Tag Archives: Facebook

Facebook Messenger For Android Gets SMS/MMS Support, UI Tweaks & More

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Just a couple of days ago, we posted about Photo Syncing – a test feature of the official Facebook app for Android - which, once enabled, can be used to automatically, instantly and privately upload photos from Android to Facebook. Another very significant update has just been rolled out in the Google Play Store – this time for Facebook Messenger for Android – that not only brings some much-needed enhancements to the overall UI of the social network’s default messaging app, but also expands its messaging capabilities manifold. Besides serving as a dedicated messaging app for your Facebook chats, the app now qualifies as a handy SMS replacement app for your Android. That’s right, provided you own one of the select devices on which said feature is supported, you can now use the Facebook Messenger Android app to send SMS/MMS messages to desired phone numbers (standard messaging rates may apply). The app’s IM interface now sports bubble-style conversations, where a blue/white bubble combination represents Facebook message threads, whereas a green/white combination indicates SMS threads. In addition, the app now provides even better and quicker means to select a Friend to start chatting with. Better yet, its lets you pin your favorite/most frequently contacted Friends right at the top of the Friends list. Read More

Facebook App For Android Gets Automatic/Instant Photo Uploading

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The official Android client of Facebook may have its fair share of critics, but one simply cannot deny the fact that the app has been constantly improving, courtesy quite a few useful feature additions and performance enhancements that it gets with each subsequent update. Already a viable source for users to access their social world on-the-go, the official Facebook Android app now caters to your photo backup needs, too, as it has just been updated with the much-anticipated Google+ and Dropbox-like instant upload feature. That’s right, the mobile app now supports the Photo Syncing feature which, if enabled, automatically and instantly uploads all photos lying in your Android’s default camera (DCIM) directory to a private album on your Facebook Photos. Uploaded images can be found under the Synced from Phone tab on your Facebook, and can be shared with masses via a new post, moved to an existing/fresh album, downloaded to the computer or deleted altogether. Maximum storage capacity for photos backed up using the Photo Syncing feature is 2GB per account. Further details and the method to activate the feature will be discussed past the break. Read More

Guide To iOS 6 Facebook Integration & Contact Sync

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iOS 6 just became available to public, and just like all previous major iterations, brought with it a slew of new features that were applauded by Apple fanboys worldwide. Whether these features are real innovations or not is a separate debate, but one that I personally find highly useful and much-needed, was the system-wide Facebook Integration. While Twitter might’ve been the best micro-blogging network, the fact remains that social interactions, at large, take place on Palo Alto’s social networking giant, and it was about time iPhone users got some form of true SNS feeling. Apple delivered that, and here, we take a thorough look at just how deep the Facebook hole goes in iOS 6, right after the jump. Read More

View Facebook Account Activity In Mac OS X Notification Center With Glow for FB

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Fall isn’t too far away now, and that means Facebook integration will be arriving soon to OS X Mountain Lion. For those who can’t wait or haven’t upgraded to Mountain Lion because an older version of OS X seems better, you might still be interested in having easy access to your Facebook notifications. Facebook integration, like Twitter counterpart, is something that you aren’t likely to realize the utility of unless you experience it the way it is in Mountain Lion. However, if you'd take our word for it, it’s pretty amazing. Glow for FB is a Mac app worth $0.99 in the Mac App Store that emulates what it would be like to have Notification Center alerts for your Facebook activity. While it doesn't offer the system wide integration that will be offered in Mountain Lion, it still lets you stay up to date with your Facebook notifications without having to open them in your browser. The benefit here is two fold; on one hand, you get your notifications easily, and on the other, you won’t end up wasting more time than you meant to by getting caught up with your feed. Read More

FlipToast Is A Facebook & Twitter Desktop Client For Windows 8

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Social networking is the craze these days. People spend more time socializing with each other in the online world than actually going out to meet one another. One reason for this change in social behavior is that fact that being online allows you to talk to and interact with a lot more people in a lot less time. For instance, if you want to tell all your friends something new about yourself, you can just set it as your status on Facebook, or tweet it on Twitter, and instantly, anyone who is a part of your network will know what is up. Sharing pictures is another important part of social networking. You can upload pictures in real time, where others can view them, like them, and comment on them. That sure seems like a better idea than inviting everyone over and showing them photo albums in order to know what they feel. However, having to deal with too many social networks take up a lot of your time. FlipToast is an app for Windows 8 that allows you to manage your Facebook and Twitter accounts from a single interface. It allows you to view activity on both accounts, post pictures, update statuses etc, without having to do it separately for each account. Read More

Wolfram Alpha Now Includes Facebook Personal Analytics [Web]

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You probably have heard about Wolfram Alpha, a rather interesting computational knowledge engine that answers various queries, such as how the weather is like, how much time till your next birthday, where you met your ex-girlfriend and whatnot, through structural database. It’s a really great analytics engine – quite a lot, actually – which even integrates with Apple’s Siri for a number of factual queries. The firm recently launched its Facebook App that collects varying information from your Facebook account in order to generate a personal analytics report. Yes, you can now dig deep and see how many statuses you updated, your total number of comments to date or what your most commented photo ever was. Read on for more details. Read More

Facebook Camera For iPhone Now Lets You Upload To Any Album & Adds Notifications

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Facebook appears to be taking iOS pretty seriously these days. Only a few days have passed since the Facebook app for iOS got revamped completely, and now Facebook Camera has been improved as well. The iPhone app now offers all the features that users have been demanding ever since Facebook Camera first came out. While the app wasn’t too bad initially, there were a few things that certainly needed attention. For one, the notification system in Facebook Camera was largely disappointing, and there was no way of knowing whenever there was some activity on any of your photos. Also, users could only upload photos to the app’s own album via Facebook Camera, and there was no way of adding new photos to other albums. Apart from that, the app suffered minor problems as well, like the lack of likes for individual comments and difficulties in reading of long captions. The latest update addresses all these issues, and then some. Read More

Facebook For Android Gets Emoji, Event Creation & New Photo Upload Flow

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The official Facebook app for Android has just been updated in the Google Play Store with several significant features. Using various options included within the latest update, you can now easily and instantly create new events on the go, enjoy sharing emoji and pictures with your buddies while messaging, and share photos even quicker with a totally revamped and user-friendly photo upload flow. You got it absolutely right; the official Facebook Android client now allows creating new events, complete with event details, invitees and privacy settings, meaning that you can now not only glance at your previous and upcoming events & birthdays, but also throw an open invitation to your chosen Facebook friends for tonight’s barbeque party, all from your Android! The option to embellish your messages with emoticons and pictures is a welcome addition, too, whereas the improved photo upload clearly indicates towards most users preferring sharing/uploading multiple local photos (from gallery) to capturing and sharing one snap at a time. Read More

PhotoUp: Facebook Camera-Like App For Android With Instant Upload

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Back in May, the social networking giant, Facebook, announced a very fine photo capturing, editing and bulk-uploading tool for iOS users in the form of Facebook Camera. The app also brought with it several slick features, including Instagram-esque filters and effects, updated photo feed of your Facebook Friends, option to add custom tags and captions to photos, and plenty more. However, as far as Android is concerned, users of Google’s mobile OS are still awaiting the official Facebook Camera app to head their way. That being said, with the app of the quality and price ($0) of PhotoUp at their disposal, Android users can safely argue that they have a way better solution to play around with. Fresh from the oven, this Android-exclusive app has been designed to help users with managing their Facebook photos. Apart from supporting Facebook Camera-style batch image uploading, capturing, tagging, captioning, geo-tagging, and editing (via dozens of filters), PhotoUp brings Dropbox and Google+ style instant photo uploading to the table, and in doing so, it puts you in control over the Album to which you wish to upload these photos, their preferred image quality, and that one favorite filter of yours that will be automatically applied to all the photos pre-upload. Read More

Permissions: Manage & Control The Privacy Of Your Facebook, Twitter & Other Accounts

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A lot of people might not be aware of the fact that they have allowed a lot of apps to post to their Facebook account on their behalf, or to access their personal data from Twitter, Instagram or Windows Live. A majority of iOS apps that have got some social aspect, need users to link these services to the app, and it is only natural to lose track of all the services that are allowed to access your personal accounts. Of course, there are menus for revoking and managing these permissions in all services (like the Apps section in Facebook’s Account Settings), but most users don’t want to go to each account separately and then go through the long list of all the apps added there so that the useless ones can be culled. Permissions is an iPhone app to cleanse all your personal accounts including Yahoo, Hotmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. The app provides a streamlined way of removing apps from all these accounts, and you can even use it to define new account privacy permissions. Read More

BetterChrome Adds Social Sharing Options To Chrome For iPhone/iPad

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Thanks to all the Chrome-related tweaks available in the Cydia store, Mobile Safari won’t be left with any distinguishing feature pretty soon. Until now, you can make Chrome your default iOS browser, add some awesome new features to it and also open any link in Google’s iPhone web browser using the nifty buttons added to Safari by a couple of tweaks (to learn more about all the best Cydia tweaks for iOS Chrome, head to our list post on the subject). Although there is already a nice collection of such tweaks in the Cydia store, BetterChrome is still one that can prove to be useful for a lot of people. This tweak adds a whole new menu to the Settings area of Chrome, and that new menu focuses on providing users with a few really handy sharing options. With BetterChrome, you will be able to share any page or link over Facebook, Twitter and Google+, right from within Chrome for iPhone and iPad! Read More

Loom: Create Mosaics Out Of Photos From Facebook, Twitter & Instagram [iPhone]

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There are many web services and iOS apps that are focused on letting users generate collages and mosaics out of the photos of their choice. A few of those apps offer convenience, while others attract people due to their ease of use. Loom Photomosaic Builder is an app that takes ease of use to a whole new level. You just have to choose as many images as you like, and this iPhone app will mesh them all together to provide you with a new image. However, that’s not the best part of Loom. The app is different from all others in its genre due to the fact that you can use photos from all your social networks to create beautiful collages. In addition to that, Loom is also a pretty good tool to awe your friends by quickly sharing the mosaics you create. Read More

Remove Or Turn Off Facebook Notifications Directly From Drop Down

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Facebook had the early-mover advantage when it comes to social networks, and although there were the likes of Orkut and Hi5 already in the market, the concept that the Paulo Alto-based giant brought to the market was entirely fresh and something that users took a liking to immediately. Despite its massive popularity, there were many qualms about a lot of Facebook’s offerings, privacy (or lack thereof) being the biggest among them. That aside, there were (and still are) the changes that are forced on users (Timeline, anyone?), and those that go unannounced altogether, until the blogosphere raises hue and cry over them. However, that doesn’t imply that all Facebook changes are evil, and some new ”features” can turn out really useful, too. One such unnoticed feature has been the ability to dismiss, remove and even turn off notifications from a certain user or application, right from within the notification drop down! Read More

How To Hide Your Facebook Email Address From Your Timeline

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A while back, Facebook launched its very own email service and encouraged users to claim their @facebook account. The feature wasn’t that popular because, in all honesty, yourname@facebook.com on your resume might make an employer think twice about hiring you. Considering the lengths companies go to prevent people from using social media sites at work, that email might have been trouble anyway. The good thing about it was that it was totally opt-in until yesterday, when Facebook decided it was going to give you your @facebook email whether you liked it or not. If your About page displays your email address to everyone, it will now have your @facebook address as your primary email contact. In case you were wondering when you allowed Facebook to change your contact info, you never did. Read on to see how you can hide it, and what implications the change will have. Read More

ClickBerry Interactivity Creator: Add Interactive Elements To Videos & Share Them On Facebook

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Clickberry Interactivity Creator is an Adobe AIR-based application that lets you add clickable elements to your videos. It is an excellent marketing tool for online campaigns on social media, as it allows you to overlay hyperlinks, link to any online video, tag your friends and more, over any selected video. It's basically designed to make interactive videos, which can include URLs to your websites, images, sidebars, and even the Facebook Like button.  The application offers an elegant user interface and straightforward usage. Just select your video and choose the interactive object that you wish to add. Read More

InstaCover: Create An Instagram Photo Collage For Your Facebook Timeline Cover [Web]

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When Facebook bought Instagram, it led to a slew of web apps and services being developed exclusively for downloading and backing your Instagram feed to your system or another file sharing service like Flickr or Picassa. Of course, not all apps that combine Facebook and Instagram are meant to be panic buttons. InstaCover enables you to use yours or others' Instagram images to create a pictorial Facebook profile cover. To get started, all you have to do is sign in with your Facebook account.  After signing in, the app inquires after visibility option. You can select who you want to allow to see posts made by the app on your timeline. It also seeks permission to post on your behalf. Read More

PicBackMan: Backup Facebook & Instagram Photos To Dropbox, Box & Image Hosting Services

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Image sharing is one of the most used functions on the internet these days. Hundreds of image sharing websites as well social networks are used by millions of people each day to share images among their friends family, and even random strangers. While the social networks, such as Facebook and Google+ allow you to share images with your friends and family, websites such as Flickr and apps like Instagram let you publish your albums for the world to see. When you have thousands of photos uploaded to various image hosting platforms, it is very hard to keep a backup of each and every image manually. PicBackMan is an application for Windows that lets you back up images from multiple sources (image sharing websites and social networks) by automatically uploading them to seven photo and storage services. Other than the images saved in online accounts, you can also upload images from local folders to different websites. PicBackMan supports backing up the pictures from Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram accounts and local folders to Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, SkyDrive, Dropbox, Box.net and Facebook. Read More

Share Images On Facebook Directly From The Stock iOS Photos App [Cydia]

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iOS 6 might not be coming to your iPhone any time soon, but the rumors of its features are certainly thick in the air. One thing that the next major update of Apple’s mobile platform is almost sure to come with, is Facebook integration. A lot of people really appreciated all the Twitter-related stuff that iOS 5 flaunted, and now everyone can't wait to see what changes will be made with respect to Facebook integration. If you have a jailbroken iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, though, you don’t have to wait too long to try out one instance of iOS-Facebook combination. With the newly released FacebookThis Cydia tweak, users can post photos to Facebook right from within the stock Photos app! The tweak adds a new button in each photo’s options, and using that button, you will be able to publish photos to your wall without much ado. Admittedly, the Facebook option offered by the FacebookThis tweak is not as smooth or efficient as it would have been in an official update, it isn't too shabby either. Read More

Bypass Facebook Social Reader App Install Requests To Read Articles In Peace [Chrome, Firefox]

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While browsing Facebook, we often come across articles shared by our friends from apps like Yahoo!, The Gaurdian or Washington Post. You might have noticed that when these links are clicked, you get redirected to the social reader’s app install request page, which accesses your personal information and posts on your behalf, including people you liked, articles you read and more.  Not only do these apps access your private details to learn your reading habits, but can also be very annoying thanks to their wall posts. If you want to read articles from various social readers but, at the same time, don't want to authorize a third-party application to access your basic information, then Unsocialize is just what you need. This Chrome extension and Firefox add-on adds an Unsocialize option to the right-click context menu, which allows you to open articles in a new tab without getting redirected to third-party apps and having to grant them access to your information. More after the break. Read More

SportsYapper For Android: Have Real-Time Discussions With Fans Of Your Favorite Sports

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Chanting, cheering, booing, arguing and challenging are a few characteristics that you are almost certain to find in any sports fanatic, and why not, for the best way to enjoy any game is by sharing it with your mates. There are plenty of apps available across various mobile app stores that connect you to worldwide fans for sharing sentiments and insights about your favorite sports with each other. Inject a dose of additional social networking to said concept, and you get SportsYapper – a real-time communication platform for sports fans. Initially launched as an iOS-exclusive app, SportsYapper is now available for Android devices too. Encompassing almost all renowned global sports and teams, the app lets you indulge in real-time conversations regarding anything from live games to a team or player, with other fans (referred to as Yapps within the app). Read More