Lexus Unveiled Timeline Inspired Application

Point of No Return-Timeline Inspired Application

Name of this newly launched application is “Point of No Return” and this application will be included in 2013 Lexus GS which will available from dealers in February 2012. This app will highlight milestones in making 2013 Lexus GS in addition to pioneering moments in design, technology and social media.

2013 Lexus GS

Reason behind Launch of “Point of No Return”

Reason behind launch of this application is to attract new customers by explaining them enthusiasm of loyal customers of Lexus so that people from all over world could connect with this brand. This application will make best use of Custom Open Graph of Facebook which has been recently launched with the use of appealing and emotionally connected words like Want, Own and Remember. This kind of interaction will be revealed like story of Personal Facebook Timeline just like the Status Updates.

Lexus Vice President of Marketing Brian Smith said, “We developed this application to empower Lexus fans to engage with the brand in a new way, leveraging Open Graph features to enhance user experience, we’re not waiting for the future. It’s all about innovating, including a ‘sneak peek’ of exciting things to come on Lexus’ Facebook page.”

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

Kapil Sibal-“Sensitive to Indian Sensibilities”

Kapil Sibal, Telecom and Information Minister of India called upon representatives of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and registered complaints about the offensive material which has been published through various sources. Kapil is of the point of view that above mentioned companies should be sensitive to Indian sensibilities.

Offensive Site-We Hate Sonia Gandhi

There are many sites which publish offensive titles and materials about Sonia Gandhi and one among them is “We Hate Sonia Gandhi”. In this website, people have pointed fingers on the Italian Origin of this lady and she has been accused of some scandals which raised questions about her credibility as leader of one of the most prominent political party of India.

Morphed Pictures of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh

Story doesn’t end here; other things which forced Indian Government to threaten social networking sites and other site owners includes morphed photographs of Mr. Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi in which they have been shown as newly wed couple.

Freedom of Expression

In a meeting, Kapil Sibal has asked all the companies to screen material but unfortunately no action has been taken and companies has rejected this request of removal of offensive material with the answer that they have been working within the defined American standards of Freedom of Expression.

Photo by Facebook

Following are the changes which Facebook has introduced about features of photos uploading;

• When the user will upload photos in an album they will be able to see the process and progress in real-time.
• Users can add details and stories without waiting for completion of album uploading and they can add captions, details about location at the same time.
• It’s also possible now to add title of album, descriptions as well as location right on the top of uploader.
• The great improvement is about the tracking of upload time, users can track how much time uploading of particular album will take.

Facebook keeps on facilitating its users with the improvements of its features and it well understood that most of the Facebook users love to upload their photos and share with their friends. The above mentioned improvement which Facebook introduced are a step forward of changes which were introduced in August 2011 which facilitated the users to share bigger photos of 700×960 pixels on their profile. You might be thinking what happened to the previous photos, you will be happy to know that photos which you uploaded previously could be displayed and viewed at higher resolution.

Highlights of Facebook for iPad

• iPad users can scroll through News Feed with single touch of fingers and  move through the album and zoom in easily. In short, you can enjoy full fun of Facebook on your most desirable iPad.

• Small Pictures in Big Screen: The big screen of iPad help users to view pictures in shiny mode just like real album, it also offers experience like slide show so that you can enjoy the nostalgic pictures with your friends and family.

• Fast Navigation: If you wish to search the content which you use most often like games, apps, lists and groups Facebook for iPad help you out by displaying the messages and notifications at the top of screen. Fast Navigation helps you to stay in touch with friends and keep track of all the updates.

• Miscellaneous Features: Facebook for iPad is available with several other features for instance you can communicate with your buddies play games and use different applications in the format of full screen. In addition, iPad users can also enjoy high resolution videos.

• Facebook for iPad is available in app store and iPad users can easily access and download this most demanding application.

Rumors have been circling around since August 2010 about the alliance of Facebook and Spotify and finally Mark Zuckerberg has made an announcement about the coalition of Facebook and Spotify at Facebook’s F8 conference. He announced

“Two of the most exciting things we’ve ever done”

Recently Facebook has introduced the new visual service Timeline. However, Spotify is expected to be the upcoming most thrilling feature of Facebook and rock the Facebook fans with music.

Here’s how will Spotify make Facebook musical.

• A Music App on Facebook

The Spotify app will be the first thing that needs to be installed. However, the service will not be accessible via Spotify app. Instead, Facebook will have an exclusive Music app on profile sidebar and Spotify will be a part of this app. According to Spotify this page is called Music Dashboard, but it is not official yet.

Daniel Ek from Spotify said, “Finding new music is always difficult and that is why we created Spotify. We have spent the last few years building a service where you can find music. Add this to Facebook’s 800 million users and this will light up the world.”

• What’s new about this Music app??

Music will be an ‘open’ app from Facebook and will enable many companies to develop apps for social communication.
Speaking about the apps, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook said,

“The open graph is a completely new class of social apps to discover new things with your friends.”

The companies that have made an agreement with Facebook are The Guardian, The Independent, Netflix (not UK) as well as Nike Plus. However, some music services like SoundCloud and Deezer have also signed up for this app.

• You need to Open Spotify

Spotify will need to be opened on Facebook, else a message will be displayed on Facebook to ‘Open Spotify’.
Spotify is more of a social music experience, as it will enable you to listen to music tracks that you  and your friends are sharing .However, older tracks can’t be searched through the Facebook interface and the music recommended to you will be on the Feeder album, rather than on Spotify.

Also there is a permission Screen flashing “Spotify loves Social” to enter in Spotify feature.

• Your favorite music can played

Now, your favorite music can be played from your Facebook.  All you need to do is to click on the ‘Play button’ from your Facebook newsfeed or Music Dashboard and you can enjoy your favorite music.

• Spotify is free of cost

Yes, Spotify is free of cost.

Daniel Ek said ,

“We knew that the service had to be free to draw people away from piracy,but of course, you’ll still need to have a functioning Spotify app to use it.”
According to him,

“Helping them to listen to even more music. To do that, we also knew that the service would have to be inherently social. There couldn’t be a better place to do this than Facebook.

He further added,

“This integration with Facebook will help everyone to discover more free music than ever before. Thanks to our unrivalled, truly free service, users can just hit play to enjoy the music, no hassle, no gimmicks; month after month after month.”

• Get updated with the Friend’s Music posts

Now the music posts and play buttons of you and  your friends will be on the news feed, thus giving you all the updates about what your friends are listening to.

• Music will be a hard sell via Spotify

More people will be interested to purchase music.

Ek said,

“We know that Spotify’s users who connect to Facebook listen to more music on a weekly basis, They listen to a wider variety of music – in fact we have more than 400 million playlists created in Spotify now. Because these users are more social, they’re more engaged. Because they’re more engaged, they’re more than twice as likely to pay for music”

He further continued,

“Social discovery on Facebook means that we’re bringing people back to paying for music again. And that’s how the brilliant artists who create this music can continue creating it for us to enjoy.”

• Spotify will also become Social with Facebook musical Timeline

Since its first appearance, Spotify has been entertaining for its users by allowing them to scrobble to Last.fm through which they can listen to popular artists and enjoy their favorite tracks. But now Spotify will also become social with Facebook musical Timeline. All your favorite music tracks, playlists and artists will occupy the Facebook Timeline. Recommendation tech will also be provided by Facebook to enhance Spotify.

So, now enjoy your favorite music, as Facebook and Spotify are hands in hands to provide

Good News for the people who are addicted to Facebook, Privacy settings for Facebook has been enhanced.  Now you will be able to see their profile in a different and most convenient way due to enhanced control and some changes which Facebook is going to introduce. On 23rd of August, Facebook announced some enhancements which will offer more ease to people while sharing posts, photos, tagging and any thing else which people desire to do through their profile.

Updated Control on Profile

The major changes which Facebook has introduced are related to the enhanced control on the setting pages and it will be inline after the tags, photos and posts. A apart from this, many other changes will make it convenient for you to understand who can access your contents on profile.

Feel at Home with Your Updated Facebook Profile

Your Facebook profile is basically your home on the internet and Facebook updated its features to make you feel at home while being on your profile. You might be excited to know that you will be able to see some new and enhanced tools on your profile which will offer you consistent and enhanced control on your profile for instance it will be in your control to view how photos and posts are added to your page. Additionally, this improved control also allows you to manage who can view and access everything on your profile.

Inline Profile Controls

Before the new updated profile features people need to go through series of changes on settings page but now you will be able to see your profile content (Home town to updated photo album) next to an icon and drop-down menu. This menu will facilitate the users to keep an eye on persons who view particular part of your profile and you will be able to change it just with a single click.

Benefit of Inline Control

One of the benefits of shifting many of the settings to inline control is that now setting page will no longer be complicated and it will be shorter and simple to use. Many settings have been shifted to this inline mode with the removal of handful.

Profile Tag Review

Now you can select the enhanced tools to allow or refuse any of the tagged photos or posts before any other user can view it.

Content Tag Review

The enhanced control also allows you to review, allow or refuse any tag which your friends attempt to add to your posts and photos.

Changes in “View Profile As”

View Profile As will appear on the top of profile, means it will be easy to access it now.

Label Changed from “Everyone” to “Public”

Facebook is changing its label from “Everyone” to “Public”, this label change has been done to avoid any confusion and problem which most of the people face. This new label will make settings more clear now with this simple change of name of label.

Tag Location in Posts

Good news for people who love to add location irrespective of the device they use to sign in, now they can add location to any thing.
Users will be able to see these changes on their profiles in couple of days; hopefully the enhanced tools make it convenient to share with people with whom you actually want to share. Nut shell is you can have more fun with your Facebook accounts after the activation of these enhancements and controls because your Facebook privacy settings are going to be strict.

Burson-Marsteller which is US based PR firm is that PR firm which will carry this issue to news agencies that social network feature of Google was breaching privacy.

Justification of Facebook

Why Facebook has hired PR firm? Facebook explained its action that it was an attempt to judge the response of third parties when they came to know about the social circle and probable privacy issues of the service. This campaign has been named as “No Smear Campaign”.

Facebook spokesperson “No ‘smear’ campaign was authorized or intended, instead we wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles – just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.”

Standpoint of Tom Goguen (RIM) about New App

Vice President of Collaboration and Social Networking at RIM, Tom Goguen said, “There are over 30 million users of our Facebook for Blackberry Smartphone app who are staying in touch with their social network while on the go, now with Facebook for Blackberry PlayBook we can also offer customers highly engaging social experiences optimized for the Playbook including the ability to share Facebook pictures and videos with friends and family on an HDTV.”

Features of New Facebook App for BlackBerry PlayBook

View and Add Friends

With this new app now one can effortlessly and promptly interact with friends, it also offers an enhanced grid view for the profile pictures so that one can easily find friends, manage their requests and add them. A part from this one can also browse profiles, access videos, photos and wall posts as well as access information of profile on different pages and can add comments.

Picture perfect Photo and Video Viewing

Do you wana upload pictures from your BlackBerry PlayBook? One can upload pictures from the picture library of BlackBerry PlayBook; can tag friends and view comments within no time. One can also connect BlackBerry PlayBook to HD TV for a clearer view of photos and videos in 1080 HD interface.

Stay Connected with Facebook Chat

No matter where you are? You can chat with your friends, BlackBerry PlayBook’ s wider screen helps you to interact with your buddies and alongside you can also view online contacts and active conversations. Notification bar notify you about any new notification chat messages hence you can easily reply to your friends’ messages even when you are browsing through their profiles.

View News Feed

One can also browse highlights like photo upload and status updates and view links in the browser of BlackBerry PlayBook.

The Facebook for PlayBook App will be unveiled in Orlando at BlackBerry World 2011 in this week.

Good news for the users of Twitter! Now there Twitter accounts will be as protected as their bank accounts.

Twitter, the famous social networking site, has given a secure option to its users. They can sign-in to Twitter in a more secure way, as Twitter is using same security protocol that is used by the banks and on-line shopping sites. Twitter has done these changes in order to protect its users from hackers.

Twitter users can use Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTP), by selecting it from security setting page. It’s been since months that Twitter was working on it. Twitter anticipate that now its users’ account will be more secure than ever as HTTP will enhance the security of accounts.
Sophos, the famous internet security firm has recommended Twitter users to switch to the new system for a more secure log-in. Graham Cluely said, “What has happened in the past is that high profile people have had their accounts snatched, when that person is some one like Ashton Kutcher, who has six million followers, then someone can send a message from them that might be spam or malware”

It seems to be that Twitter is in bit aggressive mode to compete with other social networking sites especially Facebook-No1 rival of Twitter. Twitter will be having an edge over Facebook, as Facebook haven’t switch to HTTPs yet.

Android devices especially the Android cell phones are very much in fashion. If you own an Android cell-phone, you can do much with it apart from just making or receiving calls. Most of people, who buy Android cell-phones, keep on searching which application they should download. Here is the possible solution for you in the form of “Top 10 Google Android Apps”

1. Wikitude for Smartphone

Wikitude is a mobile application that provides the augmented reality platform. Wikitude World browser and Wikitude drive runs are latest applications which are meant for smart phones only. iPhone users will be glad to know that Wikitude 6.0 is available for download from Apple Apps store. This latest users interface provides a customized home screen, iPhone users can do full text search in Wikipedia, Mobile coupons, twitter etc. Wikitude World Browser is accessible to the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3Gs. More than 1000 Worlds are available, now it’s up to the choice of user what he/she selects and haul to the Home screen.

2. Kindle for Android

Kindle Application is designed for the Android devices, Kindle Books for phones enable the users to read their favorite books in easy-to-use interface. Kindle store provides over 750,000 Kindle books at the reasonable price. Those who are keen to read books can carry their books with them through the cell-phones.

3. Shazam for Android

Shazam is the music discovery engine. People can buy, share and discover with Shazam on Android. You can easily download Shazam, you can identify music tracks and store on your phones. Music lovers can enjoy music and can download their favorite track through this music discovery engine.

4. Opera mini for Android

If you need a smart web-browsing try Opera mini, Opera mini is fast, cost-efficient mobile web browser. You can enjoy the fastest browsing on the cell phones and can browse with ease. Opera mini uses the compression technology to shrink pages in order to best applicable for phones. You can also set Opera mini as default browser. It is available in 92 languages.

5. Music player for Android

If you are looking for Android devices for your Android devices, consider these five options.

• MixZing: It is the app which is the advance music player for the Android OS.
• Act1 Video player: It is the most suitable video player for the Android devices.
• Meridian Player : This is video as well as music player

6. Facebook for Android

Facebook is a social media network that provides you the best way to socialize with your siblings. Facebook for Android is a most convenient way to stay connected with friends; you can also share information with your friends. Apart from it you can checkout news feed, update your status and can peep into your friends’ wall

7. Twitter for Android

Twitter had released a more advanced version of Android app; you can browse your interest and can go though your favorite blogs even if you do not have any twitter account. Twitter has also included the universal search to the app. In addition you can also find out which of your siblings are on Twitter by, scanning your address books.

8. Google sky Map for Android

Google sky map is the latest application for the Android devices; you must be thinking why it is said to be as Sky map? It is because you can point your phones in the sky and it will show you stars, planets and will help you to identify the celestial objects. This sky map is feasible for all Android phones running Android 1.6 or higher.

9. Google for Android

Google offers the best apps for the Android devices i.e. Quick search box, Gmail, YouTube, Latitude, Buzz, Google Voice, Google talk, Google calendar, Google contacts, Google finance, Google shopper, Google blogger and blogger.

10. Weather App for Android

Weather has a great impact on your life, if you have an Android phone and you wants to keep yourself up-to date about the weather, use the weather app for your Android e.g. The weather channel is the most eminent download application in the Android market, by applying it your cell phone you will be able to know about the weather of different cities you travel around, 10 days forecast and 36 hours update.

Hopefully you will be able to judge know, which Apps you should download on your Android cell-phones.