Facebook making efforts to remove fake profiles

Social networking giant Facebook is making a "huge effort" to weed out fake profiles to prevent misuse of such identities, a senior company official has said.

"Absolutely, there is a huge effort," Facebook India business manager Pavan Varma told PTI when asked about the company's action on this front.

If Facebook doubts the ownership of an account, it will ask the user to identify himself/herself, he said.

The doubt about the authenticity of the account will arise if an account has a generic name instead of a proper name, uses images of celebrities/ cartoon characters as display pictures, or does not have "enough friends", Varma said.

"It could even be that Facebook comes back to you saying, could you help us identify yourself if you don't have enough friends, because we don't want fake identities," he said.

"We are worried about the experience we deliver...It's not about protecting our brand identity so much," he said.

Recently, there were reports of fake accounts being created by computer programs, which are used for inflating the number of "likes" on Facebook page for a brand.

Facebook had recently said it would be taking out fake "likes" generated by spammers, malware and black marketers.

Varma said advertisers must also shed the obsession with numbers. "How does an advertiser today treat a Facebook page? It is treated as a place where they just come with a number of people who are there. But that is a wrong way of doing it," he said, stressing that the conversations around the brand should assume importance rather than the numbers.

Mere "likes" on the page do not help a brand, he said.

Companies generally pay Facebook for a dedicated page on its platform that helps them connect with the target audience.

Varma, who was speaking to PTI on the sidelines of a banking summit, said Facebook, as a medium, is completely secure and cited the case of ICICI Bank, which now offers basic services over the Facebook page by integrating its net banking platform with the social networking site.

He added that IDBI Bank claims it has over five lakh fans on Facebook.

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Sachin Tendulkar joins Facebook

Over two years after making his debut on Twitter, cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar is taking strike on Facebook. The Little Master's Facebook page, at the time of posting this report, has got over 410,000 likes.

Tendulkar welcomed his fans to a Facebook page with a video message. "I'll like to welcome you to my Facebook family. As a child I always dreamt of playing cricket for India and I chased my dream of winning the World Cup for 22 years. It wouldn't have been possible without your support. I wanna take this opportunity to thank all of you for having prayed for me and wish well for me. I look forward to sharing my experience with you, join me on my Facebook so that we both can share this experience and go through this journey together," he said in the message.

Sachin Tendulkar's Facebook page is maintained by a Gurgaon based company Seven3Rockers. The page is also chronicles Tendulkar's cricketing career and lists his major achievements.

Sachin Tendulkar's official Facebook page can be accessed at:http://www.facebook.com/SachinTendulkar

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20 Tricks to Make Facebook Better

Facebook is By Far the Biggest Social Networking Site on Web.These Cool Tricks and Tips Help you to Enhance Your Facebook Experience.

Tweak Your Facebook Settings

1. Appear Offline to Certain Friends

By opening your Facebook chat window, clicking the settings icon in the upper right corner and then navigating to “Advanced Settings,” you can customize your chat experience by appearing offline to certain people on your friends list. This tweak will be especially helpful for those of you with chatty acquaintances who like to talk your ear off when you’re online.

2. Reposition Your Timeline Photos

When uploading a new photo, it might not always appear on your Wall the way you Thought. Particularly long or wide photos have a tendency to be cropped , but you can fix this rather easily. 
By clicking “Edit Photo” from your Timeline page, you will gain access to a “Reposition Photo” option. Using this tool, you can move your photo around the preview window so that it appears as you intended.

3. Add Photos to Your Worldly Travels

If you’re a fan of Facebook’s “Places” feature, you can very easily decorate it with pictures to show off your various activities all over the world. On the main Places page, simply click “Add Photos to Map” and start tagging away! If you frequently upload photos directly to your Facebook profile using a mobile app for iPhone or Android, you might find that your map is already pretty well populated.

4. Easily Hide App Notifications

By going into your account settings, navigating to the “Notifications” tab on the left side of the page, you can browse the applications that have permission to populate your news feed. If find that a friend has spammed your feed with an excessive number of app notifications, simply deactivate the offending app. It’s easier than breaking off the friendship.

5. Upload Photos in High Resolution

Sometimes you’ll find that a gorgeous photo you wanted to share with your friends appears tiny and blurry after adding it to your social network profile. Remedy this by going into your Facebook albums and, before uploading a photo, click the “High Quality” box.

6. Use the “View As” Option to Tweak Your Appearance to Specific Friends

Knowing what your friends can see on your Facebook Timeline is an invaluable tool to ensuring your virtual reputation stays intact. From your Timeline page, click the settings icon next to “Activity Log” and then click “View As.” From here you’ll be able to see what specific friends see when they visit your page.

7. Download Your Entire Facebook History

Ever wanted to browse your entire Facebook profile at once — including every status update you’ve ever submitted? Facebook makes it easy. Under your Account Settings page, a small link will appear at the very bottom of the options list. Click “Download a copy of your Facebook data” to begin the process of securing your entire archive.

8. Forward Your Facebook Conversations

Having to repeat yourself is annoying in day-to-day life, and it’s even more of a bother when online. Rather than copying and pasting directions or instructions to multiple people, click the “Actions” tab at the top of any Facebook message thread to access the option to forward it to others. Ta-da! No more double-talk!

9. Turn Chat Sign-in Off by Default

Can’t stand endless chat when you’re simply browsing your status updates? No problem. Click the settings icon in the main Facebook chat window, and click “Turn off chat” to have all future messages sent to your inbox, rather than pop-up in realtime on your screen.

10. Use Facebook to Design Your Business Card

If you’ve put a lot of work into making your Timeline page reflect exactly who you are, consider using it as a pre-designed business card. Clicking the “About” link — located under your name on your Timeline — lets you browse your social network details. In the Contact Info window is a small business card icon that will direct you to Moo.com, where you can customize a Facebook-flavored business card and place an order.

Web Tools That Optimize Facebook

11. Analyze Your Facebook History With Wolfram Alpha

For the most comprehensive breakdown of your entire Facebook history, Wolfram Alpha can’t be beat. Simply type “Facebook Report” into the main search bar, approve the app’s use of your Facebook data and wait for the system to break down your history. Once it’s finished, you’ll be treated to a seemingly endless number of graphs and data points showing your update history, most-liked photos and much more.

12. Schedule Facebook Updates With Sendible

Believe it or not, thieves are big fans of Facebook. By finding out when you’ll be away from your home, security experts believe would-be robbers target those who go on a Facebook hiatus. Sendible — an application that allows you to schedule updates even when you’re not near your computer — can keep your online persona active, even when you can’t.

13. Use Twitter to Update Facebook

Sometimes you just don’t have enough time to keep all your social networks up to date, but thankfully Facebook and Twitter play nice together with a little tweaking. Head to the Twitter app page on Facebook to begin the process of syncing your virtual social lives. After authorizing the Facebook app via Twitter, all your tweets will appear on Facebook as status updates.

14. Export Your Facebook Calendar to Your PC

Make sure you don’t miss any important events by exporting your Facebook calendar to either Microsoft Outlook or Apple iCal. Head to your Facebook calendar (located under the “Events” tab on the Facebook navigation bar) and click the settings icon. Click “Export,” and then choose either your Facebook birthday list or upcoming events. Your desktop’s calendar app should launch immediately, making the process even more streamlined.

Chrome Extensions for Facebook

15. Facebook Photo Zoom

Using this extension, you no longer have to click on the photos in your news feed in order to view them in full size. Simply move your mouse cursor over the image thumbnail and the larger version will pop up right in front of you. You can even adjust the zoom by moving the mouse back and forth over the photo itself. It’s like magic.

16. Revert Facebook Photo Viewer

If you’re not into real-time photo zooming, this extension turns back the clock on your Facebook’s photo feature. Rather than displaying pictures in the new “Theater” layout, photos will appear on their own pages, complete with the full comments section and “Like” options.

17. Facebook Chat Notifications

Have you ever left a Facebook tab open on your web browser and missed an urget message from a friend? This handy plugin produces a pop-up window on your desktop to notify you when someone needs to chat, ensuring you never miss an important bit of info.

Firefox Add-Ons for Facebook

18. Like the Page

If you’re a Firefox user, you can use this add-on to instantly share any web page they come across, even when the site doesn’t have a built-in Facebook share button. A small “Like” icon will pop up at the bottom of every browser window, and all it takes it a click to share your find with the world.

19. FB Purity

This plug-in returns your Facebook to an earlier day, back when spammers and useless clutter wasn’t a hinderance to your browsing habits. You can hide any type of notification you wish, including birthdays, relationship updates, tagged photos, links and much more. You can make your social experience as simple as you wish.

20. Facebook Auto-Logout

Do you hate it when you accidentally leave yourself signed in to the social network, only to come back to missed chat messages and anxiety over whether someone else was browsing your digital life? This handy add-on will automatically sign you out of your Facebook windows if you’ve been inactive for too long, ensuring that nobody can snoop your info.

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Asia should have its own Facebook, Twitter: China official

Asian countries should have their own version of Facebook and Twitter to expand the region's influence, a Chinese official said on Tuesday.

Asian media groups should use technical innovation to enrich their communication channels and have their own versions of Facebook and Twitter to expand the region's influence, Cui Yuying, deputy director of the State Council Information Office said.

"Compared with Asia's increasingly vital role in the world economy, the influence of Asian media groups on the world stage is very much disproportionate," Cui said at the fifth 10+3 Media Cooperation Forum at Chana's Changchun city on Tuesday.

China banned Facebook and Twitter but permitted microblog services, akin to Twitter whose numbers crossed over 300 million, constituting the world's biggest microblog network.

Cui said that more than 80 per cent of news comes from major Western media groups while their Asian counterparts, lacking "a strong platform and authoritative status," have to rely on the Western media to obtain information.

The forum, jointly organised by the Beijing-based People's Daily and the Jilin provincial government in northeast China, was themed "Asia's Voice & Values: How Can Media Promote Peace, Harmony & Cooperation."

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See how much Facebook earns from user sign-ups

Facebook's shares maybe at an all-time low on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), but the social networking site's primary interest lies in increasing the number of friends and apps a user has on the website, as it draws most of its revenue from advertisers and users who sign up for the social site.

Facebook reportedly earns an average of 5.90 dollars a year for everyone who signs up for the site.

The firm's value is not just in the adverts that one clicks on the site, but also makes money through a the number of friends a user has, whom he/she can recommend products and services and the number of apps he/she has signed up for.

Facebook users may have noticed lately that people with fewer than 30 friends are being recommended to them as an addition to their friend list, as people with more than 30 friends are more likely to be active users, and Facebook wants all its users to be active, logging in at least once a week, Stufzz.co.nz reports.

Facebook has also smartly and cleverly changed its app sign-up screen, which previously used to show a user in large print exactly as to what permissions they were granting while signing up for the app such as whether it would post to their wall on their behalf or they could simply click 'no thanks!' if that was undesired.

Now, that information has been moved to the bottom of the sign-up screen, in fine print and grey font, and the options for not signing up for an app been made far more confusing and complicated for a user to understand.

Despite the plummeting stock prices, Facebook has left no stone unturned to garner more users for its social site along with new apps in the App Centre and adverts, which surely would ensure the firm's smooth sail in tough waters for a long time to come.

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Facebook is reportedly set to expand its organ donor initiative to Asia

Facebook’s organ donor initiative looks set to come to its first market in Asia tomorrow, that’s according to Korean news agency Yonhap which reports that the feature will go live for users of the social network in South Korea tomorrow.

The report states that the state-run Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will team up with the social network to give the feature a visible push when it is brought to the country.

As it is a company with truly international reach, Facebook is unlikely to expand the service piecemeal and bring it to Korea alone so we suspect that the country will be one of a number — perhaps from Asia and beyond — that gets the feature for the first time tomorrow. At this stage, however, no details of any such plan have been communicated by the Menlo Park-based company.

Launched in May, the ‘life saving’ initiative, as Facebook called it, has been a huge hit and it has helped swell the ranks of organ donors worldwide. Donor registration numbers jumped by 800 percent in California the day after it launched, while the UK’s NHS saw its own figure more than triple overnight.

The move was widely-praised for the positive change that it is making and, with Facebook rapidly approach 1 billion users, it further demonstrates that the social network is a platform of great influence with the potential to bring about social change worldwide.

A statement from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg at the launch of the feature read:

Facebook’s mission is simple: to make the world more open and connected. But the Facebook community has also shown us that simply through sharing and connecting, the world gets smaller and better. Even one individual can have an outsized impact on the challenges facing another, and on the world. At Facebook, we call that the power of friends.

Organ donation is currently available to Facebook users in Australia, Brazil, Columbia, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, UK and the U.S.

To get it, those on the list must ensure that they have a Timeline profile and follow the instructions from the dedicated Facebook Q&A page:

• Click Life Event at the top of your timeline
• Select Health & Wellness
• Select Organ Donor
• Select your audience and click Save

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Find Your Most Popular Facebook Posts With This Cool App [REVIEW]

How Popular Was that Video that You've Posted on Facebook ? Or How About Those Pictures and Albums From Your Most Recent Vaction? Well if You Want to Find Out Them Then Here is a Cool App Named Good Sort ...

A new app called Good Sort will find your most popular posts on Facebook according to likes, comments or shares. First, you have to let the app access your Facebook Wall. Good Sort lets you stay on top of the most commented and liked posts that include you, so potentially embarrassing pictures you’re tagged in never get buried in your feed without you noticing them.

Perhaps the purpose of this app is to help you better manage your page, gain more Facebook friends or simply boost your Facebook confidence. But just how much will users want to pay for this app?

The Good Sorts app [iTunes link] is available for $.99 on iTunes, but requires a quarterley subscription of $2.99 if you want to sort posts of friends, groups and pages (so long as you have admin access). Seems a lot to shell out, but so far in the comments on the iTunes app store, users are fans of this app.

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