Get Facebook Home Running On Nearly Any Android Device

At the start of the month, everyone was excited about the Facebook Event, which finally revealed Facebook’s new launcher for Android – Facebook Home. A few days later an apk was leaked which worked on nearly any mobile. But, Facebook was quick to pull the plug on the app. Yesterday, finally Facebook Home was launched on the Play Store.

Sadly Facebook Home currently supports only Samsung Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note 2, HTC One, One X, or One X+ (and HTC First). At first I side-loaded the apk (as I had done with the leak), surprisingly Facebook was checking the phone build, and all you get is this screen.

Luckily, Android is open-source and highly modifiable. You can change nearly anything, even your device. Hence running Facebook Home on your device is pretty easy.

Method 1: Rooted Devices Only

1. Install any build.prop editor app from the Play Store, such as this or this.

2. Open the app and MAKE A BACKUP.

3. Change build.prop to the following:

ro.product.model=GT-N7100

ro.product.brand=samsung

ro.product.name=t03gxx

ro.product.device=t03g

ro.product.manufacturer=samsung

ro.com.google.clientidbase=android-samsung

4. Save and reboot.

5. Install the Facebook Home apk – Link Here.

6. You are good to go!

Method 2: Non-Rooted Devices

1. Uninstall your current Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps.

2. Install the following apps. Facebook Home apk link and Facebook apk link.

3. You are good to go!

4. Do note that by this method your apps will no longer get updates on the Play Store.

My personal experience with Facebook Home, has not been the best. I simply do not like it. It looks useful for those who use their smartphones only for Facebook. Although I love the “chat-heads” feature (more on that in the next article).

Please let us know your views on Facebook Home in the comments below.

P.S: I’m not gonna do a complete review of the app – as I find that my views are much similar to those by Android Police.

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Source: Android Police

Facebook Working on Introducing the Hashtag

  Facebook is taking its business rivalry with Twitter into the realm of symbols: #Feud

Although the hashtag labelling system orignated in early social media such as the IRC, it was Twitter that led to a prominent rise in the use of it for labelling, as well as classification. Over the past few years, its use and spread have spread so far that it was awarded "Word of the Year 2012" by the American Dialect Society on Jan 4, 2013. Now, according to a a report on Wall Street Journal, Facebook is experimenting on incorporating this feature.

For those unaware (seriously people, have you been living on the planet for the past 5 years?), hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by the "#" symbol. It is a method to collate numerous tweets about a single news/event.

According to the report on WSJ, Facebook is testing thee feature, which will allow users to click on a hashtag to pull up all stories about the news/event. It will also allow quick indexing of conversations around "Trending Topics" and build those conversations up. It is important to note that Instagram, the image sharing site that Facebook acquired last year, already uses hashtags. With Facebook allowing this feature, it may lead to a much closer integration between the two.

Facebook must also be interested in the new opportunities this provides for advertisers. Advertisers could promote particular hashtags as the current promotion of likes on fan pages. Through this they, may manage to get longer presence on Facebook's news feed.

Facebook maybe working on it, but I dont expect it to hit the common user any time soon. As far as the view on it's usefulness, I will reserve it for the launch.

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Source: WSJ

Happy Birthday, Facebook!

Happy Birthday, Facebook!

Its hard to believe that the largest social networking site in the world has not even been around for a decade. Facebook, with well over 1 billion users turned 9 today. The website which had humble beginning for a closed user group within Harvard has grown manifolds in these years.

Facebook started of as Facemash, a website where Harvard students could rate each other on hotness quotient based on the uploaded photographs. Later Mark Zuckerberg relaunched Facemash as TheFacebook.com. In 2005, the site allowed users to upload their own photos. Till date, Facebook has seen more than 220 billion photos being uploaded. In 2006, Facebook expanded and allowed anyone over 13 to join the site and also introduced the News Feed. The Facebook like button was introduced much later in 2009 and according to the latest company figures, it has seen  1.13 trillion 'likes' since its introduction.

How Mark Zuckerberg took Facebook from an invite only Ivy League college website to this level is no secret, with popular culture featuring the story in movies and books like 'The Social Network' and 'Accidental Billionares'.

One thing that has remained constant over the nine years is change. Zuckerberg and Co. have made sure that great feature are added to the website on a regular basis. Be it the business pages or the relationship status or the social networking games or everything else in between.

  

Now, Facebook has taken to spreading its supremacy even on the mobile platforms. With the number of smartphone users growing everyday, the social networking giant is trying to make its mobile applications at par with its website. Shifting from HTML5 to building native apps from the scratch on both iOS and Android was a great move for the company.

Last year was a big one for the website as it became the first social networking site to go public with an IPO. Although, Facebook's shares have fluctuated heavily, Zuckerberg and Co. have managed to salvage the situation every single time. The company also went to buy the photo editing app Instagram.

Of course, controversies have played a huge part in this 8 year long journey. Nevertheless, the future looks bright for the birthday website. Facebook has taken 2013 head on with the introduction of Graph Search. It's small features such as these that make it different from the rest. Knowing Zuckerberg's penchant towards treading unknown paths, we're looking forward to Facebook surprising us with new features for many years to come.

Mark Zuckerberg Introducing Graph Search

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Web Platform

As the Web continues to move towards the usage of next-get Web technologies such as HTML 5, CSS 3 and others, the current reality is that there aren't many  definitive online resources that cover the best practices for these technologies and their implementations.

Fortunately, a conglomerate of big companies that include Apple, Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia and Opera (all working closely with the W3C) have come together and launched a website that plans to become such a definitive resource for HTML 5, CSS 3, and any other web development technology. The website, intuitively called “Web Platform” will also cover the standardization and cross-browser implementation part of these technologies (since many technologies such as HTML5 -for instance- has not been yet standardized by the W3C).

The aim is to improve the standards across all platforms, which means the resource should ideally set the standards for every other company, whether it’s meant for desktop, mobile or other device.

We are an open community of developers building resources for a better web, regardless of brand, browser or platform. Anyone can contribute and each person who does makes us stronger.

Although at the time being there are only a handful of tutorials, ones that mostly relate to the general principles behind these next generation web technologies, the website is organized under the form of a Wiki. In the future, representatives from each of the companies listed above will update the Web Platform with tutorials pertaining to certain aspects of web development.

Users willing to learn the best practices of tomorrow’s web development techniques will also be able to interact and share advice using the forums or the website’s IRC channel. At the time being, the content is supplied in its entirety by the companies part of the project. In the future, though, visitors with the appropriate knowledge will be encouraged to share tips, code examples and such on the Wiki. All the content on the Web Platform website will be licensed under the “creative commons” license.

Here is what Adobe officials had to say regarding the Web Platform initiative:

It is now up to the web community to help create and maintain the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for web technologies. So, go check it out and start contributing. Document the web!

To me, this looks like an awesome initiative, and given the high profile of all the companies that are supporting the project, the Web Platform website might soon become the number one resource for any technology relating to web development and even mobile.