beautiful bytes – Facebook again, mainly.

Facebook updates ‘like’ button functionality

Last week, Facebook upgraded the functionality of their ‘like’ button. In summary, when someone hits a ‘like’ button, a full story is published to his or her newsfeed in the same way that sharing a link used to:

For all the juicy details, have a read of my post from Monday that outlines the changes made and how Open Graph Meta data is used in the published story in your newsfeed.

Facebook to shut down for Earth Hour?

According to the Independent, green activists are pushing for Facebook to be shut down for 60 minutes to mark Earth Hour. Previous events have seen the Empire State building and the Eiffel Tower turn off its lights to mark the event.

It’s a great cause, but where’s the logic in shutting down Facebook for a day? Why not keep Facebook going and use it to create a conversation around the subject instead of cutting communication off completely? For example, users could be urged to post one example of ‘going green’, or even just devoting a status update mentioning the cause. That way, information and knowledge on the subject could be shared benefiting society as a whole.

There is also an increased possibility of creating a negative opinion by annoying people who want to use Facebook to communicate with friends, especially those with limited Internet access. The aim should be to create a positive view around Earth Hour. In doing so, it might increase the chance of users thinking about the environment.

Facebook adds suicide help system

Working with Samaritans, Facebook have launched a new help system that will allow users to report suicidal content posted by friends.

A three month trial reportedly received several genuine alerts from concerned users without any hoax reports. This new system can only be a good thing.

Who uses QR Codes?

After a flurry of interest about QR codes a couple of weeks ago, we got to thinking about how many people actually interact with them. According to an infographic from Jumpscan (where would we be without an infographic nowadays?!), 57% of Facebook and Twitter users have snapped a QR code at least once in the last year.  40% have said they have snapped a QR code at least five times in the last year, contributing to the 1200% increase in QR scanning between July and December 2010.

Image courtesy of Jumpscan, via Mashable.

#cookiepocalypse

Thanks to @goodbook for alerting me to this one. New EU laws to be introduced on 25th May are set to affect the way websites track out internet activity. Once the laws become effective, websites will need to gain explicit consent from users in order to collect various details in the form of cookies.

Cookies have been widely used since the mid-to-late nineties; different sites use cookies in different ways. Some use them in a less invasive way such as to track things like shopping basket contents and site preferences such as region or language.

Others use cookies as a more…comprehensive approach, collecting browsing history that is used when delivering personalised ads. Facebook uses a similar type of cookie, and forms a key part of how their ’like’ button, but we’re not 100% sure on how else they use the data they collect…

Initially, this new law could potentially have a huge impact with the way sites are built. Seeking permission from users to track web activity is an immediate stumbling block. In future, browsers may even be built to block cookies by default unless the user grants access.

Until next time,

Ash