I tried to send out a simple message to friends to test the new Facebook messenger and this is what I get #fail

If you want to try out yourself, download it from the marketplace.

Will become

The expanded view in the modal window even has LIKE buttons, two browse buttons and a place to comment on it. Sleak!
What do you think about this new feature?

Facebook has issued another update on profile-layouts and I am loving this one. It has put more focus on letting users have a summary of the actual users and trying to group people together by letting you specify people you have gone to school, college, graduation and work-place with.

The best part is, that my privacy settings are not changed by opting in this new layout!

Update (April 23, 2011): I have updated the download urls to point to new servers

A little while ago (approx 2 weeks) I read a story online which claimed a person has downloaded a compiled 100m Facebook users’ personal data. I searched online and found this torrent on thepiratebay.org

I downloaded this torrent and to my surprise, its almost NOTHING personal. Just names and Facebook IDs. Anyway, I also found a BBC Story on the same topic which is pathetic! They sounded this as if Facebook is HACKED, which is not the case.

Anyway, anyone who does not want to download via other file-sharing services or torrents can download this from the following VPS locations

• Location 1 (US)
• Location 2 (UK)

P.S. If, for some reasons, you cannot download this file, leave a comment with a valid email address in this post and I will get back to you with the valid link.

Well, I thought today, I have been developing in facebook application for so long now – Why not put online a few hours to fetch Facebook Friends data via API and keeping track of who did what? (status updates) and who changed his/her profile picture? So last night I was up, as usual, and I put together a small script in PHP that fetches my friends’s list, processes newcomers, checks for updates (pictures and statuses) and posts them into a database. Now I can track who updated his profile picture and what was their previous profile photo. Also, I can invest in another 1 hr to create high-level-summary everyday for ME

Do you do something of this sort? I’d love to hear your story

Updated at: 1027 PST, Monday, May 31, 2010
LAHORE: A Pakistani court on Monday ordered authorities to restore access to Facebook, nearly two weeks after the popular social networking website was blocked nationwide in a row over blasphemy.

Justice Ejaz Chaudhry of the Lahore High Court issued the directive, reversing a May 19 order on the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to block Facebook over “blasphemous” drawings of Prophet Mohammed on the website.

“Restore Facebook. We don’t want to block access to information,” Chaudhry told the court.

A contest organised by a Facebook user calling on people to draw the Prophet Mohammed to promote “freedom of expression” sparked a major backlash in the conservative Muslim country of 170 million.

Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous and even moderate Muslims were deeply offended by the drawings that appeared on a Facebook page in an answer to the call for an “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day”.

A group of Islamic lawyers petitioned the Lahore court, which had ordered Facebook blocked until May 31 and the PTA then banned YouTube and restricted access to other websites, including Wikipedia.

Chaudhry on Monday asked the government to develop a system to block access to “blasphemous” content on the Internet, which he said was already in place in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“It is the government’s job to take care of such things, which spark resentment among the people and bring them onto the streets. They should take steps to block any blasphemous content on the Internet,” Chaudhry said.

The court Monday adjourned until June 15 the petitions from the Islamic lawyers.

Mudassir Hussain, an official from the information technology ministry, told the court that all links to “blasphemous” content on the Internet would remain blocked in Pakistan.

via Geo.tv

Whatever the design, I just hope Facebook’s new layout would be lighter and bug-free.

Further reading

• Facebook Rolling Out Redesign To Some Users
• Analyzing Facebook’s Forthcoming Redesign

Even though gaming on Facebook has been around for a while, 2009 was the year of the social gaming boom. Mafia Wars was the first game since Scrabulous to get a nod from mainstream media, and by the end of the year, you’d be hard pressed find anyone — even your Mom — who hasn’t at least heard of FarmVille.

Then there’s the fact that these games are basically cash cows, corralling millions of dollars for Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and CrowdStar (and the prediction that social gaming will be a 5 billion dollar industry in a several years), we’d say this whole social gaming thing has officially taken hold, and we can’t wait to see how these games change in 2010.

Out of the 500+ games on Facebook, five in particular held us captive this year. All of the games on this list launched in ’09 and have 10 million or more monthly active users. It’s equally mind-boggling to sit back and think of how many hours we’ve sunk into these games, not to mention (yup, it’s confession time) how much real-life cash we’ve paid to buy virtual items for these games.

You can read the entire article here. In my opinion, I never played any of these games except Mafia Wars, that too very rare. Farmville and Cafe World are two games that I have started playing in 2010

I wanted to reply him that this website is a money-making-scam and that it redirects to “biznews7 org” but before I could do tht Facebook warned me that the message could not be posted because it contains a suspicious URL. OK, I removed that URL but right after wards, my account was suspended automatically.

Good for me that I could reactivate it myself again.