How to Know When Someone 'De-Friends' You on Facebook

Just last week Facebook reminded users of the options they had for ignoring unwanted friend requests and the social network is trying to make it as painless and subtle as possible for all parties involved. Another issue that got the same treatment was removing a friend from your list, which was also a subtle action with the ones removed not notified in any way. Unless they have the Friends Checker Greasemonkey script, that is, which brings up a hard to miss message when a user removes them.


“When the script detects that someone you used to be friends with is no longer one of your friends, a message will appear informing you about who it was and giving a link to their profile page,” the script's entry on Userscripts.org says. “The script checks by default once per hour when on Facebook, but this time can be increased.“

The script, spotted by Inside Facebook, is simple to use, assuming you can handle installing a Greasemonkey script, and its functionality is limited but to the point. Facebook Friends Checker regularly polls the social network to see who has “de-friended” you in the interval since the last check. The polling interval can be adjusted by going to the Greasemonkey entry in Firefox's Tools menu and then selecting “User script commands” followed by “Set time interval to check for removed friends.”

With Friends Checker you can automatically see who has removed you from their list every time you visit the site. Of course you could check this manually by going through each friend's profile but this isn't really an option especially for those with hundreds of friends. Facebook itself, for obvious reasons, doesn't send any notifications in this event. However, there's no need to worry just yet as the script has been installed only about 20,000 times which, while a decent number by itself, pales in comparison to the more than 250 million registered users the social network has at the moment so the chances of someone you're removing using it are pretty slim.

Source: Softpedia.com

Facebook Connect Available Now in Multiple Languages

Facebook may be the biggest social network in the world and one of the most visited web sites but it doesn't stop here. The company wants to get as many people as possible using the service and while the site is already the most visited destination online it aims to connect to its users even when they are visiting other sites. This is where Facebook Connect comes in, allowing any site or service to offer Facebook integration.
And with the social network having such a big presence worldwide it was only a matter of time before Facebook Connect got internationalized.

Being the premier social network in the world, as it has officially passed 250 million registered users with only 70 million or so in the US, it’s easy to see why it would need a powerful localized experience and, in fact, Facebook is available in 64 languages already, just 18 months since the program was launched. And now Facebook Connect users can benefit from the same level of service, with all of the features currently available in their native language.

“Developers who've implemented Facebook Connect, including those who have installed social widgets like the Fan Box, now have the ability to decide in which language they want their Facebook Connect features rendered,” James Leszczenski writes on the Facebook developer blog. “When a user first connects to your site, or publishes something back to Facebook, the Facebook Connect content will appear in the language you specify. User-generated content continues to appear in the language in which it was written.”

Facebook Connect has been a resounding success for the site, having been deployed by more than 15,000 sites or services in a little over six months since its launch. The login standard has been adopted by several large companies already, allowing users to login with their Facebook credentials. The localization feature is easy to implement, with webmasters having to make just small modifications to their code.

Article source: Softpedia

Falcon Grabs Screens with Talon

Aviary has expanded their offering of nifty AIR-powered, bird-themed graphics tools with the recent release of Falcon – a simple visual markup tool.

So what exactly *IS* a visual markup tool? Falcon is basically just a really neat tool for selecting, cropping, and marking up screen content. Bloggers, writers, and general forum junkies take note!

Like Aviary’s other tools, Falcon is free and runs live in your browser via the magic of Adobe AIR. However, the bit that makes Falcon particularly useful is its integration with Firefox via the Talon Firefox Extension.

So, here’s the 30-second tour:

1) After installing Talon, you’ll find a new button on your Firefox toolbar, and a new right-click/CTRL-click option on your mouse. Activate this control and you’ll be able choose between capturing areas, whole pages, or the entire application window.

2) Falcon resizing textOnce captured, your screen image is auto-loaded into the Falcon application inside your browser, complete with a small but useful suite of editing tools.

3) The toolbox allows you to add attractive, stretchable arrows, lines, squares, and circles with a simple drag and drop. As these are vectors, they remain fully editable at all times.

4) The Text tool lets you annotate your image. I must admit, I found the lack of text-size controls a little disconcerting at first. However, once you’ve become accustomed to the idea of using the scaling tool to control the size of ALL elements, — even the text — it’s all good.

5) When you’re happy with your image, you can then choose from two options: save to desktop or create an account with Aviary. The latter allows you to upload the image directly to their image hosting servers.

Though I confess I’m partly loath to add yet another image hosting service to my list, it’s hard to beat the sheer click-and-forget joy of the Falcon/Talon system. The transfer process is completely invisible, and it also autogenerates ready-to-eat markup for Twitter, BBcode, Facebook, and WordPress. Slick stuff. There’s something to be said for laziness.

Ready-to-eat codeI’ve been using Falcon for a couple of weeks now and it has quickly become a fave. True, the editing tools are relatively modest but are good enough to make your point in 95% of situations. In the other 5% of cases, jumping out to more sophisticated tools (including Aviary’s own Phoenix editor) is simple enough when required.

Most importantly, Falcon is superfast — even on modest systems — and clean, and positions itself exactly where you need it, when you need it.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Articles source: Sitepoint

Manage your social life with these apps

Managing social network profiles is getting more difficult. As we sign up for more services, we need to split our time between multiple sites. But with the help of social aggregators, we can limit those issues. The following tools do a fine job of keeping your social life in one spot, helping you to monitor it more efficiently.

I should note, though, that these won't be your path to social networking bliss. Some folks find aggregators too overwhelming. They believe these resources only complicate matters. You might agree after trying some of these tools.

I should also note that Facebook Connect--Facebook's single sign-on service that competes with OpenID--might soon match these aggregation services. Users can already bring some items with them to Facebook. It might only be a matter of time before the service allows users to pull full social network feeds into Facebook.

Social network aggregators
Atomkeep Atomkeep is designed to help you sync all your profile information across multiple social networks. When you change your profile information on the site, all the networks you sync with it will be updated automatically. So, if you're moving to a new home, you can go to Atomkeep, change your address, and it will update that information on Facebook, Bebo, and other social networks. The site is in private beta, so you'll need an invite code to try it out.

Qik brings its mobile video to Facebook

In the live-streaming wars, mobile service Qik has a new weapon in its arsenal: integration with Facebook's video player.

Thanks to Facebook Connect, Qik members can now automatically upload their videos to Facebook, set their status messages to link to the video on Qik when they start live-streaming, and have the update show up in their news feeds. Windows Mobile smartphone users (non-touchscreen) can also selectively upload Qik videos to Facebook, an extra feature that the company hopes to roll out to other devices soon.

You can't use Qik to live-stream videos directly on Facebook, at least not yet. But regardless, it's the first mobile video app to allow automatic uploads to Facebook through the social network's application program interface, Qik representatives said.

Live streaming, much like location-based mobile networking, is one of those niches of social media that doesn't have a real frontrunner yet. There are a ton of players in the space, both Webcam- and mobile-focused, and getting a few extra steps ahead is often a matter of being the first to get on a popular platform.

Article source: CNET