f8

Video: Connecting with Facebook at the f8

Facebook banded together with hordes of programmers this week at the f8 developers' conference at San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition & Design Center, where company CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced advancements to the Facebook Platform.

Take a look at some of the scenes from the show, including application developers hard at work, doughnut girls, and Zuckerberg's out-of-character footwear, set to the sounds of the exhibit hall and key speeches:

Connected Weddings does your seating chart for you

My favorite app concept from the Facebook F8 Developers' Conference was Connected Weddings. Based on the fact that planning a wedding is a social affair (duh), it lets you connect with two different groups: the people coming to your event, and other people who are getting married. With the former, you can share stories and photos. With the latter, you can talk about your plans and get advice. But that's not the cool thing.

What I really like is that Connected Weddings will create seating charts for your wedding reception, based on the Facebook connections between your invitees. You … Read more

Facebook opens up with Connect

Mark Zuckerberg today officially rolled out Facebook Connect, a way for apps not on the Facebook Platform to leverage the Facebook social network. It's an extremely powerful idea, and the demos we saw at the F8 conference were much more impressive than the MySpace Data Availability project that rolled out yesterday.

Facebook Connect allows other Web sites and apps to have their users log in, or authenticate, to the Facebook system, and once logged in, their social network comes with them. The reason it's a bigger deal than Data Availability is that it's two-way. Not only does … Read more

Facebook F8 conference set for July 23

Facebook understands what makes its service tick: lots of users and developers.

On July 23, the social-networking powerhouse will hold its second annual F8 platform conference in San Francisco. The company claims 400,000 developers in more than 160 countries and 24,000 Facebook applications in its directory.

Facebook also recently reached a milestone, according to ComScore, catching up with MySpace on the unique-user metric.

Both social networks attract about 115 million members on a monthly basis. However, most of Facebook's growth has come from outside the United States, which could be more difficult to monetize than U.S. … Read more

GCT claims WiMax chip in Asus Eee PC

WiMax is in the cards for the Eee PC. Asus will demonstrate notebooks Monday that integrate WiMax chips from San Jose, Calif.-based GCT Semiconductor.

Despite recent statements that the Eee PC 901 will not get WiMax, GCT Semiconductor announced--along with Asus--Sunday that Asus has integrated GCT's GDM7205 WiMAX single-chip silicon into the F8 notebook series and Eee PC.

GCT says the F8 series and Eee PC will be demonstrated with WiMax at the WiMax Expo Taipei that begins on June 2nd.

The widely-reported specifications for the Eee PC 901 are a 1.6GHz Atom processor, an 8.9-inch … Read more

Photos: White-hot Asus F8P leather laptop

Vegetarians should look away right about now--Asus has unveiled yet another leather-clad laptop in addition to its UE2, aimed at posers, fashionistas, and pretty much anyone from Essex. Ladies and chavs, introducing: the new and updated Asus F8P Stylebook.

We're being terribly harsh here. The F8P is prettier than most laptops and is available in black as well as white. The palm rest is finished in real leather and the lid in a matching ivory effect--although we doubt the latter is derived from the tusk of an actual elephant. Shiny metal accents around the edge and above the keyboard … Read more

Facebook for iPhone doubles as a massive phonebook

There's been a lot of buzz over the iPhone optimized version of Facebook in the past couple of days, and with good reason--it rocks. It does nearly everything the full version of Facebook can do, sans apps from the Facebook apps platform, which I assume are on their way later this year. Everything is rolled up into a tight little package using a simplistic set of two rows of tabs to cover core navigation, and a sliding interface that mimics the iPhone's signature UI. To get there, just point your iPhone (or browser) to http://iPhone.facebook.com. … Read more

7 cool, unadvertised Facebook features

When I wrote our Newbie's Guide for Facebook last week, there were several things worth including that just couldn't make the cut. These seven features aren't often advertised or well-known among most newbies, but can be quite helpful, and in some cases great time-wasters.

1. Feed tweaks: Dial it up. Did you know the Friends' feed you see on the Facebook home page doesn't contain every little piece of information about what people are doing on the network? While everyone can tweak what they want published to the news feed, you too have control of what … Read more

5 absurd Facebook apps

Just two months after the launch of Facebook's f8 developer platform, there are nearly 2,000 applications. While a good portion of them are useful and work well as social tools, there are also a handful that are simply absurd. In no apparent order, I've rounded up five of my favorites below.

Vibrating Hamster. The vibrating hamster is a simple picture of a lovable rodent you can put on your profile. As the name suggests, every time you click the picture, the hamster vibrates violently while playing the Web meme-famous hamster dance song. To keep anonymous hamster vibrations … Read more