Facebook's New features

You know when it’s going to be a rough week, is when Facebook throws a hissy-fit, and you have to resort to actually writing essays that are due in later next week.

Part of a series of updates, many users of the world’s largest social network will have noticed brand new features across their profile page and news feed. Seemingly small updates, these are ultimately designed to save time and increase access to the end user.

But Facebook has not learned from past mistakes. Though a free service, the customers in this case, over 500 million of them, are not pleased, with a series of borks and screw-ups which is causing the site to become close to unusable.

So far today, I’ve personally struggled with:

• The notification counter displays zero and does not shift until you click on it.
• When you do, it displays the usual list of notifications temporarily before swifting you away to the full notification page.
• People updating posts half way through because they have yet to discover how to drop down to a new line with the Enter-to-post feature (it’s Shift + Enter, by the way).
• Event pages and group pages are not displaying the wall, even though notifications are still flowing in.

And for those who have recently updated to the new messaging feature that Facebook is slowly rolling out, many users are struggling with a great deal of problems.

• • Each time you click on a person to chat to in your online contacts, it creates a new chatting tab at the bottom of the page, without any capability to send messages.
  • Or, if the user can do, users cannot close the window down.
  • If you’re lucky, your messages do go through but then yourmessages suddenly do not display. But, you are lucky to some extent in that all chat messages go through the Messages area, but you get a flash and a buzz from your mobile phone every time that happens.
  A lesson from the younger generation to Facebook. People don’t like change. Younger people as an innate feature of their personalities, on the most part, do not like change.
  It’s this sort of indiscriminate attitude towards your userbase demographics that will turn people off the site. It’s already forced me to log out for the night and resort to the mobile interface on my phone.
  Frankly, I think many would rather the entire site was down than struggling to cope with the frustrating string of failures and site screw-ups.

Facebook's Brand New Features

3 New Features were announced;

1 - Group Chat - The ability to now group chat with your friends on your normal chat feed, not just from within a group

2 - Chat Re-Design - From now on, provided you have a wide enough screen you'll have a dynamic list of friends on a side bar

3 - Video Chat! Yes Facebook have announced their integration with Skype and free instant video chat on the site!

Rihanna Overtakes Lady Gaga in Facebook Fans

When it comes to Facebook fans for female celebrities, it appears that Lady Gaga is now under Rihanna’s umbrella.

As reported by Mashable, Rihanna overtook Lady Gaga to claim the title of most popular woman on Facebook, with 40,591,705 fans at the time of this post, compared with 40,560,858 for Gaga.

Both female crooners still dwarf President Barack Obama, who totaled a mere 22,031,452 Facebook fans at the time of this post.

Both women are undeniably red-hot in terms of popularity, so why the surge for Rihanna? She and her staff appear to be relying on consistency, rather than trying to score a huge gain from one single post. Over the past few weeks, her page has been updated 2-3 times daily, with content including quizzes that involve fans, tour updates, plugs for her other social media ventures (Twitter, GetGlue, merchandise, and links to stories about her from other online sources.

Then again, Gaga has done much of the same on her Facebook page, and this could just be a temporary setback.

Besides, “Mama Monster” still has Twitter to fall back on, with 11,647,769 followers at the time of this post, for the No. 1 overall ranking, versus just 6,111,538 and No. 13 for Rihanna.