Blue Bugle: Mobile, Desktop & Web Technologies

In the 90’s one of the most popular online things was the Yahoo! and AOL online chat rooms. When social networks started appearing and gained popularity, chat rooms slowly died. In December last year, Yahoo! shut down its popular chat service. We can chat right inside Facebook or Google Plus or Gmail. This has become quite so common these days. What is making news in this sea of social networking sites is the new information that Facebook is building chat rooms for its users, who are counted to be more than a billion. The biggest competition to FB chat room will be Google’s own Hangouts feature available on Google Plus. Facebook is testing out a new feature known as ‘Host Chat’ that will help you create and host chat rooms within FB. This being said, there are a number of chat applications already within Facebook. OpenChatRoom, LiveChatRoom, etc., are third party apps available in Facebook for the same purpose. These chat applications are not however so popular although they are ...

Do you remember our earlier post on how to be smart on Facebook ? That gives an important lesson. You know, there are many Facebook pages that have been prepared to mimic the official celebrity pages. These pages are prepared solely as a marketing gimmick too. Since they are made under the name of a popular celebrity, they quickly interest the fans of that celebrity and get a fan following pretty easily. Then marketing becomes easy. This was one of the reasons why Twitter introduced verified pages. You know that simple check mark on Twitter accounts of VVIPs? That is a sign that the Twitter account is a verified one, and it does indeed belong to the person mentioned. Facebook has also gone the same direction by introducing verified pages yesterday. Here  is the official PR from FB. Verified pages on Facebook have a blue check mark on them, next to the name of the page or profile. Check out this official page of Michelle Obama. Facebook has the official page of the celebr...

One of the announcements that has rocked the world of smartphones in the last couple of days is that of Facebook Home, which is as Facebook says, a piece of software for your phone designed to put your friends above everything else. What does this mean to the existing smartphones, and how does it affect the status quo? Let’s find out. Check out the promo video: The announcement came two days ago, on Apr 12, 2013 . It has received, as expected, widespread attention from the smartphone community. On an unrelated note, I was unable to check it out at the time because I was hospitalized for renal calculi that were eating me alive. Facebook Home is not a new operating system that targets Android or iOS, neither is it an enhanced app for your existing Facebook smartphone app, which by the way is one of the most popular apps out there. Facebook Home is an enhanced home screen option for Android devices. Also, not for all Android phones, only these—HTC’s First, One , One X, Samsung’s...

We know how social networks have changed our lives. Led by Facebook, they crawled in and conquered us. How many of them do we know now? How many of them do we use? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google +, and it goes on. Each of these social networks satisfies a specific group of individuals, I believe. For instance, Facebook is for the general public, who want to share their pictures and videos and want to know what is happening with their friends. Twitter is for celebrities and large organizations to immediately share their important news with the followers, and also for latest news on civilian emergency response. LinkedIn is for anybody to boast about their career and business plans or to interact with others in the same industry. Google + satisfies website owners and authors. The social media job revolution began when Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar), CMO and Chief Customer Officer for Enterasys Networks, a wireless networking equipment provider, tweeted this: I am hirin...

Yes, it’s live, albeit in a few places worldwide. Facebook has yesterday announced the aesthetic new design of its popular newsfeed feature. Check it out here. The image is from Facebook, and you can click it to enlarge the view to see it on a Mac, iPad, and a HTC smartphone. So, what are the changes? First of all, the change is still not all over the world. A select group of people have access to it right now. All you can do is, go to this page , scroll down, and click on ‘give it a try’. Like this. Facebook has also given us this video telling the basics of the design. I hope you read about our post on graph search earlier. Newsfeed redesign is quite a bit related to that feature. It is a clever way in which Facebook is reinventing itself as a premier social networking platform, with the hidden intention to be better in socially pushed ads. The major difference from the previous version of the newsfeed is that the images, links, videos, etc., that your contacts and th...

This is just an explanatory article, and we don’t intend to promote any illegal activities like spamming and hacking. Google “Hack Facebook account” and you will get to this particular website: HackFacebookAccount.org. It is a website that supposedly offers a way to hack a Facebook account. Now, anybody that has some experience with the Web knows it pretty well that this is simply a scam and there is no way a website like that can hack into Facebook accounts. Still, I would like to show you exactly how the service works to bust the simple myth that many people believe. 1. Go to the website and identify the account First of all, I went into the website, and identified my own Facebook account to hack into. I was presently not logged into my Facebook account. Here it is. I put in my Facebook account link, and the service correctly identified the account immediately. And it automatically started hacking the account (how very convenient, huh?) 2. Completed! The hacking complete...

Facebook has yesterday unveiled a very important update to the social network, Graph Search. This is essentially the most promising search algorithm in effect within the social network. We all know the existing Facebook search system that returns more irrelevant results than relevant ones. With Graph Search, it is going to take a turn for good. Is this a competition to Google search? Let’s see… Facebook Graph Search is not a web search thingy. It is within Facebook and can search only what your friends and others generally have shared with you. For instance, you can do a search for “My friends who like Michael Jackson” and Facebook will give you a list of your friends who have liked Michael Jackson profile page. On the official Facebook Graph Search page , you have examples like this. Most of these searches have the keyword, “my friends” in them. This is probably an indicator used by Facebook to identify you are searching for a list of your friends who do a particular thing. Wh...

Facebook is the largest social network, and hence it is practically understood why people want to capitalize on its one billion users. Many of Facebook’s users are in the upper side of the economy and could be potential buyers of products and services. Hence, companies create Facebook pages and try to reach potential audience by asking people like you to comment and like these pages. This will make sense to you if you know the concept of viral marketing. Viral marketing works just like how a virus spreads through your body—it is automatic and highly accelerated. In the same way, when you like a particular page on Facebook, you are actually recommending that page to all of your friends. They will be able to see this page on your profile page and timeline. Going further, if you have fifty friends in Facebook, the page you like reaches fifty people and by mere chance five out of those fifty may like the page. If each of these five people has fifty friends, the page will reach a wider a...

 Facebook, being the largest social network, is a haven of hackers. They have been targeting Facebook users for years. A lot of things can be done with a hacked Facebook account—promotion of products, free advertisements, building email lists, and spamming. You can find out if your account has been compromised through a few symptoms. One way to know if your account has been hacked is obvious. You spot new people in your friends list; your account sends out spam to your friends; it shows up promoting illicit stuff—drugs, sex toys and pills, spam, etc.; or you have lost access to your account because of a change in password. But there is a chance that the attacker has been working secretly without your knowledge, making it difficult for you to recognize the situation. In such cases, he does not send out any information from your account or change your password. Instead, he would be gathering information from your account—your personal and financial details and information about...

Facebook is the largest social network in the world and the first website in terms of overall traffic. Hence, it is very advantageous to have a page on it and have some people promote it for you. The way people can vote for your page on Facebook is by Liking it. Every page on Facebook has the ‘Like’ link, with which you can do this. However, people have started abusing this privilege. In order to be successful in Facebook quickly, people have started campaigning to get more Likes in illegal ways possible. These ways include purchasing Likes, using malware to get Likes, and Likes generated by hacked accounts. All of these dishonest activities are against the terms and conditions of Facebook. The automated spam fighting module of Facebook has been recently upgraded to remove the spam Likes on pages. Facebook has recently published a blog post  about this. .................................................................................... Also Read: Why Apple Should Fear Go...