Facebook – The Graphic Mac

Facebook adding “Unsend” feature to Messenger

“We have discussed this feature several times. And people using our secret message feature in the encrypted version of Messenger have the ability to set a timer — and have their messages automatically deleted. We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives’ messages. We should have done this sooner — and we’re sorry that we did not,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement.

Uhhhhh….

General

The Science of color: Why is Facebook blue

Companies use color to trigger an emotion from us. Here’s a great little article about why designers choose the colors they do.

Resources

adJelly: Your social media image/ad guide

You may recall that I’ve written about Advise in the past, but they’ve changed their name and domain to adJelly.

General

8 tips for photo sharing on Facebook

Following up on last week’s post about social media image specs, here are 8 more tips for sharing photos on Facebook.

General

Prevent Facebook from sending message Read receipts with AdBlock…

Adblock Plus, an open-source content-filtering and ad blocking plugin for all major browsers, today announced a new feature for Facebook users: the ability to turn off read receipts. In short, you can now prevent Facebook from telling senders you saw their messages. VentureBeat has the full scoop.

General

How to optimize your Facebook photos

Everything you need to know about image sizes and how to make your photos look their best on Facebook.

Apple | Mac

Recent acquisitions should make you wary of buying new…

The headline sounds a bit over-the-top, I know. But it sums-up my point best. With Google acquiring Sparrow (the extremely popular email client software for OS X and iOS), and Facebook buying out Acrylic (makers of the popular RSS reader, Pulp), and Instagram, it’s clear that no matter how small or large your favorite app or service is – it’s entirely possible that it will cease to exist at any time.

With Instagram, Facebook chose to allow it to live-on for now – but I suspect it will eventually get fully integrated into Facebook’s brand apps. Unfortunately, Google has not been as kind. They’ve made it clear that they have no intention on adding features to it in the future. It’s dead. And while Facebook only hired the developers and not purchased the apps themselves, they’re essentially dead as well.

I’m not suggesting that you should not buy apps from independent developers. They’re what makes the Apple community great. And I absolutely do not blame any developer for selling their company for large sums of money. They worked hard to create a great app or service and they deserve the rewards.

But you should take these recent acquisitions into consideration when you purchase your next app that may be a mission-critical one. Let me give you an example. Read more “Recent acquisitions should make you wary of buying new apps” →

General

Why Google+ is losing the battle with Facebook: It’s…

If you’re using a Mac (and you probably are if you visit this website), one reason you do is probably because it’s simple to use and maintain. If you’re a designer in the advertising business you know that the simpler the ad, the better the results.

Simple is always better. Simple-to-use always beats feature-rich-but-complicated. If you believe that, then you know why Facebook is beating the digital pants off Google+ in the social media arena.

Facebook is a fairly simple service:

You sign up
You search for friends or companies you want to follow
You click a “Like” button on their page
You get a feed of everything they post (text and photos)

There’s very little thinking or learning-curve involved with using Facebook. Finding new friends is dead simple using Facebook, as is finding brands you wish to follow, and sharing photos and video. There is very little in the way of techy lingo used on the site, and outside of the privacy controls, the entire site is easy for even the most non-geek user to navigate and use. Now let’s look at Google+. Read more “Why Google+ is losing the battle with Facebook: It’s simple” →

General

The most hated companies in America

Customers, employees, shareholders and taxpayers hate large corporations for many reasons. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed a lengthy list of corporations for which there is substantial research data to choose the 10 most hated in America.

The list (in no particular order) features four technology companies:

Facebook
AT&T
Nokia
Netflix

For the record, I would add AOL, Google, Verizon, Samsung, and a host of others to the list.
Read more “The most hated companies in America” →

General

Rant: The annoying year that was 2011

Like any other year, 2011 brought a lot of highs and lows in my tech life. Unlike any other year though, 2011 was filled with situations and trends that just wouldn’t change to my liking.

Social — 2011 was just too much sharing for my taste

There were lots of great things happening in tech this year, too many to talk about here. But I have put together a list of things that managed to annoy me to no end. Read more “Rant: The annoying year that was 2011” →

Apple | Mac

Raven: Site-specific browsing on the Mac

Raven is a site-specific web browser that allows you to be more productive by creating a dedicated browsing instance for each one of your web apps, such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter, CNN, YouTube, and many more.

Raven is not a standard web browser to replace Safari, Chrome or Firefox, though you easily could if you wished. Instead it focuses on improving the experience on the sites you interact with the most. For instance, clicking on the Twitter icon in the left sidebar slides open the controls for Tweets, DMs, @Replies and Search for easy access. The controls available depend on what each site offers.

Think of Raven as the Mac OS X Twitter app, only for a plethora of social and news sites. Raven offers bookmarking to Instapaper, a smart bar, history, and even a toolbar icon that loads the mobile version of the site right in the Raven browser window – so you can view the site just as you would on your iPhone.

Some of the sites that take advantage of Raven’s site-specific browsing are: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, MySpace, Quora, Linkedin, Digg, TechCrunch, Daring Fireball, CNN, New York Times, AllThingsD, The Next Web, Dribble, Instapaper, Dropbox, Hulu Plus, Flickr, Vimeo, and more.

Raven isn’t for everyone, but it’s definitely a cool piece of technology worth checking out.