Facebook Search Trends 2009

There go the trends of Facebook search for 2009. Below is the method by which Facebook determined the search trends and also the most popular trends. (original post copied from Official Facebook Blog) for more details search of each search result kindly visit http://blog.facebook.com

Status updates on Facebook help people understand their friends and the people around them–how they’re feeling, what they’re doing and what they’re thinking. In the United States alone, people on Facebook are sharing hundreds of millions of words every day, thousands per second, in status updates. When taken as a whole, these words offer a unique barometer into the issues, world events and thoughts that are connecting people.

In the tradition of year-end lists, we’re introducing Facebook Memology. “Memology” refers to the study of how “memes,” or new ideas and trends, are spreading on Facebook. For this year’s list, the Facebook Data Team mapped the top trending words and phrases in U.S. status updates for 2009.

While significant news events and celebrities made the list, more personal topics like family, religion and even emerging digital slang were as common—no doubt reflecting the way people share their daily lives with friends on Facebook.

To generate the list, we started by looking at how many times each phrase with length from one-to-four words occurred in U.S. Facebook status updates, then we computed the rate at which each phrase occurred in 2009 compared to 2008. Using some data-mining methodsdetailed here, we analyzed important bursts in activity around words and series of words to find the key trends for the year. All personally identifiable information was removed from the status updates to conduct this analysis, and no one at Facebook read the individual status updates.

Because quite a few words and phrases were related to each other and correlated contextually, we grouped some of them together to form the final list that follows.

1 – Facebook Applications

2 – FML

3 – Swine Flu

4 – Celebrity Deaths

5 – Family

6 – Movies

7 – Sports

8 – Health Care

9 – FB

10 – Twitter

11 – Years

12 – Lady Gaga

13 – Yard

14 – Religion

15 – I

Facebook Translation – Awards being distributed for contributors

Two years have passed since the translation applications were launched by Facebook. A staggering 300,000 people participated for more then 70 languages. Facebook says this service has helped people stay connected in the language they feel most comfortable in, without regard to the number of people speaking the language. Facebook has also announced to reward their translators through extra recognition.

Facebook will give them special icons in accordance with the difference milestones reached by them. Facebook has categorized the awards into three categories and says the level of accuracy and frequency of contribution in activities like translating words and voting on the best translations.

• Voting Participation
• Words Published
• Translations Published

Facebook is starting nine more awards and looks to add more categories. These will help facebook put their translators in public spotlight, to value their worthy contributions. This is how facebook has recognized the contribution of their translators. ” We would have never accomplished so much so quickly without the help of all of you who have contributed to translating Facebook. Since the first translation, we’ve grown to more than 350 million users on Facebook, with 70 percent of them now outside of the United States. We appreciate the hard work from all of you who’ve taken part, and we hope you’ll enjoy translating even more with the new award system.

If you know multiple languages and haven’t yet tried the Translations application, we encourage you to give it a try here. Your contributions make a big difference.”

Courtesy : The Facebook Blog.

Facebook New Privacy Settings (Courtesy : The Official Facebook Blog)

Wondering how facebook’s new privacy settings are set and how will they help you protect your part of the privacy. Read on, this is the official word of Facebook and setup your privacy preferences now, be safe when you are on line.

UPDATE on Thursday, Dec. 10: In response to your feedback, we’ve improved the Friend List visibility option described below. Now when you uncheck the “Show my friends on my profile” option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won’t appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications. Thanks again for your comments and suggestions.

We’ve also posted a third tutorial about the new privacy controls here. This video explains how to use the privacy control in the Publisher, the box where you publish status content such as updates, photos, videos and links.

Thank you for all of your feedback so far on the new privacy tools we began rolling out today. We’ll be providing updates and listing the most common questions we’re receiving in this post. Be sure to read our full blog post on the new privacy tools, if you haven’t already.

Why don’t I have the new settings?

If you haven’t yet seen the three-step transition tool for reviewing and updating your privacy settings, you will shortly. We’re asking all 350 million people who use Facebook to go through this process and are rolling out the changes incrementally to make sure it goes smoothly. Keep in mind that you also won’t see the new Privacy Settings page until you’ve gone through the transition process.

Can I limit access to my Friend List?

Many of you have mentioned that you want a way to hide your list of friends. In response to your feedback, we’ve removed the “View Friends” link from search results, making your Friend List less visible on the site.In addition, you can further limit the visibility of your Friend List to other people on Facebook if you want. After you’ve completed the transition to the new privacy settings, you’ll be able to click on the pencil icon in the top-right corner of the “Friends” box on your profile. Unchecking “Show my friends on my profile” will prevent your Friend List from appearing in your profile.when it is viewed by people who are logged in to Facebook. Keep in mind, however, that because Friend List is publicly available, it will be visible to people who are viewing your profile while not logged in. Again, you will only have this option once you’ve completed the transition to the new privacy settings.

Remember, you can also limit who can find you in searches on Facebook and control whether your information can be indexed by public search engines under “Search” on the Privacy Settings page.

Can I limit access to my Wall?

There’s been some confusion about whether you can still limit access to Wall posts from friends and applications. The answer is yes. Just as before, you have complete control over who has access to posts your friends have made through the “Posts by Friends” setting under “Profile Information” on the Privacy Settings page. For example, if you choose Friends of Friends, only your friends and friends of those friends will be able to see posts others have made on your Wall.

You can also control whether applications you use can post stories to your Wall on theApplication Settings page. Just click “Edit Settings” next to an application’s name and choose the settings that are right for you.

Is there a tutorial on using the new Privacy Settings page?

To give you as much information as possible about how to control your experience on Facebook, we’ve created a short video that walks you through the new Privacy Settings page. The video shows you what you’ll find on this page, guides you through the basic levels of privacy, and explains how to customize your privacy settings. You can check it out here.

Where can I provide feedback?

Once you’ve gone through the three-step process to update your settings, please visit the new Privacy Center, our comprehensive resource for information on how to control your experience. You’ll be able to access this page at any time from the “Privacy” link at the bottom of any Facebook page.

If you haven’t gone through the transition, please provide your feedback here. While we unfortunately cannot respond to your emails individually, we’re listening to all of your feedback.

Ana, a Facebook product marketing manager, is keeping you updated.

An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

(Courtesy : Official facebook blog)

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we begandiscussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg