Zoho Apps Mash Up With Facebook
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The online application vendor has ported its productivity tools to the social networking site.
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Which Facebook apps make your circle of friends a better place? The apps are rolling in to the social networking site's new platform, launched several weeks ago. Use our open-submission tool to tell us about your favorite.
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Online hangout Facebook, seeking to avoid a second revolt over privacy, is offering members more controls over their personal profile pages as it relaxes eligibility requirements to join.
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Social networking site Facebook is partnering with Comcast's user generated video site Ziddio to produce a program that would give Facebook users the opportunity to have their user-generated videos appear on television.
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Following Facebook's lead, the social networking site plans within the next few months to make an API for its platform available for anyone looking to build applications to run atop the site.
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Anyone can make their own Facebook app, and now Widgetbox users can make them faster with App Accelerator, a new web-based helper tool. CNET editor Jessica Dolcourt tested it out with her very own Webware app for Facebook.
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When prominent blogger Robert Scoble tried to collect contact data about his friends stored in Facebook, the social networking site reprimanded him. But Plaxo, the creators of the new address book importer Scoble was beta testing, have no plans to discontinue development of the tool. Let the data portability standoff begin.
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(InfoWorld) - Three months after it opened its platform to outside developers, Facebook is taking steps to prevent some third-party applications from engaging in what the social networking company considers inappropriate actions. Dave Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager, outlined late Monday in an official blog posting a series of changes in the capabilities it makes available to external developers. In the blog posting, titled "Change is Coming," Morin states that the changes are designed to create an environment in which the popularity of applications is determined by how useful and entertaining they are. For example, Facebook wants to stop developers from displaying big boxes in profiles that scream in capital letters messages like "ADD THIS APPLICATION!" to visitors, while hiding them from profile owners. To that end, the latest release of the Facebook Markup Language -- version 1.1 -- changes how profile boxes display content, removing applications' ability to display profile content to visitors and hide it from profile owners. "We did this so that the user is always aware of how they are expressing themselves to their friends through your application. This means no more yellow boxes that display 'Add this app!' in the profile box without the user knowing about it," Morin wrote. "We think this will help users make more informed decisions about the profile boxes they choose." Meanwhile, this week, Facebook will shift how it measures application popularity in its applications directory away from total users and toward user engagement. "This will help inform users as they make decisions on which applications to add," Morin wrote. The company will also remove e-mail from a notifications capability for developers to contact users who have adopted their applications. The reason is to crack down on what Facebook considers the spamming of deceptive and misleading notifications to its members. Earlier this month, Morin posted a blog item about this problem, stating that Facebook had noticed developers misleading users "into clicking on links, adding applications and taking actions." Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request seeking comment.
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BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. announced Wednesday it has launched software that will make it easier for Facebook users to use the popular social networking site.
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The online advertising firm has launched a new program for serving ads to third-party developer applications on Facebook--but what will Facebook's own advertising announcement next week mean for this sort of strategy?
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Facebook took a new step into the mobile realm on Thursday, launching a platform for operators designed to make its social networking application work better on portable devices.
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Facebook will help other social networking sites to run applications developed for its own software platform, it said Thursday.
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New social networking site lets users share photos, videos, and more.
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By Anick Jesdanun  Operators of the online hangout Facebook wanted to help users save time by highlighting changes their friends make to their personal profile pages. Instead, the new feature has drawn complaints from thousands of its users and even threats of a boycott.
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The success of Facebook's Web-app building tools hasn't gone unnoticed by Salesforce.com, which on Friday announced a new platform for building on-demand business software that it hopes will lead to an "explosion" of applications.
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SAN FRANCISCO, May 24  /PRNewswire/ -- Facebook f8 Event -- Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive today announced two political applications built on Facebook Platform, a development platform that enables companies to integrate with the Facebook website and gain access to millions of users.
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Belatedly recognizing the importance of social networking as an online service and advertising vehicle, Google this week will unleash its strongest response yet to the rising threat and skyrocketing popularity of MySpace and Facebook.On Thursday, Google will announce OpenSocial, an initiative with a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) at its core that is designed &quot;to spread social applications across the Web,&quot; the company said.These common APIs have been designed to let developers create social networking applications that will run on multiple Web sites, simplifying the making and distribution of these programs.Partners supporting OpenSocial include various well-known software developers and social networking sites: Oracle, Salesforce.com, Hi5, iLike, LinkedIn, Slide, Ning, Friendster, and Plaxo. Neither Facebook nor MySpace is on the list of partners at press time.The move is also no doubt intended to dilute the massive&#160;success Facebook has had in attracting external developers&#160;since it opened up its Web site platform to third-party applications in May.About 7,000 such applications have been built for Facebook so far, helping to make the social networking site more attractive to people and thus boosting its usage.&#160;MySpace recently announced it would follow Facebook&#39;s example.By allowing developers to write an application once and have it work in multiple social networking sites, the OpenSocial initiative could, in theory, water down the appeal of Facebook&#39;s ballooning applications catalogue.Once considered a fad of interest mostly to teens and young adults, social networks have significantly broadened their demographic appeal, attracting many people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond.Along the way, social networking sites have been created for other purposes beyond entertainment and staying in touch with friends. For example, there are social networks tailored for specific occupations, such as doctors, and interests, such as sports.Google has had a social networking site named Orkut for several years, but it doesn&#39;t seem to have merited much attention from the company until recently, and only after the popularity and potential of this type of site became evident.Google was reportedly locked in a battle with Microsoft&#160;over which one would be chosen by Facebook to buy a stake in the social networking company and earn a deal to provide advertising to it.Microsoft eventually won, buying a 1.6 percent stake that values Facebook at an eye-popping $15 billion, although the social networking company reportedly will have revenue of just $150 million this year.With about 300 employees now, Facebook expects to have about 700 a year from now, its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg recently said. About 250,000 new users register every day at Facebook, which was founded in 2004.In June, MySpace had 114.1 million unique visitors worldwide, ranking first among social networking sites, followed by Facebook with 52.2 million, according to comScore. Hi5 ranked third with 28.2 million, while Friendster was fourth with 24.7 million. Orkut rounded out the top 5 with 24.1 million.More information about OpenSocial and resources for developers will be available in this Web site later this week. There will also be a developer sandbox.