Tech.blog

A couple of days ago, Facebook unveiled a new version of the home page. One of the most obvious changes is that the News Feed view can now be viewed as either a “Live News Feed” or a (summarized) “News Feed”.

If you haven’t logged on in a while, you’ll be presented with “News Feed”. This view contains a summary of what you may have missed since you last logged-on. It includes some of your friends status, links, photos, and videos. The posts shown depend on varying factors like the number of comments they received, the number of likes, the number of views, etc.

After looking through this summarized version, you may opt to view the “Live News Feeds” which contain the latest updates from your friends. This view integrates the “News Feeds” view and “Highlights” which used to appear on the right-hand side of the Facebook home page. So aside from the usual status updates, links, videos, application updates, and others, it also includes information like friends that one of your own friends added, groups that your friends joined, what your friends became a fan of, etc.

In short, “Live News Feeds” contains more information that you may or may not care about.  Although Facebook still gives you the option to hide application updates and even friends from the view, you cannot hide the “became friends with”, “has become a fan of”, “has joined the group” information. That is really a big downer for me as I don’t want those information on my stream.

Apparently, a lot of people have the same sentiment. They have cried out to Facebook to bring back the old version of the home page.

But this recent change may also be a blessing in disguise. It shows you how much information you yourself may be unwittingly sharing to the world. For me, it made me review my privacy settings on my Facebook account.

From the settings page, I realized that like my friends, I was allowing Facebook to send out the same information that I didn’t want appearing on my home page. Check out your own privacy settings and think about what you want or don’t want published. If you want something published you may want to limit those who can see it. For example, most of my information and updates cannot be seen by people who are not on my friends lists. I’ve also chosen not to publish information about who I’ve added as a friend, what groups I joined, and I just became a fan of.

To get to the privacy settings, go to the Settings menu located at the upper right hand portion of the Facebook page and select Privacy Settings. From that page, you can tweak your privacy options for the following:

1. Profile. This is information about you. This includes your birthday, current location, education information and work information. You may want to limit who sees this information particularly your birthday as this piece of information can be used in identity theft.
2. Search. You will want others — particularly your friends who are not on your friends list yet — to be able to find you but you may still want to limit what information is shown on search pages. You can also opt not to be included in search outside of Facebook (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, Bing).
3. News Feed and Wall. Here is where you control whether or not you want to publish information about the friends you’ve added, groups you joined, etc.
4. Applications. The settings here control what information is available to the applications integrated with Facebook.

You may need to tweak your settings several times until you are satisfied. To do this you may need to ask a friend to help you out so you can verify what information you are not allowing to be published are not being published and only the information you want published are being published. Since Facebook is constantly evolving, you may want to check on your settings once in a while to see if they’ve somehow been reset, if new privacy option settings appear or if old ones disappear.

Facebook and other social networking sites are still for me a great tool to connect with each other. But at the same time we still need to be aware that any information we put up may just be something that we or our friends may or may not want to see.

For some months now, I’ve been using Bloomberg Mobile on my iPod Touch to keep myself updated on what’s happening to my stock portfolio. The thing I liked about Bloomberg is it allowed me to monitor stocks from almost any stock exchange in the world, like the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE). Since I live in the Philippines, adding stocks from the PSE was a huge plus.

Then just the other day, I read that Yahoo! Finance for Mobile for iPhone/iPod Touch was available at the App Store. So, I decided to give it a try and compare it with Bloomberg Mobile.

Read more…

Facebook for iPhone Home Screen

The latest version of Facebook’s application for the iPhone and iPod Touch is finally available from the App Store. It has a new user interface that totally blows away the UI of the previous version.

Taking a cue from the iPhone OS interface, Facebook for iPhone opens up with a home page containing icons representing common Facebook pages: News Feed, Profile, Friends, Inbox, Chat, Requests, Events, Photos and Notes. You can even add your own links to your friends and pages just as you would add applications on your iPhone when you purchase them from the App Store. You can also rearrange the icons and see different pages of the Facebook home screen the same way you do with the iPhone.

What is nice is that the icons show badges that represent new items. For example, if you have 5 new friend requests, that number is shown with the Requests icon.

In terms of functionality, the Facebook iPhone app is very close to the Facebook website. Below are some of the Facebook for iPhone functions:

The bottom part of the screen shows the latest notification that you may have. Touching that part of the screen will display all of your recent notifications. The number of new notifications also appear as a badge on the iPhone application when you are on the iPhone’s home screen.

When you are in News Feeds, you can filter what is displayed using the group lists that you created in Facebook. It would have been great if the same feature was available in the Friends page. As it is, you can only scroll through a list of all your your friends. So right now, if you created a list to contain your friends from high school and another list to contain your friends from college, you cannot filter your view like you can in Facebooks’ website. But I’m sure this will be addressed in a future release, though.

You can easily comment or like your friends’ posts. It’s all a matter of selecting the post you want to comment on or like, and then selecting the appropriate button.

The Events page conveniently separates events and birthdays just like in Facebook’s website. From the birthdays tab, you can just select a friend who happens to be celebrating a birthday and post to his or her wall.

You can confirm friend requests from the Requests page. I wish you could also confirm fan, group or page requests, but maybe these will come in a future version.

An additional feature that I wish the developers will add is the ability to add a friend to an existing list group whether you are adding a new friend or you are confirming a friend request. Right now, you’ll have to remember to login to your account using a browser so you can add your new friends to the respective lists. Sometimes, I do forget and when I do remember, I have to check all my friends again just to see if I missed adding anyone to their respective list. So you can see how the feature can be handy in the iPhone app; well, at least for me.

The Photos, Notes, Inbox, and Chat apps all function as they should. Although like the Requests and Friends apps, I do wish I could set my online status selectively using the group lists I’ve already created.

Overall, the Facebook for iPhone app is worth the download (and it’s free). It’s the best way to connect to your Facebook buddies whenever you are on the go. If you’re like me, you can even use it while you are on a computer but don’t want to fire up a browser because you are doing something else…like working or playing World of Warcraft, for example.