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.

Social Networking site accounts hijacked! ( Courtesy : The NewYork Times Technology News )

According to a fresh look, people have been maliciously attacked by the wrong doers for all the wrong reasons. Often people with a lot of followers or friends on social networks are more prone to this. More people know and trust them. Their accounts are hijacked in order to drive a lot of traffic to different sites that earn the hackers from the click streams. Click here for an article from The NewYork Times Technology News for December 14,2009 that would help you know the gravity of the situation. Please do check this out, your account might be the next on their list and yea be sure to have a strong password to minimize the chances of being hijacked (Google for a strong password to have further assistance). And most important thing to remember is that when any of your friends asks you for an unusual thing to visit or click on, give it a second thought before clicking the link as your friend’s ID might have been hacked as well and by clicking on the link you would be next. Most obvious tactics would be winning of dollars or a girl asking you to follow her for more of her pictures.  And yea in case you need further advise check out the privacy settings for your social netwoking site to become extra careful. Happy social networking online .

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

Twittering in French

Twitter has accelerated its pursuit in providing multilingual platform to its users. Twitter recently added Spanish and now have added French as well. The company made the news public through its own blog with an entry in French language. Following is the translated version of what has been written in that blog post.

“With the addition of the Spanish version of the site last month, many people have joined the conversations on Twitter. More and more people twittent outside the United States and we are now able to accommodate users of nearly 30 Francophone countries. It is now possible to change the language settings in French with the participation of translators who have helped turn Twitter into a platform for truly global communication.

The French twitteurs golds can already track people and companies they are familiar. Whether you attended or @ @ Lepicerie lopera for your gastronomic outings, you read @ lemondefr way to work or you listen @ theteenagers on the way home or you’re a fan of @ CanadiensMTL, there is a wealth of information useful to discover at any time.

To see Twitter in French, just check your settings and select “French” from the menu.”