Facebook wants to hear your life story.

Not satisfied with just being a repository for recent vacation photos, the company is revamping the profile pages on its website to better highlight the milestones in a person's life, executives announced at its annual conference for software developers on Thursday.

This new version is based around the idea of a personal "timeline" rather than the standard profile pages that users have become used to.

"We're more than what we did just recently," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in unveiling the new look. "Timeline is a completely new aesthetic for Facebook."

The pages look more like blogs than a social-networking site. A large photo covers the top of the pages, stretching from one side of the screen to the other. And posts -- like photos, status updates and the locations a person visits -- show up below that, attached to a vertical and chronological timeline.

Facebook is hoping the changes encourage people to publish more information about their daily lives and about their pasts. In his onstage demonstration, Zuckerberg posted a baby picture of himself, which showed up at the bottom of his timeline profile.

"We think it's an important next step to help you tell the story of your life," he said.

Some users got a beta version starting on Thursday, while others will be able to request access. The new profile will be turned on for everyone in the next few months, according to Bret Taylor, Facebook's technology chief.

The world's largest social network, with more than 750 million users, introduced some related new features earlier this week. Zuckerberg said Facebook's reach continues to grow.
"For the first time ever, in a single day we had half a billion people use Facebook," he said.
The company made a second big announcement Thursday when it unveiled a new version of its app network, which also is launching in the coming weeks.

Facebook will make it easier for people to post info to their profile pages without visiting the site or clicking a Like button. The company has partnered with dozens of prominent software developers for applications that integrate more closely with the social network. Some of these features launched on Thursday.
This is "the most significant change we've made to our platform since we launched it four years ago," Taylor said.
Streaming music services, including MOG, Rhapsody, Rdio, Spotify and Turntable.fm, can automatically send data to Facebook about each song a user listens to or about new playlists. These might then show up as a weekly report on the user's Facebook page. Zuckerberg called this "real-time serendipity."

"This rings the friction out of how to share music," Kenneth Parks, Spotify's content chief, said in an interview.
To promote this real-time sharing, Facebook also announced partnerships with Yahoo News, Netflix, Hulu, foodie social network Foodspotting and others. These companies have created Facebook apps that can post all of a person's activities on Facebook's new "ticker," which appears in the top right-hand corner of the site's homepage.

Some video services will similarly be able to notify Facebook each time a user watches a video. Hulu, the TV streaming site, and Netflix, the paid subscription service, will be among the first to adopt the new features. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is also on Facebook's board of directors, said that in some cases, Facebook friend recommendations can trump Netflix's vaunted algorithms. Netflix's Facebook features will be activated in 44 countries but not in the U.S. because of a law that Hastings described as outdated.

"You don't have to Like a movie," Zuckerberg said. "You just watch a movie."

Miscellaneous apps like Nike+ and recipe sites also will be able to send more info about particular runs or dinner concoctions without asking each time.

"I'm not going to publish a status update every time I walk up to my stove," said Taylor, the Facebook CTO who is also an avid cook. "I don't want to spam my friend's news feed every time I pick up a spatula."

News websites and apps will ask readers to sign in with their Facebook accounts so that they can send info to the social network about every article they read.

For the news industry, "it's huge," said Eric Vishria, the CEO of RockMelt, which integrated some of these features into its Web browser. "It gives a more tailored view."

But Flipboard, a news aggregation app for iPad that is listed among Facebook's first partners, decided not to adopt that particular feature because, according to a spokeswoman, users probably wouldn't want to share so much information. Instead, users of the apps will be able to highlight individual articles using the Like button, as they currently can, or also share sections to their profiles, she said.

The new Facebook features could anger privacy advocates. With these changes, Facebook is seeking significantly more data about people's activity online and about their personal lives.

Some Internet users who were watching Thursday's presentation online reacted negatively.

"Get ready for over-sharing," one Twitter user wrote.

"This is just WAY too much sharing. The end of privacy," a Facebook user wrote on the company's live stream page.

Facebook is hoping to alleviate these concerns during a "slow rollout," Facebook's Taylor said in an interview with reporters after the announcement. The company worked with privacy groups during the development of these features, he said.

"This is actually a major step for transparency and control on Facebook," Taylor said. Users will be able to delete individual items after they've been posted, he added.

Zuckerberg has said he believes Internet users will continue sharing significantly more of their lives online each year. Comedian Andy Samberg, who opened Thursday's event with his familiar "Saturday Night Live" impersonation of the hoodied Facebook founder, poked fun at this idea in a brief introductory routine.

Source: CNN

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Google denies 'cooking' search results

Google's executive chairman has denied that the company fixes its search results to promote its own websites and services.

Eric Schmidt told a congressional hearing in Washington: "May I simply say that I can assure you we're not cooking anything."

The Senate Judiciary subcommittee on anti-trust is looking at whether Google abuses its market position.

The US Federal Trade Commission is also investigating the same issue.

The website search giant faces a further continuing investigation by the European Commission.

'Extraordinary advantage'

Mr Schmidt told the senators: "Google does nothing to block access to any of the competitors and other sources of information."

When asked whether Google was a monopoly company, Mr Schmidt said the search engine giant was "in that area", adding that it recognised it had a special responsibility because of its market power.

In reference to software giant Microsoft - which faced years of anti-competition investigations and subsequent fines - Mr Schmidt said: "We get it. By that I mean, we get the lessons of our corporate predecessors."

Concern over Google's domination of the internet search - it has a global market share of about two-thirds - has grown as the company continues to expand into other internet areas, such as its own price comparison website and buying US mobile phone firm Motorola Mobility.

Sen Michael Lee of Utah said that Google's market dominance gave it an "unnatural and extraordinary advantage", and it had a "clear and inherent conflict of interest".

Mr Schmidt was chief executive of Google for 10 years until April, when he was replaced by Larry Page, one of the company's two founders.

Source: BBC

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Academic selection 'improves social mobility', says head.

Christopher Ray, high master of Manchester Grammar School, says that the current system of state education will struggle to cater for the needs of the very brightest pupils unless ministers reconsider their ban on selection by ability.

Ministers have repeatedly asked leading private schools to set up and run a new wave of state academies funded by the taxpayer.

Earlier this month, David Cameron met representatives from a series of schools including Eton, Manchester Grammar and Wellington in a bid to drive forward the Coalition’s flagship academies programme.
But writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Mr Ray says the move “fails to understand the importance of academic selection in our essential character”.

He says that selecting pupils by ability remains “one of the great engines of social mobility”, suggesting the brightest pupils often struggle in mixed-ability classrooms.

Four years ago, Mr Cameron sparked a backbench rebellion after announcing he was severing the Conservatives' ties with academic selection.

The Coalition has now placed the academies programme at the heart of its attempts to drive up standards.
In the last year, the Government has created more than 1,000 academies – state schools with almost complete freedom to run their own policies on the curriculum, teachers’ pay and the shape of the academic year – compared with just 200 opened under Labour.

But ministers have refused to give them powers to select pupils by ability. Only existing state grammars that convert into academies can select.

Writing today, Mr Ray says successive Governments have “thrown money” at schools and communities in an attempt to promote social mobility and boost education standards.

But he says social mobility “remains stubbornly resistant to such tactics”.

“When the government asks independent schools to share with state schools their DNA, it fails to understand the importance of academic selection in our essential character, one which embraces social diversity which in turn vigorously promotes social mobility,” he says.

Mr Ray claims that a fixation on the “ills and defects” of the 11-plus – the traditional grammar school entrance exam – has made it almost impossible to have a “rational debate” on the issue of academic selection.
Manchester Grammar – an independent day school – currently selects children using day-long assessment exercises in which prospective pupils are monitored by teachers in a series of normal classes to see how they respond.

Mr Ray says it is possible to adjust the method of academic selection to “meet the needs of the 21st century”. (telegraph)

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Facebook takes on Twitter, Google+ and Blackberry

Facebook has had a busy seven days – with the release of its new smart friends lists suspiciously similar to ‘Circles’ on Google+, becoming the biggest web brand in America by a country mile and now having launched a subscribe button – in a direct attack on Twitter’s territory.

It has also launched its new free mobile instant messenger app in the UK (Facebook Messenger) in the last 48 hours, which will undoubtedly make Blackberry feel a little protective over BBM, (Blackberry Messenger), as Facebook aggressively moves into that growing real-time communication field.

All of these moves have come a week ahead of the company’s annual developers conference, f8, which will be held on September 22 in California, at which Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief, is expected to unveil a supreme digital music service, in partnership with the likes of Spotify and Mog.

In short, Facebook is making good on its promise to become a platform on the internet and not a just a website – meaning that everything online could eventually have some kind of Facebook tool attached to it or some kind presence on the site.

When I toured Facebook HQ this summer, Carl Sjogreen, product manager for the Facebook Platform (‘Platform’ is the part of Facebook which allows other websites to integrate Facebook apps or tools), told me that Facebook becoming an internet platform rather than just a single destination site, was the key to stop it suffering the same ‘fad’ fate as MySpace and is the reason why the service has continued to grow.

“Any destination site has limited potential. It only contains the features that the team can build as quickly as they can create them,” he explained.

“Being a platform allows your Facebook identity to become a service for the whole web…We are not going to be able to build everything – but if we can create an eco-system – as we are doing around our service, it will make continuing coming to Facebook a more interesting experience. There is now a whole industry built on our platform which is invested in Facebook’s success.”

Facebook’s ecosystem is just getting bigger and bigger, as it fast becomes a web within the web. As with any business, the ultimate sign of success is to become indispensable to your users – and that’s what this 750 million-strong social network is trying to achieve at the expense of its biggest rivals. (telegraph)

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Facebook 'to float in late 2012'

The Financial Times, citing people close to the company, said Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg "wants to wait until next September or later in order to keep employees focused on product developments rather than a pay-out".

A number of technology companies have recently delayed their initial public offerings because of the volatility in the stock market but the FT said Facebook's plans "have been set according to internal interests".

The CNBC business news network reported earlier this year that Facebook was likely to conduct an IPO in the first quarter of 2012 with a valuation of more than $100bn (£63bn).

Mr Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, has repeatedly said he is in no hurry to take the company public.

The Palo Alto, California-based Facebook is the world's largest social network with more than 750m users. (telegrpah.co.uk

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'Angry Birds' adapted for political satire

When Indian activist Anna Hazare last month succeeded in pushing his government to take tougher steps against political dishonesty, victory came only after he endured days on hunger strike.

But the 74-year-old ascetic may also partly have another unlikely source to thank for his victory -- a computer game that carried his anti-corruption message to hundreds of thousands of people.India's activist fasts against corruption

And while Hazare's campaign may have brought about a watershed in India's long battle against graft, it could mark the advent of a new era of online activism driven by interactive games created through easy-to-use software.

The computer game, "Angry Anna," is a straightforward pastiche of "Angry Birds," a simple yet addictive game that has become one of the most downloaded apps of all time.

Whereas the original game involves using a slingshot to fire birds at pigs, "Angry Anna" substitutes the birds for caricatures of Hazare and fellow activists Baba Ramdev and Kiran Bedi and the pigs for Indian politicians including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

What better format than to adapt 'Angry Birds' for political satire? Jane McGonigal, author

Mohammad Faisal, who co-created the game with two colleagues at his New Delhi-based development company Geek Mentors Studio, said "Angry Anna" was put together in under three days, a speed that allowed them to feed into the momentum of Hazare's protest.

"We wanted to go to a candlelight march at (New Delhi landmark) India Gate but we were unable to because of the heavy work load in our office, so we thought, why not build a game so people can vent their frustration by sitting in an office and playing," said Faisal.

"We didn't expect it to be so successful."

According to figures from GameSalad, the company whose software was used to build "Angry Anna," the game has been played online nearly 267,000 times. Faisal believes such figures allow him and his colleagues to take some credit for Hazare's success.

"Definitely it made some impact in India anyway," he said.

Faisal said the key to the game's success was the swiftness with which it was published -- a speed made possible by GameSalad's free drag-and-drop software that allows even the non-computer-language literate to build games.

Once created, the games can be published in HTML5 -- the latest revision of the web's core language -- which means it can be played on almost any browser and easily broadcast around the internet, bypassing approval procedures required by outlets like Apple's app store.

"Angry Birds" worth $1.2 billion?

Steve Felter, CEO of GameSalad, says although "Angry Anna" pushes a specific political message, it wasn't unexpected. Technology is now able to empower a lot of people to express themselves in a medium that wasn't available in the past. Steve Felter, CEO of GameSalad

"'Angry Anna was the first example of that of something that was able to be produced in a few days; very topical, somewhat controversial, but able to be quickly spread through social networks because everyone can access HTML5 through the browser," he said.

"We thought that something like 'Angry Anna' might happen, but this is the first time, so we we're really pleased that people are using (the software) for these kind of messages."

Felter says with games offering more interactivity than other internet media such as video, they are likely to open up as a new form of online communication, particularly now that companies such as GameSalad are opening up game creation to non-experts.

"The reason that this hasn't happened to date on a wide scale is that the tools of game creation weren't really available to the average person, they required large teams that do coding and all the costly items that go into creating a popular game," he said.

"So technology like GameSalad that makes it so easy for people to create games quickly -- it's able to empower a lot of people to express themselves in a medium that wasn't available in the past."

Jane McGonigal, author of the New York Times bestselling book "Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World?," says she also believes "Angry Anna" could be an indication of a new dawn for games that even goes beyond sending messages.

"'Angry Anna' is a fascinating demonstration of the power of games when they're harnessed for social change. It's a brilliant satire of 'Angry Birds,' which hundreds of millions of people have played," she said.

"I think it's fair to say that, over the past year, more people have spent more time playing 'Angry Birds' than experienced any other entertainment form -- more than any film, TV show, or book. So if you want to get a social message across, what better format than to adapt 'Angry Birds' for political satire?

"What I hope to see in the future are games used not only for messaging around social change, but also inspiring direct action. Give players who win the virtual game a chance to get involved in real change." (CNN)

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YouTube Founders Revamping a Site for Link Sharing

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have some experience with turning a small Web site into Internet gold. In 2006 they sold their scrappy start-up YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion.

More recently they picked an unlikely candidate to be their next Web sensation: a Yahoo castoff.

The men are trying to inject new life into Delicious, a social bookmarking service that, in its time, was popular among the technorati, but failed to catch on with a broader audience.

“What we plan to do,” Mr. Hurley said in an interview here last week, “is try to introduce Delicious to the rest of the world.”

Created in 2003, Delicious lets people save links from around the Web and organize them using a simple tagging system, assigning keywords like “neuroscience” or “recipes.” It was praised for the way it allowed easy sharing of those topical links. The site’s early popularity spurred Yahoo to snap it up in 2005 — but in the years after that Yahoo did little with it.

In December, leaked internal reports from Yahoo hinted that the company was planning to sell or shut down the service.

At the same time, Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley, who had recently formed a new company called Avos and begun renting space a few blocks from the original YouTube offices in San Mateo, had been brainstorming ideas for their next venture. One problem they kept circling around was the struggle to keep from drowning in the flood of news, cool new sites and videos surging through their Twitter accounts and RSS feeds, a glut that makes it difficult to digest more than a sliver of that material in a given day.

“Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day,” Mr. Chen said. “There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on.”

He added, “There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.”

When the men heard about Yahoo’s plans to close Delicious, their ears perked up, and they placed a personal call to Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo, and made him an offer. (They declined to disclose financial details of the transaction.)

At heart, they say, the revamped service will still resemble the original Delicious when it opens to the public, which Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley said would happen later this year. But their blueprint involves an overhaul of the site’s design and the software and the systems used to tag and organize links.

The current home page of Delicious features a simple cascade of blue links, the most recent pages bookmarked by its users, and it tends to largely be dominated technology news. But the new Delicious aims to be more of a destination, a place where users can go to see the most recent links shared around topical events, like the Texas wildfires or the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the gadget reviews and tech tips.

The home page would feature browseable “stacks,” or collections of related images, videos and links shared around topical events. The site would also make personalized recommendations for users, based on their sharing habits. “We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing,” Mr. Hurley said.

Mr. Chen gives the example of trying to find information about how to repair a vintage car radio or plan an exotic vacation.

“You’re Googling around and have eight to 10 browser tabs of results, links to forums and message boards, all related to your search,” he said. The new Delicious, he said, provides “a very easy way to save those links in a collection that someone else can browse.”

They say they decided to buy Delicious rather than build their own service for a number of reasons.

“We know how hard it would be to build a brand,” Mr. Hurley said. “Delicious lets us hit the ground running with its existing footprint.”

A number of sites already have Delicious buttons as an option for sharing content — right alongside Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, Mr. Hurley said.

But Mr. Chen said the team also “liked the idea of saving one of the original Web 2.0 companies that started the social sharing movement on the Web.” He added: “There was some sense of history. We were genuinely sad that it would be shut down.”

Both founders acknowledge that they were never diehard Delicious users. “I signed up in 2005 and I didn’t use it again until 2011,” Mr. Chen said with an embarrassed laugh.

But Mr. Chen said it had become clear only in recent years how valuable such social data is — for personalization and to customize advertisements. Eventually the men plan to add such sharply focused advertising to the site.

Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen’s biggest challenge may be persuading already-overloaded people to start using yet another service. But Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at the Altimeter Group, which studies technology and advises companies on how to use it, said Web users who were tired of wading through silly links and other noise on Twitter and Facebook might be open to a better solution that helps them find more personalized and relevant articles, links and videos.

“It feels like there’s still an open opportunity to set a new precedent for social search,” Ms. Etlinger said.

Caterina Fake, who helped to found Flickr, the photo-sharing service, among other start-ups, recalled her initial awe of Delicious.

“It opened up the Internet in a way that was not remotely possible before,” she said. “You couldn’t stop surfing. It was infini-surf. You could be interested in a really arcane field of biology and find the five other people that shared that same interest and shared links on that topic.”

Ms. Fake said Delicious might attract a wider audience now that more people are accustomed to sharing links and information socially — something foreign to most people eight years ago.

“It didn’t quite get to the mainstream before,” she said, “but I’m optimistic that it can get there now.”

The ambitions of Delicious’s new owners make it sound as if they want to jump into the social networking turf war among Facebook, Twitter and Google — a curious challenge considering Mr. Chen was at Google until 2009 and Mr. Hurley stayed even longer, giving up his title as chief executive of YouTube in late 2010.

But they resist the notion that they are looking to compete with those companies.

“Google is still the utility for quickly finding things, like the capital of Texas,” Mr. Chen said. “But when people aren’t doing search for a simple question, we want to capture the results of that idea, that browsing, and showcase the results for the next guy.”

Before starting YouTube with Jared Kawim, Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen were among the early employees at PayPal, which helped shape the way people pay for goods online. Now they are trying to cast the same spell on Silicon Valley that YouTube did. But they are remaining true to their start-up roots with a sparsely outfitted space that houses around 15 employees, mostly engineers.

Computer desks and a few Ikea couches dot the office’s single floor, which is decorated with a few Street Fighter III and Spinal Tap posters and two slim-neck guitars — Mr. Chen’s. A flimsy computer-printed sign taped to a window announces the company’s name. There’s no sign of the bubbly excesses of some young start-ups — there isn’t even a kitchen or a sink.

“We’re trying to stay focused,” Mr. Hurley said.

Delicious still attracts around half a million visitors a month, according to comScore. Some of the early users are still fiercely protective of the service. Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley said they planned to invite the earliest users to test a version of the new site and solicit feedback about the designs and features.

“We didn’t buy it so we can kill it,” Mr. Hurley said. “Hopefully people will understand that.” (nytimes)

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Hacked TV remote will auto-mute Snooki

When Matt Richardson works from his home in Brooklyn, New York, he likes to keeps the TV on to stay informed, but some celebrity or another is always taking up airtime and bugging him.

"A while ago it was Charlie Sheen. And then it was Sarah Palin. And then it was Donald Trump," said Richardson, who is a video producer for Make Magazine. "And after a while I realized there's sort of always someone who I don't really want to hear about."

Like any good hacker, Richardson decided to come up with a fix: He developed a do-it-yourself TV remote control that will automatically mute the television when certain celebrity names are mentioned.

He plans to debut and explain the hack at the upcoming Maker Faire event in New York. The name of his talk is "Enough Already: Silencing Celebs with Arduino."

Unless you're speaking at that do-it-yourself inventors' conference, you may be wondering: "What the heck is Arduino?" It's basically a piece of computer hardware that can be programmed to do anything you want. In this case, Richardson combined a couple of Arduino circuit boards with an infrared LED light -- that little red bubble on the front of your TV remote -- and programmed the whole thing to interact with a TV's closed-captioning system.

The DIY gadget reads the closed-captioning transcript as it's aired and then automatically mutes the television for 30 seconds when it picks up certain words. That list of unspeakables can be re-programmed (so if you really love Sarah Palin, don't worry -- you could mute President Obama or Sen. Harry Reid references instead).

As long as that person's name keeps coming up, the remote keeps muting the TV. The first time he got it to work, Richardson said he "was in silent bliss for that 30 seconds I didn't have to hear about Kim Kardashian."

The whole thing cost about $70 to make, he said, and he built and coded it in about a week, working only in his spare time. It's worth noting that this isn't a product Richardson expects to be commercialized -- it's just for fun. He posted the code online so other people can play around with it.

The implementation itself is pretty crude, he said. Closed captioning doesn't always appear in real-time, so sometimes the system will miss a first reference.

If you're interested, he explains the process in detail in a blog post.

In the comments below that post, Make Magazine readers chime in with all kinds of ways this sort of closed-caption-reading tech could be used.

"You could generate the list of key words dynamically. E.g., by monitoring Twitter's trending topics or by parsing Google's zeitgeist lists," one reader suggests.

Another wants to use it to mute all commercials:

"Does the CC (closed captioning) stream contain any kind of marker for indicating commercials? Because I'd tweak this in a heartbeat to mute the deliberately louder commercials that seem all the rage these days."

The Maker Faire, which is dedicated to all kinds of cool and bizarre crafts, machines, computer hacks and mousetraps, will be held September 17 and 18 in New York. You can see a full schedule on their website.

Neither Kardashian nor Snooki is expected to be in attendance. (CNN)

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Samsung loses appeal against Galaxy Tab ban

Last month, the Dusseldorf court banned the sale of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 across Europe but later lifted the ban except in Germany. Today the court upheld the German ban but said it would not ban sales elsewhere in Europe.

Apple argued that Samsung’s tablet violated its intellectual property rights. The iPad-maker won a similar injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 last week, forcing Samsung to withdraw it from IFA, the consumer electronics show in Berlin.

Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said: “The court is of the opinion that Apple’s minimalistic design isn’t the only technical solution to make a tablet computer, other designs are possible.”

The judge said the court accepted that the back of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was different from Apple’s iPad but said the crucial point was that the front was almost identical.

She added: “The crucial issue was whether the Galaxy tablet looked like the drawings registered as a design right. Also, our case had nothing to do with trademarks or patents for technology.”

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the latest tablet computer from the Korean manufacturer. The original version of the Galaxy Tab was a 7-inch tablet but this year’s model adopts a similar screen size to the iPad and is marginally thinner than the iPad 2.

The release of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia was also delayed recently after Apple filed a complaint with the Federal Court of Australia. (telegraph)

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