It seems that while the company was filing their submission to go public, the engineers and designers haven’t taken their foot off the pedal. Today also marks the release of an updated photo viewer. Photos posted on users walls open to a lightbox when clicked, but instead of comments (and ads) being displayed at the bottom, they are now located to the right.

Sound familiar? Yep, those social networking sluts will know that Google+ treats photos in a very similar way. The difference being that G+ photos display larger, in more a full-screen mode, but essentially there’s a strong similarity between the two.

What do you think? Like the new style, or is this yet another change users will revolt against ?

We’re all too familiar with the hot buzz words and catch phrases in the technology industry. This video below pokes fun at the heart of technology, where a lot of startups come from, Silicon Valley.

The video features classics like “I retweeted it, I re-blogged it and I checked into it” and “They don’t even have a foursquare venue for their appartment.” My personal favourite is “Is the internet down”, but think they missed one – “OMG twitter’s down”.

It’s a light hearted, amusing 1 minute and 46 seconds, so relax on this Australia day and have a laugh between beers.

Social ranking site Klout is currently experiencing an issue with Facebook data that is seriously reducing the scores of users.

We’re experiencing a temporary issue with Facebook data that may result in lower score this morning, we’re working quickly to resolve this.

While the problem is likely to be fixed soon, it is however very confronting for users to see such a dramatic drop. There’s been a lot of contention about the relevance or accuracy of Klout scores, but for those that care, scores matter. After Klout confirmed the issue was with Facebook, user comments are indicating that drops have been as much as 40 points. One user reporting their score of 53 went down to 13 overnight, and another 47 down to 25.

If the issue is just with Facebook, then its surprising how much weight Klout puts on that network compared to other connected. Personally my posts to the blog and twitter are far more influential content posted to Facebook. For those people that use Klout to filter content like twitter streams, a lot of content won’t be seen with the significant reduction in scores.

Personally I’ve been question the value I place on Klout,. While the idea of ranking social influence is great in concept, Australian Perks are pretty much non-existent. Also in the past week, despite gaining world-wide attention and over 1 Million views on YouTube video, my score actually went down (before this error).

Update
Klout have posted an update on the issue, detailing the cause (error with Facebook scores). Unfortunately the issue still exists, but as an interim measure they have returned Klout scores to what they were 1 day ago.

More at Klout on Facebook.

The world of location-based services and check-ins is certainly a fierce place to live. CNN are reporting that Facebook have purchased Gowalla, although there’s still no official post on the Gowalla blog. Known best for its gorgeous UI, and high profile investors like Kevin Rose, it seems none of that was a match for Facebook.

When Facebook launched their check-in feature last year, they were careful to invite ‘partners’ Gowalla and Foursquare, the two big players in the space at the time. With a user base of 800 million users, all but the die-hard users began moving their checkin behaviour to Facebook.

Seen by more of their friends, with more opportunity for comments, meetups and integration with an app you already use daily, it was a winning formula. While Gowalla originally started with a point of difference (collecting and leaving virtual items) the company ended up removing that.

Gowalla suffered not only from the introduction of Facebook Places, but were also lagged behind Foursquare’s rapid growth in user adoption. Foursquare offers an easy way to push check-ins to Facebook, meaning you can tap their deal system and post to your existing network there (assuming they all didn’t move to Facebook as well).

So let this be a lesson to any Industry, when Facebook decides to make a move in your direction, you’re headed for a world of hurt. The best hope you have is that they do the right thing and acquire your talent. In this instance, Facebook will take on most of Gowalla’s employees.

More information @ CNNMoney.

If you head to Facebook right now, you may see a new feature on your Wall, sorting. After Facebook recently changed the way information on your Wall was ordered (Top stories / Highlighted stories at top), a large number of users were unhappy. This option for sorting solves that issue and essentially returns your Facebook Wall to it’s previous state.

Recent Stories First: Stories will appear in the order they were posted. Highlighted stories will be marked with a blue corner.

Highlighted Stories First: Highlighted stories you haven’t seen yet will appear at the top of your News Feed. (If you don’t see highlighted stories, it’s because there aren’t any new highlighted stories since your last visit.)

More @ Facebook.

We all over Digg v4 ? Good, time to move on. This morning Digg have taken the wraps off a brand new feature called Newsrooms. While Digg’s front page is driven by the community, there is issues with leaving content select to the masses – just ask twitter trends.

Digg Newsrooms, currently in private beta, aims to offer a more refined and relevant source of news. By following the Newsrooms of your favourite topic, Technology, Science, Politics and many others, you get stories from influential people in that area.

Once you dive into a topic, the most influential users in that genre are displayed complete with an overall ranking, with a breakdown of how they achieved that number. This is very Klout-esk, a service that ranks influential people who are socially active, which come to think of it, suspiciously lacks Digg support.

To get Newsrooms, you need to have signed up for the beta, if you didn’t crawl to a Facebook friend who did. Facebook connection is required for Digg Newsrooms. Only time will tell if new features like Newsrooms will bring back the core Digg audience, but engaging a leaderboard is something Digg was heavily criticized for removing.

If you’re a developer and keen to take advantage of the newly updated Open Graph, then your should check out the Facebook Developer’s site. While the keynote is still going, the dev site has already been updated.

Open graph will also support ratings. This means that application interactions posted to user’s walls, will provide analytics back to developers about what is most engaging and most annoying. This information can inform future development decisions.

Those who aren’t developers may also want to check out the site, as it contains a lot of information and images about today’s F8 announcements.

More info @ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/

Music service Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek took the stage to discuss the way Spotify are taking advantage of Facebook to allow users to discover new music. “Today is a big day for music” and “a big day for the music industry.”

Ek dropped a couple of bombshells without much reaction. He announced Facebook now has 800Million users, up from the previous 750 Million in July. He went on to say that Spotify will be available around the world. Currently Spotify only supports the US, UK, Sweden, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, France and Finland.

We’ll need some further clarification on just what Ek meant by his statements, particularly if that includes Australia, lets hope so. Discovering new music via your Facebook friends is a neat idea, but the experience will be really broken if we end up seeing ‘I’m sorry your friend lives in a unsupported country’. In fact some of the best ways to discover new music is to watch the US or UK charts, so it makes sense this would be supported.

We’re all too familiar with how messed up media licensing is, something that seriously needs to be sorted for the innovation of tomorrow to take place. Facebook’s slide of initial media partners working on the new Open Graph, doesn’t showcase any Australian companies.. Alarm bells.

Application developers can now use verbs in their applications. Previously the Facebook Open Graph only allowed for a limited set of ‘Likes’, but now you can ‘do’ something with ‘something’. Facebook believe this change will lead to a completely new class of social apps that weren’t possible before.

Clicking ‘Like’ on a Book or Movie will become ‘Jason watched Transformers 3: Darkside of the Moon’ for example. This makes a lot of sense, but don’t expect this immediately, developers will need some time to update their apps.

Another important change in the Open Graph, is that applications won’t interrupt your use of an application with an annoying permission request. Zuckerberg says we should think about adding an application as joining an application and your Timeline. The initial permission request will essentially grant access to an application to publish updates to your wall. A lot of applications already require this to use the app, but require multiple requests. 

Having application permissions dealt with in a single dialog does simplify things, it does set alarm bells about just how much it will post. Of course if an app is posting content you don’t want, you can revoke permissions in your settings.

Facebook have just pulled the trigger on their latest UI refresh. Their continued persistence on marching forward wether users want or demand it is relentless. The changes include an change to the News Feed, It now distinguishes between the most recent stories and the Top Stories, depending on how long its been since your last login.

The dedicated update box is now gone, replaced with a set of streamlined update options – ‘Update Status, Add Photo and Ask Question. The Add Photo option seems miss-named as the options provided once you click it, also include video. Gone is the separate ‘Add Link’ option, instead this is just done by pasting the link in the status update.

Chat on the right is now split into two sections, the top being status updates from friends currently online, making it easier to engage with those are, or have recently been online. There’s no refreshing here, the top section is live and flows like a river with updates.

Photos have also been updated, with a gallery of photos now displaying in a tiled design.

The timing of the release is interesting, being a couple of days before the F8 developer conference on Friday. If they felt the need to push this change out prior to the conference, that only gives weight to the rumoured ‘big changes’ that are coming. Hold on tight people, could be a big FB week.

Judging from early reaction online people aren’t happy, not surprising, change is hard and with 750 Million users, you can’t please everyone. The change is jarring initially, but seriously isn’t that different, just live with it for a while people. At the end of the day you don’t have a choice of the old design. Live with it.