More information about the new Facebook Timeline, how to configure it properly and use it securely see can be found here: The Facebook Timeline Complete Guide
It’s very important you take the time and pass trough all of those privacy setting, to make sure you stay safe (well at least as safe as Facebook will allow you to be).

The Timeline Cover Photo is what makes that first impression people will get about you when they visit your Facebook profile. It can be part of you, of who you are or what you do, and there is no limit (for now at least) to where you can take this.

Facebook Timeline Creative Cover Photos

I wanted to show you few more examples of creative Timeline Cover images:

Not too bad, hmm?!

Facebook Timeline Covers Web Sites

There’s an abundance of new Facebook applications and web sites where you can get or install a new Cover Photo. Some are legit and offer original content, some less..  Here are few of these:

• - Coverphotoz a nice selection of quality images to chose from. Some do contain a watermark. It also gives you an option to “create your own” cover. You will need to log into your Facebook account to install these cover images
• - What a Timeline another pretty nice selection of quality images to choose from.
  The one that caught my attention here was this one:
  
• - MyProfileCover a very nice selection of original artwork designed primarily for timeline cover photos
• - Creative Facebook Timeline Cover Photos a very wide selection of creative and interesting timeline cover images. You need to allow their application to install the cover image for you.

It all comes down to what you like. The downside is though you may encounter other people with the same cover as you have.

Make your own Facebook Timeline Cover

Of course, the nicest way to welcome your Facebook visitors though is to make your own cover photo. Tell the world that part of yourself you want to show.

Here is what I did for my Timeline Cover:



Nothing too complicated or over the top. You don’t have to be some design expert or Photoshop guru’ to make your own Facebook Timeline Cover Photo.

Here are the exact sizes you need to know to make everything fit just right:



*Ah, a small issue I encountered here, your Facebook profile picture when you add it, has to be at least 180 x 180 pixels  but on the Timeline it will be displayed at 130 x 130 260 x 260 px. It’s an important detail if you want to use some sort of combination between the profile and the cover image. Let’s hope they will keep the new sizes a couple more months this time!

*Another thing to consider when making your own cover is the quality. Even if you get the right image height and width, Facebook will still resize your cover picture on uploading. That may lead to a loss of quality. It happened for me with a previous cover. Try to keep your cover images as simple as you can and don’t add to many fancy effects.

*For a slightly better quality of the uploaded cover image, use this little trick, upload your new Timeline Cover Photo in one of your Facebook picture albums and select the high quality upload checkbox option provided by Facebook. After this upload, select the image as you new Timeline Cover!

I have attached a small Photoshop template to get you started, the right way: Facebook Timeline Cover Template.zip The archive will also contain a correctly sized profile picture containing only an horizontal line, to make that continuous line effect you can see on the cover I made for my profile.



Starting with March 30, 2012 all Facebook Brand Pages have been updated to the new Timeline format. This means a shinny new cover image will sit on top of every brand page bringing the possibility of a stronger marketing impact.

There are though a series of restrictions, your Facebook Brand Page Cover image can not contain:

• - Any price or purchase information like “Free booze“
• - Any contact information (phone, e-mail, website, social media links)
• - Any calls to action like “Buy this now“, “Get it for free“, “Go shoot yourself“
• - Any references to Facebook features like “Like our Page” or any arrows or signs pointing to any similar feature, like your old custom frame (if you had one)
• - Copyrighted material (of other people of course)

But more about these changes and the update can be found here: Facebook Timeline Brand Pages Updated

Now all you have to do is to unleash your creativity and make that awesome Facebook Timeline Cover Photo to welcome your visitors in style!

 

If you want to know more about Facebook Brand Pages and how you can use Facebook in your marketing efforts, take a look at our new Facebook for Business free guide:

Facebook Marketing Guide and Best Practices

 

]]> http://www.vectorash.ro/facebook-timeline-cover-photo/feed/ 22 http://www.vectorash.ro/facebook-secrets-ipo/ http://www.vectorash.ro/facebook-secrets-ipo/#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:25:57 +0000 http://www.vectorash.ro/?p=880 Facebook filed for an IPO seeking to raise $5 billion, making the company’s value as high as $100 billion. With over 845 million users generating  2.7 billion Likes and comments a day, last year alone Facebook made $3.71 billions!]]>
Facebook finally filed for an IPO (initial public offering ) seeking to raise the small amount of just $5 billion, making the company’s overall value as high as $75 billion to $100 billion.

By taking this road Facebook had to finally reveal a lot of information about the company and especially about their financial status.

Last year alone Facebook made $3.71 billion, out of wich almost $500 million came from Zynga, the undisputed king of online social gaming. (I wrote a while back exactly about Zynga and the huge profits made from this, see it here: Online Social Games – Billion Dollar Industry )

The rest of these money come mostly from advertising, so basically 85 percent of Facebook‘s revenues comes from selling our activity to other companies and such..

Facebook underlined though the importance of the social games, because more users lead to more page views that leads to more advertising money. So that’s how much you get out of using 845 million users for your personal benefit ;)

And that’s not all, around 483 million of them return to the site daily, they shared (posted) over 100 quadrillion (real number) bytes of photos and videos, and made around 2.7 billion Likes and comments a day only in the last 3 months of 2011. Just a bit mind blowing.. hmm?!  And imagine all of these in the end are used to increase Facebook’s treasury and allow Zuckerberg to fully enjoy his private jet.

Still last year (2011, for the confused or late readers) the highest payed employee of Facebook was Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer that earned over 3 million dollars. I guess most of that comes from taking crap from Zuckerberg all year long!

Another interesting disclosed document was a manifesto called “The Hacker Way“, a “unique culture and management approach” basically about focusing on creating and delivering features first and improving them later.

Zuckergerg wrote “We have the words Done is better than perfect painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping”.  ( Here’s the provided official Facebook IPO Filing document in case you want to browse through)

What this actually means is Facebook‘s way of telling the world that “shit will still happen“! As they do now, new features will crash, old features will crash, private data accidentally becomes public data, strange bugs might be encountered (see here: Facebook tracking user activity after log off )

And all of that does not mean they’re completely and utterly unprofessional and incompetent, it just mean they are using this new ground breaking and mind blowing revolutionary technique, called the hacker way!

Of course its more productive and way easier to just release features and half tested functionalities to see what happens instead of good planning and thoroughly testing, as a responsible software provider should.

But ah well, this is all just part of the true Facebook culture: with great power comes great irresponsibility.. ah and a couple of billion dollars!

]]> http://www.vectorash.ro/facebook-secrets-ipo/feed/ 0 http://www.vectorash.ro/facebook-timeline-guide/ http://www.vectorash.ro/facebook-timeline-guide/#comments Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:05:20 +0000 http://www.vectorash.ro/?p=832 guide, set of guidelines and privacy checks for the dreaded new Facebook Timeline. Learn how to properly manage your new Facebook Timeline and make sure you will NOT share the wrong data with the wrong people!]]>
Facebook Timeline is the new profile look that Facebook has unleashed upon its users. If you don’t have it yet and Facebook didn’t already impose it on you, here’s a small guide on how to activate it: How to get Facebook Timeline.

Most of us have the Timeline and hate it.. of course.

Unfortunately the only final method to remove the Timeline is to put your Facebook account out of his misery (see Delete or Remove the Facebook Timeline )

If you’re still determined to keep using Facebook, you need to learn how to properly manage the new Facebook Timeline because otherwise it may become a stalker’s paradise! Or it can be just an endless source of humor: you being mocked by all of your Facebook friends for some stupid picture or post you had 6 months ago…

Bottom line: You have to know how to use the new Facebook Timeline and you have to make sure NOT to share the wrong data with the wrong people!

So enough chit-chat, here we go:

Table of Contents:

• Facebook Timeline Cover Photo
• Facebook Timeline Navigation
• Editing the Timeline
• Facebook Timeline Privacy
• Facebook Activity Log

Facebook Timeline Cover Photo

The first thing to deal with once you get the Timeline is the Cover Photo, that will sit from now on on top of our timeline. The Facebook Timeline Cover Photo is the first thing people will see when they get on your profile. You can use an existent photo from one of your albums or upload a picture especially for this. With little skill and a bit of creativity you may welcome your new stalkers, ah I mean visitors, in style ;)

Here’s what few others did:






In case you want to do play with your new cover, here is all the data you need to know:



To find out more about the Cover Photo, examples and tips on how to customize this new feature: Facebook Timeline Cover Photo Guide



Facebook Timeline Navigation

Right under your Cover Photo you may now find few boxes with your friends, photos, all of your likes, all the applications you’ve installed and other crap. And on the right you may now see the actual “Timeline Navigation”:



Click on it or scroll down to see most if not all of your posts, picture and events from the moment you joined Facebook.. here’s where the fun begins.

You can choose to see all of the events posted or just the highlights, the most important ones:



It can be useful when you don’t want to see everything or in the contrary you want to see all the post on it.

You can of course still add new posts, from Status updates to Images and Life Events:



And you may add these new posts on top of the Timeline or at any date you choose too. It’s a bit like going back in time. All you have to do is go to that exact point in time and if you hover on the blue timeline bar in the middle, you will see a small “+”. Click it and you’ll be on your way :



A very important feature in viewing your new Facebook Timeline is the “View As” button:



This will show you how your timeline would look to the rest of your world. You can even choose a specific friend or family member’s perspective to know exactly what he/she can see on your profile. This is to avoid some of those awkward discussions with your parents after the latest party pictures surfaced ;)

Editing the Timeline

Now once that you have identified the compromising pictures or drunken posts, all you have to do is hide it from the face of the world (well actually just from Facebook, and that only until they will get some privacy bug that might post all of these all over again..)

On the top right of every posts you can find these buttons:



You may:

• - “Star” a post – making it bigger, 2 columns wide bigger that means.
• - “Change date” – it will move that post to the date you change it too..
• - “Hide from Timeline” – his will NOT delete the post, it will just hide it from your timeline. The post will still be visible in your friends feed( or depending on the privacy settings for that post)
• - “Delete from Timeline“. This will delete the post, image or event from the timeline.

Facebook Timeline Privacy

Now pay extra atention because the most important things you need to know about the new Facebook Timeline are the privacy elements.

In kinda the same way you edit the posts you can also edit who do you share it with:



This is how you can control how each post can be seen by the rest of the word.

An additional help would be here if you have already divided your friends intro Friend Lists. Facebook gives you the ability to organize your friends into lists. It can be extremely helpful, for example to share a post just with your “neighbors” list only or create a party event and share with everyone except the  “idiot friends I never talk to” list.

So now that you got the hang of it, you could go and edit all of these posts, well the hundreds or even thousands you may have depending on how active or very active Facebook user you are.. OR use a little privacy trick to at least change all public posts to “Friends Only” sharing setting.

If you have any old posts that are either public or shared with “friends of friends” you can change the privacy for all of them (if you want, of course) to “Friends Only” with just one single click:

• - Click on the arrow button nex to the Home button on the top right of your Facebook page:
• - Select Privacy Settings
• - Scroll down to “Limit the Audience for Past Posts” and select “Limit Old Posts”:

This is one of the fastest ways to bring back some security to your Facebook life.

Also now that you’re here, you may explore more of your privacy settings, especially the:

“Control Your Default Privacy” section:



Here you may choose how your posts will be shown by default, share it with the world, or just a small set of your friends.

There are few other cool tricks you can do here:

1. Making your Timeline Posts Private – make it that nobody can post anything on your Timeline, except for yourself of course.You can do that by going again to “Privacy Settings” – “How You Connect”.

   Once there, go to “Who can post on your timeline”:

   

   This is a good way to expect no surprises from “dear” and “loving” friends.

2. Or you may allow them to post but don’t let anyone see it.. well expect you or the people you choose. You do this by going to the same “Privacy Settings” – “How You Connect” and select the last option: “Who can see posts by others on your timeline?”
3. Use the “How Tags Work” section if you want control over what pictures or posts you will tagged in by other people and also who can view this.
4. “Apps and Websites” are the place to make sure no pesky application gets more data than they are required, also this is the right place to stop any of those that are spamming or annoying you.Facebook introduced a new concept the “Frictionless Sharing”. This means sharing your non-Facebook web activity with your Facebook friends BUT without your explicit permission:
   

   As you may see I was watching a movie on Dailymotion, and it was automatically posted on the Facebook news ticker. Yeah, creepy as hell!  All you have to do is view an article, play a video and not pay to much attention to the privacy settings for this feature, and voilà, everything you do shows up on Facebook.

   So if you want to “silence” any application that did this to you, this is the place for it.

Take your sweet time and explore all of these privacy features as it may at least, save you a lot of embarasment.

Better to be safe than.. sorry!

Facebook Activity Log

On the top of your timeline, next to the “View As” button is the “Activity log” button.

This will take you to a new window where you may see all of your activity, every comment you ever made, every photo you tagged, every little crap you “liked”.

But don’t worry, this is a part that only YOU can see, none of your friends or visitors can see this.
It’s a good place to check you did nothing stupid, or nobody else used your Facebook account.

Since I don’t want you dosing off, I’ll leave it to this. If you’re going to follow this small Facebook Timeline guide you should be safe, well actually as safe as Facebook allows it;)

 

]]> http://www.vectorash.ro/facebook-timeline-guide/feed/ 29 http://www.vectorash.ro/how-to-disable-or-remove-facebook-timeline/ http://www.vectorash.ro/how-to-disable-or-remove-facebook-timeline/#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:08:17 +0000 http://www.vectorash.ro/?p=795 Facebook officially unleashed upon the world their new Facebook Timeline. This is the only guide I could find to disable and delete the new Facebook Timeline forever!]]>
As you must know Facebook officially unleashed upon the world their new traffic gimmick and stalker paradise, the Facebook Timeline.

You are here because you obviously hate the new Facebook Timeline and you want to remove or delete it.

Most of us already have the shinny new Timeline, either by choice or imposed on us by dear old Zuckerberg in the “Facebook way” of always doing things.

They care not about what us, the users, actually want. And why would they?! All we are for them is a source of income, the “product” that they are actually selling.

But enough with that, for more Facebook bashing, see: “Facebook new crap profile reloaded“

Now you must want to Remove the new Facebook Timeline, right? Here’s the only useful guide I could find:

Step 1. Alternative account

Go to Google+ and create your account, in case you don’t have one..



Once you’ve done that fill in your profile, add photos, friends, and so on, you know the drill..

(More about Google+ here: Google turning Sociable and NOT Nice )

 

Step 2. Spread the word

Log into Facebook and inform all of your friends about your new Google+ created account. Spam them until they get it ;)

 

Step 3. Problem removal

Go to the Facebook Account Delete page.



They will ask for your password and stuff, and once you do that, for 14 days you must NOT log into your Facebook account until it will be terminated.

 

Step 4. Socialize.. ahead

Stay on Google+ or what ever social networking site you enjoy most and never look back at the nightmare you just escaped from!

 

This, my Facebook using friends, is unfortunately the only method I could find to disable and delete the new Facebook Timeline forever!

 

In case you still want to stick with Facebook I recommend you spend a little time and customize properly your new Facebook Timeline:

[ How to Use Facebook Timeline Guide ]

 

]]> http://www.vectorash.ro/how-to-disable-or-remove-facebook-timeline/feed/ 43 http://www.vectorash.ro/how-to-enable-facebook-timeline-reloaded/ http://www.vectorash.ro/how-to-enable-facebook-timeline-reloaded/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:08:17 +0000 http://www.vectorash.ro/?p=776 Facebook is finally ready to release the Facebook Timeline. This is the new updated guide on How to get your shiny new Facebook Timeline with just 2 clicks!]]>
Well you might remember over a month or 2 ago Facebook started to brag about their groovy new feature the Facebook Timeline.

For the eager beavers out there I wrote a small guide about How to enable the Facebook Timeline (at that time).

Meanwhile Facebook dragged us along for some time with this, telling us it’s not yet ready. If you ask me that entire platform of theirs is not ready but that never stoped them..

 

Either way they are now finally up and willing to let the entire world have their shinny new Timeline.

And if the last guide had 7 easy steps to get the Timeline, this new improved one lets you do it with just 2 clicks! So let’s go:

Step 1. Activate Timeline

Go the Facebook Timeline presentation page. And all you have to do is click on “Get Timeline“:



 

This will enable your Facebook Timeline (7 – Day Preview). It means you have 7 days to edit, to hide compromising pictures, delete posts you made while drunk, kinda “put your best foot forward“!

You may scroll down and do that if you’re worried what your Facebook friends might find, better to be safe than.. sorry!

Or..

Step 3. Publish Now!

You may go ahead and publish this damn Timeline already, just click on the top of the page on the “Publish Now” button:



You can always edit your posts and timeline after doing that whenever you want.

And ta daaa, that was it, now feel free and stalk your other friends that have the damn Facebook Timeline enabled.

[ Update: Check out the new guide on
How to Disable or Remove Facebook Timeline ]

[ Also, learn how to use and secure the new Facebook Timeline:
How to Use Facebook Timeline ]

 

]]> http://www.vectorash.ro/how-to-enable-facebook-timeline-reloaded/feed/ 36 http://www.vectorash.ro/twitter-brand-pages-and-redesign/ http://www.vectorash.ro/twitter-brand-pages-and-redesign/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:03:28 +0000 http://www.vectorash.ro/?p=758 Twitter is the one now that gets more sociable and nice announcing their new Twitter Brand Pages and redesign positioning itself once again as a major competitor for Facebook and Google+. These new changes are set to highly increase the company's revenues over the next period of time!]]>

Twitter, the social media veteran is back in the big boys league with a large scale redesign and a new product aimed straight at the companies, the Twitter Brand Pages!

The last couple of months all we could hear about was Facebook Timeline and Google+ Business Pages. I guess Twitter felt a bit left out, so it decided to get back in the game and they’re doing it with a bang!

The name of this new campaign is called “Let’s Fly” – “A faster, simpler way to stay close to everything you care about“

The small video presentation released for the new Twitter:

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chairman of Twitter said that one main goal of this redesign is to make “Twitter more accessible for all 7 billion people on the planet” especially since they already see Twitter as “the best place to represent yourself on the Internet“

Well I guess if there is one thing this world will never be in shortage of is.. idiots! So the plan here is to make things as easy as possible for all of these idiots to get their “voices” heard.

The new Twitter aims exactly at that, making more and more people everywhere using even more and more of Twitter :)

But let’s not get side tracked here, there’s one main underlying reason for all these changes, the same reason that makes the corporate world go round and round: the profit!

With over 300 million users (reported for 2011) that generate over 300 million tweets and over 1.6 billion searches per day Twitter was lacking a proper advertising system to seriously cash in on this huge traffic and bring in the big bucks. It’s reported that in 2010 they made only $45 million.

The first main step for increasing these “small” revenues are the new brand pages, as they announced it: “Let your brand take flight on Twitter with enhanced profile pages“

The pages will have similar features as the competitors Facebook Pages and Google Plus Brand Pages but apparently with a bit more customisation options. Brands will be able to put in larger logos and banners, control color schemes, have embedded multimedia like videos, images, maps, other tweets…

There are already around 20 huge brands that serve as launch partners for these pages, showing a bit of the new features. Some of these partners are:

Pepsi



Coca Cola



McDonalds



Heineken



That really kinda makes you want a beer. But it may be just me, the Disney page has the same effect :P

Disney



Intel



 

The new design will roll out during the next few weeks as Twitter announced. The same applies for the brand pages. The will soon release this feature for companies and brands everywhere.

These new brand pages will bring a major focus on Twitter from companies and advertisers everywhere positioning Twitter once again as a strong competitor for Facebook and Google+.

]]> http://www.vectorash.ro/twitter-brand-pages-and-redesign/feed/ 1 http://www.vectorash.ro/facebook-settles-with-ftc/ http://www.vectorash.ro/facebook-settles-with-ftc/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:14:20 +0000 http://www.vectorash.ro/?p=724 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that a settlement has been reached between Facebook and the FTC (US Federal Trade Commission) over charges of engaging in "unfair and deceptive" practices and systematically invading their users privacy. Zuckerberg himself admitted that “we have made a bunch of mistakes”]]>

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that a settlement has been reached between Facebook and the FTC
(the US Federal Trade Commission).

The FTC previously accused Facebook of engaging in “unfair and deceptive” practices and systematically invading their users privacy over the years.

There were 7 main complaints expressed by the FCC about Facebook privacy:

• - In december 2009 friend lists and other user data became public without any warning
• - Facebook applications may request almost any piece of user data even though Facebook said they can only access the data they need to operate.
• - The “Friends Only” privacy setting still allowed data to be accessed by third-party applications used by friends.
• - Facebook claimed their  “Verified Apps” program will verify the security of applications, witch did not happen.
• - Facebook “accidentally” shared personal data with advertisers when it expressively promised it would not do that.
• - User data from deactivated and deleted facebook accounts were still accessible even if Facebook claimed the contrary.
• - Data from European Union users was transferred in violation of the US-EU Safe Harbor Framework (a certification for US companies to comply with an EU Directive for protection of personal data).

On November 29th, 2011 Facebook has settled with the FCC over these complaints, Mark Zuckeberg himself admitting in a Facebook blog post that “we have made a bunch of mistakes”  (yea think?!)

From now on Facebook is “required to obtain consumers affirmative express consent before enacting changes that override their privacy preferences”, effectively making “opt in” (a user choice) for all future changes on privacy control to the audience of already shared data or content. That means that if you once posted a message or a status on Facebook for only 2 friends to see, Facebook has to always respect this choice of yours and  not make it visible for everyone with one of their delightful updates.

Also under this settlement, Facebook has to subject itself every 2 years to an independent audit on consumer privacy for the next 20 years. So for at least 20 years from now they have to… “behave” ;)

The FTC did not accuse Facebook of intentionally breaking the law and submitted them with no fines. However, if Facebook violates the terms of this settlement in the future, it would be liable to pay a penalty of $16,000 a day for each count. It’s not like they can’t afford it ;)

Of course, they’re not doing this for our benefit,  the settlement is part of their assumed plan for Facebook to file for an I.P.O. (initial public offering). When the company goes public it will raise $10 billion, bringing its valuation to more than $100 billion, making each of their 800 million users worth $125. (Facebook IPO would value each user at $125)   Can I get my money now?! :D

Well I would say Facebook got away pretty easy considering all of their “mishaps” (see Facebook tracking user activity after log off and The Facebook crap profile). But I’m not that surprised, I bet their legal department costs them as much or even more then their development one.

Basically even if Facebook got away so easy, I hope this will make all of our data more secure (an itsty bit more)!

]]> http://www.vectorash.ro/facebook-settles-with-ftc/feed/ 2