According to the official post on the Facebook Developer blog, they arrived at this decision because it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain these pages. These app profile pages are automatically generated and similar in appearance to the Facebook pages, but they do differ in features such as Insights, APIs and distribution channels.

Angry Birds Facebook app profile page is empty but still exists to support the app

While all apps have a Facebook profile, most of them do not use this page. This has increasingly become the case as more and more businesses choose to have custom Facebook tabs and welcome pages, which require an app to be created but whose profile page should ideally remain hidden to avoid confusing users.

A banner indicating that these pages are soon to be deleted will now be displayed to admins at the top of their App Profile Pages.

If an admin has an eligible Facebook Page – that is, a Page matching the app name and of the Product/App category – the Likes can be transferred to that page. Once the Likes have been transferred the page administrators will be able continue to publish updates to users from the Facebook page. However, the content of the App Profile Pages will not be transferred. The contents such as photos, posts, insights, will have to be manually downloaded and then uploaded again. All this will have to be done before using the “migrate” button. Once the ‘migrate’ button has been clicked, all data on that page will be deleted.

The migration process can take upto seven days, and it may be several hours thereafter before any activity is seen on the page. If no action is taken before the first of February, the app profile page will be deleted and all its traffic will then be directed to the app.

Facebook will also remove all related graph API object connections on the 1st of March 2012.

New apps will no longer automatically get an app profile page. They will have to create a Facebook page and will be presented the option to do so easily during the app creation process.

The very first thing users will notice about the Facebook app is that it looks and functions a lot more like the website. Notifications are immediately visible and layers are used to provide instant views of friend requests, messages and notifications.

Facebook’s old Android app was notoriously slow, had multiple screens each of which took long to load even for simple functions and did not have a very intuitive interface. Even something as fundamental as viewing pictures and commenting on them was hidden and required users to know exactly where to touch to show the comment option.

It is now much quicker and easier for users to share photos, and messages as well as to navigate. According to a post on the Facebook blog, with this new app, photos and albums will be twice as fast as before. It will also be easier for users to edit their captions and view comments, both of which were tricky features to use in the old app.

Messages and notifications will now be placed at the top of the page, so users will be able to access them and respond tot hem without leaving the page.

Similarly, a new menu button on the top left corner of the app drops down a menu that enables users to access their news feeds, groups, games and apps with a single click, instead of having to leave the news stream and then go to the main menu.

These new features are for Android 1.8 and require Android 1.5 or later versions. The app continues to be available for free on the Android Market and still does not feature any Facebook ads.

Mobile Ads En Route?

Given that over 350 million active users (43% of Facebook’s total user base) currently access Facebook through their mobile devices, the platform is extremely important for the social network. It is no wonder then, that they would strive to make the user experience as good as it is on desktops.

It will also be no surprise when they do start monetising the medium and launch a mobile advertising service.

The search giant has been running trials of this app on Sprint phones and they are now ready to roll out the app to all Sprint Nexus S 4G phones with an over-the-air update.

So far, they have only tested the app with Citi, MasterCard, and First Data. However, now they are ready to add other partners including Visa, American Express and Discover, to this service. It is not yet known when these cards will become functional on Wallet, as technical details are being worked out.

Once users download the wallet app to their phone, they can use it to make payments through NFC technology instead of having to carry several credit cards.

This service is still in its infancy, as it works only on one Sprint phone, and is compatible with only a limited number of credit cards. Also, the number of terminals compatible with this technology is a very small percentage of the total number of terminals in use.

Google aims to be able to let users use this app for all credit cards, and is also working to make the feature compatible with several other handsets. They also hope to increase the number of terminals compatible with this technology in the near future.

While Google Wallet is compatible on the Sprint network, the other popular networks, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, are working with several credit card companies to create their own digital wallet too.

These apps can be of great use to residents of the city as well as to tourists. Since the mobile apps are available to users at all times, it is a great way for people to make enquiries about the city and get up to date information even when they are on the go.

The ‘311 feature’ which is a built in app is very commonly used, according to Andy Sparks, UI and project and sales manager for eproximiti, a software development firm specializing in the health care industry and municipalities.

According to him since cameras and GPS facility are generally available in all smart phones, this app can be used to find out not only about events taking place in the city but also current details of graffiti information about potholes and bad roads, or fallen trees in some area and the like.

Earlier, information about such incidents could only be reported through phone calls and computers, but these apps on smart phones have simplified this process to a great extent. According to Andy Sparks, these apps can also be used to spread information about news initiatives being taken up in the region and increase citizen participation through increased awareness.

Some of the cities which have already introduced such local apps are Baltimore, New Orleans, Ottawa and Charlotte.

A well known mobile app called ‘Proximitips’ functions as a hyper-local social magazine, that not only provides news reviews and promotions but also has facilities for purchases and bookings.

This app can be used through street name city name or suburb. The app also allows users to interact with each other thus making the information more interesting and engaging.

Proximitips has been developed in London’s Tech City, and is available in throughout Europe covering 125 million places of interest.

Microsoft, Apple and Oracle have come together to buy old patents of Nortel. Having done that, they are now asking manufacturers to pay a fee of $15 for every Android system they wish to use on their mobile devices. This fee makes it more expensive for phone manufacturers to use the Android apps in their phones, compared to the Windows Phone 7.

Google’s official blog claims that the imposition of this “tax” for these dubious patents is a means of fighting Google through litigation rather than competing by developing their own patent-worthy technology.

The U.S. Department of Justice should ask Microsoft and its partners to license the said patents at a reasonable price as it does not approve of the acquisition of patents as an anti-competitive tool.

In the meantime, Microsoft has responded to this allegation, saying that Google had also been invited to bid jointly for these patents, but had refused.

Google, in turn, replied saying that joining the group would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners, thus making sure that they were unable to assert themselves against these patents. It would also mean that Google would end up paying for something that would actually hamper the growth of their platform.

Microsoft has further said that Google refused to join the other companies because it wanted to buy these mobile patents for itself, to assert against others. Clearly, the last word on this issue is yet to come, but in the meantime, it will be the end users who suffer as they will end up paying heavily for the use of the patents.

In fact, studies conducted recently have indicated, that not only a large number of users already use smartphones, but a sizable portion of the rest plan to start using one within the next 3-6 months.

Several mobile operators have also announced that they intend to launch app stores in the near future. This will make it easier for users to download the apps they want.

Some of the popular manufacturers such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry already have their own app stores. As would be expected, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS are the most popular among the users of smartphones.

Not only do users of iOS and Android OS download more apps, they also use each of these apps more frequently than users of other smartphones.

It has been found that users of Apple’s iPhone have an average of 48 apps, while Android OS users have 35 apps and Blackberry RIM users have 15 apps on their handsets. Additionally, 68% of iPhone users and 60% of Android users access their apps frequently everyday, while only 45% of RIM users do so.

In order to improve their odds, other manufacturers must keep in mind that they need to encourage their developers to come up with good apps, by keeping the process of app certification simple, as well as providing them with transparent revenue sharing systems as incentive.

Developers on the other hand, should keep in mind that a good app is one, which is not just interesting at first glance, but continues to hold ones interest and provides some valuable service or facility.

Users can access Twitter through TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, Twhirl and many other similar applications that were built for PCs as well as Macs. These applications have also been responsible, at least in part, for the growth of Twitter from 48 million tweets per day to 140 million tweets per day over the last year.

While most people would consider this growth to be good, the authorities at Twitter do not seem to think so.

Ryan Sarver, head of API and platform at Twitter, says that they want all Twitter users to be able to access the service in the same way. To enable this, Twitter has developed its own app to allow users to access Twitter from different platforms like the iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac and RIM Blackberry.

While this ensures that 90% of their users access Twitter through the official method, there is still a segment of users who use Twitter through unofficial apps. Twitter wants to stop this.

Official reasoning by Twitter for such a move is that if there are too many means to access their service, it leads to inconsistency and confusion among users. It has also been found that some of the client apps violate Twitter’s terms of service and privacy policy. Due to this Twitter has to revoke several API’s and apps every week. They also say that they’d like tweets and actions to be represented in standardised formats, such as ‘follow’, ‘favorites’ etc.

However, many industry insiders believe that the real reason behind such a move is purely monetary. Twitter wants to ensure that they are the ones who reap the benefits of their service, and so they want to ensure that Twitter ads are the only way to advertise on tweets.

At the same time Twitter has clarified that they have no intention of thwarting the development of services such as publisher tools and realtime data signals.

Expectedly, this decision has come under fire from a lot of developers. They too claim that Twitter is doing this to gain control of the service and increase their revenue generation through ads.

In other words, developers feel cheated, as Twitter has taken advantage of their apps and now that their purpose has been served the developers are being shown the door.

They go on to explain that they want to give importance to architecting for extensibility, providing a robust API and ensuring the long term health and value of the user experience.

Twitter manages the integrity and relevance of the content in the network, in the form of the timeline, and they spend a good deal of time and money, to ensure user satisfaction.

It is true that in order to monetize their site, they have announced some measures lately, and one of them is Promoted Tweets. They clarify however that these tweets have to be relevant in order to retain the basic essence of Twitter.

Thus they have decided to disallow third party apps developers from injecting paid tweets into any of their services.

In effect ad networks like ‘Sponsored Tweets’ and ‘Ad.ly’ will be discontinued.

As may be expected, many third party developers have reacted quite negatively to this decision. They feel that this decision has only been taken with the intention of avoiding any possible competition to ‘Promoted Tweets’.

‘What The Trend’ analyst Liz Pullen says, “The problem is that business have been created, received funding and developed over the past year, with the full knowledge of Twitter, and this just undercuts & destroys them.”

Others have also said that they have been building these apps after being told by Twitter that “they had nothing to worry about.”

Twitter client Eric Woodward said “It is clear that Twitter is going to take everything for themselves,”

It is believed that over 3,000 developers will attend Google’s annual I/O conference to be held in San Francisco on the 19th and 20th of this month. Google might introduce their new technology at the event, so that developers can start developing apps for Google’s TV platform.

Google’s new technology is meant to allow set-top boxes and new television sets to draw more content from the Internet.

Sony, Intel and Logitech are already believed to have shown an interest in Google’s offering, though nothing has been confirmed as yet. Even more rumours claim that Sony has already agreed to use Intel’s Atom chip in some of their future products in order to give them similar functionality to netbooks.

If developers take an interest in this platform, the market could soon be flooded with apps for TV, just as it is for smartphones. Hardware manufacturers will need to commit to the technology first, though.

Google is also conducting a limited search service with the Dish Network, according to some reports. This service will enable users to search for various TV programmes on the Internet.

If Google’s entry into the television market is successful, it will provide a lot of value-based content to viewers, while Google will drive more ad revenues via a whole new medium. It could also bring down the package prices of other cable providers, thus making it a win-win situation for both Google and the user.

The software available in this online store will be from Google’s business partners, and it should help Google to increase the sale of Google Apps, which are not doing as well as their competitors are currently.

Google already has a website, called the ‘solutions marketplace‘, where Google Apps users can access several different add-on tools and support services such as Identity Management, Securities and Compliance, Migration and Sync. Services such as Medium/Large Deployment, Small Business Setup and Support, Custom Development, Training and Google Analytics are also available to download from this site.

The source reveals that the new store is being setup with the intention of providing better integration between Google Apps and the software provided by Google’s partners. Buying add-ons and services will thus become easier for end-users.

The solutions marketplace is just a site where users of Google Apps can connect with third-party developers. However, the business store will be likely to charge a nominal fee for whatever services or products are sold through it.

At present, about 20 million people are believed to use Google Apps, but only a small portion of them pay for these services.

In contrast, Google’s rival, Microsoft, has a far larger market share in the software sector, and almost 500 million people have paid for Microsoft Office.

Google refused to confirm or deny the setting up of a store. A statement issued by them says, “We’re constantly working with our partners to deliver more solutions to businesses, but we have nothing to announce at this time.”

The Wall Street Journal, though, believes that Google may make a formal announcement about the Apps Store by March.

Even at present, various platform developers have been making some advances in this matter, with the help of the very basic APIs available to them. The currently available geolocation based projects are made with the use of the location details filled in by users on their profiles. However, this is not a very reliable and effective way to judge immediate location as users often tweet from multiple locations without updating their location each time.

Twitter will allow users to add in their latitude and longitude if they wish to do so with each tweet. The service will be strictly opt-in, with the default set to ‘off’.

Tweet-level geotagging will be treated differently than the location data entered manually by the user in their profile. Location data in the profile will continue to be used to give a general idea to visitors about where a user is normally based.

Udates to the API will be made available a couple of weeks before launch, to allow third-party app developers to incorporate this new feature. Documentation for the geolocation function in the API is already available.

Location data will be passed in the following format (code):
curl -d “lat=37.780467&long=-122.396762&status=I have arrived” -u user:pass

The W3C geolocation API will be used on m.twitter.com for the launch of the mobile service.

Users who decide to disclose their location will have to opt in on the Twitter website itself, and the location data won’t be stored indefinitely. Third-party applications will not be given the ability to enable / disable the feature via the API in order to avoid rogue apps turning on the feature without a user’s consent.

Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, says, “if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet by tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.”

Placing this choice squarely in the hands of the user is a smart move to avoid the usual problems regarding user privacy and security.

The geolocation service will enable users to follow tweets sent out by people from their neighbourhood or city in addition to tweets from the users they normally follow. This facility would be especially useful, when information needs to be spread urgently, such as in times of crises.

Search results will most likely also reflect location awareness in the near future, once more users opt in to use this feature. This could make Twitter even more useful and much more relevant than Google for real time, on-the-spot searches.

No official date has yet been announced for the launch of this service, though, given the amount of information and developer support available indicates that it should be just a matter of weeks.

Blackjack players need to keep track (count) of the number of face cards, aces and 10s played from the deck, as against cards of a lower value, in order to judge their chances of winning the game, and bet accordingly. Card counting, per se, is not illegal in Nevada, but using any kind of device to do so is illegal and carries severe punishment.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board has warned casinos, through a circular dated 5^th February, regarding the Blackjack Card Counter, which is an application for iPhones and the iPod Touch that is available on the iTunes Application Store for a mere US $1.99. Installing this application makes it very easy for gamblers to count cards, and thus cheat the casinos.

The application can be set to quickly switch to the “Stealth Mode” where it looks as though the phone has been switched off because the screen is shut off, but the card counter is still functional, and can be used by pressing keys on the screen.

Under Nevada law, using a device to count cards is an offence punishable with imprisonment between one to six years or a fine of up to $10,000 for the first offence.

Gambling regulators in California first found this device being used by customers in an Indian Casino and informed the concerned authorities.

This application was developed by Australian, Travis Yates (webtopia.com.au), who says its demand has gone up several times after the National Gaming Control Board issued the warning.

Another similar application is available in the App Stores. It is called “Card Counter” and costs $2.99.

Developers can use the Google App Engine to write new web applications, which will continue to be based on GFS and Bigtable. The Engine will allow creation of scalable applications, that is, developers can first build their applications on a small scale and then expand them as they gain in popularity.

Each application built using the Google App Engine will be allotted a quota of 5 million free page views per month. Bandwidth, storage and CPU use will be free. It is expected that this capacity will increase in the near future, and its users will then be able to buy additional resources as per their requirements.

The App Engine from Google will compete wiith Amazon’s S3 service. According to the InsideGoogle blog, it may also compete with social networks such as Facebook since now anything that can be done on any social network will also be possible without using a social network.

According to some, Google’s App Engine may come to be viewed as one of Google’s most revolutionary products because it will be a web host that will be well configured, well connected and well tested without being phenomenally expensive. The preview will be available to the first 10,000 people who sign up for it and download the SDK. The product is still in its trial stages and further improvements will be made on it based on feedback received from its initial applications developers.

If the ease of use of Google’s Gadget builder is anything to go by, the App Engine may well change the way information gets organised and delivered to users in the future. However, it is one of the many Google products that will never be popular with the masses due to its technical nature and specific functionality.

appengine.google.com/

Ever since Facebook opened its social networking site to third party developers interested in building applications for it in May 2007, they have been battling deceitful and abusive practices. The main irritants are self promotion features in applications such as bulk unsolicited emails and intrusive message displays.

Facebook has gained immense popularity as a platform for sharing content through the social graph / news feed. They have gradually opened up the limits on notifications, requests and email communication.

However as with all new technologies there are those who choose to abuse the system for their own benefit, in this case by sending notifications to users for an application that the user has not installed via another application installed on the user account.

Other application developers have deceive users by putting links in the Facebook news feed, notifications and notification emails that lead to the installation of a different application in a similar way, thereby tricking users into installing an application that they did not intend to.

In the New Year Facebook has made a “resolution” to block all such abusive practices. This of course is not a foolproof system, as friends can still send silly invites to each other. The safeguards will however reduce the amount of spam, and hence will win Facebook back some points with the privacy police, points that they had recently lost due to their over-ambitious Beacon advertising program.

According to Nick O Neil at AllFacebook.com, “Facebook has imposed a number of restrictions and has slowly clamped down on spammy activities available to application developers. The new announcement by Facebook underlines their continuing dedication to battle spam both within applications and elsewhere on their site.”

http://apps.facebook.com/googlenews

Most Facebook apps are targeted at winning space on the user profile page. Visitors to a profile often pick up apps that they like and post them to their own profiles. The smartest way that most apps spread, though, is by prompting users to invite their friends at the time of installation.

Inviting friends to use the new app on one’s profile makes sense. Most apps require the user’s friends to interact by commenting, selecting values or posting photographs etc on the user’s profile. In order to interact with an app, the friends are often required to install the app themselves, which creates a great viral push for the app, and its associated brand.

Google News’ app takes a more docile approach. Once a user installs it, there’s a good chance he/she might never see it again. The problem is two-fold:

1. The app is designed as a stand-alone page
   Unlike most Facebook apps that go on the profile page, the Google News app is meant to be a stand-alone news page that features a user’s favourite news topics and top stories. This means that the app in itself cannot be placed on the profile page for everyone to look at. Only profile visitors who see the Google News icon snuck on the side in the list of apps might realise a user is subscribed to the app.
    
2. Sharing the app is not automatically prompted
   When a Facebook user installs Google News, the program does not automatically prompt the user to share the app with friends. In fact, the only prompt to share a story is located on the top right of each story in the “Share” link, which then gives the option to send the story to a friend or place it on the profile page.

Social networks just don’t seem to be Google’s forté. Orkut is nowhere near as successful as they’d like it to be. And now their official foray into Facebook has floundered at the very beginning. Perhaps a few more big acquisitions might solve that?