Facebook’s first European data center in Luleå, Sweden (near the Arctic Circle) is now online, and thus far it’s the only facility that’s exclusively using servers the company itself designed. Similar to the social network’s North Carolina complex that served as testing ground for its outdoor air-cooling configuration, the Swedish facility takes advantage of the region’s frigid winds. Excess heat produced by the machines is then routed to offices to keep employees warm in the chilly region. The firm claims the 900,000-square-foot center is powered entirely by hydroelectric energy — a source so reliable that Facebook saw it fit to scale down the number of backup generators by more than 70 percent. With an average power usage efficiency (PUE) of 1.07, the servers should consume 1.07 watts of energy for each watt they need to function pointing to minimal energy loss. Now that the Luleå installation is complete and operational, the company can focus on building its $1.5 billion megastructure (its biggest data center yet) in Altoona, Iowa.
[Image credit: Facebook]
Via: Ars Technica, The Register
Source: Facebook
Twitter is the pioneer of the hashtag, but since then, many other online services have been adopting the number sign as well, because why not? Twitter’s biggest competitor, however, just now added support for hashtags. That’s right, Facebook now lets you click on hashtags that your friends have long been posting to their status updates.
Facebook wants to help you make your conversations just a little more discoverable (if you so desire), and it’s decided to finally include a long-missing feature — clickable hashtags — to the News Feed. If you’ve ever enjoyed hashtag searches on Twitter, Instagram or other social networks (some of our friends enjoy them a little too much, if you ask us), you’ll now have the same feeling of exhilaration on Zuckerberg’s service as you are now able to click on each one. Up until today, any hashtags from imported tweets or Instagram posts just showed up as regular text, with no backlink to accompany them. When it comes to the visibility of your own hashtags, Facebook won’t allow any unintended audiences to see your private updates, so you remain in control of your desired privacy. The company also plans to roll out trending hashtags and other related features in the coming months, but this is a good start for now. The company’s official blog post can be found below.
Filed under: Facebook
Source: Facebook

There’s no #stopping hashtags. Facebook is confirming it will officially support the maddeningly ubiquitous categorization tool starting today, allowing users to #hashtag posts and making those hashtags #clickable. Clicking a hashtag will bring up a list of posts from friends …
Facebook announced today that they have opened up their first data center outside the US in Luleå, Sweden. It’s located in a small town at the northern edge of the Baltic Sea, and is just 62 miles south of the Arctic Circle. It’s an odd place for a data center, but Facebook says there are
Paranoid Android’s HALO does Chat Heads-inspired multitasking, goes open source
Posted in: Today's ChiliIt’s been a couple months since we first saw the fruits of team Paranoid Android’s labor around in-app pop-up window multitasking, and it looks like Paul Henschel and co. are finally sharing the finished product. HALO, as it’s called, loosely combines the ideas behind Samsung’s Multi Window and FaceBook’s Chat Heads into a slick multitasking interface. The feature is activated from the notification tray. It places an icon — or halo — on the display, which can be moved around very much like Chat Heads, or dismissed by double-tapping and dragging it towards the red X at the top. Swiping sideways from the halo shows a series of white lines and text bubbles that match and highlight the notifications in the status bar. Releasing your finger is like tapping on the selected notification, but instead of launching full-screen, the app opens in a pop-up window on top of whatever’s already running, just like Multi Window. The background app continues to run while you interact with the foreground app — to dismiss the pop-up window, simply tap outside of it. Other cool functionality includes swiping up to dismiss the last notification and the ability to pin apps permanently to the halo. But what’s really most exciting is that team Paranoid Android‘s decided to make HALO open source so anyone can be involved. Check out the awesome demo video after the break.
Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Samsung, Google, Facebook
Via: xda-developers
Source: Paranoid Android (Google+)