Facebook Messenger's Free Call arrives in the UK

The Facebook Messenger app as been a curious addition to the Facebook mobile apps lineup. It's only advantage over the messages section of the Facebook app itself was the loading time. It appeared as though Facebook were trying to 'replace' text messaging with their Messenger app. This was until January when in America and Canada users were able to use the Messenger app to make voice calls to contacts over their data contract or Wi-Fi connection.

This feature now comes to the UK, but without too much of a fanfare as it's more of a beta test and will be rolled out properly once bugs are squashed. To try out the feature for yourself in the UK you'll need the iOS version of the Facebook Messenger app. Then just swipe right to reveal a list of your contacts. Tap a contact for their information and the new 'Free Call' button will be there. If it's got a green phone symbol, you are good to go! If they don't answer you can even leave a voice message.

Skype and Windows Messenger

Microsoft's aquisition of Skype in October 2011 meant that Microsoft have been running two services along side each other which largely do the same thing: Skype and Messenger. Looking forward to April 2013 they will be merging these services into one brand, Skype. Skype have become a household name for video calling over the internet in much the same way that people refer to vacuum cleaners as a Hoover.

This was achieved by offering free video calling through an easy to use app which is available on  multiple platforms. A Mac user can call a Windows user and then the Windows user can phone another friend who's out and about with their smartphone.

Microsoft are encouraging you to merge your contacts into one Skype service. They are emailing customers with the following:

Starting April 8th, we will begin upgrading customers from Messenger to Skype. The process will take a few weeks to complete. April 8th is the first day you may be required to upgrade. This is a bit later than the March 15th date we previously mentioned to some of you as we wanted to give you more time to make the transition.

Having tried out the merging process I can report that it was surprisingly easy. Just download the latest version of Skype for your operating system. Log in using your Microsoft (MSN) account. Choose 'I already have a Skype account' and sign in with that account. Click 'Merge Accounts' and you are done.

All of your existing Messenger contacts are in a separate list and you can instant message them from within Skype itself. By linking your Facebook account too you can use Skype to contact Facebook friends using Facebook Messenger. Facebook is also cross-platform so they can be in a web browser on the Facebook website or using the various Facebook Messenger apps for iPhone, Android etc.

With the new version of Skype comes a slightly darker shade of blue for the logo which is simplified to reduce the 3D effect which it previously had. The simple bold logo fits more with Microsofts branding in Windows 8 and it's services such as Outlook.com.

Facebook Poke

Incredibly Facebook now has over one billion active users each month! This huge success is often accredited to Facebook's constantly changing service, always adapting to include new features or keep up with (or purchase!) competition such as Instagram and Google+. Today they have launched yet another iOS application for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It's simply called "Poke".

Poking a friend has been a decreasingly used feature amongst many users. Since poking became a feature of Facebook a lot has changed. Your profile's wall as become a timeline and the use of mobile or third applications has increased massively. Messages have become a defacto way to prompt a response from a Facebook friend. The new app brings more to poking your Facebook friends.

With the new Poke app you can poke your Facebook friends who also use Poke app too, and you can include a message, photo or video along with your poke. You can even control how long that the recipient can see your poke for, down to only 3 seconds! Poke allows you full control of who gets your poke, and you can select whole groups of users.

Will Poke be a success? Will it replace dropping a quick message to your mates or posting a pic on your timeline? Only time will tell. Many of the options are already built into Facebook, and this app isn't yet cross-platform. It may just be a flash-in-the-pan novelty, but at last it keeps Facebook's ever changing list of services fresh.

Let us know what you think by dropping a comment below.

RockMelt - A More Social Web Browser

RockMelt is a Chromium based web browser that features integration with your social networks. Chromium is the open source project that aims to create "a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web". As Google Chrome is built on the same base code, the look of RockMelt is immediately familiar to Google Chrome users (which is well over a third of all internet traffic now). 

RockMelt's selling point (it's free by the way) is that it supports integration with all the big social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube... the list goes on, and on... and on. The Facebook integration is impressive as it includes your news feed, friend requests, messages and Facebook chat, all in the browser window. The layout is shown below in the picture from their website:

To try RockMelt head over to www.rockmelt.com or for a more detailed review see below.

Facebook chat goes cross platform

You don't have to log in to www.facebook.com to instant message your Facebook friends anymore. Facebook are positioning themselves as a one stop shop for messagaging by making their system cross-platform and compatible with all types of devices and systems. Facebook chat nows allows access through several channels including:

• Messenger app for iOS, Android, Blackberry
• The latest beta version of the Skype desktop client
• Messenger for Windows
• iChat or Messages beta chat client's on a Mac
• Pidgin chat client
• Adium chat client

To set up Facebook chat to work on third apps apps using Jabber see the instructions on Facebooks page: Facebook Chat Set Up

Nokia Lumia Deadmau5 Event Tonight

Tonight Nokia and Deadmau5 will light up London's Millbank Tower on the banks of the river Thames in a spectacular 4D Audio Visual Display! This free event will also be streamed live on the internet at Nokia's website.

From Nokia's website:

To celebrate the launch of the Nokia Lumia 800 we’re hosting a multimedia extravaganza on 28 November. Join us as deadmau5 rocks the London skyline in 4D.

Joel Zimmerman (AKA deadmau5) will be performing two new tracks created especially to accompany a stunning 4D projection display against the backdrop of the 120-metre Millbank Tower on the banks of the River Thames. This amazing, one-off gig is not to be missed, so if you're anywhere near London, be sure to come along to see it live, or visit our Facebook page to watch the live stream. It’s happening in London, but everyone is invited to take in the sights and sounds of this spectacular event live from the north side of the River Thames.

App of the Day - Facebook Messenger - iOS, Android and Blackberry

Facebook Messenger is a new app for smartphones from Facebook. It's basically an exert from the main Facebook app which still includes messaging as a feature. The new app is purely for messaging and opens very quickly on iOS4 compared to the Facebook app.

Facebook messenger features more control over messaging alerts, it allows you to hide notifications for 1 hour or until 8am.

The new app looks to be aiming to compete with over online messaging service apps such as:
Skype
Microsoft Live Messenger
Google+
Twitter (to some extent)
BBM (on Blackberry)
What's App (which is a paid download)
iMessage (iOS 5 - due 12/10/11)

So with all these options, and many being cross platform, will operators loose out on revenue from SMS and MMS? More than likely.



Rating 3/5
Price - Free
Developer - Facebook

Image: Facebook

Thoughts on Google+ embedded

Do you remember Google Wave (it was a bit like a social email collaboration tool, before buzz and Google+ came along)? Oh yeah and it was promoted and discussed right here on Web Warp Blog. Well Google said at the time that they were looking to introduce embedded waves. Unfortunately developers were the only people to try them out during the Google Wave beta period.

Basically the idea was that a collaborative wave could exist embedded within a website. This could have many applications but in particular it would of suited Web Warp Blog. A wave would be to used as a forum for comments. If a user comments on a blogpost or would like to keep up to date with other people's reaction they could of 'followed' the wave and add it to their wave inbox page.

My question to Google is: Will you build on this idea and create Google+ embedded? It would be ideal for website comment areas and even for Wave style collaboration. There are some webpages already using an embedded Facebook comment structure, so hopefully this is in the pipeline for Google+, probably after the creation on brand pages.

App of the Day - Facebook - iOS and Android

Facebook is 2nd most popular site in the world (Alexa rating page) and it has over 500 million active users. A lot of these users have smart phones and if you have an Android device or iPhone, iPod Touch etc. then the Facebook app is a must for you! Keep up to date with your friends latest statuses/photos/event invitations, all on the go. The Facebook app runs through a web fetching system so essentially all of the content within the app is actually online. This means that it is updated and improved all the time without the need to constantly download updates to the app itself. Facebook's mobile app incorporates all of the recent changes to Facebook's News Feed and privacy enhancements such as post approvals to add tagged items to your own wall.

The Facebook app also features Check In which uses your smartphones GPS to quickly determine your location, and also alerts you if a friend checks in nearby. You can look at pages on the go and read and respond to private messages. If it wasn't so buggy and often unreliable then it would get 5/5 but sadly it is so it's getting a 3/5 rating. It's also spookily similar to the Google+ app following recent changes...



Rating 3/5
Price - Free
Developer - Facebook

Image: Facebook

Facebook's New Features

Facebook's under going a self titled "launch season" with site changes in terms of features and content delivery happening all the time. Last week their popular smart phone app was updated to include the new version of the News Feed. Facebook's privacy settings also enjoyed a refresh, prompting the inevitable backlash as they always seems to be too disjointed and complicated for most users.

Interestingly one of the new improvements comes from a combination of privacy settings and content delivery. Many Facebook users have hundreds of friends and many of these peoples "I've had a bad day" status aren't really worth your time. Their new lists include a Close Friends list, so if one of your best mates posts, "I'm off to the pub tonight, if you fancy it, join me!" Facebook will bring this right to the top of your news feed (add a small blue triangle), so you will never miss a trick in your close circle of friends. Wait, did I just say close 'circle' of friends? Well yes... and now that I mention it it sounds exactly like Google+'s Circles feature. As imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, Google+'s engineers should be very flattered!! In addition to receiving statuses from your close friends first the activity feed will be live, just like Twitter, so you won't be waiting for updates or refreshing your profile page to check for new content.

Other new features include more integration with third party companies, such as Spotify, to put Facebook at the centre of your online social life, as if it isn't already! To compete with Twitter and Google+ all the tagging and location tagging features of these other services have been recreated too (they are spookily similar).

In a few weeks users will get a whole new profile experience: Timeline. Facebook explains all on their blog: Timeline on Facebook's Blog.

Image: Facebook

Public Wi-Fi Data Security Issues

Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC technology correspondent, investigates security issues with public Wi-Fi networks. If you use internet cafe's with your laptop or smartphone this video is of interest to you!

Here is the link: bbc.in/mfMDkH

The main issue highlighted by this video is cookie theft when logging on to popular sites like Facebook and Hotmail. This can be done by anyone using Firefox and a free add-on: Firesheep.

Facebook Email

Facebook now offer their 600 million users a new unified message service - Facebook messages, Facebook chats and even a Facebook email address all find their way into a single inbox. In order to get this service you will need to upgrade to the Facebook Messages service. Invitations will appear when you log into Facebook.com but until you receive yours you can find out more from Facebook New Messages.

Once upgraded you can claim your @facebook.com email address. Here's how: Click Here. by default your @facebook.com email address will be your vanity URL which you may have chosen in 2009. Here's a quick reminder of the username/vanity URL feature.

It will be interesting to see if the addition of a facebook email service will have any impact of the existing web based email dominance of Microsofts Hotmail, Google's GMail and Yahoo's YMail. The Facebook email experience isn't as fully featured as GMail, for example. Facebook Messages seems to focus on continual conversations with friends, in a similar mannor to the old facebook messaging service. The ability to start these conversations from an external email service would appear to be the only real benefit.

The iPhone app highlights the change:

Facebook Places

Facebook have launched a new version of their iPhone app, version 3.2. This add's Place's to their service in the US. The service is similar to Foursquare but (and Facebook stresses) the Facebook service is limited to your Facebook friends. In fact you have strict control over which friends or lists can see your location. Despite Facebook's tight privacy controls privacy groups are concerned that geotagging your location onto the internet is a step too far.

Version 3.2 also brings Twitter for iPhone (formerly Tweetie 2) style "Pull Down to Update", which is a neat improvement.

For more information about Places check out this article from Mashable.

EDIT: Facebook for iPhone is now version 3.2.1 following bug fixes.

Facebook More Popular Than Google, the Webs Changing.

Figures show that last week Facebook was the most visited page in the US, stealing thunder from usual suspect Google, Channel 4 reports. This is a significant change in our internet browsing habits. We are not purely using the internet to search for information (that was so last decade), we are now more interested in our social group and the latest news in our friends lives. With the improvement of connection speeds and websites the internet has become a hugely popular place to find current news, whether national, local or social. The internet is no longer about googling for facts, and large corporations websites. It's a live and ever changing scene with content being added from an ever increasing number of its users. Facebook is most successful example of this trend and it's therefore no surprise that it's pipped Google to the No.1 spot in America.

Google Buzz Launched

Google have released a social networking service integrated into their popular email service, GMail. The social networking service is called Google Buzz. Twitter is currently trending tweets about Google Buzz here. Should Facebook and Twitter be scared? Rory Cellan-Jones doesn't think so on his BBC blog.

I have tried the service and it's a bit confusing? It allows public "tweets" so why not use Twitter and private "tweets" so why not use Facebook, particularly as all my facebook friends don't use Google Mail. Facebook now lets you post links/status etc to a public version of your profile anyway.

The location based element boasted by Buzz has crept into Twitter but doesn't work as well as Google Buzz which integrates with Google Maps. I'm not convinced by Google Buzz yet. I much prefer Google Wave (even though it is only a preview) and would like to see the kind of GMail integration for Wave as Buzz as been privileged to.

So the jury is well and truly out with this one - please feel free to comment below with opinions.

Here is the Google Promotional Video for Google Buzz