Twitter – Launches its SMS service in Australia!

Twitter has made yet another leap forward. It has continued its trend of launching its SMS services and this time it is Australia. Twitter has partnered with Telstra to provide this service to its Australian Users. Standard service charges apply and its free to receive notifications. It is just like exchanging plain SMS with friends. You can always subscribe it by sending “START” to 0198089488. Once your phone is configured with your Twitter account you can start twittering or following who ever you like. (Courtesy : Official Twitter Blog)

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.

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 .

Linkedin navigation structure in process (The Official Linkedin Blog)

Linkedin working on site navigation structure to make Linkedin more user friendly for us. (Courtesy The Official Linkedin Blog)

A few weeks ago we announced we were doing limited testing of a new navigation design for LinkedIn. Thanks to all of you who have sent usfeedback. We are now in the process of rolling out the new design to all of our users. If you don’t see the change yet, you will sometime in the next week.The first thing you’ll notice in the new design is that there is no persistent left-hand navigation. All global navigation is in the top navigation bar. We did this in order to free up space for page content – information about you and your professional network.Another thing you’ll notice is that the new global navigation bar takes up less vertical space. Page content is moved up higher on the page – less scrolling!