New Facebook Timeline Sections Roll Out Worldwide

Facebook has made sections available worldwide, enabling all users to express themselves and share their interests in app-specific boxes on the timeline. Many apps have already taken advantage of the new feature, integrating with sections to provide users with a new way to interact and engage with games, music, movies and much else besides.

Goodreads, Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes have all integrated with sections to enable users to star-rate and categorise books and movies. Sections are tabulated, allowing users to say whether they have read a book or watched a movie, want to do so, or have liked the book/movie on Facebook.

Music apps have also integrated with the new sections feature, so users can now share the songs they listen to and like. Users can also listen to their friends’ favourite songs by clicking on them in the timeline. Facebook believes that sections are better than the now-defunct aggregations, according to the announcement post on the Developers pages:

Sections are […] a more beautiful and lasting way to display your app on timeline compared to aggregations, which we are no longer supporting.

In the announcement post, Facebook also highlights the potential that integrating fitness apps within the timeline could have: friends could motivate one another by sharing fitness regimens. Endomondo, Nike+, Runtastic, and Strava are the app examples given, written above a chart displaying a random user’s weekly running distances.


App developers have the opportunity to be creative with their sections, messing around with tab titles and the content within them. The game Pearl’s Peril, for example, displays a user’s completed levels on the timeline, information similar to that which is shared in the notifications section of the news feed.

At the end of the announcement post, Facebook shares its best practices for app developers looking to take advantage of the new sections feature:

1. Give people a way to add your custom section to timeline: Consider including a URL in your app to give your users a preview of your section and help them decide whether to add it to timeline (see Foursquare example below).
2. Choose the right template for your section: For example, apps with great visual content should use the gallery template to draw people's attention. We also support list and map templates.
3. Focus on quality and completeness before submitting your section for approval: To make the review process simple, submit your section only after making sure your object images and descriptions are complete and look great from the perspective of your users.

According to Facebook’s announcement post, users are already taking full advantage of the new sections feature, adding 200 million items daily. At the time of the posts publication 17 billion songs had been added to music sections via apps or likes.

Do you like Facebook’s new apps sections?       

Facebook Updates Its Page Manager App For iOS Devices

Facebook has rebuilt its Page Manager App to make it “faster and easier to use”, according to the download page in the iTunes app store. Facebook has also added photo filtering and stickers to the app. Only the iOS app has been updated thus far, there is no word yet on when Android users will be able to download the new version.

Facebook has made some changes behind the scenes to improve navigation on the app: scrolling through the news feed is faster and more intuitive; photos can be opened and closed quickly with a single downward swipe.

Previously, users could not edit photos using the app, instead they had to apply filters and make changes to photos in Instagram, or another image editing app, before uploading them to their page in the Page Manager app. Now, iPhone and iPad users can edit the photos as soon as they are taken or uploaded to the app, with a similar array of filters to those available in Instagram.

Page administrators can also add stickers and emojis to messages sent using the app. Facebook started using stickers last month, adding them to Facebook Messenger on iOS devices earlier this week– they were already available to Android users.

Have you used stickers yet? What do you think of them?

Make Your Facebook Profile Business Friendly With Web App

Facewash is a new web app that gives users of Facebook the ability to clear out profanities and cursing from their profile in order to look more professional and business friendly.

A negative and sometimes embarrassing profile on social media can often be the difference between being accepted into the business world, or continuing to be overlooked for a professional role.

Party photos from nights out, bad language, and confusing privacy settings will often cause a bad impression to a potential employer when they begin researching job applicants. This sort of content will now become even more evident due to Facebook’s Graph Search feature.
The Facewash app will search through your Facebook profile once you have connected to it with your account. The app will scan through photos that you’re tagged in, photos that you have posted, comments posted on your wall, status updates, links that you’ve liked and more for anything that resembles offensive content.

Comments such as ‘xxx’ will be flagged up, with users of the app also able to search for specific content or words that they feel may offend someone. This content can then be deleted should they wish to do so.

Although the default that Facewash abides to isn’t perfect, it definitely looks along the basics of what could be considered offensive and negative.

Social media, and in particular your Facebook profile is often visited by businesses when they review applications for a particular role in their company. Having a profile which is politically correct and offers nothing in terms of offense will give a good impression and increase chances of finding work.

Businesses can also profit from the app as their own page could be scrutinised by potential customers for having negative content on display. The company then will be able to distinguish which comments are constructive and which are merely offensive.

To use/experiment with the app, click the following link: Facewash

What do you think of Facewash? Does your profile need cleaning up?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter.

Blogger Buys 1.1 Million Facebook User Emails for $5

Bulgarian blogger Bogomil Shopov wrote Tuesday that he had purchased a spreadsheet containing 1.1 million Facebook user IDs and email addresses for $5. The data was allegedly scraped by third-party applications and offered for sale on a website called Gigbucks by a user named “mertem.” Shopov verified that the emails did correspond to the Facebook user IDs, most of them private. He had even identified people he knew in the list. The next day, he was contacted by Facebook’s Platform Policy Team.

“Hi Bogomil,
We’d like to set up a call with you to discuss a recent blog post of yours. Could you please provide a time and a phone number that works with your schedule?
Thanks,
Platform Policy Team
Facebook”

According to Shopov, Facebook wanted to reclaim the data and investigate the leak and sale (clear violations of the network’s terms of service), but their discussion was somewhat cloak and dagger. He summarized the exchange in a subsequent blog post — the exact thing Facebook asked him not to do.

“Now we would like you to send us this file, delete it, tell us if you have given a copy of it to someone, give us the website from which you bought it including all transactions with it and the payment system and remove a couple of things from your blog. Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation; it is a secret that we are even having this conversation.”

Shopov confirmed these events to Mashable, and elaborated on his dealings with Facebook. He has spoken to them again since his latest post.


“I had a call with them last night [about] why I am writing those things on my blog,” Shopov tells Mashable in an email. “They didn’t mean to leave this impression on me, and we agreed on how to transfer the data to them. I gave them the data today via their secure system. I promised to delete the data, and I did.” Shopov shared this screenshot of the secure data transfer back to Facebook.

“[The seller] said the data came from a Facebook app, and I can believe that, because we checked a couple of profiles and there was no e-mail address present. This info cannot be scraped from the Facebook website,” Shopov explains.
While the seller’s listing for the data has been removed by Gigbucks, you can view a Google cached version here.





Shopov also forwarded the text of an email he received from “Josef” at Gigbucks, explaining that this listing was in clear violation of their terms.

“Hi,
I am the admin of Gigbucks and wanted to let you know that we have
deleted the Facebook profiles from our server as well as banned the
user account “mertem” for violating our terms and conditions that
clearly state that such thins may not be offered on Gigbucks. 

We manually approve each gig and I don’t know how this one slipped
through the crack. I apologize and we will take steps to improve our
gig reviewing process to make sure such things will never be posted on
Gigbucks again.
Please let me know if there is anything else that we can do.”

At the time of this writing, Facebook has not responded to our request for comment.
UPDATE: A Facebook representative has responded to our request for comment: “Facebook is vigilant about protecting our users from those who would try to expose any form of user information. In this case, it appears someone has attempted to scrape information from our site. We have dedicated security engineers and teams that look into and take aggressive action on reports just like these. We continue to investigate this specific individual.”

Protecting Yourself

This issue obviously raises privacy concerns for Facebook users. It’s about the privileges third-party apps have when connected to your account. Most have access to private data in your profile (email address, user behavior) and some allow your friends’ apps to access this data as well. It’s mostly used to make the experiences around apps and games more social. But it would be relatively easy for a malicious app developer to scrape the information into a database and sell it to marketers and spammers — the likely intention in this case.
How can you protect yourself?

• Be mindful of the apps you connect to your Facebook account. Only use apps you trust from established publishers, and even then, don’t connect many of them.
• Check your apps often and remove unwanted or unknown applications. Go to your Privacy Settings, click Ads, Apps and Websites and remove apps that you’re not using or that may have been connected to your account unintentionally.
• Control what your friends’ apps can see about you. Even if you don’t have apps connected to your account, the private information you only share with friends might be accessible to the apps they are using. Turn this data off by editing the settings in How people bring your info into apps they use.
• Turn off the Facebook Platform. If you never use any apps or games, you can completely disable the Facebook Platform, which will cut your private data off from third party developers completely. Click Turn off your ability to use apps… in the first section.

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Screenshots courtesy of Bogomil Shopov.