1st behra scooter khinch ke leja raha tha
2nd behra-kya hua petrol katam ho gayi kya?
1st behra-nahi yaar, petrol khatam ho gayi
2nd behra- acha mujeh laga petrol khatam ho gayi.
March 19, 2013
Joke No. 1
Pappa: mummy kyu chup baithi hai?
Santa: kuch nahi, mummy ne lipstick maangi thi, lekin maine fevistick de diy
Santa: kuch nahi, mummy ne lipstick maangi thi, lekin maine fevistick de diy
Joke No. 2
Boy: tumhaara naam kya hai?
Girl: sab mujhe "behan" bulaate hai
Boy: wah, mujhe sab "jeeja" bulaate hai
Girl: sab mujhe "behan" bulaate hai
Boy: wah, mujhe sab "jeeja" bulaate hai
March 09, 2013
Facebook Acquires Storytelling Site Storylane in Talent Grab
Facebook has acquired Storylane, a relatively young social network focused around telling stories, for an undisclosed sum.
Storylane announced the acquisition in a blog post Friday, noting that the service will wind down and the team will join Facebook. "After a lot of discussions with Facebook about how our teams might work together to have even greater impact, we are announcing today that the Storylane team will be joining Facebook," Storylane's founder and CEO Jonathan Gheller wrote in the post.
Facebook confirmed the acquisition in a statement provided to Mashable: "The team from Storylane will be an incredible addition to Facebook. Their previous work showcasing real identity through sincere and meaningful content will make them a perfect fit at Facebook."
We've heard from a source that the five-person staff at Storylane will join Facebook's Timeline team, reporting to Sam Lessin, who heads up the "Identity" product group at the company.
Storylane launched in October with the goal of prompting users to share meaningful stories from their lives. The service is perhaps most similar to Medium, the publishing platform launched last year by two of Twitter's co-founders. Gheller was ambitious in his goals for the service, telling Mashable at the time that the service was trying to "build a library of human experiences by crafting a community where people can share things that really matter."
For those who did share stories on the service, Storylane plans to roll out tools to help migrate those posts to other sites. Gheller also says Facebook will not be getting any of the company's data or operations as part of the acquisition.
Storylane announced the acquisition in a blog post Friday, noting that the service will wind down and the team will join Facebook. "After a lot of discussions with Facebook about how our teams might work together to have even greater impact, we are announcing today that the Storylane team will be joining Facebook," Storylane's founder and CEO Jonathan Gheller wrote in the post.
Facebook confirmed the acquisition in a statement provided to Mashable: "The team from Storylane will be an incredible addition to Facebook. Their previous work showcasing real identity through sincere and meaningful content will make them a perfect fit at Facebook."
We've heard from a source that the five-person staff at Storylane will join Facebook's Timeline team, reporting to Sam Lessin, who heads up the "Identity" product group at the company.
Storylane launched in October with the goal of prompting users to share meaningful stories from their lives. The service is perhaps most similar to Medium, the publishing platform launched last year by two of Twitter's co-founders. Gheller was ambitious in his goals for the service, telling Mashable at the time that the service was trying to "build a library of human experiences by crafting a community where people can share things that really matter."
For those who did share stories on the service, Storylane plans to roll out tools to help migrate those posts to other sites. Gheller also says Facebook will not be getting any of the company's data or operations as part of the acquisition.
Present.me Makes It Easy to Give a Presentation Anywhere
What do you do when you need to give a presentation in San Francisco, New York, and Austin all on the same day? Present.me lets you trade building up your frequent flyer miles for building a presentation that can be viewed anywhere. The company is a 2013 SXSW Accelerator finalist.
Spencer Lambert, co-founder and CEO of Present.me, describes the service as a meeting of YouTube and Slideshare.
The company was founded when he had a client who needed to make a video of their business pitch because they wouldn't be able to deliver the pitch in person. The process involved filming the presenter, editing the footage together along with the slides, and putting the whole thing online. At the end of the process, the client had spent 25,000 British pounds and the job had taken over a week to complete.
"We knew there had to be an easier way, and that was the catalyst for Present.me," Lambert told Mashable.
Present.me lets you upload your presentation and then film yourself, using the webcam on your computer, clicking through your slides and doing your presentation. Once you're done filming, you can publish your finished product publicly or privately.
"Present.me isn't a technology business, it is driven by the needs of our clients and the insights gained from the team's many years of experience in corporate communications," says Lambert. "When we show Present.me to technologists, they say 'why?' When we show business leaders they say 'wow!'"
The company is located in London, England, and is currently funded by "twelve heavenly angels." It's currently looking for additional funding.
Present.me launched in beta in May of 2011, and has since grown to over 22,000 users that produce around 2,000 presentations each month.
You can check out Present.me now on its website.
What do you think of the service? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Spencer Lambert, co-founder and CEO of Present.me, describes the service as a meeting of YouTube and Slideshare.
The company was founded when he had a client who needed to make a video of their business pitch because they wouldn't be able to deliver the pitch in person. The process involved filming the presenter, editing the footage together along with the slides, and putting the whole thing online. At the end of the process, the client had spent 25,000 British pounds and the job had taken over a week to complete.
"We knew there had to be an easier way, and that was the catalyst for Present.me," Lambert told Mashable.
Present.me lets you upload your presentation and then film yourself, using the webcam on your computer, clicking through your slides and doing your presentation. Once you're done filming, you can publish your finished product publicly or privately.
"Present.me isn't a technology business, it is driven by the needs of our clients and the insights gained from the team's many years of experience in corporate communications," says Lambert. "When we show Present.me to technologists, they say 'why?' When we show business leaders they say 'wow!'"
The company is located in London, England, and is currently funded by "twelve heavenly angels." It's currently looking for additional funding.
Present.me launched in beta in May of 2011, and has since grown to over 22,000 users that produce around 2,000 presentations each month.
You can check out Present.me now on its website.
What do you think of the service? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Bring On The Platform Wars!
Writing software used to be so simple. A giant pain in the ass, mind you, but simple. You were a Microsoft developer, with binders full of Visual Studio CDs; you were a Java developer; you used the LAMP stack; or you worked with something proprietary from IBM or SAP or the like.
Nowadays, though, while the tools and technologies we use have improved enormously…imagine, God forbid, that you're building some sort of web service. Should you use Ruby on Rails? Node.js? Python and Django? PHP and Drupal? .NET? Any of the panoply of Java servers? Something new and cool like Go or Scala? And how/where will you host your code? Amazon? Heroku? App Engine? Joyent? EngineYard? Force.com? How about your app? You'll have an app, right? On which platforms? Native code? Hybrid HTML5? Cross-compiled with Xamarin? And then there's your database…
The mind gibbers and reels with analysis paralysis. It's almost enough to make me miss the bygone days of Microsoft's dominance. Is a mediocre standard better than an industry splintered into a dozen excellent fragments? Is a single authoritarian government better for its citizens than a dozen city-states set against one another in perpetual civil war? And, wait, isn't better software supposed to make life simpler?
The problem is that nowadays everybody wants to be a platform–but none of the available options are obviously better than the others.
Consider Heroku. I'm a big fan of theirs. We use them for tons of projects – startups like TeePublic, Travtap, Postography, etc., and for larger clients, too. Heroku started as a Ruby On Rails service, but now they support Node.js, PHP, Python, etc. They offer a free tier. Deploying to the server is as easy as typing "git push heroku master." Add-ons like database connections, email services, etc. etc. etc., are very nearly automagical. They're mostly a joy to work with.
But they're expensive; they don't seem to scale to really large sites; every now and again you still run into some obscure and tricky configuration error that takes days to debug; and they have not exactly covered themselves in glory with their recent RapGenius controversy. It's sad to say, but my Heroku love has been waning over time.
Then there's Google App Engine. I love GAE. You can tell by the fact that I build all of my side pet projects — e.g. ScanVine, WikiSherpa, ePubHost – on it. It makes testing, deployment, and versioning a breeze. It makes a panoply of really powerful tools available (for example, asynchronous tasks, a headache with Heroku, are a snap with GAE; and there are experimental full-text search and MapReduce tools, too.) It used to only give you Google's powerful-but-quirky BigTable datastore as an option, but nowadays you can plug in Cloud SQL with ease. It offers a very capable free tier, and you can write your code in Java, Python, or Go.
It can be expensive, but that's not the problem. The problem is that nobody else gives you these tools. (There are some halfhearted attempts at open-source cognates, but they're a long, long way from prime time.) So once you start writing code that uses them — and you will, because they're really powerful and really easy to use — you're locked into GAE…
…and for some reason this notion drives managers and executives insane. Which doesn't make any sense if you ask me. Yes, I suppose there's a risk that Google will abandon its flagship web platform, or hike its prices to punitive levels; but compared to all the other business risks out there, that looks pretty tiny to me, and the advantages are significant. But for client after client, that one fact makes GAE a complete nonstarter.
There are lots of other options. Microsoft has bet big on its Azure platform. I really like Parse as a simple and powerful built-in backend for Android and iOS apps, for instance. (It's approximately 1 billion times better than the horror called RestKit I had to use once. Shudder.) If you use Parse, you don't have to write your own back-end server at all! …Of course, on the other hand, if you need a back-end server to do anything more than mildly interesting, you're currently out of luck. But for straightforward apps, it's an excellent solution.
There are many other platforms, some of which I mentioned above. If you use the good ones, you can get more done, faster, with fewer developers.
But for one reason or another — one being cost — so many projects keep falling back to infrastructure services like Amazon Web Services, where instead of simply deploying to the cloud without much caring about what happens next, you have to provision individual servers running Linux or Windows and configure them as you would a machine of your own.
App Engine hasn't exactly taken off, so Google introduced its own AWS clone. And then there are second-rate AWS knockoffs like Rackspace and Savvis, whose business models, based on my (limited but nonzero) experience, consist largely of schmoozing corporate decision-makers into buying inferior technology at inflated products.
There's nothing wrong with AWS. There is a problem with Amazon's attempt at a platform, called Elastic Beanstalk, which, when I last tried to use it, caused me to throw my hands in the air before nearly using them to gouge my own eyes out. But Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud is generally awesome: seriously cheap, insanely powerful, proven to scale to enterprise levels, and provides a host of really useful and effective tools. In fact, Heroku and Parse are both built atop AWS.
The problem is that after using GAE and Heroku — or (I presume) any of the other platform services — configuring servers just feels so painfully and unnecessarily slow, byzantine and complex. Alas, sometimes it remains the right choice. Or at least no undeniably better one has come along yet.
And so we remain stuck with all the choices I listed earlier, and more, and more, and seemingly more every year, and whatever decision you make, you're left with the nagging feeling that you could have done better. (Unless you chose PHP on Drupal, in which case it's more like a nagging certainty.) I guess that's life, and I suppose this kind of ferment is necessary and good:
"You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
(cite)
This is the software Renaissance. Which is nice. But it still sure can be tough on the ordinary artisan.
Nowadays, though, while the tools and technologies we use have improved enormously…imagine, God forbid, that you're building some sort of web service. Should you use Ruby on Rails? Node.js? Python and Django? PHP and Drupal? .NET? Any of the panoply of Java servers? Something new and cool like Go or Scala? And how/where will you host your code? Amazon? Heroku? App Engine? Joyent? EngineYard? Force.com? How about your app? You'll have an app, right? On which platforms? Native code? Hybrid HTML5? Cross-compiled with Xamarin? And then there's your database…
The mind gibbers and reels with analysis paralysis. It's almost enough to make me miss the bygone days of Microsoft's dominance. Is a mediocre standard better than an industry splintered into a dozen excellent fragments? Is a single authoritarian government better for its citizens than a dozen city-states set against one another in perpetual civil war? And, wait, isn't better software supposed to make life simpler?
The problem is that nowadays everybody wants to be a platform–but none of the available options are obviously better than the others.
Consider Heroku. I'm a big fan of theirs. We use them for tons of projects – startups like TeePublic, Travtap, Postography, etc., and for larger clients, too. Heroku started as a Ruby On Rails service, but now they support Node.js, PHP, Python, etc. They offer a free tier. Deploying to the server is as easy as typing "git push heroku master." Add-ons like database connections, email services, etc. etc. etc., are very nearly automagical. They're mostly a joy to work with.
But they're expensive; they don't seem to scale to really large sites; every now and again you still run into some obscure and tricky configuration error that takes days to debug; and they have not exactly covered themselves in glory with their recent RapGenius controversy. It's sad to say, but my Heroku love has been waning over time.
Then there's Google App Engine. I love GAE. You can tell by the fact that I build all of my side pet projects — e.g. ScanVine, WikiSherpa, ePubHost – on it. It makes testing, deployment, and versioning a breeze. It makes a panoply of really powerful tools available (for example, asynchronous tasks, a headache with Heroku, are a snap with GAE; and there are experimental full-text search and MapReduce tools, too.) It used to only give you Google's powerful-but-quirky BigTable datastore as an option, but nowadays you can plug in Cloud SQL with ease. It offers a very capable free tier, and you can write your code in Java, Python, or Go.
It can be expensive, but that's not the problem. The problem is that nobody else gives you these tools. (There are some halfhearted attempts at open-source cognates, but they're a long, long way from prime time.) So once you start writing code that uses them — and you will, because they're really powerful and really easy to use — you're locked into GAE…
…and for some reason this notion drives managers and executives insane. Which doesn't make any sense if you ask me. Yes, I suppose there's a risk that Google will abandon its flagship web platform, or hike its prices to punitive levels; but compared to all the other business risks out there, that looks pretty tiny to me, and the advantages are significant. But for client after client, that one fact makes GAE a complete nonstarter.
There are lots of other options. Microsoft has bet big on its Azure platform. I really like Parse as a simple and powerful built-in backend for Android and iOS apps, for instance. (It's approximately 1 billion times better than the horror called RestKit I had to use once. Shudder.) If you use Parse, you don't have to write your own back-end server at all! …Of course, on the other hand, if you need a back-end server to do anything more than mildly interesting, you're currently out of luck. But for straightforward apps, it's an excellent solution.
There are many other platforms, some of which I mentioned above. If you use the good ones, you can get more done, faster, with fewer developers.
But for one reason or another — one being cost — so many projects keep falling back to infrastructure services like Amazon Web Services, where instead of simply deploying to the cloud without much caring about what happens next, you have to provision individual servers running Linux or Windows and configure them as you would a machine of your own.
App Engine hasn't exactly taken off, so Google introduced its own AWS clone. And then there are second-rate AWS knockoffs like Rackspace and Savvis, whose business models, based on my (limited but nonzero) experience, consist largely of schmoozing corporate decision-makers into buying inferior technology at inflated products.
There's nothing wrong with AWS. There is a problem with Amazon's attempt at a platform, called Elastic Beanstalk, which, when I last tried to use it, caused me to throw my hands in the air before nearly using them to gouge my own eyes out. But Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud is generally awesome: seriously cheap, insanely powerful, proven to scale to enterprise levels, and provides a host of really useful and effective tools. In fact, Heroku and Parse are both built atop AWS.
The problem is that after using GAE and Heroku — or (I presume) any of the other platform services — configuring servers just feels so painfully and unnecessarily slow, byzantine and complex. Alas, sometimes it remains the right choice. Or at least no undeniably better one has come along yet.
And so we remain stuck with all the choices I listed earlier, and more, and more, and seemingly more every year, and whatever decision you make, you're left with the nagging feeling that you could have done better. (Unless you chose PHP on Drupal, in which case it's more like a nagging certainty.) I guess that's life, and I suppose this kind of ferment is necessary and good:
"You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
(cite)
This is the software Renaissance. Which is nice. But it still sure can be tough on the ordinary artisan.
Did PayPal Just Clone Stripe’s API Documentation?
Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? As we reported this morning, PayPal just launched a number of new APIs and a brand new developer portal today. This also included the release of new REST APIs. One thing that manynoticed—competitor Stripe's REST API documentation looks remarkably similar.
You can see from the screenshots that PayPal structured their documentation with the API documents on the left hand side of the page and the sample code on the right side of the page. This layout is identical to the way Stripe lays out its REST API. PayPal also has a blueprint of its logo on its developer home page, which is similar to Stripe's blueprint on the startup's homepage.
You can see the chatter about the similarities on Twitter here. Even Stripe's founder Patrick Collisonweighed in on Twitter, Tweeting, "16 months after Stripe launches, PayPal's response is… a clone of Stripe's API docs."
It doesn't appear that PayPal has copied any actual language but many seem to think that the payments giant copied Stripe's design for their documentation. There's no illegality in this, but it is something that is called out by the developer community when it does happen.
A spokesperson for PayPal issues this statement: "Under David [Marcus'] leadership we have a renewed focus on creating simple beautiful products for all our customers – consumers, merchants and developers. The design of the developer pages matches that philosophy in making it as easy as possible for developers to get to what they need quickly. It matches what we have already done on paypal.com for consumers and our PayPal page for merchantshttp://www.paypal.com/merchants.";
Stripe launched its developer-friendly online payments system that allows developers to avoid setting up merchant accounts and dealings with banks, while still ensuring transaction safety. The service has bit a hit with developers because of its simplicity. The company not only competes with PayPal, but also Braintree; and is backed by General Catalyst, Sequoia, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk.
Curebits was called out for taking design elements and code from 37Signals last year. Zynga has sued Vostu over game design. These are different cases, of course, but the underlying fact is that design was copied. It's a surprising move by a company that is actually part of another public company, eBay. And it's worth noting that the design was copied from a very buzzed about, fast growing competitor.
You can see from the screenshots that PayPal structured their documentation with the API documents on the left hand side of the page and the sample code on the right side of the page. This layout is identical to the way Stripe lays out its REST API. PayPal also has a blueprint of its logo on its developer home page, which is similar to Stripe's blueprint on the startup's homepage.
You can see the chatter about the similarities on Twitter here. Even Stripe's founder Patrick Collisonweighed in on Twitter, Tweeting, "16 months after Stripe launches, PayPal's response is… a clone of Stripe's API docs."
It doesn't appear that PayPal has copied any actual language but many seem to think that the payments giant copied Stripe's design for their documentation. There's no illegality in this, but it is something that is called out by the developer community when it does happen.
A spokesperson for PayPal issues this statement: "Under David [Marcus'] leadership we have a renewed focus on creating simple beautiful products for all our customers – consumers, merchants and developers. The design of the developer pages matches that philosophy in making it as easy as possible for developers to get to what they need quickly. It matches what we have already done on paypal.com for consumers and our PayPal page for merchantshttp://www.paypal.com/merchants.";
Stripe launched its developer-friendly online payments system that allows developers to avoid setting up merchant accounts and dealings with banks, while still ensuring transaction safety. The service has bit a hit with developers because of its simplicity. The company not only competes with PayPal, but also Braintree; and is backed by General Catalyst, Sequoia, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk.
Curebits was called out for taking design elements and code from 37Signals last year. Zynga has sued Vostu over game design. These are different cases, of course, but the underlying fact is that design was copied. It's a surprising move by a company that is actually part of another public company, eBay. And it's worth noting that the design was copied from a very buzzed about, fast growing competitor.
Facebook's new News Feed: Bigger is better
The social-networking giant today unveiled changes to the site in an aim to make the Facebook experience more unified across devices like computers, smartphones, and tablets.
Facebook today unveiled a redesigned News Feed that incorporates bigger images and allows customization, giving the site a much-needed overhaul that the company hopes will ultimately keep user attention and attract advertisers.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg noted Facebook's goals for the new News Feed are richer story design, choice of different feeds, and a consistent experience on mobile devices and desktop Web browsers.
"What we're trying to do is give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper we can," Zuckerberg said. "The best personalized newspaper should be intricate, rich, and engaging."
The changes include a redesigned layout with larger images of maps, news articles, photos, and apps information, like a Pinterest post. Users can choose to sort the feed chronologically or only look at things like what music people are listening to or what events are happening. And depending on the things a user has liked on Facebook in the past, he or she will see articles that are trending and that are most relevant.
The company noted it has several new feeds to explore in addition to the same News Feed users have today. They include:
All Friends -- a feed that shows you everything your friends are sharing
Photos -- a feed with nothing but photos from your friends and the Pages you like
Music -- a feed with posts about the music you listen to
Following -- a feed with the latest news from the Pages you like and the people you follow
Chris Cox, vice president of product at Facebook, said the company wanted a "more modern and clean" interface for users. He noted the company took design principles from phones and tablets and brought them over to the Web.
The redesigned News Feed will start rolling out to a small number of people on the Web today and will then show up on phones and tablets over the next few weeks.
"Because this is a big change on the Web, we're going to be very careful and slow in how we move it out," Cox said. When the product is more "polished," it will be rolled out broadly.
Meanwhile, Greg Marra, a product manager at Facebook, posted some tips for developers on the company's blog. Notably, because all images are bigger -- including items shared through apps -- developers need to use higher-resolution images. Facebook recommends 600x600-pixel images or a minimum of 200x200.
The new design also features bookmarks like before, but they now are "more relevant for people" and show up on every page.
"Bookmarks are an important way for people to re-engage with apps, and we've made improvements so people can quickly access the games and apps they use the most," Marra said. "These ever-present bookmarks will also display the notification counter from the most recent game requests to help drive re-engagement with players."
The changes shown today are the first big overhaul of News Feed, the first page people see when logging into the site, since Facebook debuted the product in September 2006. The changes could have significant, far-reaching consequences that affect how people use Facebook and determine whether the social network can capitalize on its most prized asset without driving people away.
News Feed may have been due for an update, but that doesn't mean users are going to like it. Facebook often tweaks its offering and introduces new items to its site, but few changes are as noticeable as the ones made to News Feed. That means few have as big a chance to freak out users. Even the slightest adjustments, like the ability to sort by Top Stories or Most Recent -- a feature added in late 2011 -- have angered Facebook users who resent change.
As CNET noted yesterday, Facebook needs an updated News Feed to help it regain the status it has lost with teens, a group of digital trendsetters who will determine whether the social network can withstand the test of time or become the next Friendster.
The new, image-centric feed may give these youngsters, who have a predilection for Instagram, a reason to stay and browse a little while longer.
"For users who spend a lot of time on the News Feed, they can quickly exhaust the available stories," said Hussein Fazal, chief executive of online advertising company Adknowledge. "The 'switcher' allows users to scroll though several different news feeds based on what they are looking for -- images, games, music, news, best friends, all friends...This will result in more time spent overall on the Facebook News Feed -- and of course increase engagement with content and ads."
Facebook today unveiled a redesigned News Feed that incorporates bigger images and allows customization, giving the site a much-needed overhaul that the company hopes will ultimately keep user attention and attract advertisers.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg noted Facebook's goals for the new News Feed are richer story design, choice of different feeds, and a consistent experience on mobile devices and desktop Web browsers.
"What we're trying to do is give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper we can," Zuckerberg said. "The best personalized newspaper should be intricate, rich, and engaging."
The changes include a redesigned layout with larger images of maps, news articles, photos, and apps information, like a Pinterest post. Users can choose to sort the feed chronologically or only look at things like what music people are listening to or what events are happening. And depending on the things a user has liked on Facebook in the past, he or she will see articles that are trending and that are most relevant.
The company noted it has several new feeds to explore in addition to the same News Feed users have today. They include:
All Friends -- a feed that shows you everything your friends are sharing
Photos -- a feed with nothing but photos from your friends and the Pages you like
Music -- a feed with posts about the music you listen to
Following -- a feed with the latest news from the Pages you like and the people you follow
Chris Cox, vice president of product at Facebook, said the company wanted a "more modern and clean" interface for users. He noted the company took design principles from phones and tablets and brought them over to the Web.
The redesigned News Feed will start rolling out to a small number of people on the Web today and will then show up on phones and tablets over the next few weeks.
"Because this is a big change on the Web, we're going to be very careful and slow in how we move it out," Cox said. When the product is more "polished," it will be rolled out broadly.
Meanwhile, Greg Marra, a product manager at Facebook, posted some tips for developers on the company's blog. Notably, because all images are bigger -- including items shared through apps -- developers need to use higher-resolution images. Facebook recommends 600x600-pixel images or a minimum of 200x200.
The new design also features bookmarks like before, but they now are "more relevant for people" and show up on every page.
"Bookmarks are an important way for people to re-engage with apps, and we've made improvements so people can quickly access the games and apps they use the most," Marra said. "These ever-present bookmarks will also display the notification counter from the most recent game requests to help drive re-engagement with players."
The changes shown today are the first big overhaul of News Feed, the first page people see when logging into the site, since Facebook debuted the product in September 2006. The changes could have significant, far-reaching consequences that affect how people use Facebook and determine whether the social network can capitalize on its most prized asset without driving people away.
News Feed may have been due for an update, but that doesn't mean users are going to like it. Facebook often tweaks its offering and introduces new items to its site, but few changes are as noticeable as the ones made to News Feed. That means few have as big a chance to freak out users. Even the slightest adjustments, like the ability to sort by Top Stories or Most Recent -- a feature added in late 2011 -- have angered Facebook users who resent change.
As CNET noted yesterday, Facebook needs an updated News Feed to help it regain the status it has lost with teens, a group of digital trendsetters who will determine whether the social network can withstand the test of time or become the next Friendster.
The new, image-centric feed may give these youngsters, who have a predilection for Instagram, a reason to stay and browse a little while longer.
"For users who spend a lot of time on the News Feed, they can quickly exhaust the available stories," said Hussein Fazal, chief executive of online advertising company Adknowledge. "The 'switcher' allows users to scroll though several different news feeds based on what they are looking for -- images, games, music, news, best friends, all friends...This will result in more time spent overall on the Facebook News Feed -- and of course increase engagement with content and ads."
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