Microsoft and Facebook Partner Up With Docs.com

At the f8 conference about 2 weeks ago, facebook announced a way of sharing Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentation files named Docs.com (not very original). It is very similar to Google Docs; documents can be created, edited, and shared (through facebook) online, but so far there is no simultaneous editing in Docs.com, which is a very powerful feature of Google Docs (and Zoho Docs). Check out the video below for more details.

Zoho Allows Sign-in With Facebook Connect

Zoho is very open with sign-in options by allowing users to sign in with Google, Google Apps, or Yahoo accounts. Today they announced the biggie that users can sign-in to any of the Zoho apps with Facebook credentials. 

Users can also share documents with all of their Facebook friends (even those without Zoho accounts) and your zoho/facebook accounts can be linked. 


Zoho is making it so easy to use their product and this will definitely cause a huge increase in their numbers. This is truly a great feature and is a big leap forward towards an open web. Great work Team Zoho. 

Using Facebook To Connect With Students

OK, so, unless you have been living off the grid or under, you've heard of facebook, the great/famous social networking tool. It's an excellent way to connect with people, and this fall I may use it to connect with my students by creating a facebook group. There is already a "connection" tool used by our school (don't want to mention it, I'll avoid the legal issues), but very few students use it because: (1) It's not very user friendly (2) it is very click-happy and (3) it's not facebook!! The reason why I would like to use facebook are:

1. Mobile Friendly: facebook is smart and dumbphone friendly, students can send messages, update status, etc. via text message or mobile app. Our current "connection" tool is years behind this.
2. Everyone's Using It: There's about 200 million facebook users, I would say that 95% of my students are on it (they're always checking it with their cellphones during the labs)
3. Excellent way to deal with questions: Questions could be posted and myself or a student could respond to it.
4. It's Facebook: Connection, connection, connection!!!

Reasons why I may not use it are:

1. Privacy: I'll have to strictly monitor what photos others and myself put up of me on facebook. Also, since I do teach at a Canadian university, the computer people may not be happy that students are forced to use a service where data is sent to US servers (damn the Patriot Act). This is the reason why my university and others haven't switched to Google Apps.
2. Internal Fighting: I heard a story about a person creating a group for his workplace, members started slinging personal insults to each other, and eventually the creator lost his job. Not cool.
3. Forcing Students to use a non-university app: My university paid big bucks for its current "connection tool", administrators may not be happy if I get students to use this free app.

It is definitely a tough call. I'm going to talk it over with coworkers, students, and the web. I'm definitely looking for your feedback and I'll let you know what my final decision is.

Note: Hope you like the new feel of this blog.

Dear Facebook: It's Time For A Change

Facebook, the great cloud computing social networking app., has allowed people to connect  with friends from many locations and time periods.  But,  since its  pop culture status, things really haven't changed much (except for the "new  Facebook" adjustment, basically tabs were added and somethings were reorganized on the page). So, here are a list of things that should be changed/fixed:

1. More Customization: I am getting so sick of the facebook colors, please allow users to at least change the colors of their homepage, and possibly fonts. With the advancement of cloud webpage editing apps., more customization should be easy to add. 
   
   
2. Better Messaging: Personally, I find the messaging system very primitive, maybe they could start with the ability to have drafts of a message. 
   
   
3. Photo Tagging: Picasa Web uses a system whereby a person is tagged in just 1 photo, face recognition software tags them in the remaining photos. This would make facebook life so much easier, I get really sick of tagging the same person over and over.
   
   
4. Feed Errors: It really annoys me when someone does an update and it doesn't show up until days afterward, or doesn't show up at all. I am not a programmer, but I'm thinking its not that difficult to solve this problem. 
   
   
5. Photo Viewing: Facebook often loads photos extremely slow and sometimes not at all. Again, this is basic and shouldn't be that hard to fix. Also, how about the ability to simply view the photos as a full screen slideshow.
   
   
6. Calendar: Sure you can add events, but how about having your very own calendar, maybe something like Google calendar. 

I'm not the only person feeling this way. I 've chatted with friends (online and in person) about the need for these changes, people are getting bored with facebook, its become very static. When facebook came along, it was a revolution for social networking, it did things that other apps. like myspace or hi5 couldn't do. If another social networking app. could come along, and offer something new, like social networking across multiple websites (Google's OpenSocial is attempting to do this) or some of the ideas above, I think that people will switch and facebook will become another hi5.