Entries tagged with facebook apps - Channel 10

PageRage Dresses Up Your Facebook Profile

sarahintampa — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:08:00 GMT

I’m not sure why you would want this, but a new app called PageRage will let dress up your Facebook profile so it looks more like a profile found on MySpace instead. (Yikes!) That’s too bad because one of the nicest things about Facebook is it’s clean and simple look and feel, without the busy backgrounds and image-heavy designs that are so prevalent throughout MySpace.

With the new Facebook app PageRage, you now can customize your Facebook profile with new themes that change both the background and the color schemes of your Facebook profile page. Some of these themes are basic, solid backgrounds, but others are quite busy.

Before you freak out and think this is the end for Facebook, take comfort in the fact that you can only see the new themed profiles if you have the PageRage application installed yourself. If you don’t want to see themes, just don’t install it.

The app works via a browser plugin which uses something called Yontoo Layers. Yontoo Layers create a virtual layer over your browser window. I’m not sure entirely how that all works, but it sounds a lot like what the Firefox extension Stylish offers.

I know. Facebook themes, ick. I definitely won’t be…oh wait…is that a pink one? Awesome.

Messenger for Facebook Updated

sarahintampa — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:20:00 GMT

Earlier this year, the Windows Live Messenger team released an app for Facebook which officially integrated Live Messenger with Facebook. The Windows Live Messenger Facebook app shows your online presence on your Facebook profile and lets you IM with your friends directly on the Facebook web site itself.

Recently, this app received an update. The new V.2 version of Facebook Messenger now syncs your Live Messenger status with your Facebook status. The team also listened to user feedback and removed the HIP (Human Interface Proof) challenge which was presented before you could start a conversation.

Additionally, the new version will automatically set your display name to whatever your name is in Facebook. Before it used to prompt you to fill this in. With these updates (both the HIP and display name), there are now no more dialog boxes that appear before chatting can begin. You can now just start typing to IM your friends!

You can add Live Messenger to your Facebook by adding the app here: apps.facebook.com/windowslivemessenger.

Tag Your Friends on Facebook…For Science

sarahintampa — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:34:00 GMT

This summer, Microsoft Researcher Desney Tan led a team that created a Facebook app called Collabio to investigate a new way of applying meta-tags to people – by using the power of crowdsourcing. In the game, friends label each other with descriptive tags that can include anything from physical or personality descriptions (curly-haired, organized, smart) to geographic locations to professional titles and more. When playing the game, you see a blanked-out tag cloud for a friend. By guessing which tags have been applied, you get points. Two or more people have to agree on a tag in order for you to receive those points.

While it’s fun for friends to play Collabio and see how they perceive each other, the researchers are more interested in how the knowledge contained in social networks can be tapped into and utilized for applications like personalization, expert matching, and so on. They plan to analyze the patterns revealed by this data to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of using games like Collabio to harness that knowledge. Using games to gather data can make social networks more of a useful and productive tool while still appearing to be a just be a place for simple, fun activities.

You can learn more about this project and their findings at http://research.microsoft.com/cue/collabio. To play Collabio on Facebook, go here: http://apps.facebook.com/collabio

Search Share for Facebook

sarahintampa — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:36:00 GMT

A Live Search powered Facebook app called Search Share lets you search for all kinds of information that you can then share with your Facebook friends. Results for Search Share can include videos, images, web pages, news, and more. But Search Share isn't just a way to see traditional search engine results within Facebook, you can also preview the content and select the results you want via drag-and-drop in order to share them with your friends.

The items you want to share are dropped into a box at the top of the app and you can then choose to email those items to a friend or post them to your feed. What's really wild is that when you hover your mouse over a thumbnail of a video, it automatically starts playing. I wasn't expecting that - I figured you would have to go off site to watch videos, but it's all right there in Facebook.

On the main Search Share page, some interesting topics are already listed for you like Today's Hot Topics. For example, today's #1 topic is "polar bear status" (how sad!). There are also boxes showing Top Celebrities, Words of the Day, Your Friends' Latest Searches, and Your Saved Search History.

Search Share is somewhat similar to Zine, in that it facilitates you being able to share various items with friends, but unlike Zine, it's more of a tool that can be used as needed instead of an online digital magazine.