Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Twitter needs to change their meta description

When you add a page to Facebook, maybe for later keeping or sharing it with your friends, Facebook looks at the meta field "description" in the source code.

On Twitter ALL pages have the same meta description:

<meta name="description" content="Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time">

This means that when you post a Twitter page (no matter if it's a profile page or a single tweet) the description posted to Facebook (which you can't change) is: "Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time".

That doesn't really say anything about the content behind the link, so I sugges that the folks at Twitter change the meta line to something more meaningful, depending on what page the user is posting to Facebook:

If it's a Twitter profile page, use the "Bio" that the user has written.
If it's a single tweet, well, just use the text in the tweet. It's only 140 characters long (at most) - perfect for a meta description.

I could do it in WordPress (you can customize it even further using custom fields). So how hard can it be? :-)

When will we see the Summize for Facebook?

What happens, when you spend almost an entire evening playing some stupid game? You miss important news, that's what happens :-)

Anyhoo, the rumors were true: Twitter has bought Summize (a real time search engine indexing Twitter) - you may have read this on TechCrunch.

Summize is now aptly named "Twitter Search" and located at search.twitter.com.

Good news. Those of you out there who are using Summize dread what Twitter would be like without it - and the rest of you (Twitter users) are about to discover a nifty tool :-)

The Summize approach to Twitter has got me thinking. When will we see a real time search engine indexing Facebook? It could index the mini feed of every Facebook user (Facebook users should be allow to hide or to select "only index my status updates") and be searchable right away.

Now why the heck would you want that?
The reason? As the Facebook platform evolves (you may have noticed that it's possible to comment on things in another person's mini feed like, say, their status updates), more and more people post more and more information into Facebook. As you may know it's virtually impossible to follow what your friends are posting on Facebook - unless you can spend an entire day doing nothing else.

When the comment feature gains momentum and a larger audience we'll no doubt see a great deal of conversations taking place in the "Face sphere". And wouldn't it be nice to be able to search all that information and subscribe to a certain phrase (like your name) by RSS (like with Summize) or with an internal Facebook subscribe tool, so you'll know when someone mentions you or a certain phrase, that you'd like to watch.

Maybe it should only be possible to search in your friends mini feeds, I don't know - I haven't thought this feature completely through, just realized that I would like it :-)

Relations between people are going to be huge this year and the next and Facebook is a major ingredient in this recipe.

Click the images for credits

Why not block Facebook?

Given the recent commotion regarding Facebook (Scott Gilbertson and Dave Winer has some wraps on this), Paul Buchheit asks an interesting question.

What Facebook wants to prohibit Plaxo Pulse from doing is, to some extent, what Facebook is doing when users import their address books from, say, Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. So should Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail block Facebook?

Head on over to Paul's post and have your say.

Related posts

Tags: Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Privacy, Yahoo

Facebook trying to get rid of the "is"

As you may or may not know, I use the social browser Flock and loving it — except it doesn't support WordPress' tagging system :-( — but today I noticed something strange.

In my Facebook people sidebar in Flock all of my friends' statuses what suddenly saying "is is" instead of just "is". For instance: "Søren is is confused".

Since I haven't updated Flock I assumed, that the issue related to Facebook itself. So I did the only decent thing and asked Google.

And what pops up as the first result? A blog post from Flock's community ambassador, Evan Hamilton, explaining this issue.

The reason for the "is is": Apparently Facebook is trying to get rid of the "is" in the status messages, to give the users a broader use of the status updates. What at nice thing to do, to blog about it :-)

"Lars is is happy" ;-)

Surfing Facebook just got a whole lot better

And I owe it all to the new beta (release candidate 3) of the social browser Flock.

I've been testing the beta for some time now, but it wasn't until now that I discovered the actual power of the People sidebar. Whenever people update their profile on Facebook, the sidebar updates itself. I can also choose to sort by name if I'd prefer that. And I can search through my friends.

Plus I can view my friends' media directly in Flock, I don't even have to visit the profile and click "View photos of %username%". Now that is sweet.

To the developers at Flock: That's a mighty fine piece of work!

The People sidebar also supports accounts on YouTube, Flickr and Twitter (not Jaiku, sadly…).

Facebook buys Parakey — exciting things happening?

Parakey logo This is probably old news already, but as the BBC reports, social networking site Facebook has bought Parakey a startup by two of the founders of the Firefox project, Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt.

Even though the Parakey.com site doesn't offer much enlightenment on exactly what kind of project this is, Wikipedia has an interesting article on Parakey.

It states:

Parakey is a Web-based computer user interface proposed by Firefox contributors Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Ross describes it as "a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do." The idea behind it is to make image, video, and writing transfer to the web easier.

He explains that the current problem with transferring data to the web is that in order to move an image onto the web you first have to transfer pictures from your digital camera, then upload them to a place like Flickr.

Sounds very exciting, eh? I just signed up for an e-mail heads up when Parakey will be launched - I wouldn't miss it for the world :D

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