Facebook Features (2/2)

• Inbox

Facebook gives you the opportunity to send messages to your friends or people from the network. These messages are private and you receive it in the Inbox page.

• Photos

The photos section is a little bit more complex. Indeed you have two types of page. When you arrive in the photo section (by clicking "Photos" in the left blue column) you have the list of the last update album from your friends. You have consequently the possibility to view the content of this album and add comments for each of the pictures in there. You also have the possibility to create a new album from this page, this album will be yours and you will be able to upload up to 60 pictures in it. Finally you also have the possibility to go to "My photos". This page is the list of all the album you create.

• Groups

There is many groups existing on Facebook. They are classified per field. You can find group dealing about cinema, photography, politics, travelling, companies, etc... Whatever can link people together (it don't need to be serious and most of the time it isn't) When you are in a group you have a discussion board, you can upload pictures to the groups, you have a public wall, etc...

• Events

The facebook users have the possibility to create events and invite people to these events. For example when you want to do a party, let's say an house warming party, you just create an even and invite all the people from your list that you want to attend to. You add as much details you want to this events, such as the address, the time, why, how, ... then your contact has the possibility to accept or not the invitation, and you can see the list of the person attending to the event. You also have the possibility to add pictures and videos to the event, and people can write on the public wall.

• Applications

Each user of Facebook has the possibility to add application to it profile. An application is a little program that uses the facebook API.

• Privacy

Users can set their privacy: such as who can access my photos? who can see my profile? There are so many private information in a Facebook profile that this needs to be really carefully set.

Facebook features (1/2)

• Home

The home page is the page where you arrive once you are connected. You get the facebook canvas which is the navigator that you will use all the time during you navigation in the website. We are basically talking about the blue frame here.
The important thing about the home page is that it is your "dash-board". You can access everything from here and especially this is here that you get all the feeds from your network. Indeed, in the central panel you have the list of the feeds that your network product. This is basically what your friends did: adding pictures, adding groups, writing messages on wall (see bellow), creating events, ... You also have updates such as the incoming birthdays, your status and your friend's status, ...

• Profile

The profile is your personal page. It displays the information you want to be public about you. It is divide in several section such as your general information (sex, date of birth, ...), your interests, your education and work, you album photos, your wall, your list of friends, your groups, your applications, ... The wall is a public board where all your friends can write, the message will however be public and display into your profile.

• Friends
  

In this page is display your list of friends. You have different way to sort it: by networks, by "last added", by "last updates", ... For each friend you have the possibility to go to his profile, send him a message, poke him, view his friends or also remove him. You also have a search engine on this page which allow you to get your friend more quickly, it is really useful when you have a long list.

• Networks

Facebook is now a world size network, but it is actually the addiction of several smaller networks. If you take my example, I registered to the website with a email from the ou.edu domain which is relevant to the Oklahoma network, but I am also part of the France network and the Napier University network. A network is a community of persons, something like an internal world. You can for example access directly the profile of the people of your network (except when the person has change its privacy), that's something you can't do (unless adding the person) when the person is not from your network. In the network page you have the number of members, discusion boards, upcoming events, ...

In the next post I will speak about the other features of Facebook : Inbox, Photos, Groups, Events, Applications, Privacy, ...

The blog FacebookAppli

Hello folks, today I decided to create a blog. Its subject will be simple but large: the development of Facebook applications. It sounds easy to me but maybe not to you. So let start from the beginning.

Facebook is a social networking website that has been created in 2004 by a Harvard's student. After created your profile, the website allows you to connect to your friends, share pictures, create events and invite people, send messages and gifts, join groups, use applications... The Facebook network is growing up very fast since that the company decided to allow developers to use its API to launch applications that users can add and remove to their profile. And these applications, or how to develop it, is the subject of this blog!

But why am I interested about this subject? In may 2006, I was in the USA for a work placement in the University of Oklahoma. At this time Facebook was still a "private" network for American students (you needed a university email to register). So I registered to this website... and I use it quick often since this date for some personal reasons. In May 2007, Facebook decided to launch Facebook Plateform and allows developers to create applications into it. I think this is a very clever idea which the Facebook's number of features to increase consequently with the less amount of work for the Facebook teams. It is also a very flexible way to imagine the website as users can add and remove the applications they like whenever they want.
I am currently student in 4th year of computing studies at Napier University Edinburgh (I'm doing a BEng Software Engineering to be precise). For my Honour's Project (project that I have to do in one academic year time) I decided to develop a Facebook application. Indeed, I think this is a very interesting subject because it is really new and full of prospect. My application is a carpooling tool, it will help people who want to share car ride to meet up each other.

The aim of this blog is to speak about the experience that I got from this Honour's Project. I'll explain the difficulties that I had in some areas of the coding, I will describes some skillfulness to develop this kind of applications, I might also speak about Facebook in general...