facebook

Breaking news! Facebook could be introducing QR codes to profile pages soon. These codes, for those of you who don't know, are a bit like the barcodes you find on products you might buy in your local shop, but are capable of holding more complex information such as a website address or a short message. Interestingly the functionality seems to have disappeared now, but after seeing this tweet (which pointed to some more information available at: http://www.technicavita.org/social-tech/mobile-sites/introduction-to-mobile-barcode-qr-technology.html):

The Course Profiles application for Facebook has been praised in a report by Childnet International and funded by Becta, the UK Government body for learning technology.

I was surprised today while on Facebook to notice an advert on the left of the page with the face of a friend of mine promoting a certain local radio station. It looks like this may be due to the SocialAds system in Facebook, which seems to be a way to persuade people to but products on the basis that their friends are a fan of it so you should too.

Something that has become vastly annoying recently about Facebook is the sheer number of invites to add applications to a profile. The invites mechanism used to be a handy way to let your friends know about an application they might like, but unfortunately some application developers decided to abuse this process and force you to invite friends before you could use it. Eventually this lead to a situation where you could log in to your account and find a large number of invites waiting for you, many of them generated by badly behaved applications.

The Course Profiles application, which allows you to display a badge on your profile in Facebook about your Open University studies has just been updated. This is a bit of an interim release while we plan a brand new user interface that will enable users to connect with the application's features more easily. Not that this is some sort of dull maintenance release though, we've put in some new features!

I can hear the thuds on the floor as the "I just don't get it" brigade become overloaded by Facebook's announcement that it is extending the ways in which applications can integrate with their mobile platform. They are even opening up methods for sending SMSs. Facebook has been a runaway success as has text messaging. Up to now if you write an application for Facebook you lose members of your audience when they.. well, go out. Now you can interact with them wherever they are.

Welcome to my first ever blog post! There is a fair chance you are here because you have been reading Prof. Martin Weller's blog post about the new Course profiles application that we have been developing to enable OU students to share with their friends on Facebook.