Facebook now has a new HomePage:Are you satisfied?

I am sure you must have seen the new Homepage that facebook released sometime back.Let us look at the changes first.
Highlights section that you used to see in the right hand side has been merged to News Feed.
You will now see two feeds in your home page Namely News Feed and Live Feed.

News Feed will focus on popular content, determined by an algorithm based on interest in that story, including the number of times an item is liked or commented on.
Live Feed will display all recent stories from a large number of a user's friends.
News Feed is similar to Google Reader's "Sort by magic" feature introduced recently.

While this is a great change and has been appreciated by many ,I do have certain problems with this change.When I first logged into my Facebook I was surprised to see that my HomePage is filled with Highlighted Material.The problem with this is that facebook does not give me an option to hide these items.I can change my privacy settings not to show my highlights to other friends but I do not have control to hide others highlights.

If you are also worried like me then you can use facebook lite till facebook provides you an option to hide others highlights.

The second problem I feel is the introduction of two feeds News feed and Live Feed.I have a feeling that some of the users may not be able to understand them because both of them will now have some overlapping items.

I also observed that this has been announced in facebook developer blog.From a technical point of view ,facebook has cleaned some of the APIs and has provided guidelines about the API usage.This is going to help facebook and other third party applications.

How to Create your own facebook apps in 4 easy steps

If you are a facebook user then chances are that you know a thing or two about facebook apps.Do you embrace facebook apps and ever thought of building one for others to use your facebook application?Well,developing a facebook application using the facebook platform is not an easy task.

If you look for information on how to build a facebook application then you might land up here which says:
Before we begin, there are a few things you need to know. In order to create a Facebook application, you should know or need the following:

You should be well versed in PHP or some other coding language — such as Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, or Python — especially one that has a client library for our API.
You need to have a basic understanding of the Internet, SSH, MySQL, and Unix.
You need to be familiar with Web hosting fundamentals and have a place to host your application. You can read some fundamentals about hosting here

Most of the users will never come back after reading this ,because it makes the process so difficult to even develop the simplest application.
Hold on,I came across Appbank which is integrated with facebook platform and allows you to build a facebook App very quickly and easily without any development knowledge.It took me 15 minutes to build my first facebook applicaiton which is a facebook quiz that you can access from here.

Interested in building one now?Go to App Bank to get started.Once you allow App Designer to access your facebook account you can start building the application by clicking on "Create A New App".This allows you to quickly build the quiz applications.So let us look at the prerequisites before you start.

1.Set of Questions you want to display to your targeted users.
2.Set Of Answers for the questions you are going to ask.
3.A Logo Image for your app.
4.Set of at least 3 images to display them to the user as the results at the end of taking your quiz.
Step1 is to provide some basic info about your application.Giving a right Logo Image is important to connect with your users instantly.

Step2 and step3 are for setting up Questions and Results:
Results step is for displaying your results to the user at the end.You have to provide a minimum of 3 results at this stage.Assuming that your quiz has 10 questions,think of 0-4 correct answers as failure,5-7 correct answers as success and 8-10 correct answers as Excellent.So decide your Result Title,Description and Image accordingly to convey the result to the user appropriately.

Questions step is for setting up your Questions and all possible answers.So getting all the options of the question is important here.

The last step is to publish your application to the facebook.Follow the instructions to publish your app and you are done now.

Once finished you can do lot many things using the App Designer platform to promote your application.It even shows various usage statistics for the apps.You can even earn if your application is accepted by them.Check the details here.Go and surprise your facebook friends now by creating your own facebook app and inviting them to use.Check your facebook knowledge by taking this quiz created by me.

How to hide facebook Wall posts

If you are addicted to facebook then chances are that you have many friends and you keep getting updates in your wall posts.Some of your Wall posts are useful and some of them are really junk.It is also possible that some of the friends are quite active and you get junk posts from them very frequently.

So how do you hide those annoying facebook wall posts of type "Chilling Out@Home" or "X opened a fortune cookie and his fortune was: Good luck is the result of good planning."? Well ,you can control what you want to see in your wall posts.You can hide friends,pages,applications etc in your wall posts.

Go to your home page if you are not already there.Here you will see all the News Feed items.Now take your mouse to the right side of each News Feed item and you will see a hide button as shown below.
Once you click on the "Hide" button you might see some more options based on the feed item.

If the item contains an application update ,you will see the option to hide the posts from the friend or the application.
If the item is from a page then you will see just one option to hide the particular page.

Decide what you want to hide and click on it.You will see a page which is similar to the one given below.
Now you can leave it if you are correct ,you can undo it if you think you have hidden it by mistake or you can click on "Edit Options" to control all the feed items.You will see a pop up window as shown below when you click on "Edit Options".
You can also reach to the same window directly by clicking on the "Edit Options" found on the bottom right of your news feed page.
In this window you see the List of Friends ,Pages or Applications that is already hidden from your wall posts.if you want to add any of them you can add them individually.

How to Hide Facebook friends

Do you have a situation where you do not want to show the friend list to other friends in your facebook account?Facebook allows you to do this through custom privacy settings.


To do this go to your profile privacy settings by clicking Settings->Privacy Settings->Profile or by clicking facebook profile privacy.Under Friends Select Customize from the drop down.Select "Only Friends" under friends,Select "None Of My Networks" under networks.Now start typing the names of those people whom you do not want to show your friend list under "Except these people" .Click Okay and then Save changes.You can even include a friend list.After doing this ,you must be wondering how this will work or what information will be visible to a particular friend when your friend sees your profile.Facebook provides a easier way to test this ,so that you can verify your privacy settings changes.In the same privacy settings page type your friends name under the text
box "See how a friend sees your profile:" (as shown in the 1st image)and click Enter.Now you can see that your friend can not see your friend list.However your friend can see the Mutual Friends.

How to Hide Mutual Friends on Facebook?
I thought of writing this since lot of people are visiting this page by searching for this.At present you can not hide Mutual Friend list from your friends on Facebook.I will update this if facebook adds this in future.

Facebook Lite :Should you try it?

Facebook has launched a new lighter and cleaner version called Facebook Lite.If you are some one who is not in love with facebook apps then you will surely love it.To make the page lighter and nicer it has taken away many things in the lighter version.


So what are the main differences?

1.The page layout has improved greatly.It looks less cluttered.
2.No facebook Apps.
3.No facebook proper that you are used to see in the bottom of your page.
4.Friend suggestion list has increased from 1 to 3.
5.it is now a 2 column page instead of the earlier 3 column page.Left most column which used to have links for News Feed,Pages,photos etc has been removed.
6.Events menu has been added to the top toolbar.
7.No groups,Notes and chat.

Twitter ,Yahoo meme and Now Facebook Lite:We need a service which will integrate all the three.

All in all the interface really looks nice .readwriteweb describes this as the twitter Imitation in its blog post.Now the big question ,Should you go for it or no? In my opinion you should definitely go for it if you are not addicted to facebook Apps.

Facebook Launches Dedicated Widgets Center

Till recently Profile Badge was the only widget from Facebook.This widget was available on the main site.It released Live Stream Box and Fan Box few weeks back.

But on 4Th September the company officially released a centralized widgets page along with two new Widgets namely Photo Badge and Page Badge.

Widgets are small applications used by a number of websites that provide easy and quick integration.

Photo Badge allows you to share your photos on other websites and Page Badge helps in sharing facebook page information.The centralized widgets page now has a total of 5 widgets including the three widgets that was released earlier.Widgets are placed under two different categories,Personal profile widgets and website or Business Widgets.It looks like the company is going to roll out a few more widgets in near future.

How to hide your Facebook Notes from everyone

If you are a Facebook user then you know How useful the Facebook Notes are.You can share your views,express your opinions and do much more using the Facebook Notes feature.But some users find it useful to keep the notes private and do not want to share it with others.Facebook provides an option to do this.Follow the steps as given below to hide your Notes from outside world.

1.Click on the Notes to go to Notes Page.
2.Click on "Edit notes privacy" under Notes settings. (Shown on the right side of your Notes page)
3.Select "Customize" from the drop down under "Who can see this?" .


Now you will see another pop up window as shown below.


4.Select "Only me" under friends.
5.Select "None of my Networks" under Networks.
6.Click Okay and then Save to save your privacy settings for Notes.

Now no one except you can see your notes.