Facebook Herald

According to the official feed Facebook is back on the Tuesday schedule for the push of their weekly update. The changes are as follows:

r96774 | jleszcze | 2008-05-05 01:04:21 -0700 (Mon, 05 May 2008) | 17 lines

• References and official support for the Java client library are being removed with this change. Please refer to the associated post to the developers blog for further details.

r96967 | wzhu | 2008-05-05 18:23:27 -0700 (Mon, 05 May 2008) | 18 lines

• Fix bug 2087: Condensed multi-friend-selector not displaying in IE

r97132 | ookelola | 2008-05-06 15:00:49 -0700 (Tue, 06 May 2008) | 17 lines

• bug 2103

r97168 | ccheever | 2008-05-06 16:05:42 -0700 (Tue, 06 May 2008) | 46 lines

• adding online_presence field to user table in FQL. returns a string, one of “active”, “idle”, “offline”, “error” (when we can’t get presence info on our side), or does the usual behavior when that information is privacy restricted.

It looks like bug 2103 was a bug that was causing thumbnails of web pages in wall post to not have the page name displayed. Good to have that fixed so we know what we are clicking on.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed under: Facebook, News | No Comments »

What It Is:

After reviewing Mario Velasquez’s lack luster Mario Kart Fan app I decided to see what other applications he offers and there is quite the list. He seems to have a thing for using other people’s intellectual property, which, I guess is OK if it is an appropriate work of homage. On his extensive app list I found Warcraft Fan that combines two things that I love: Warcraft and Tower Defense games. I know, I know, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. But,am I really being fooled this time.

The Way It Works:

When Warcraft III, Blizzard Entertainment’s immensely popular entry into their RTS franchise, was released it shipped with a fully functional map editor that allowed players to modify the way the game was played. One of the most popular modifications was to create a map and make it into a Tower Defense map.

A small note on Tower Defense Games: This is a popular flash game genre in which a stream of monsters enter the playing field and attempt to cross it from the entrance to an exit on the opposite side. Playing fields normally come in two flavors, a wide open field or an already laid out maze like path, though there are other variants. It is your job to place varying types of towers strategically on the playing field to stop any monsters from reaching the exit. Most games will allow nineteen monsters to pass before the twentieth ends your game.

This app is a flash version of the popular Warcraft III modification. The playing field has a single long path with an entrance at the top of the screen that winds around until coming to an exit point next to the entrance. You are given forty gold to purchase your initial towers from which you have a choice of arrow(7g), canon(9g) or anti-air (12g). Each tower has it’s own advantages and disadvantages such as the arrow tower is fast but weak, the cannon tower is slow and can’t hit air targets but does splash damage, and the anti-air tower fires quickly but only hits air targets. Each one can be updated to increase their range and damage so these are all you’ll need for the first waves.

As your towers kill monsters they will reward you with gold which you use to buy new towers or upgrade your current ones. After a certain number of of rounds you will be given one lumber to spend on unlocking one a three new kinds of towers: a water tower that has relatively low damage but a splash and slowing affect, a fire tower that has high splash damage and fires fast, and an earth tower that fires very slowly but does the most amount of damage and splash in the game but only hits ground units. Each of these cost fifty gold after you unlock them. You could also spend your lumber on increasing the amount of gold you get from each wave. You can also spend forty gold at any time to gain a life back.

The warning on the app download page says that this is a tough game but it doesn’t actually present much of a problem until wave 32 when the difficulty suddenly swings up. Eventually you may want to mute the sound because the repeated custom sounds of things dieing will grate on your brain. The towers and monsters loose detail due to the small size of the game, and the towers look the same no matter how you upgrade them making it more difficult to find which ones still need upgrading. Besides the game the app also offers the Youtube and Flickr streams for video and pictures from the Warcraft franchise that his Mario Kart Fan app offered for that franchise. It also offers the forums, high scores, and a section that shows you who else uses the app.

All in all this is a pretty solid reproduction of the popular Warcraft III modification and that makes it seem more of a tribute than an attempt to profit off of some one else’s intellectual property as Mario Kart Fan came across as being. It’s fun and when you finally get past wave 32 it will feel like an accomplishment. Still though, I feel like a focus on the social aspect of the app would be well served. This is a definate improvement over Mario Kart Fan game wise and has the things that made that app neat, notably the streams. This app can be obtained free of charge from Warcraft Fan.

6/10 Warcraft Tribute + Tower Defense = Good Enough

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed under: Facebook, Reviews | No Comments »

I’ve noticed through my Google Analytics report that nearly 40% of our readers are using an Apple operating system. I myself do most of the work for the site on a Macbook Pro so I thought it would be nice to do a feature on something for all of those OS X users out there. I headed right over to Apple and looked through their widgit library until I found this little gem for the Dashboard uploaded in January of this year by developer Dustin Senos.

After you download the widgit it gives you instructions on how to import the Facebook Notification RSS Feed into the widgit. Facebook also tells you how to access the feed but I found them both to be a little confusing. If you have some trouble with their instructions like I did you can do it the way I did.

My suggestion is to go to your Facebook Inbox and click the Notifications tab. On that page at the bottom of your right hand side bar, there is a RSS icon next to “Your Notifications”. Right click this link, click add in the book mark that comes up and now you have the an open page of tab with the RSS link right in the address bar. Copy and paste that into the widgit and you are go to go.

The feed is set to check for updates every 15 minutes by default. You can change this to ten, five, two or one depending on how into checking your notifications you are. The great thing about this widgit is that you don’t have to hang out on the website if you are waiting to hear back on something, or want to see if someone has commented on something you posted, like a picture. This is a one click access to your Facebook Notification feed that fits in great with the aesthetic sleekness of the platform. This OS X+ widgit can be obtained for free here.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed under: Facebook, Spotlight | No Comments »

The official feed is  confirming that the weekly push that normally goes out on  Tuesday did go out last night as planned. As you can see the normal lines of push changes are present:

r95052 | jleszcze | 2008-04-22 23:45:27 -0700 (Tue, 22 Apr 2008) | 25 lines

• creates a new API call auth_expireSession, which will expire the current session being used

r95143 | mvernal | 2008-04-23 14:20:39 -0700 (Wed, 23 Apr 2008) | 16 lines

• Adds an fb:user-status FBML tag with support for two attributes — @uid and @linked. @uid specifies the user id. @linked specifies whether urls within the status should be hyperlinked. The default value is true.

r95561 | jleszcze | 2008-04-25 16:10:13 -0700 (Fri, 25 Apr 2008) | 15 lines

• Adds an API call auth.expireSession to invalidate the current user session.

r95892 | ookelola | 2008-04-29 11:13:10 -0700 (Tue, 29 Apr 2008) | 21 lines

• Turning off “For Facebook Pages” part of the application directory…

r96022 | mvernal | 2008-04-29 17:33:12 -0700 (Tue, 29 Apr 2008) | 27 lines

• bug 2033

r96041 | eric | 2008-04-29 19:00:57 -0700 (Tue, 29 Apr 2008) | 24 lines

• improving reliability for total users metric

r96054 | jleszcze | 2008-04-29 20:27:21 -0700 (Tue, 29 Apr 2008) | 18 lines

• Expose a user’s current locale in the users table for FQl queries/users.getInfo API calls.

But note the inclusion of Bug 2033. This is the bug that has been messing with the invite list for some applications. If this fix works then it  will be a well received release push. Our beloved Haikoo Zoo is one of the apps suffering from this bug so we will keep an eye on them through out the day to see if their situation improves.

The other items coming off th official feed is that allocation for bucket thresholds have been changed. If I understand correctly, it looks like apps that get a high amount of traffic, that is the most popular apps, have received more buckets for their notifications. Request are maintaining the same number of buckets but will receive more request for some applications (we assume the popular ones) and fewer request for others.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed under: Facebook, News | No Comments »

The BBC published a story today about the possible risks associated with the installation of Facebook Applications.

Anyone with a basic understanding of web programming can write an application.We wrote an evil data mining application called Miner, which, if we wanted, could masquerade as a game, a test, or a joke of the day. It took us less than three hours.

The article notes that you have the option of turning off the ability of an app to acess your personal information, that’s the first check box you interact with when you decide to use an app. Even if an app does mine your info, it only has access to the information that you have already made public anyway. We here at Facebook Herald recommend that you use the same strategy when installing Facebook apps as you do when you download something to your desktop.

Facebook responds to the BBC with a Q&A:

Click: Is Facebook reconsidering at present its default security settings for applications at a level beyond day-to-day review?

Facebook: We regularly evaluate and adjust the security settings for third party applications to ensure that Facebook’s Terms of Service are not violated.

The full BBC article can be found here and the Full Facebook Q&A can be found here. Remember, social network responsibly.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed under: Facebook, News | No Comments »

 What It Is:

I want to begin by saying that I am a huge fan of Nintendo’s Mario Kart franchise. I didn’t play it until Mario Kart: Double Dash came out for the Gamecube, and when Mario Kart DS came out for the hand held, I was hooked. Even now I play at least a few times a week with my friends over wifi, and have been  eagerly  anticipating  Mario Kart Wii. Mario Kart Wii was released earlier this week and I thought it would be neat to have an app review that corresponded. What I found was the Mario Kart Fan app developed by Mario Velasquez.

The Attempt:

The app provides many things, but the main feature, and the one that we are going to focus on is the flash game. The game is the main reason a person would want to install the app. What you would expect to be a Mario Kart port, or at the least a Mario Kart themed racer, is actually a, well, I don’t know what to call it.

What we’re looking at is a few background screens from Double Dragon for the NES stitched together to form an endless loop of the same back ground, if you watch, you can see the seam. The bad guys from Double Dragon have been mostly replaced with various Mario henchmen that walk from the right side of the screen to the left. These range from 8-bit goombas to 2.5D Diddy Kongs with Thwomps falling from the top of the screen. All of which appear to have been lifted out of Nintendo games. Your choice of protagonist is either Mario or Luigi in a small go-kart.

The controls use the arrow keys for movement and the “A” key as your only attack, a nitro boost that speeds you forward to ram enemies. And that’s the point, ramming enemies. There is no racing in this game, just gut splashing collisions. There are several abundant graphical glitches that are rather annoying. For one the thwomps that fall from the top of the screen can not be rammed through, which I get, but it’s nearly impossible to know how far above or below them you have to be to avoid them because the item collision sub-par and often you will clip through part of a thwomp one time and not another. In addition to the visable seams in the background that a mentioned earlier is the fact that when you are nitro boosting you can not see the only other enemy that can impede you, the spike shelled beetle things. The games end when you have taken enough damage to reduce your health bar to zero. There is a tiny box in the upper left corner of the play screen that displays how many enemies you have hit and missed, and your score. These numbers are so small that they are pretty unreadable.

There is more to this app than the game though. Accessing it through your left sidebar you can get to the forums and high scores if you manage to be able to read it. Now the next three almost could make the app worth getting and in my opinion should be the meat of the program. There is a button for photos and videos that stream for Mario Kart tags from Flikr and YouTube respectively. If you are into the franchise and like media on the subject, this is actually pretty cool. There is also a button to see other people running the app and leave them a message and a button to see a list of other apps. The whole app seems pretty ad intensive and I was not able to excess the game portion for the whole day yesterday.

The Wrap Up: 

Here’s the thing, as a Mario Kart game the flash game fails to deliver in any way. It is obvious that Mario Velasquez has some kind of programing ability, but wasted it on a sub-standard attempt to get attention from a popular franchise. Instead of shoe-horning the idea to make Mario Kart even remotely involved, why not make an original game? The idea of the game is a good one, the execution of the game is not. Grab an artist friend if you can not make the background/sprites on your own, call it Crashman or something and give developing this app another shot. There may be a good idea in here for a social media sharing app, and maybe some energy towards that would be rewarded. All in all the game, as is, is not any fun and I recommend staying clear of it. If you insist on giving it a try, it can be obtained free of charge from Mario Kart Fan.

4/10 Some Wasted Good Ideas

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed under: Facebook, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Facebook generally pushes out it’s new releases on Tuesday of every week but they must have hit some sort of snag. The official feed is telling us that the release that was supposed to come out today will instead land on Thursday. They will be back to their normal Tuesday releases next week.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed under: Facebook, News | No Comments »

What It Does:

Renkoo is a company that has a focus on creating applications for social networks. Their Haikoo Zoo entry allows you to put overly adorable pets into your Facebook profile to be cared for by you and your friends.

The Beauty Is In The Breakdown:

I know that as a reviewer I am supposed to be an unbiased source of information, a stable, unrelenting bastion of integrity, a veritable fount of stone hearted observation. I am happy to say that no one, not even the integrity driven Walter Cronkite, could remain unbiased when faced with the unforgiving cuteness that is the pets of Haikoo Zoo.

Once you go through the normal application installation process you get to make the hardest app choice you will ever be faced with. You are presented with a list of the cutest drawn animals you will ever see. You can choose from a wolf, koala, dragon, fox, hedgehog, tamarin, lovebirds, hippopotamus, penguin, bunny, tiger, and a panda. Each and every one is adorable in it’s own cuddly way so take some time to choose the one that is right for you. Think of a good name too because you are going to want to fill out your new pet’s profile with likes, dislikes and age. You will be able to choose from a wide variety of accessories to dress your pet up in. For example, the first thing I bought for my Hedgehog, Stonk, is a brown cowboy hat.

These items, as well as food, backgrounds, habitats, and small pet pals are purchased from the market place with coins. You earn coins by taking care of your friends pets. You can go visit anyones pet and play, cuddle, pet, or poke them and you will be rewarded with a cute phrase and five coins. Another way to earn coins is to challenge friends to a game called “belly bump”. You have to bet five to two-hundred of your own coins and then pick a friend to bump. Under each friend there is a bit of information about your chances to win and the multiplier for if you do win. For example, if you beat a friend with a 4.107 multiplier a bet of 25 coins will yield roughly 102 coins for a win.

The food that you can buy to fed your pet when the get hungry ranges from simple fruits like apples to food that will make your mouth water like Philly cheese steak subs and miso soup. There is a growing range of items for you to purchase and decorate your pet’s habitat with. Want to set a romantic mood? By her some candles. Or maybe your Panda really gets it Saint Patrick’s Day when you get him a four leaf clover. There are normal items like schools of fish and items that are added for holidays like firecrackers for Chinese New Year. These items, as well as the food, can be bought and then gifted to friends. When you do this the cost of the item is returned to you as a thank you for your kindness. There are currently 22 backgrounds for you to put behind your pet depending on how you see her personality. Is she a little bit of a diva? The spot lighted stage is perfect for her. His your Koala a bridge enthusiast? Let him bask in the splendor of the Golden Gate Bridge. Tiny pet pals are the last thing offered in the market place. These little pets are replicas of the larger ones, but will only display one emotion/pose and you do not need to take care of them. As an example I gave my mini-hedgehog a perpetually curious fox and my girlfriend gave her dragon perpetually sleepy and sleeping mini-dragons. Renkoo says that they plan to add limited and special addition pet palls in the future, so that is something to look out for.

Haikoo Zoo gives you plenty of reasons to come back, whether it’s caring for your pet or a friends, browsing the market for new items to give your pet some flare, or trying to decide exactly what background fits the soul of your little virtual friend. The belly bump, though simple in execution and animation is adorable and oddly addicting.

There are a few things I can think I can think of to improve this app a little better. The promise of another game to add to belly bump would be really nice as well as the ability to drag habitat items around the habitat to position them as they are currently limited in where they can be placed. The app has been having some problems recently with inviting friends to to it; it seems that the Facebook friends list is not showing up as populated. Renkoo is aware of the situation and is working with Facebook to rectify the issue.

The people over at Renkoo know what they are doing and have a clear winner in this app. As long as they stay the course and keep doing what they are doing I don’t see this app getting old anytime soon. This application is available free of charge from Renkoo.

10/10 For perfectly implemented cuteness overdose.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Filed under: Facebook, Reviews | 5 Comments »

The chat feature has been live on Facebook since the 6th of April for some people but it seems like today it has achieved full penetration. You may have noticed this nice non-intrusive aluminum brushed bar at the bottom of your screen that could only look sleeker if it had rounded corners. The bar is pretty long, almost touching both sides of the screen but only the far right side is being used by the chat features, that probably means that we can look forward to other features that will persist from page to page as we navigate Facebook.

There are three sections to the current set up. From left to right, the longest shows how many friends are on-line. Clicking that sprouts a small window above it that shows a thumbnail of your friends profile picture, their name and status if they have one posted on their profile, and a little dot to indicate their status; green for available and a moon if they have been idle for some time. The next rectangle has a little icon of a post with a sign on it and the number of new notifications you have will appear on it. I had seven before I opened it, mostly Haikoo Zoo notifications and a friend acceptance. The last icon is a shadow of a little person with a dot next to it and contains your chat options.

It allows you to update your status from there but I have been able to do to a transport error every time. Weak. A button to go off-line so you do not show as available for chat. Using the “pop out chat” option will bring your chats up into their own window, with the chat on the left with profile picture thumbnails, and the right panes showing your status, your current conversation, and what friends are on-line. The neat this about this is that you can pop out the chat window and then close it and you don’t loose any of the information. Anything you type while it’s off the bar shows up on the bar sprout as well. Other than a self explanatory Help link there is a Settings link which opens up your options to change whether or not mini-feed stories appear in real time in your chat window, toggle whether your on-line friends stay open when you click to talk to another person or if they minimize, and the option to show only the names, and not the profile picture thumbnail of your friends. You can also, once again, choose to make yourself unavailable for chat, or attempt to change your status and get another transport error.

A clarification on the transport error. I have three instances of Facebook open at the moment, my page, the Facebook Blog, and a friends profile. It appears that I can change my status from the chat bar while viewing either my page or my friend’s profile, but I can not from the Facebook Blog even though I have access to the bar and other chat features there. This should be normalized across all Facebook pages that show the bar to prevent confusion.

Two more features that are small but pretty neat. The chat is spell checked as you type if you are running Firefox. I say “if you are running Firefox” because I don’t know if it is a function of the chat app or the browser. The second feature is that if you have multiple websites open in tabs; say you are writing this article and talking to a friend on Facebook, the all tabbed instances of Facebook will flash “new message from <friend name>”.

What it currently does not allow is chat rooming. Allow chats are one to one among people who are already friends. To keep it that way, among friends, and have a chat room there would have to be a filter that allows only people who are mutual friends. Facebook can already show us what friends we have in common with some one else, so this feature may not be that far off. I have no interest in chatting with people I have not already friended, I got over that in 1998. The chat also currently saves your chats in a log for you. You can clear the log, but you can not export it to another place to be saved. But I am also fine with that, as I do not need people have constant access to what I said. If I need to remember something we talked about, there is pen and paper, Google Docs/Calender etc.

What we have here is an expansion of the way Facebook allows us to communicate with our friends. The Inbox and the Wall are great but the chat brings us into the realm of real time communication. We can be sure that there will be more features to follow, I don’t know what they are, but I am going to throw out a prediction of Video Chat. Looking for added functionality in the future.

A special thank you to my friend Brianne for helping test the chat features and giving me permission to use part of our chat in screen shots.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Features, News | No Comments »

The official Facebook platform status feed is reporting that the weekly release was pushed out late last night. Copied from the Push Changes section of the Facebook Developers Wiki:

“r93821 | jtung | 2008-04-15 19:16:40 -0700 (Tue, 15 Apr 2008) | 54 lines

• Bug fix so that when granting an infinite session to a user who already has a valid temporary session with the app, we just change the timeout for the current session instead of granting a new key
• bug 307

r94316 | jleszcze | 2008-04-17 21:23:46 -0700 (Thu, 17 Apr 2008) | 22 lines

• Allows server-side sessions to create/promote session secrets through an added parameter to auth.getSession and the new API function auth.promoteSession, to allow interaction with the client-side (JavaScript) API client library. Note that regular server-side signature logic will still use the application secret.“

I have to admit that I don’t really know what any of that means, but fewer bugs in any program is a good thing.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed under: Facebook, News | No Comments »