The Facebook Journal

There were a lot of rumours yesterday about this morning’s Facebook announcement but none of them were really spot on.

Facebook announced 3 major things this morning:

1. Download Your Information

2. Dashboard for Connected Apps

3. New Groups

Some sources still say that this is just phase one of their “Lockdown” and there’s more to come soon. We’ll just have to wait and see.

From The Telegraph to TechChrunch to your Facebook news stream. The rumours are spreading. Fast.
According to some reports, Facebook has been in a “Lockdown”, working 24/7 on something secret. These rumours started a couple of months ago when Digg founder Kevin Rose tweeted about rumours that Google is working on a social network to challenge Facebook called Google Me. The tweet has been taken down, video below.

The speculations that Facebook is planning something big caught the attention of the masses when Facebook started sending out the invitations for the event which said that the event is starting 10am on Wednesday and that lunch will be served, meaning that the announcement will take quite some time..

Rumours started escalating, bloggers started predicting, Facebook said nothing.

The main 2 rumours are:
1. Facebook is revamping the chat, adding support for video calls via Skype deal.

2. Facebook has a new design.

The more uncommon ones are:
1. Facebook is going public
2. The launch of Facebook Questions
3. Facebook phone
4. Facebook Photos

Below is a video of Kevin Rose talking about Google Me

Facebook Journal is giving you the opportunity to write about your own Facebook app/game!
You can post a review of your new app or game, write about recent updates or improvements. To do so, create an account on The Facebook Journal here, log in and start posting! Your posts will be reviewed by our team and should be live in about 1 business day.

You can even include one Google AdSense ad at the bottom of your post!

So what are you waiting for? Write your posts, increase traffic to your apps/games, spread the word and start earning money on The Facebook Journal today!

For more info and tips on how to write, click here.

Facebook announced about their new Privacy Settings earlier today. Facebook says that the changes are made to simplify the Facebook privacy settings and give users more control,  but according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation these changes are made to push users to publicly share even more information than before.

For app developers these changes will be very useful. Users won’t be able to hide information such as gender and friend lists (and other Publicly Available Information – PAI) from apps, they can’t opt out of the Facebook API (by the “Do not share any information about me” setting) anymore and even if a user hasn’t granted permission to any apps the PAI of the user will still be available through the friends of the user who use the application.

According to Chris Cox (VP, Product Management) “everyone” will be the new default for status updates, which will make Facebook more like Twitter and give greater access to information for developers. This means if Facebook allowed Google to pull user status updates for its new real-time search,  Facebook could have replaced and even eliminated Twitter.

Below is a video demonstrating these new changes.

Google announced today, at their Search event,  that its new real-time search will also include status updates from Public Profile Pages, aka Facebook Pages.

No word yet if it will include Application Profiles or not, but for now it certainly won’t include user Profile updates.

This can really increase the significance of Facebook Pages and events like the streaming of Alicia Keys’ new album on her Facebook fan page can be accessible (and searchable) for a broader audience.

Google Realtime Search