www.simonleparc.com

Facebook Translation

Over 60 millions users... this is the power of the social network Facebook. And these users are not all from the USA: it is actually far from that! Facebook is becoming huge in many contries all around the world. Look at the map below.

In the world, the easiest way to communicate is the use of english. However, everyone doesn't speak very well the Shakespeare's language and so Facebook decided to translate the website in other languages. They found a very nice and clever way to achieve it by asking the actual user to do it. Indeed, they are the principal concerned and will absolutly want to say how they want everything to be translate. The principle to allow users to translate the website is simple: a panel of several thousands users is selected and they are allow to add the "Translation" application. This application proposes to the users about two thousands sentences or words to translate into their native language (Spanish, German and French so far). The final sentence will be the one which had the highest number of vote.
The system works pretty well as the spanish and the german version are already available. The french one should come very soon!

Country	Number of users
US	23935860
Canada	8711420
United Kingdom	8687280
Turkey	2836180
Australia	2350660
France	1281800
Sweden	1095960
Norway	1066500
Colombia	776640
South Africa	734280

Review of my application

Hello folks, tonight we are going to review what my application is capable of so far...
So the first, and of course one of the most essential, feature that I implemented is the creation of a ride. It is possible to create two types of ride: requested or offered rides are the two possibilities. The creation is done in tree steps; the first one consists of entering the addresses of the ride, the second concerns the details of the trips (days, time, etc.) and the optional preferences for the rides, finally the last one is the confirmation of all the information entered in the previous steps.

Once created, the rides are display in a calendar and separated in two pages depending if they are requested or offered. This type of display has been chosen for a matter or readability. On these pages it is possible to click on the rides to see all their details and either edit them or delete the rides. Within the calendars themselves, it is also possible to edit or delete separately the trips (a ride is made of several daily or weekly trips).

All of this is very nice but the aim of this kind of application is to connect people to each other: the essential feature is consequently the search engine! It is possible to do different type of search here. You can do a regular search with starting point and ending point. Another type of search can be made with only the ending point... and a more unusual search but still possible search would be to only enter the starting point and check where it is possible to go from this start.
I also created a more advance search which can search also for rides near the location you are looking for. The users have the possibility to selected rides around the location in a limit of 1, 2, 5, 10 or 20 miles.

Finally the home page has been made to be as useful as possible: a map of the town you are living is provided with the 6 last rides displayed in it. The user can click on the markers to have more information about them.

Clean up of the Facebook profiles

After the possibility to hide part of the applications displayed on the user profile for more readability and to reduce the happy mess created by the thousands of applications now available, Facebook will now release the organisation of the profile in tabs. The personal information, the wall posts and the photos will now be separated using these tabs.

This measure is in my opinion a good thing to keep Facebook "under control". Indeed, the website has always been more tidy and organised than its big competitor MySpace. For several months, the profile where starting to get more busy though... this new measure will hopefully help bring the thing back to the good way.

See below for some preview of the future changes:

The About tab

The Wall tab

Fight against spammy application

Here is a good news for Facebook user, which is also a bad news for developers: Facebook is fighting against spammy application!

Facebook launched a few days ago new features that will help user to avoid the spam. The first and the most important one is the possibility to block permanently invitation coming from an application. Each time you receive an application invitation the message is followed by a link allowing you to block the application.


A second change is the possibility to unset the sending of notification via email at the installation of the application. It can also be done from the "edit application" page.



Finally, Facebook announced they will release new features in a few days. These features will have to aim to [from Facebook]:

• Helping users communicate and share information more efficiently

• Generating more meaningful activity

• Providing valuable information to users

• Increasing user trust

The problem at the moment on Facebook is that too many applications are very poorly valuable and interesting but very spammy. Facebook is trying to fight against applications that try to increase their number of user by forcing them to send invites. The goal is to move to a platform with useful and relevant applications.

[Pictures from http://www.allfacebook.com]