Daily Bits

Yahoo Now Lets You Update Facebook Status Inside Yahoo Mail

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Yahoo continues its drive towards becoming more social with another integration feature in cooperation with Facebook.  To be rolled out gradually to users, Yahoo is now allowing you to update your Facebook status while you are reading your Yahoo mail. You can also see your friends’ Facebook profile photos when they send you an email.

This is a follow-up to the previously rolled feature which allows Yahoo users to import their Facebook friends’ email addresses to Yahoo! Contacts. The new feature also solidifies some more Yahoo and Facebook’s underlying partnership. Of course,  Gmail also somehow has this feature wherein you can respond to updates via email, but this feature is not as fluid as the Yahoo Mail-Facebook integration.

The new feature is to be rolled out to select users initially. If you’re one of them, you’d find the activation link if you see the “Add to Facebook” option in the status section on the What’s New page in your Yahoo Mail account.

Once you’ve logged on with your Facebook credentials and successfully connected to Yahoo Mail, you can start using the following features:

Update your Facebook Status: Simply start typing what’s on your mind in the status box, and then choose where you want to share it – Yahoo!, Facebook or both.

See Facebook profile photos when people email you: With this feature, you will see people’s Facebook profile photos – if available – anytime someone emails you.  In addition, by clicking on the profile image, you will go right to that person’s Facebook page.

Google Rolls Out File Transfer Feature on Orkut and iGoogle, Coming Soon for Gmail Too

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Google is rolling out a new  feature to some of its communication services such as Orkut, iGoogle and Gmail. This new feature has something to do with easily transferring files through the chat facility.

If you are an Orkut member or you use iGoogle as a start up page for your browser, you might be aware that both these services have a Google-powered chat facility.  And one of the important feature of  any chat facility is of course file transfer capability.

So, if you want to transfer file to a friend, you don’t have to send them an email again. Just start a chat session, click on the “Send a file” option from the Actions menu and then start sending the file.

And while you’re either in your Orkut dashboard or iGoogle account, you may have noticed that Google also did some minor facelift to on the chat facility of these two services. More particularly you may have noticed three new blue icons that enable you to start a video, voice or  group chat easily and quickly.

These new chat features will also be available to Gmail Chat facility . But in the meantime, you can still use the “Video and More” option from the Gmail chat window to start a video conference with your Gmail buddies.

Facebook Takes a New Step in Site Governance

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Recently, Facebook has published some updates to its statement of site governance. These updates aim to maintain users’ control over privacy and the things they share on Facebook. Here’s a quick look at the salient features of the proposed changes to Facebook’s Site Governance Page.

On Location – Facebook might soon introduce a new feature that will let you add a place to something you post. By place, Facebook means a page for a local restaurant instead of the actual geotag of its location. More details and other privacy controls about this feature will be rolled out in the coming days.

On Sharing and Connections – Facebook is also clarifying on how members connect with people, places and things that are important and how this information and content are shared with friends and other people. Right now, Facebook members share photos or links on their profile and can control who can access those. Facebook will change some wording to further clarify these policy.

On Applications and Third-Party Websites – Facebook will soon be proposing a new privacy policy that would offer more personalzied experience when visiting and sharing third-party websites that are featured on Facebook.

Other Policy Changes – Facebook is also explaining the series of smaller changes on different aspects of Facebook including why invitations that a non-user receives to join Facebook sometimes include the names of other people besides the person who invited them, as well as a thorough explanation of the “Everyone” setting. The new policy changes also explain how people can sync their contact lists on mobile devices and other contact management services.

Here’s the link to the proposal: Facebook Site Governance policy.

WordPress for iPhone 2.3 Now Supports Geotagging for WordPress.com Blogs

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WordPress has just released version 2.3 of its mobile application for iPhone. Biggest new feature is geotagging support for WordPress.com hosted blogs via a very intuitive interface. This means that you can now add geographic location to each and every post that you are going to publish on your WordPress.com blog.

Unfortunately for self-hosted WordPress blog, the feature is not activated yet. But you can still geotag your posts and it will be saved, possibly for display later on when a plugin to provide geotagging display is enabled for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

In addition to geotagging feature, the new WordPress for iPhone app also comes with a couple of improvements on user interface.  The bug on “more” tag was fixed and it now allows you to load more posts and pages in excess of the default number  of posts allowed as specified in your blog settings.

Incidentally, the WordPress for iPhone folks are excited to report that in only months since they have released the app, it now has 250,000 download, up from the mere 20,000 downloads it got in November 2009. Quite an achievement indeed, although if only all of the WordPress.com bloggers have their iPhone and iPod Touch and will do mobile blogging, then that number would shoot up some more.

Anyway, the new WordPress for iPhone app version 2.3 was supposed to be available here. But I have no luck in finding it from both my country’s Apps Store nor at the U.S. App Store. Did you get it?

GoDaddy Will Stop Selling .CN Domains

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Looks like Google has gained an unexpected ally with its China boycott. Domain name registration and web hosting company GoDaddy.com has announced that it will  stop selling .CN domains.

According to the GoDaddy announcement, courtesy of the Search Engine Journal:

“We didn’t want to act as an agent of the Chinese government,” Jones said. “We can’t let them be strong and us be weak all the time. We just have to stop it, and then we’ll start offering .CN domain names again,” said Christine Jones, general counsel for Go Daddy.

This is in response to Chinese policies requiring every website owner to submit photographs, business information and individually signed forms including their physical address, email address and telephone numbers when registering a new .CN domain. These data will be forwarded to the China Internet Information Center (CNNIC), a quasi-governmental agency. GoDaddy does not usually require this information from its billions of domain registrants asking only name, address, telephone number and e-mail address before they register a domain.

According to Ms. Jones,   China was the first government to retroactively seek additional verification and documentation of registrants.  The Chinese government is implementing those policies to stop individual Chinese owned websites from getting attacked by spam.

Interestingly, Jones said that while Chinese domain name have been recently attacked most frequently, those sites however are mostly those “deemed not appropriate” for Beijing. Particularly sites containing information about  the Tiananmen Square uprising or human rights.

It would be interesting to see how this issue will unfold in the coming days. Will China feel the pressure from Google, GoDaddy and perhaps other Internet players and relax their internet policy a bit?

Facebook Tightens Policy on Photo Tagging, Feed Sharing

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In a possible move to contain the growing complaints of members who consistently receive unwanted photo tagging notices and news feeds that they are receiving, Facebook is updating its policies on these features.

First, the new policy on policy tagging states – “You can tag a photo only with the express consent of the user on whose behalf you are doing the tagging, and must only tag images when the tag accurately labels what is depicted in the image.”

In short, you can no longer tag your friends and other Facebook members on photo collages, avatars and other images which are being used for marketing purposes, just to get their attention and hope that they clicked on your campaign materials.

On news feed publishing, the new Facebook policy states – “You must not publish a Feed story unless a user has explicitly indicated an intention to share that content, by clicking a button or checking a box that clearly explains their content will be shared.”

This policy aims to put a stop on reports that some apps are forcing their Facebook members to extend permissions to publish news feeds on their walls. This will give other application developers a good chance at getting more followers and users the legit way – that is because they’ve gained the Facebook members’ trust.

And finally, you can no longer publish the same Feed story to more than one friend’s Wall at a time. This is to avoid spamming of Facebook members stream with feed stories that do not interest them.

Facebook will enforce punishments and suspensions of account on a case to case basis if anybody is proven guilty of violating these policies.

So there, hope these new policies help reduce the noise level in your Facebook content streams.