Daily Bits

Facebook Grew Bigger, Again

Arnold Zafra — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:09:48 +0000

Just recently, Facebook has passed the 300 million user mark. This is already a remarkable feat for a social networking site which started as a college project in some university, right? But that number was so yesterday. Based on Facebook’s own advertising statistics, the number of Facebook users have now reached 325 million.The thing is, these userbase continues to grow at an alarming rate. Thanks perhaps to the slew of Facebook games that many have found to be amusing and entertaining. Plus of course the idea of encountering long lost friends and high-school buddies, and renewing old bonds.

Or can we attribute this growth to Facebook’s granular privacy settings and increasingly strict limitations?

If there’s any indication that this might true, just check out your old social networking site before you joined Facebook and see how deserted and lonely those sites are right now.

In my part of the world, Friendster was so BIG before. But now everyone seemed to have migrated to Facebook. It’s like Friendster just had an exodus of user, with most of the Friendster going to the “promised” land.

The question is, when will Facebook’s growth ever stopped?

Facebook Grew Bigger, Again

Anatomy of an iPhone User, Sort of

Arnold Zafra — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:06:49 +0000

Here’s a not so serious take on understanding what type of personality does iPhone users have. The study was candidly conducted by Retervo by asking the general question – “What makes a person attractive to you?

Generally, the study concluded that iPhone users are the gadget-friendly type who prefers things up-to-date and most importantly will not demand that their future partners have a college degree. For as long as their future partners are digitally-switched, iPhone users wouldn’t mind then not finishing college.

iPhone users see themselves as media buffs, extroverts and intellectuals as compared to users of other mobile phones.

And here are some more fun highlights:

some iPhone users broke up with their partners via text message or email
iPhone users will get turn off with their partner if they have outdated gadgets
iPhone users frequently watch “adult materials”
Some iPhone users have broken up with their partners because of overuse of mobile phones.

Anatomy of an iPhone User, Sort of

Google Dashboard: how much does your life rely on Google?

Andy Merrett — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:47:51 +0000

How times have changed since Google was a humble search engine. Today, you can edit office documents, share calendars, manage your address book, blog, receive alerts, synchronise your mobile devices, talk online, watch and upload videos, store your web search history, upload edit and share photos, and more.

How do you keep track of how much information the mighty Google has on you?

Simple: take a look at the new Google Dashboard.

It’s a fairly simple concept: as any good dashboard application should, it simply displays which of Google’s services you’re using and makes it easy to access settings, such as privacy control.

Google announces:

Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this.

Check it out, particularly if you use a lot of Google services. You might be surprised how much you rely on Google!

Google Dashboard: how much does your life rely on Google?

Fun Tools Grow at the Flickr App Garden

Arnold Zafra — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:03:16 +0000

Have you checked out the new Flickr App Garden? It’s a repository of home grown apps created by Flickr members who used the Flickr API. Actually, some of these apps are not really newly developed apps. You might have seen or used it before with your Flickr photos. What Flickr did is to organized previously available apps, added new ones and organized them in one place to come up with the App Garden.

If you have a Flickr account, whether free or pro account and you use Flickr other than as a back-up site for all your photos (like me!), you’ll enjoy the different apps available at the Flickr App Garden.

The site is well organized as well, with featured apps that the Flickr Dev Team suggest at the forefront. You can jump directly to the various apps category using the tag cloud, or check out the suggested apps by the Flickr crew, or if you are a developer or planning to be one, you might also want to check out the Flickr documentation.

Fun Tools Grow at the Flickr App Garden

PayPal Now Supports 24 Currencies

Arnold Zafra — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:18:58 +0000

In the country where I am located, one way for me to receive payments from contacts abroad is through PayPal. But I received payments in dollar and had to open a dollar account to withdraw the payments I got from PayPal in my local currency. But that will change now as PayPal has added 5 new currencies that it supports including - Brazilian Real, Malaysian Ringgit, Philippine Peso, Taiwan New Dollar and Thai Baht.This makes the number of currencies that PayPal now supports to 24 all in all. Previously PayPal supports the U.S. Dollar, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Hong Kong Dollar, Singapore Dollar, Taiwan New Dollar, New Zealand Dollar, Euro, Swiss Franc, Czech Koruna, Swedish Krona, Danish Krone, Norwegian Krone, Hungarian Forint, Mexican Peso, Philippine Peso, Malaysian Ringgit, Chinese RMB, Israeli New Shekel, Pounds Sterling, Brazilian Real, Polish Zloty, Thai Baht and Japanese Yen.

In addition, PayPal has also rolled out its PayPal X global payments platform for use by third-party developers. To kick this out, PayPal has made available the first API under PayPal X which is the Adaptive Payments. This scheme automatically converts currencies using live exchange rates.

This opens up possibilities for developers to create multi-currency applications using PayPal X.

Are you using PayPal? Is your country’s currency one of the currencies supported by PayPal? If not, what online payment system are you using to receive payments internationally?

PayPal Now Supports 24 Currencies