Facebook Acquires Snaptu to Bring Social Networking to Feature Phones | Techiepk

Facebook has acquired Israeli startup Snaptu, a creator of simple mobile applications for feature phones, for an estimated $70 million.

Snaptu’s technology is designed to bring web service such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to almost any phone through a series of applications it has designed. The company’s Java-based apps replicate many of the features of smartphone apps but make them accessible to the millions of people that don’t own a smartphone.

In fact, Facebook tapped Snaptu earlier this year to create its feature phone app, which provides an almost smartphone-like experience that includes contact syncing and a homescreen that will be familiar to users of the social network’s iPhone and Android applications. One of the reasons Facebook chose Snaptu is because its technology works on more than 2,500 different mobile devices.

“We soon decided that working as part of the Facebook team offered the best opportunity to keep accelerating the pace of our product development,” Snaptu said in blog post. “And joining Facebook means we can make an even bigger impact on the world.”

The deal, which will close in the next few weeks, was first reported in several Israeli publications. Snaptu was founded in 2007 as Mobilca and has raised funding from Sequioa Capital and Carmel Ventures.

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Addicted to Facebook? Facebook Addiction Get yourself a SNAK keyboard

I can honestly say that I am not a big fan of Facebook, but I know several who apparently need it to survive everyday life.

These are the people who clearly need the SNAK. This is an acronym for the Social Network Access Keyboard, and it puts 19 Facebook hotkeys for the Facebook subscriber.

So, if you’re doing a status update, just click the right button, and I imagine that Like and Dislike buttons just have to be there too. Just imagine how much time this will save for the real Facebook addict!

You will note that this picture only shows one side of a PC or laptop keyboard, but the SNAK is actually designed so it is on both left and right sides of the keyboard. Hopefully, it will still be easy for the ordinary Facebooker to use, but I hope there will be some way to make some of these buttons custom.

I wonder if there are any plans, or if the SNAK keyboard can do Twitter as well. I wonder if it can also do MySpace, or does anyone really care about MySpace anymore? Well, too bad they didn’t dress it up like the Optimus Maximus, but that would raise the price significantly. As it is, you should be able to get this for about $30.

Source

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How to hack your Facebook profile picture: a step-by-step guide to 'refacing' your profile

A French artist has kicked off a new trend by ‘refacing’ his Facebookprofile. Alexandre Oudin tweaked the photos on his Facebook page to make them look like pieces of one large photo. Since then, other Facebook users have been repeating the trick to create their own versions: see our gallery here.

If you want to ‘reface’ your Facebook page, here’s how you do it.

• You’ll need to have activated the new Facebook profile page - if you have, you’ll see your basic biographical information at the top of the page and, below that, a photo strip of five recent photos that have been tagged with your name.

• You’ll also need a photo that’s at least 692 pixels wide - that’s the width of the page from the left-hand edge of your profile picture to the right-hand edge of the photo strip.

• The final thing you’ll need is a photo-editing program that allows you to crop images. If you don’t have a program on your computer, try an online editing service, such as Photoshop Express.

• Now you’re ready to get started. Crop your photo to 692 pixels wide, based on how you want it to appear on the page. The left-hand side of this image will be your profile pic and the right-hand edge will appear at the end of the photo strip. Let’s call this image your Base Photo.

• Next, create your new profile pic by taking a crop of the left-hand side of your Base Photo. Start in the top left corner of your base image and, moving down and right, make a crop that’s 180 pixels wide and 540 pixels high.

• Now we need to create the images for your photo strip. The profile pic you’ve created will extend 20 pixels higher on the page than your photo strip so to create the photo strip you’ll need to start the crop 20 pixels below the top of the image. So, from the right-hand edge of the Base Photo, 20 pixels from the top, take a crop that’s 492 pixels wide and 68 pixels high. This crop will almost meet the right-hand edge of your profile picture but not quite - there is a 20 pixel gap between your profile pic and the photo strip. It’s important to leave this gap if you want the final profile page to look right.

• Still with us? Good. Now you need to chop the photo strip image you’ve created into five pieces. The images in the photo strip are separated by a line two pixels wide so you need to make sure you leave those gaps. Essentially, what you need to do is this: starting from one side of the 492x68 image you created in step 6, crop an image that’s 96.8 pixels wide and 68 pixels high, then leave a two-pixel gap, crop another 96.8x68 image, leave a gap and so on. When you’re finished you should have five small pictures.

• That’s the difficult bit over. Now you need to upload the images to Facebook. Set the image you created in step 5 to be your profile picture but don’t tag it with your name. Then tag the five images you created in step seven. The order in which you tag them is critical: you have to tag them from right-to-left based on the order in which you want them to appear on the page. So the image that you want to appear on the far right should be tagged first and the far left image should be tagged last.

• Now all you need to do is tell your friends to come and admire the handywork on your profile page.

It might take a couple of goes to get this right but once you’ve worked through the instructions once, it should be easier for you to adapt them to suit the image you want to create.

in simple ways:

You Can Also Do This By Using This Application

FACEBOOK APPLICATION

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Facebook has ‘no plans to introduce additional app security measures’, despite internet experts’ warnings.

Dan Rose, Facebook’s head of platform marketing said the company was happy with the security tools it had place to prevent ‘rogue apps’ from spamming users across Facebook.

Responding to a question at UK press conference at Facebook’s European headquarters, about whether the social network would consider introducing vetting measures similar to Apple’s App Store, which forces third party developers to jump through several security loops before admitting their app to the shop, Rose replied: “The tools we have in place which stop apps from spamming users have become more sophisticated…the actions we have taken have reduced the level of spam across Facebook.”

However according to Sophos, an internet security firm, Facebook is plagued by rogue applications which solely exist to post spam links to users' walls, point users to survey scams that earn them commission - and sometimes even trick users into handing over their mobile numbers to sign them up for a premium rate service.

The issue of security and users’ privacy came back into the spotlight last week. After Facebook was forced to disable a new feature which allowed third party app companies access to people’s personal contact details, after negative feedback from security experts and users.

Rose, when questioned why the company had temporarily disabled the new feature, which allowed third party app developers access to people’s mobile phone number and home address (if already part of a person’s profile), once a user had agreed to downloading an app, admitted that the firm had made a “mistake”.

“We did make a mistake. Companies make mistakes and this was a mistake. But we quickly looked at user feedback and responded to it within 24 hours,” he said.

Rose said that the company had failed to make the notification of what additional data users would be giving away to third party app developers prominent enough, and was working on displaying the actual data in a box at the point when users agree to an app’s terms and conditions, before turning the feature back on.

When asked why Facebook wanted to allow third party companies access to this data in the first place Rose said: “The data belongs to our users and they should be allowed to easily take their data with them.” He gave examples of how certain app companies would benefit from having a user’s personal contact details, such as an airline app

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Facebook to improve security measures with encryption

According to an announcement on the Facebook blog, it seems that Facebook will take some serious steps related to improving the security of their social network, and these steps include encrypted connections.

Since we all share personal information on Facebook, it’s more than necessary to ensure that your personal information is safe from malicious users, therefore Facebook decided to use encrypted pages.

According to Facebook, encrypted pages could take longer to load, but with HTTPS you won’t have to worry whether will anyone track your personal data. In addition, Facebook is planning to add another feature that will help you to protect your account if it ever gets compromised. For example, if someone gets your login data, and starts using your account, Facebook will require that person to identify pictures of your Facebook friends. This sounds like a great idea, but you might have to delete all those people that you don’t know, in case that you somehow compromise your own account

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Facebook Support High Resolution Picture Sharing

Many of us try to avoid sharing photos on Facebook, because reason can not save the image quality. In addition, depressing images also have a limited resolution. It seems that the changes in its path.

the world's largest online network has announced that for networking high-resolution images. According to reports, the improved image quality compared to eight times and is now supported. Transition from the image with a maximum 720 pixels to 2048 pixels.

IFacebookn In addition, to view the photos be any different than now. This dark frame around the image for better viewing. Experts believe that Facebook is not trying to take the photo-sharing site Flickr and Yahoo with new changes.

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