My previous post was about a new feature which I would like to see on Facebook, where you can see all your FB likes (not the FB pages, but Statuses, Pictures, Videos, Links, Notes) and comments at one place.

Guess what, not Facebook but Google had come up with a similar feature for Google Buzz where you can see all the posts, comments and likes you have made on Buzz. Following is a screen shot of how it looks like on my Buzz profile.

“By default, these tabs are only visible to you. If you want to share your comments and likes tabs, you can choose to make them publicly visible to others from the Buzz tab under Settings” As I have mentioned in the previous post this will be highly helpful if you want to go through your past posts, likes and comments.

On Facebook, with ‘Like’ being added to comments it will be somewhat complex to add aforementioned kind of a feature. But still Facebook can ignore ‘Likes’ on comments and instead include the “Likes” you made on other web sites. And even with these ‘Likes’ on other web sites, Facebook can bring up a stand alone book marking service.

I don't know whether Google had seen my post to come with the said feature :D If someone needs there are 10 more mentioned here :) Do you have anymore in your mind ?

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Everybody is eagerly waiting to see what the next Facebook feature would be. Do you have any guesses? Well I have one, rather it is something I would like to see within Facebook as a feature.

By the way am I talking too much about Facebook ? (1st post, 2nd post, 3rd post, 4th post, 5th post, 6th post ), hope not;). When there are over 350 active users worldwide, I don’t think it’s something worthless:) Back to the topic.

When we surf through Facebook, we come across many many status updates (mm.. that will be my next post I guess :) ), links, videos, pictures, notes etc. Sometimes we click on the Like button and sometimes we comment on them. But what if I want to take a look at the items I have liked and commented sometime back there’s no easy way for that. Either I have to depend on memory by relating to some person or some incident or I have to walkback through my past activities. It’s really a time consuming task.

The item I'm looking for can be a very informative link, a hilarious video, a picture of a memorable moment etc. Someone can suggest to use the typical bookmarking methods for this purpose. But as the number of items keep increasing it will be too messy and complex.

For example if I want to find out all the comments I have left in the blogosphere there’s one place to find all. If you follow this link you can find out all the comments I have left in other’s blogs. But as Facebook is inaccessible externally the solution should come within the Facebook platform. I have no idea that how far will Facebook support to develop such an application by a 3rd party developer. So the best thing would be Facebook bringing by its own.

In brief it will look like following.

	Statuses	Pictures	Videos	Links	Notes
Liked	1. Akila’s	1. Uni Album	1. Singing	1. TechCrunch	1. My Life
	2. Frank’s	2. Trip	2. …..	2. ….	2. ….
	3. …	3. …	3. …	3. …	3. …
Commented	1. Akila’s	1. My Album	1. Flying	1. Mashable	1. FB stats
	2. Frank’s	2. London	2. Playing	2. …..	2. …..
	3. …	3. …	3. …	3. …	3. …

Of course this is just a sketch :) If Facebook really going to develop such an application/feature they can surely come up with a better model :)

What do you all think about this one?

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It is with deep sense of happiness and pride that I announce the selection of Royal College as one of the best innovative schools in the world by the Microsoft Corporation. After a thorough evaluation of the applications received from thousands of schools across more than hundred countries in the world, Royal College has beaten many schools in all the countries and managed to place its name at the first slot in the list.

In May 2009, there was a local competition organized by Microsoft Sri Lanka in coordination with the Ministry of Education to select 5 most innovative schools in the country. Royal College took part in this competition and was selected together with another four schools to represent Sri Lanka in the global competition. In July 2009 we submitted our application to the Microsoft Corporation for consideration. Microsoft has evaluated the achievements of each school in following areas.

1. Academic Success
2. Innovation Culture
3. Leadership Development
4. Learning Community
5. Strategic Development Planning
6. Innovative Use of ICT

Selection of Royal College as one of the best global innovative schools proves that our achievements in all of the above areas received utmost recognition of the panel of evaluators which consisted eminent educational professionals from leading education institutions in the world.

Royal College now becomes a Global Pathfinder School in the Microsoft Partners in Learning Network. Microsoft has pledged to assist us uplift our standards by making available expert resources to help us improve our school further by sharing best practices in the world. Our teachers will face more opportunities to improve their teaching skills by attending workshops conducted by Microsoft both locally and abroad. Our students will be able to partner with students in other Pathfinder schools to share best practices. They will receive more exposure to technology and they can look forward to a much better learning experience at Royal College, most importantly with lots of fun and joy.

This achievement was made possible by dedicated and committed contributions made by all senior management staff, teachers, students, parents, old boys and other staff at Royal College. Every single one of you contributed to this historic victory and all of us must be equally proud of this achievement. I feel privileged and honored to lead all of you to achieve this historic milestone in the 174 years history of Royal College. Thank you very much indeed for all your support so far and look forward to receive your unstinted support in the future to lead Royal College to reach much greater heights.

FLOREAT

Upali Gunasekara,

Principal.

Read more in Sinhala : http://www.divaina.com

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If you are a frequent reader of my blog, you would have noticed that I had a widget called “Posts I’m thinking of” (Still it’s there:) ) There I had mentioned something like “Next Facebook Feature”:) The feature I was dreaming of has become a reality.

via Mashable

Facebook just sent shockwaves through the social web with its announcement that they will be supporting @mentions in status updates. The feature, which Facebook calls tagging, allows you to not only reference friends, but groups, pages, and events.

Well as you might know that this is something copied from Twitter. And it will be a major threat for Twitter as well.

Without any hesitation we will say that this move is a direct attack on its upstart competitor Twitter , whose @mention feature (formerly known as @reply) has been an integral part of the microblogging service.

This is not the first time Facebook copied other sites especially Twitter. Facebook copied Twitter real-time search and FriendFeed’s ‘Like’ feature. ( Facebook acquired FriendFeed later )

I thought about this @Mention feature because of the difficulties I faced when using Facebook. For example if you are mentioning someone’s name in a status update there was no way that person could know about. If you are mentioning that person’s name in a comment it was the same. Further more you could not relate someone to a picture without tagging him/herself. This was something many people didn’t like.

Beside that when it comes to Facebook notes, only the author can tag people. A reader doesn’t have the opportunity to relate it to other people (But they could share). In my case I thought of using Facebook username anywhere with the ‘@’ sign whereas Facebook uses the user’s name and currently this feature is only available on ‘Facebook Wall’

Why Will This Be a Good Move ?

• More interactivity among users.
• This will a platform for larger conversations
• This will attract Twitterholics in to Facebook (will it be;)?)
• The users who could be attracted by Twitter will be attracted to Facebook.

Why Will This Be a Bad Move ?

• Existing users might not like this feature
• Too much conversations – SPAM ( Some say the new Facebook app makes photo spam
• Existing users might leave Facebook as it’s getting too much annoying (will it be?)

Actually it is arguable how effective integrating Twitterlike features in to Facebook because Facebook is a more closed network whereas Twitter is more opened.

But Facebook has become a long way being just a typical social network. It has attracted most of the leading brands in to its umbrella. So who knows this might be a Twitter killing move.

Twitter watch out. Facebook is on a roll here!

Further reading

• Facebook @Mentions: Five Ways They Could Impact Twitter

• How To Use Facebook’s @Mentions Status Tagging

• Twitter vs. Facebook: Who Will Win in Real-time Search?

• Tag Friends in Your Status and Posts - Facebook Blog

Update:

Twitter users has the habit of using "RT @username when they re-post an update sent by another user. But on Facebook there was no such a habit. But with the @Mentions feature it's now time to bring that habit to Facebook as well.

Shall we call it RP (RePost) or use same old RT in honour of Twitter ?

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Opera 10 is here. It's a trending topic on Twitter at the moment.
I have been using Opera for quiet sometime now. It was the alternative for Firefox (sometimes for IE) when FF became too heavy and unstable. I used it especially during my internship where I worked on Ubuntu 8.04. I'm huge a fan of Opera Mini too, as I use it on my mobile.
Back to Opera 10:)
I wanted to experience it so I installed it.

Yes it's fast and has awesome features such as Turbocharge, Visual Tabs....

But one thing worried me at the first instance. It didn't load my Twtter updates.

I looked at another site and it was the same. But after few minutes it was ok:D. May be it was something wrong with Twitter (As it sometimes does:) ).

Go and try out the new Opera 10 and share your experiences.

Links:

• Opera features we used to know
• Opera Tips and Tutorials
• Opera 10.00 features
  

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