New Feature Rich Facebook Games Portal Launching Soon

Facebook is said to be getting ready to launch a new feature rich gaming portal that will offer a centralized place for all Facebook gamers to find and play all their favorite games. The social network has close to 200 million monthly gamers and the new portal will have Facebook partnering with a number of developer partners in this launch.

This news is still a rumor and although Facebook has not completely denied it, they have said that the games team is “working on building features to make it easier for people to discover and re-engage with games”. That definitely sounds like a rational explanation for the resources being put into this new portal.

The games portal shall be an extension of the gaming dashboard that Facebook launched in September of this year. This upcoming launch should centralize the whole gaming experience. The portal is rumored to launch by mid-November.

New Facebook Page Management Tools Released

If you are the owner of a popular brand with your own Facebook page, then here is something that you would be pleased to hear. Facebook has introduced a new page management tool interface that makes administering the activities on your Facebook Page a pleasure. The new interface is much simpler and intuitive and makes it much more easy for the administrator to access the several features. This is unlike the older interface where certain features were buried deep down into the management section.

One significant addition is the ability to change the Page name in case you typed it wrong during creation. This feature is however limited to those Pages that have less than 100 connections. In addition to this, the other important features are

• Condensed view page
• Basic Information and Profile picture section
• Connecting Page to Mobile Device
• Marketing Tab

Have you tried the new Facebook Page Manager? Tell us your experience in the comments. Continue reading »

Buy Facebook Credits From Wal-Mart & Best Buy Soon

Want to invest in your virtual farm but do not have sufficient Facebook credits? You can soon buy them during your weekly groceries shopping at Wal-Mart. The Facebook Credits card will soon be available in the impulse section of both Wal-Mart and Best Buy that will let consumers in the United States to buy credits to replenish their virtual cash on Facebook – something that can come of use in over 200 games and applications.

This is however not something new. Another popular American retailer, Target has been stocking such cards since September of this year and it has apparently been a successful experiment. Customers looking for such cards will be able to buy them at denominations of between $5 and $50. This is definitely an interesting move and something that could push more people to spend money on Facebook apps.

Facebook Spam Filter For Pages Releases

Facebook pages have been a great place for not just the brands and websites to broadcast to ‘fans‘, but also allows members to post content among themselves. While this is good on most counts, the number of spammers making use of this feature is on the rise as well. Facebook appears to have taken note of this as they have recently launched a ‘Spam filter‘ for fan pages.

An explanation of the service notes,

“Facebook is now helping Page admins ensure that the most valuable content posted by users on their Page wall is more visible to anyone viewing the Page. We are now offering automatic content filtering on Page walls that will ensure that posts soliciting spam are removed from public view as well as ensure that posts containing good content remain more visible.”

This is a good way to encourage genuine discussion among people with similar tastes and ideas on a page. What do you think?

Print Facebook Photos At Target Using Kodak Kiosks

Popular American retailer, Target, has offered in-store photo printing facilities to users for quite some time. These kiosks however required users to bring their photo files in USB drives to get them printed. Starting now, the company has announced that these Kodak kiosks will be getting Facebook connectivity so that users may directly log on to their Facebook account and pick and print the photos from their virtual album.

The Kodak kiosk is pretty comprehensive in that it will let you print your photos, including those from Facebook, on a variety of objects including photo paper, greeting cards, calendars, movie DVDs, etc. Target has however indicated that the Facebook connectivity will be limited to accessing the photo album; which means you cannot check and update statuses from there.

Facebook has been slowly becoming the primary photo sharing website ahead of more specialized services like Flickr. The company recently opened up options to download photos besides uploading high resolution pictures. It will be interesting to see whether and how Flickr/Yahoo responds to these developments.

A Desktop Client For Facebook Chat For Heavy Chatters

Despite a massive 500 million user base that is into social networking, Facebook really does not offer a very pretty chatting experience. The native Facebook IM service offers a pretty average networking experience.

If you are one of those who use the Facebook IM service a lot to chat with your friends on Facebook, here is a desktop application that you should probably take a look at. UK-based ChitChat is a full fledged Windows-only desktop client for Facebook chatting. The application basically brings the several benefits of popular Instant Messaging clients like AOL, Yahoo Messenger and GTalk to Facebook. For one, it relieves you of having to keep your browser open and can be accessed directly from your desktop. Secondly, the application comes with a beautiful tabbed interface that makes it easy to switch between open chat windows. Also, unlike the browser-based native chat application, new message notifications do not get hidden under other browser tabs since you are prominently displayed a new message notification like you are on GTalk.

ChitChat is free to download and can be installed by clicking here. Don’t forget to tell us your experience in the comments below.

Facebook Video Chat And Voice Calls Coming Soon?

Facebook, the world’s largest social network with over 500 million registered users is said to have signed a deal with Skype; the world’s largest VoIP calling network with more than 560 million registered users to bring together a feature that will let users to send SMS, make voice calls as well video chat with their Facebook friends. The new functionality is expected to be available in the new Skype 5.0 that is all set to be made public in a couple of weeks from now.

What is interesting is that the feature is confirmed to be available on the Skype application interface but it is unclear if a voice-calling functionality via Skype shall be made available over the Facebook web interface. That would have been a much more disruptive offering considering that Facebook has a much larger user interaction. Nevertheless, this is a good beginning and it will be interesting to see if this functionality will be made available on the mobile apps as well.

Steve Ballmer On Facebook – “I’m On Facebook Every Day”

It’s not often that you have corporate CEOs admit to visiting social networks every other day; at least if they are not Mark Zuckerberg. Apparently, Microsoft head, Steve Ballmer does. In an interview to the Seattle Times, not only did Ballmer admit to having a Facebook account that he visited every day, but also agreed to the problem with fake accounts. On being asked if he was one of those several Steve Ballmers on Facebook, the Microsoft CEO said,

“Yeah. I do, but I don’t want to tell you which one it is because I don’t want to get those friend requests. There’s about 11 of them (Steve Ballmer pages). Not as many as there are Bill Gates, but there are a few Steve Ballmers.”

Ballmer later also admitted to being a frequent visitor. He said,

“Every day. Oh, absolutely. I’m on Facebook every day.”

That doesn’t sound surprising. But I really don’t think he goes there to check on his crops. What do you think?

Facebook Phone Rumors – What To Expect

TechCrunch broke the news about Facebook working with hardware manufacturers to bring a new mobile phone to the market. While that does sound audacious at the outset, it makes sense considering that Facebook may not be really looking to challenge the smartphones but would instead be looking at a Microsoft Kin like device that is targeted at the teenagers.

Facebook may have denied the rumors completely. But what can you expect from Facebook in case the rumors turn out to be true. First and foremost, Facebook has to be pretty innovative about how they implement the software. Facebook’s customers are going to be teenagers who have the following four requirements from a phone – Calling, Texting, Internet browsing (Facebook mainly) and Gaming. The first two are no-brainers. And a Facebook integrated UI is expected too. But the last segment could be contentious. TechCrunch believes Facebook is working on its own OS that could be wrong. Facebook really cannot bring all their web success to the mobile phone all over again and the only way out is to integrate their offering with the Android marketplace. However, a Facebook phone will be incomplete without integrating the phone with the thousands of third party apps that are available on the website. In that case, the phone should come with a physical keyboard and not a touchscreen since the latter will require massive restructuring of all the thousands of applications on Facebook.

Now for affordability. The Facebook phone could be built on Android, but it needs to be noted that the teenage audience may be pretty frugal on data plans and hence the regular smartphone data plans may lead to a major flop show, much in the same lines of the Kin. Nevertheless, this is a carrier issue and we really cannot look deeper at this point.

But if anything can be said at the moment, it is just that this is an Android phone with a custom socially integrated UI and a physical keyboard.

Can’t Like Or Comment On Facebook? You’re Not Alone

The AllFacebook blog is reporting about what appears to be a bug affecting a small section of users on Facebook. According to what is reported, several users are noticing an issue with not being able to ‘like‘ or ‘comment‘ on Facebook posts. Status messages from friends displayed on the profile pages of these users simply do not have these options. Considering that the bug has been noticed by users since early yesterday, we assume that Facebook has been working on it, or probably even fixed it by now.

However, not all issues appear to have been resolved. Some users claim that while new updates do not seem to have this problem, those messages posted during the time the bug occurred still seem to be missing the like and comment options. Other users seem to be noting old updates – those as old as a month – appearing on the profiles now.

Are you noticing similar problems?