.

With pattern recognition the apps will have better control on what to recommend for you based on what you have done earlier. Find what’s best suited for you, you are likely to get exposed to a whole new horizon of songs, movies, books, news, places etc you would not have found otherwise. Facebook has not only announced this feature but also to demonstrate a way to what’s best, have partnered with some of the giants in the above niche. With Yahoo, Spotify, Netflix and plenty more the service is going to be bigger and better. A smart move that will set high standards for apps to come.

Integration of all this likes to your timeline is under your complete control making it even easier for you to express yourself in a much better way. All this with nothing but a touch of a button named Add to Timeline.

Sharing being the focus of all the above experiment, you do not have to worry about the annoying pop-ups from the apps you love. Pop-ups that tell you to share whatever you have used that app for. It will now be auto-posted. Saying this, it may feel that the news feed is going to get more cluttered with apps your friends use. Wait, it won’t be. This will be there on the newly introduced ticker to the right. However if a pattern is figured out that may be of your interest, the update might also get placed on your main feed.

The Final Conclusion

All said we better not forget the annoyances Facebook has created in the past. But the change definitely promises to be more engaging and adds a more personal touch. Think of this, when have you last enjoyed a song with that friend from school? You can feel that fun again. The move if executed properly will definitely catapult Facebook higher in the social industry ladder. No wonder, it is always better to do things that you love with people whom you love or people who admires your choice. At the end of the day that defines the social game.

The New Facebook – A Complete New Way Of Sharing And Telling Who You Are originally published on Ampercent

Set Up Facebook Voice Calling:

1. Visit the official Facebook Video Calling page. Press “Get Started”.

2. Once the chat list opens up, open the chat window for any online contact by simply clicking on his/her name in the chat list.

3. Once the chat window opens, click the () button to start the video call.

4. However, you will now be prompted to complete a quick one time setup to get started with video calling on Facebook.

5. Press the “Set Up” button and it will initiate a download.

6. Once the FacebookVideoCallSetup_v1.2.199.0 file is downloaded double-click it to open the Facebook Video Call Plugin Installer. Now as the installation completes, your browser will need to be restarted.

7. Now start a chat with any of your online contacts and press the () button. You are good to go and have a voice chat with him.

8. If any of your friends make a Facebook video call to you you will get a notification like the one shown below.

Another good thing about this video calling feature is that you can send video messages to your Facebook friends as well.

Addition of voice calling certainly makes Facebook chat a more useful tool. Provided the count of Facebook users (750 million at the time of the announcement) this is going to be a major hit overnight. Ironically, this may have led to possible server outage due to massive requests as there are reports stating the Facebook voice call plugin failed to get downloaded. Fear not, it gets resolved after a couple of *failed* attempts.

The major downside of this new feature in Facebook chat is that it supports Windows systems only. That means Linux and Mac users will have to wait to have a taste of this.

So it is time you make a video call to your Facebook friend. Keep the comments coming.

Get Started With Facebook Voice Calling originally published on Ampercent

So the next Twitter follower of yours checks your Twitter bio, arrives at your blog, finds the Facebook link and leaves.

He might not get all the options to connect with your brand or social channels on other web 2.0 sites like Quora, Friendfeed, LinkedIn and so on. And more importantly, he does not have the time to hit through half a dozen links and follow manually every single time.

So how do you make sure that every follower who lands in your blog, Twitter profile or Facebook fan page follows your brand on all the popular social networking sites? How do you capture that customer almost instantly and turn him into a loyal follower ?

Enter FullyFollow.me – a new startup which wants to aggregate all of your social profiles in one single page. Signing up is free and once you have connected all your social account’s with your FullyFollow.com profile, your clients, fans, followers can instantly follow your profile across all of the social networks supported by FullyFollow.me (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn at the moment but the developers are planning to add more social networks shortly).

No, It’s Not An About.me Clone

So how does FullyFollow.me differs from About.me or other similar startups who aggregate all the social profiles of users in one single page ? There is a neat difference

Users arriving on your FullyFollow.me profile have to click just one button and they will connect with you on all the social sites in a flash. There are no confirmations, no second thoughts – just that one button. (see example)

While About.me also lets you portray your social accounts, Twitter profile and web links similar to Google profiles but users have to click through each link and follow you manually on all the social sites. First they choose Twitter, click Follow, go back to your About.me page, click the Facebook profile link of yours –don’t you think it’s too complicated and has a lot of exit channels ?

This is why the folks at FullyFollow.me thought to create the service and make life easy for socially savvy people so that their followers can instantly follow them across all the social sites. If a user is already signed into Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, all he/she has to do is arrive at your FullyFollow.me profile and hit the big button “Fully Follow Me”.

Looks great and I am a little surprised why About.me or Google haven’t thought of a similar feature yet.

Related: Create your online business card

Let Your Social Fans Follow You On All Social Networks With FullyFollow.me originally published on Ampercent

Missing that ‘newspaper feel’ I started an online search of ways I could read my Facebook and Twitter feeds in a newspaper-like manner. After much searching I found what I was looking for: “PaperLi.”

PaperLi is a free web service that does exactly what I mentioned above; it lets you read Twitter and Facebook feeds in a newspaper-like manner. The first step is to link your Twitter and/or Facebook account with the service. Next you specify what items your newspaper should be composed of.

For example, if you have your Twitter account connected, you can create a paper consisting of all Tweets related to a particular username, hashtag, or Twitter list.

Alternatively you can create a custom paper with a title of your choosing and a specific area of focus.

When your options have been selected, you submit them. The site takes a short while to process the information and form your desired newspaper. During the process, you are shown a window indicating the search.

With the process complete, your paper is displayed in the browser. As you can see in the image below, the resultant view resembles a newspaper exactly. All the articles, links, and images tweeted or shared on Facebook are displayed on the paper. You can keep updating the paper to fetch the latest Facebook shares and Tweets.

The site publishes your paper on a unique URL. You can share this URL with friends and let them get their news feed in a newspaper-like manner too.

One of the best ways to take advantage of the service is to create a custom paper of topics you are interested in and then saving the paper’s URL. By visiting the URL every day you will always stay updated with the news that you are interested in.

Tired Of Same Old Newspapers? Get One With Facebook and Twitter Updates originally published on Ampercent

It is already common knowledge that any information set to “everyone” is free for the world to see, but Facebook is taking upon themselves to share some of it with third party websites to enhance user experience.  For instance, your friends can discover on Pandora.com certain types of music you like just going by what you’ve “liked” in the past.  This sounds fine, right?  What if Facebook does this by default and never ask you?

The argument could be made that you had the information set to “everyone” so nothing has been breached.  This is true.  It should also serve as a reminder that we need to be very vigilant about our privacy settings.  Many people just don’t like the idea of Facebook making it available by default.

Anyhow, you can disable it if you’d like. It’s really easy to do and I’d like to show you how.

1. Go to the privacy settings (refer screenshot below):

2. In the lower left-hand corner you will find the link to edit the settings for apps and websites:

3. Look for the “Edit settings” button under the “Instant Personalization” section:

Watch out for the pop-up!  Facebook wants you to understand a bit about what Instant Personalization is all about.  Just close the pop-up, scroll down to the bottom, and uncheck the “Enable instant personalization on partner websites” check box:

That’s all there really is to it.  Just the one check box changes it all.  Maybe you like the idea of Instant Personalization and maybe you don’t but at least now you know how to disable it if you so choose.

This would also be a good time to tweak what information is public in your Facebook profile.  To do this, head back to the privacy setting page.  Pour through these setting one by one and think about what you want other people seeing and what you want the whole world seeing.  Also keep in mind who you allow as friends.  For instance, if you allow any old stranger to be your friends, you’d better be careful what type of thing you share.

Be especially careful about your contact information.  Personally, I don’t list my whole address anyhow and my mobile is listed only because of interaction I do with Facebook using it (only I can see it though).

Security and privacy is very important to you , we know.  Here are several other articles written specifically about Facebook security and privacy:

• How To Setup Facebook Login Alerts – Know When Your Facebook Account Gets Hacked
• How to Stop Facebook Photo Tagging And Facebook Video Tagging
• How to Block All Facebook Applications From Your News Feed
• How to Delete a Facebook account which is Impersonating you?

What Is Facebook’s ‘Instant Personalization’ And How To Block It? originally published on Ampercent

Firesheep Makes Us Vulnerable

In late 2010, a developer known as Codebutler released an add-on for Firefox known as Firesheep. The add-on allows users to capture the security cookies that are passed back and forth the verify logins via websites like Facebook. While this security flaw is limited to open Wi-Fi networks, it is a very important idea. Many of us use the Wi-Fi available in coffee shops or university campuses, and those are all vulnerable to Firesheep-like attacks.

It was quickly realized that the best way to fight the attacks was via SSL browsing. Twitter rolled out the more secured browsing rather quickly, tightening security by the end of November. It took a hacker cracking Mark Zuckerberg’s page on Facebook for that company to respond, but they have now released SSL through the website.

Enabling SSL In Facebook

In order to enable the new SSL setting in Facebook, first go to your Facebook page and click the Account button in the top right hand corner. Once there, click the Account Settings button.

Once you are on the Account Settings page, you will see a number of options available to you. Click on the Account Security section to expand it.

In the Account Security pane, you will see a check box under Secure Browsing (https) that says Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible. Click that check box and press Save to save the setting.

That’s it. You will now use SSL when logged into Facebook. This will prevent your account from being cracked by Firesheep like attacks. Facebook has not released this feature to all users yet, so if you can’t find the setting, just look again in a day or so. Everyone should have the option soon. (also read: How to secure your Facebook account by setting up login alerts )

If you have any trouble finding the setting, leave a note in the comments. Do you think that this should be a forced setting? Have you ever had a Firesheep experience? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below as well.

[Firesheep Screenshot via Codebutler]

Stay SAFELY Connected To Your Facebook Buddies With SSL Browsing originally published on Ampercent

Rockmelt: Welcome To The Social Browser

Rockmelt is based on the source for Google Chrome, meaning that it has access to the Chrome Web Store and all of Chrome’s extensions. However, Rockmelt is something much bigger than a Chrome variant. It is a full social integration into browsing. The team at Rockmelt took the idea of the internet connecting you to your world, and redesigned the way a browser works. They started by adding a full suite of Facebook integration tools. From the very start of the browser, you log-in via your Facebook account, establishing your place in the cloud. Next, they added Twitter to the equation, giving you access to all the tweets in your feed whenever you want them. They then integrated the ability to watch RSS feeds from the browser’s framework. All this with the added ability to browse the web the way you know with Chrome.

Make The Most Of Rockmelt’s Biggest Features

1) Facebook Chat – Rockmelt does a very good job of giving you access to your friends on Facebook at all time. The left hand edge of the browser is dedicated to a chat interface for Facebook. You can view all friends online, or you can set favorites by clicking the star icon in any open chat window. Once Favorite friends are set, you can click the star icon on the chat edge to view just those friends. Using this favorites features is one of the best ways to make Facebook Chat work for you. You know when the people you want to talk to are online, and are given immediate access to them and their profiles.

2) App Edge – Rockmelt’s “App Edge” allows you to create shortcuts for your favorite sites, so long as they have RSS feeds. These shortcuts allow you to monitor your favorite websites for updates. This counts for Facebook and Twitter feeds as well. To make the the most out of this feature, add sites you visit and read everyday. If you are using time out of your day to check them for updates, add them to your app edge. It may not sound like much, but I find that I spend less time hunting for stores I care about by having the ability to monitor updates from sites that I am always interested in.

3) Instant Search – One of Rockmelt’s most hyped features is its change in search, specifically the built-in search bar. What they have done is produce results in a small pop-up window, similar to the others user in Rockmelt’s interface. The best way to make the most out of this feature is to use it instead of going to Google or typing search terms into the address bar. The ability to pick directly from an instant list without leaving the page you are on is incredibly time saving. You will find yourself getting things done much faster through this change in the way you search the internet.

How To Get Rockmelt

Rockmelt is still in invitation only beta. The easiest way to get it is to sign up via their site. You can use your Facebook login information to request an invite. If you want to see my thoughts on Rockmelt, please visit my review on Tony’s Brain.

What do you think of Rockmelt? Does it help you  be more productive? Please let us know in the comment section below.

RockMelt: Welcome To Integrated Social Browsing originally published on Ampercent

NutshellMail is an online tool that compiles all your updates from Facebook, Myspace and Twitter in a single mail and deliver it to your inbox anytime you choose. Just go to the site and sign up for a free account. Once you are done just add all the social networks you use. The networks that are supported by the service are Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Linkedin and Ning. You can directly connect it to your Twitter or Facebook account. In that case you will have to provide your email address separately.

Features of NutshellMail:

1. Nice option to choose how many times a day you want to receive the updates. You also choose more specific time for the email with the updates.

2. All major networks like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Linkedin are supported.

3. Other than these you will have an Update button that can be used to feed your inbox at any point of time.

4. In Facebook you will have the option to choose the topics you want to get notifications about.

5. In Twitter you can choose specific search topics to get updates about. Other than these you will get to choose other specific options about updates.

Here is a sample email from NutshellMail.

Get All Your Social Network Updates In A Single Email originally published on Ampercent

Clobby is a free application from Sixtakes that lets you integrate group chat in your Facebook page or profile. This is a nice application to chat with all your friends all at once. The profile owner has the admin privileges. He/she can also add moderators in the group.

Integrate Group Chat in Facebook

1. The setup is very simple. Scroll down to the bottom of the tool’s home page and you will find a button named “Create My Chat Room”.

2. Now you can choose to have a group chat in Facebook profile or fan page. If you are a blogger you can use the fan page chat to create a buzz around your  blog or you could just use the profile page chat.

3. I will demonstrate using the “profile” option. Now you will get redirected to a new page where you will need to authorize Clobby and then add the chat tab in your profile.

4. Now go to your profile to chat with your friends all at once.

If you are still not sure if you need to use it you can try out the Clobby demo. The service is free to all. I liked it  a lot as it helped me chat with all of my “like-minded” friends (on Facebook) to gather in one small place.

Get A Group Chat on Your Facebook Profile or Fan Page originally published on Ampercent