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.

Rather than write a thousand words about the app, it’s much more impressive just to show you in screen shots.

News Feed

Friends

Search

Photos
 

Mini-view

Windows 7 support

Actually what you can’t see from the screen shots is the sweet transition animations between screens.

Get it yourself at – http://www.fishbowlclient.com/

TweetDeck, your time to shine is now over. There’s a new kid on the block and it’s Seesmic for Windows. Those familiar with the twitter client war will know Seesmic Desktop has been available in Windows for months now. The difference this time is it’s built as a native Windows app (using WPF) rather than Adobe’s AIR platform.

One of the biggest criticisms of TweetDeck is it’s heavy resource usage, Seesmic Desktop for Windows seems much lighter, so it should run better if your on a lower-end machine.

Running on Windows 7, it’s got the nice list of features:

• Window transparency effects
• Support for Aero snap
• Multiple monitor support
• Multiple Account support
• Draggable columns
• List support
• Modify search columns
• Customisable URL shortener / image uploader

On the negative side, you can’t resize the columns and there’s no Facebook integration, something I really hope is added in the future. Unfortunately there’s also no use of Windows 7 Jump Lists.

Below is a gallery of images from the application.

Profile pane

Browser-type Search box

Modify your search

Tabbed controls
 

Services Options

If you want to check it out for yourself, just head over to http://seesmic.com

This morning I was greeted with a new option inside Facebook – Live Feed. This turns your news feed into an auto-update stream. This is a great addition, something I’ve wanted for a long time. I often run multiple browser windows across multiple monitors which let me get updated information at a glance. Now I can add Facebook to that list.

If you want to keep exercising your clicking finger, then there’s still the option to view the News Feed in it’s traditional fashion, and let you click refresh when your ready.

My only wish now is that Google Reader would follow suit.

Many of us are probably most familiar with the idea of liking status updates on Facebook. Well the latest on the social bandwagon is Google Reader. Not only can you Favourite and Share a RSS Feed item, but now you can also Like it.

These Like’s are public, so you can get profile information about other readers who also enjoy that content.

Do you think you’ll use this feature ?

Today (June 28 US time), round 2 of the Facebook username land rush begins. On one hand we have those users who were late to the game and signed up after June 9th, 2009 will now be able to create a username. There’s also those pages with less than 1,000 fans (and more than 25) will also be able to set usernames.

Of course this being round 2, those of you looking to secure a username today may be out of luck, with millions of names already taken.

There’s about 4 hours to go, so should be around 2pm AEST.

Update
Facebook have increased the minimum fans for page usernames to 100.

Update 2
Facebook usernames, round 2 has now gone live. I’m very happy to have secured http://facebook.com/techAU for the fan page.

More @ http://facebook.com/username

The Government has just announced a new website www.gov2.net.au which is the destination for a new Government 2.0 Taskforce to publish information.

They’re beginning with a crowdsourcing competition to design the banner / logo for the site. You can get more information about the competition here – http://gov2.net.au/banner-competition/

This is a new, very positive side of the government, one that claims to have more transparency and seems to have representatives that understand the benefits of using social media. There’s been some great quotes from the forum (live streamed and discussed on twitter with #publicsphere), such as “Top down is no longer the best model of government".

Sick of telling people to go to facebook, search for your name, then sorting through the hundreds of entries ? Then get yourself over to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and if your lucky, no one else has taken your name. If they have, then of course you do get the alternatives like email signups.

I very happy to have landed http://www.facebook.com/jasoncartwright but when trying to get /techAU for my page, I was met with a “techAU is not eligible for a username at this time. In the future, techAU will be able to set a username.”

I’m assuming that’s due to my fan page not yet having 1,000 fans.