CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Places today. We’ve known this has been in the pipeline for some time now but today the details were revealed. Facebook places allow users to check-in at different locations and share that with their friends. So basically Facebook is adding only one new piece of functionality that’s not already available with other services. This is the ability to check-in not only yourself, but also other friends that either can’t be bothered themselves or don’t have compatible devices. What is most compelling about Facebook offering location is that it’s Facebook. 500 million people and pretty much everyone you know is already on Facebook, unlike early location-service adopters.

What was originally thought to be the death of existing location-based services like Facebook and Gowalla, turned out to be very different. Rather than the 500 pound gorilla squash competition like a bug, they’ve decided to partner with Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp. Now admittedly these services didn’t really have much of a choice, it was partner or be put out of business. Facebook also announced an API for Facebook Places that allows for 3rd parties (or partners) to utilise location information coming from Facebook.

Image credit: Tech Crunch

All this is great except for the fact that its only launching in the United States. Worse yet, Facebook don’t have any timeline for an international release. Even more temptatious is the release of an update iPhone application complete with the Places menu option that results in a disappointing “This feature will be available in your region soon. Thankyou for your patience”. Frankly my patience with US-only launches is running out.

We’re living in an international marketplace and online companies are operating in it, yet we continue to put up these false walls at a nations borders. Understandably technology rollouts need to be tested, but this relates to volume, not geography. After the revelation that there’s no roadmap for an international rollout, my interest in the announcement died. 

More info @ http://www.facebook.com/places/

Twitter is unique in the public functionality that it offers and when you don’t have access to the collective knowledge of your followers, you do feel somewhat naked. It’s surprising in just a couple of years how dependant we’ve become on twitter, a service that often feels optional, when you don’t have it, it feels, very, very necessary.

In the early days of twitter users became used to constant outages as growth pains plagued twitter infrastructure. As time went by, the service became solid and dependable, so with that as the benchmark, day-to-day twitter was reliable. Naturally growth spikes like the World Cup caused issues, but why in the last 24-48 hours ? There’s no massive event happening around the world that would explain severe outages, rate limit restrictions and sections of their API like Oauth being completely offline. Fortunately late this afternoon twitter was back online and users were tweeting once again.

More @ http://status.twitter.com

Social bookmarking site Digg.com has begun sending out thousands of invites to users who registered for the Alpha. These will come in batches, probably a good idea given the first round brought the site to a grind. After receiving the email below, I tried to login but it went nowhere. If this happens for you, basically just try again later.

Now the login is sorted, the on boarding process begins.

Naturally its still Alpha, so there’s going to be some issues. Good to see Digg’s developers have a sense of humour.

And now the new interface…

Digg Feed Submission verification code: fc2a7a14eecf4cbabb85727ac672b773

More soon.

In this publisher preview video above, Digg’s Founder and CEO Kevin Rose explains the upcoming features in version 4. The big change comes from the way the Digg system works. Currently you Digg stories up when you like them, if enough people do that they make it to the front page. That’s an oversimplification but you get the idea. In Digg v4 your homepage will be filled with a Facebook-style feed of what your friends are digging so if you haven’t got many friends on Digg, you better find some. There will be an transition or on-boarding process for existing users where you select people to follow from a suggested user list similar to that of Twitter.

Naturally there’s still going to be the Top News section that does feature the most popular stories Digg-wide, but the focus has certainly shifted to having your friends be the focus for surfacing new and exciting content.

For publishers (like techAU) we’ll have the ability to auto-publish an RSS feed to Digg, removing the hassle for end users to submit stories manually. While we’re on that topic of submissions, if you’ve ever submitted a story to Digg before, you’ll know it’s a fairly lengthy process. In Digg 4. 0 submissions will become a lot easier. Simply submit the link to the content you want to share, choose a thumbnail and category and your done. This simplification is sure to increase the amount of content submitted – smart move Digg.

At the end of the video Kevin says “there’ll be a lot more features we’ll talk about over the coming weeks and months”, so you could assume from that statement that we won’t be seeing the release of 4.0 for quite some time.

via TechCrunch

With a single master setting, you can set all privacy options in bulk to Everyone, Friends or Friends of Friends. Those who want more control can go in and set a Custom privacy level.

Surprisingly Facebook are making it simple to turn off ALL 3rd party applications. Whilst this may sound like a great idea, just take a second to think about what that really means. I’m a big fan of being able to post to Facebook from 3rd party apps like TweetDeck, but hate rubbishy apps like Farmville. If I was to turn off 3rd party apps, it would definitely stop Farmville, but also TweetDeck. So I’ll still need to go through app-at-a-time and customise that.

If users begin to block their information from 3rd party apps and services, this will harm Facebook’s ability to earn revenue from these users. It seems Facebook have taken the approach that it’s better they have these people on Facebook, rather than not and potentially earn revenue from their friends and family. Now ads will clearly still be shown to users who opt out of sharing their information, but a consequence may be much less targeted / useful ads.

The new privacy controls will be rolled out periodically, so if you can’t see it at http://facebook.com/privacy now, check back in the next couple of days. Spend the time to set your privacy levels, hopefully this will be the last change for a while.

After the privacy scare last week, Facebook disabled their chat feature. The “Preview My Profile” feature allowed some users Facebook chat sessions be able to be seen by others.

Good news for FB addicts, Facebook has re-enabled this feature. Go get your chat on.

Home screen
After launching the app, you’ll land at the Home screen. This is a dashboard into your contacts latest Facebook updates. The screen is divided into Latest Updates, Breaking News, Latest Images, Links and Video. Using this as an additional monitor while working on your computer works quite well. The app auto-updates periodically letting you keen an eye on Facebook updates while remaining productive.

People
The People screen gives you an easy way to browse through your friends profiles. The page loads in thumbnails of your friends drawn from their current Facebook profile picture. This is a very nice, visual way to browse your friends list, actually this does a better job of presenting friends than Facebook.com.

Photos
To check out your friends photos, just hit the Photos screen. Probably my biggest issue with this app is the fact you can get a single aggregated stream of photos from your friends ordered by date and time. Hopefully this gets added in the future.

Events
The events page shows a present icon on every day that has on or more events on. Your contacts birthdays are added automatically, again this is a feature that’s actually better than the Facebook website. When you select a day with an event on, a description of each event is shown at the bottom of the screen. I do think having the ability to RSVP to events right from the app would be valuable.

Profile
Naturally the Profile screen shows your latest tweets, profile picture and information, as well as a mini-scrollable thumbnail list of your friends.

From any screen of the application you can update your status by clicking on the ‘Update your states’ icon in the top right hand corner.

Overall Sobees for Facebook is a nice application, providing the best interface to Facebook on the iPad other than going to Facebook.com in Safari. The application doesn’t support notifications, but you can like and comment on friends’ updates. That said once the official Facebook app arrives, I’m likely to jump ship for more functionality, at least they have a benchmark now.

More @ Sobees

Old photo size (left) compared to the new size. (Note that actual photos are larger; this shows scale only.)

There is a caveat for external applications that upload photos to Facebook (i.e. Windows Live Photo Grallery, iPhoto etc).

All uploads on Facebook.com will support the new photo size, but uploads made from some external applications may continue to use the previous size.

This will likely be remedied with an update to the application or plugin.

Ultimately this is a good thing, the limited photo size has been a contentious issue for many, particularly photographers eager to show off their work. Sites like Flickr allow photos to be uploaded and viewed in a variety of sizes including full resolution.

Stop! Before privacy advocates rush to burn twitter at the stake (assuming they’re finished with Google Buzz), please remember this latest move is entirely optional. When logging into http://twitter.com you’ll be prompted with a screen that reads ‘Be found on twitter’ and asks you confirm your profile information.

Twitter say they are aiming to increase discovery of your profile. I already have a public profile, so for me, this was a no brainer – the more followers the better.

Update
Post updated. Thanks to James for pointing out your email won’t be displayed publicly.

Well you sure like your facebook don’t you. After the launch of their (first) 2010 UI redesign, Facebook has just made the announcement they have reached 400 Million Active Users. A phenomenal number, and phenomenal growth, with the 350 million announcement only a few months back.

The next milestone is surely the big half a billion users, could it happen in 2010 ?

More @ Facebook.

Here’s a handy guide as to what’s new in the update.

Learn more about it @ Facebook

This is quite an amazing statistic for a country of 22,135,317 people, more than 1/3 of the population.

Via Laurel Papworth

What used to be a very useful feature of Twitter – Trends, is now mostly filled with uninteresting rubbish, instead of being an insight into the most discussed topics online. Looking to solve this issue and make trends more appropriate to your part of the world, Twitter has just launched Local Trends to the public.

Sadly the localisation is extremely limited with only 6 countries available and the rest of the world being slumped into the all too familiar “Worldwide” mess.

If your country or city missed out (most will have) then Twitter has a message for you – “Don’t see your location? We’re working on it.” With only 15 cities this feature is clearly undercooked.

A more productive workaround for now is to use a search like “Albury OR Wodonga” for your city / town and surrounding area to see the conversations happening in your local area.

If you do happen to live in one of the “lucky” countries or cities, then you can see Local Trends by logging into http://twitter.com

Could Bill Gates soar to the top position on twitter ? With news that he’s officially on twitter spreading like wildfire, his follower count continues to grow at an astonishing rate. In a matter of hours, he’s gone from 0 followers, to over 100,000 in one day.

Head over to http://twitter.com/billgates and hit the refresh button on your browser to watch how fast they’re piling on. Expect this rate to be sustained for the next few weeks as more tweets and blogs help spread the world. I predict he will become one of the top people on twitter, if not THE top.

So what’s the world’s richest man got to say ? Well his first tweet is a tip of the hat to his geek past – “Hello World.” There’s also news about his work at the Bill and Melinda foundation and the disaster in Haiti.

He’s only following 40 people right now, including powerful people like Barack Obama, but also some more interesting accounts from the tech community – Ina Fried from cNet and also TechCrunch. Apparently Bill’s also a fan of Ashley Tisdale

Something else to watch with interest, is Gates’ first hand exposure to the power of twitter, a service his beloved Microsoft does not own. Could we see a buyout or investment of twitter by Microsoft in the not to distant future ?

Ultimately, it’s an import celebrity for twitter to get on board and an important platform Gates to use to hopefully benefit humanity.

Update
Today the count is over 250,000 followers on twitter. Add to that his Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/BillGates has 58,817 fans. He’s also now posting blog entries at http://www.gatesnotes.com/

Apparently it’s time for Titter app updates. We got Tweetie 2.1 on the iPhone yesterday, today comes the latest version of TweetDeck. Version 0.32 add support for LinkedIn, Twitter Lists, Geo-location, Twitter’s version of Retweet and more.

For the full list of updates, check out TweetDeck.com.