Hasta La Gadget!

After the whole Vine kerfuffle and Yandex situation, Facebook clearly feels it has some explaining to do. Over at the site’s Developer Blog, director, platform partnerships and operations Justin Osofsky would like to set some things straight about the social network’s platform policies. He begins by assuring developers that most can just keep on keeping on.

Osofky adds, however,

For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today

Those developers (and interested civilians) who’d like to drill down a bit further into those newly clarified policies can check the fine print in the source link below.

Filed under: Facebook

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Source: Facebook Blog, Facebook Platform Policy

Twitter’s new Vine social video service, a “video Instagram” of sorts for sharing six second blasts of video content, has fallen afoul of Facebook, with users blocked from raiding their Facebook friends for new contacts. Vine, which launched as a free iOS app yesterday, attempts to kickstart the sharing process by pulling in other users from Twitter and Facebook accounts; however, shortly after the app went live, those trying to import contacts from Facebook were faced with a message that the functionality had been disabled.

According to the original pop-up, Twitter’s new app “is not authorized” to grab Facebook’s data, leaving users facing manual adding of their friends on the site. That warning has since been changed to a more generic “An error occurred” dialog; there are also reports that Vine users have been unable to share their videos to their Facebook timeline.

A Facebook spokesperson told Mashable that the social network had no comment beyond the vague text of the error message. However, it’s not the first time the company has yanked down the shutters to prevent rival social services from getting their teeth into Facebook data.

Back in August, microblogging platform Tumblr discovered its friend-finder functionality had been blocked by Facebook, for instance, while Android dropped native Facebook contacts sync in early 2011, after the social site refused to allow exports for backup purposes. Facebook isn’t the only company to wage war with data access, mind; only a month before the Tumblr block, Twitter had thrown up a similar block to Facebook-acquired Instagram.

What remains to be seen is whether Facebook has a Vine-style short video sharing feature of its own in the pipeline; the company has proved adept at mimicking rival apps with its own, home-grown versions, such as happened with Snapchat-esque Poke last month. Expanding Facebook Camera or Instagram with brief video support would hardly be difficult.

Facebook’s Vine Whine is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you’re looking for more detailed insight about your Facebook network, such as your friends and your activity on the site, Wolfram Alpha announced a variety of updates to their Facebook analytics tool, which initially launched back in August. The tool allows users to see analytics on their daily posting activity, as well as friend statistics.

In the new update, Wolfram Alpha added a new categorization feature that arranges friends, family, and acquaintances into several different groups: Insider, Outsider, Gateway, Neighbor, and Connector. An Insider is a friend who has many mutual friends with you, an Outsider is a friend with very little common friends with you, a Gateway is a friend who has many friends outside of your network, a Neighbor is a friend with few friends outside your network, and a Connector is a friend who connects you with other groups.

All of this, combined with other information about your friends, such as location, age, gender, etc., will provide a bevy of different visualizations, and it lets you see certain patterns amongst your friends that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. Essentially, it’s pretty close to what Facebook’s new Graph Search can do, but this provides a visualized look into your network while you wait for Graph Search to launch.

To try out the new Facebook analytics features, you can type “Facebook report” into Wolfram Alpha’s search box, and after connecting their Facebook account with the search engine (as well as creating a Wolfram Alpha account), you’ll then see all sorts of information about your Facebook network.

Wolfram Alpha improves personal Facebook analytics tool is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Vine, Twitter’s new micro-video sharing… thing, is temporarily down, buckled beneath the weight of desk recordings. More »

We’re sure that many of you guys are probably used to Facebook implementing changes and redesigns every so often, sometimes without really telling its users what’s going on, resulting in many status updates from users expressing their surprise and sometimes dismay (i.e. many people weren’t too happy about the redesign of the profile pages when they first launched). Poking fun at the various changes Facebook likes to implement every now and then is the YouTube channel UCBComedy where they have created a video demonstrating where Facebook manages to get their ideas from. It’s pretty funny if this style of humor is your sort of thing, and they do a pretty good job at pointing out some of the snafus the social network encountered on the way. In any case it’s a good way to kick start a Thursday so if you have a couple of minutes to spare, be sure to check it out!

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Netflix Added 2 Million New Subscribers Domestically & 6 Million Internationally In Q4 , Pirate Bay Documentary Becomes First Film To Premier Online At Berlinale Festival,