Mark Zuckerberg calls movie on Facebook, “fiction”

If you’ve been in loop, you probably know about “The Social Network”. The movie whose story is supposed to be that of the Harvard Students who started the fastest growing network in their dorm, Facebook.

What we have found out is that Mark Zuckerberg is unhappy with the movie. He calls it “Fiction.” According to him, what is portrayed in the movie aberrates from the actual happening.

The movie presents a story which proposes series of betrayals and desperation for friends which they would never be able to appease. Chris Hughes, Facebooks co-founder quoted, “That’s not what was going on. It was a little more boring and quotidian than that.”

Mark is quite angry with the press too and in an interview with NYT, he blatantly said  “Honestly, I wish that when people try to do journalism or write stuff about Facebook that they at least try to get it right.”

YouTube turns 5 with a massive TWO BILLION Views per day!

Happy Birthday Youtube! You turn 5 today and this is yet another milestone in YouTube’s journey. This day, five years back was special to someone who started a website so that they could share videos in his garage. Today they have servers to fill in thousands of garages with enough media, if played together could last for more than 1000 years!

YouTube has changed the way people consume digital video with HD and 3D technologies. Along with that, we have citizen reporters, YouTubestars who are amazing musicians and got a chance to showcase their talent to a huge audience. In a word, It’s “amazing”.

And And, they’ve also started a channel My Youtube Story Project where the users are uploading videos as how YouTube changed the way the do things! Feast your eyes on it here.

Facebook chat not working? : It’s fixing a massive privacy hole!

Few moments back, we’ve been reported, the presence of a massive security hole in Facebook. The hole affects all users and threatens privacy. Within few clicks anyone can view your live chats, notifications, requests, etc. and this is extremely pathetic and embarrassing for people.

Facebook’s new preview feature to check out your profile virtualizing yourself to be anyone of your friend makes all their ‘stuff’ visible to yours and vice versa!

Here’s a video of the hole in action.

Update : Facebook has disabled chat to fix this hole.

Update : Facebook’s official statement (Via Techcrunch)

For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users’ chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the “preview my profile” feature of Facebook privacy settings. When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented.

Update : Facebook chat is recovering!

Yahoo partners with Twitter

Yahoo!, the so called internet giant which is losing its vigor due to immense competition from Google and Bing. If you were following the recent news, you might know that Twitter made few bucks signing a deal with Google and Bing, allowing them to index the tweets.

Lately, we also came across the fact that even Yahoo was indexing tweets from twitter, but there was no such deal. Yahoo! was just using the most famous –  publicly accessible API (Application Programming Interface).

Here’s what the news is. Twitter confirmed that they have partnered with Yahoo on their blog.

According to this deal, Yahoo will index the public timeline from Twitter, second by second from all over the globe and will show relevant tweets in all their searches and portals. What more? Yahoo will make clients for twitter to make tweets directly from anywhere on the Yahoo! network. It’s no surprise that Yahoo still has 600 Million users which is no small figure.

The Art of leaking news : Learning it from Apple

The first thing i see when i log on to Digg.com is some Apple news. When i start reading articles in my RSS reader, all i see is Apple Rumors on all blogs. Who gives birth to these rumors? Why is everyone interested in Apple news? How does it spread so fast?

Apple knows all the answers. Let’s take the questions one by one.

Who gives birth to these rumors/leaks?

Apple itself. Apple has a team of marketing geniuses and news hungry people. That makes a perfect combination.

What? Apple itself leaks news?

I read this article at MacObserver which gave me a deeper idea as to how Apple made leaks. It had few simple steps.

  • Some Senior Executive instructs juniors to find to talk to someone at Major news outlets and reveal some information.
  • It is done over phone or in person and never in writing or emails because then no one comes to Apple with a proof.
  • This method works out the most as it’s claimed as a “Rumor” and so it may or may not be true and in this case the reputation of the both the parties is maintained and both of them benefit, Apple get’s required buzz and the authors get reader’s interest!

How do they get people interested in their news?

There are about 94,143,486 blogs who have posted about iPhone with a collective readership of over 30 Billion readers but only 45 Million iPhone were sold.

Apple does controlled leaks and it’s famous for not revealing information. If we see, generally you would be interested to know something when the other is trying to hide it. Simple principal is that

The more one hides, the more interest it generates for the other to know

This simple principal is responsible for the companies huge marketing success.

How does Apple get people to post their news?

If there are readers, give me a reason why people wouldn’t like to read about it? I mean our blogs first Digg frontpage was a Apple story too!

Also apart from readers, they do have great communication specialists who know the right people and get them at the right time so the news is a sure hit.

Why do they need news leaks?

To capture public reaction before releasing actual news as this helps them to plan actual stuff for products. I mean they could consider this as an unofficial trial without hammering the companies reputation.

They get the buzz by doing this. I can’t speak much on this because if we compare the Operating System market share, Apple has only about 5%-6% while Windows leads the rest of the market with much higher market share.

How far is this method successful?

In terms of popularity, this method works a lot. I mean every Windows fed up user wants to buy a Apple computer (sort of?).

Frankly if we think what a Apple customer is going through, then it’s hell. Why you ask? It’s simply because first of all he’s putting a lot of money into buying a premium product and on top of that he’s quite unsure about any refresh/updates to the product line so he gets confused if he should buy the product or not and so he wastes time thinking to buy it or not.

Facebook for Pirates : Get on the ship, pirates! (BTW this is not a facebook app)

Facebook is awesome and the experience is even better when in our native language. Well perhaps this could be true if you knew this little option did exist in Facebook.

What if Facebook was like this….

For all you budding pirates and experienced one’s, if you want Facebook to speak your mother tongue (Ahoy, Pirates!)  you need to follow three steps.

  1. Scroll down till the end of the page until you see this option where your selected language option is present.
  2. Then click, your language and then you will get a box, where you have to select “English (Pirates)”

Get on the ship, pirates!

Thanks Yahoo for Twitter Integration : So Early

Google Got it. Bing Got it. My brother got it. Now Yahoo gets it. Thanks Yahoo so much for the adding a brilliant new feature of Twitter results to Yahoo so early (If you thought Yahoo! did it early, your actually dum. I am being sarcastic, sigh.)

Anyway, let me show you how it works. As we know Google and Bing surely have better backups and investment ready compared to Yahoo and when they included search results they payed Twitter for getting access to status updates on twitter but on Yahoo’s side, Yahoo is completely dependent on free tools (mostly the twitter API itself) for indexing updates.

Yahoo-Twitter-Search

Yahoo with Twitter integrated Search results

The Algorithm is such that it finds relevant tweets matched with the Search and then shows up in the results, but mind it guys it would only appear for the trending topics / hot topics. 

What could be the effects? Perhaps not radical but surely this could help Yahoo a bit since today, more then reading long stories we prefer finishing everything up in 140 characters, but i wonder if it makes a huge difference as Google and Bing who are one the largest search providers have already done it.

All  have for Yahoo is a good luck wish (if it hopes to survive in the market). 

[Picture Credit : Mashable via Yahoo News]

Right time to use Facebook and Twitter [Video]

Facebook is addictive. You’ve got to admit it and the most addictive thing being the Relationship status part (though many don’t change it) to some it means a lot. 

Picture 23

Having a relationship and not updating your status on facebook, could have you fall into deep trouble if your partner finds it out! After the Break, we show you a video where @TheSoftwareJedi updates his status on twitter and facebook right away before kissing his bride from the Church! So this proves, there is no right time to use facebook, it’s the right situation!

[Via TechCrunch]

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter : Most Popular English word of 2009!

twitter

Every 98 minutes, a new english word is created. With that you know, how many words out there are created throughout the year.

Twitter is perhaps the fastest growing social network, and even more talked about service. This makes twitter the No.1 on the list of most popular terms of 2009 for English Language.

The name itself is addictive (I like to say, “Tw-i-tt-er”), and thus it was declared the top word of 2009 by Global Language monitor which tracks English Language.

So, Twitter does Defeat Barack Obama and H1N1 in the phrase too, and it was quite obvious. Obama, H1N1 etc. had been trending topics on twitter i.e most tweeted about, they said it through twitter so it was going to win.

Massive growth in Social Media has benefited twitter a lot, and twitter has broken so many records!

Twitter Labs : Expect more Developers to mingle around with Twitter.com

You Might have heard of Google Labstwitter_logo3? Gmail Labs, the one which allows you to access many features for your Gmail account which are under development and testing like the Gmail Goggles, Undo Mail Feature and so on. 

FaceBook Prototypes, which allows users to use applications which are not yet released for public use but are up for testing and other purposes. I did try out the Desktop Notifications Application from there, but found out that it was real buggy.

Similarly Twitter,  about which the developers are crazy have developed applications for Twitter using it’s API since a long time but very few allow complete integration with Twitter.com. But Recently when Britt Selvitelle, Twitter’s user experience and front end engineering lead confirmed that soon we might be able to see, Twitter Labs, Developers would get an awesome opportunity to develop apps for Twitter.com itself, test it out with users and showcase them. 

It will Include add ons to Twitter along with some more cool features you might have always missed. Directly watching videos in Twitter time line etc. might be possible soon!