New Facebook features leaked!

Facebook suddenly went down for about an hour Thursday, after an accident of exposing some of the incoming features for hardly 45 minutes, and apologized in a Twitter feed by tweeting "Some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It's now back to normal."

Mashable caught some of the screenshots of the prototypes, which include new Facebook Pages (with Questions integration), a “Switch Accounts” feature for Page Admins, a new Memories feature that chronicles photos and status updates from years past and a new and improved lightbox user interface for photos.


Facebook Pages

Facebook Pages got a temporary facelift with the tab-free design, that closely resembles the new Facebook Profiles. Facebook Questions feature was also integrated into the Pages, and Facebook introduced a “Switch Accounts” feature for Page admins.

 

Lightbox UI for Facebook Photos 

The lightbox user interface for Facebook Photos, previewed two months ago when Facebook upgraded Photos, was improved, although it seemed quite buggy. It lets view photos in a black box hovering over the rest of the screen with some minimal navigation controls and relevant social features, allowing to concentrate completely on the image at hand. 

Memories

During the glitch, a new feature called Memories, appeared in people's profiles right below Photos. It showed options for jumping to photos grouped by years: 2010, 2009, 2008, etc. with complementing information like status dated status updates, the number of friends added per year, events attended and Facebook places check-ins. Memories would make for a pleasant walk down memory lane, so hope this features finds its way back to Profile Pages in the near future.

 

Related articles

• New Facebook Features Exposed in Accidental Update (mashable.com)
• Facebook Introduces New "Memories" Feature (thenextweb.com)
• What Is Facebook's New 'Memories' Feature? [Updates] (gawker.com)
• Facebook launched Facebook Auto Tagging Feature (mwd.com)

The new web browser RockMelt, making social networks really better

Little has been known about stealth start-up RockMelt except that it's a browser, specifically (and yet ambiguously) a "Facebook browser," and it's backed by browser godfather Marc Andreessen. Well, now RockMelt has crept out of the woodwork into a limited beta for Mac and Windows, and the world can get a peek at it.

RockMelt is indeed a "Facebook browser," if only because Facebook is the social-media service that's best integrated into it at launch. It's clear that ultimately the browser's team plans to make it more customizable with other services. The ultimate goal, you could say, is revamping the traditional browser many of the Web-browsing behaviors that have popped up in the past few years--social-media sharing, Twitter clients, RSS alerts, and speedier search--and works them into an interface that aims for convenience rather than confusion. While it may still have too many bells and whistles for the average Web user, it's likely to attract some curiosity from hardcore social-media users, obsessive multitaskers, and efficiency geeks who see an opportunity to cut down on the number of browser tabs and desktop applications that they may have open.

"We're reinventing the browser for how people user the Web today, which is dramatically different from how people were using the Web only a few short years ago," RockMelt co-founder Tim Howes told CNET.

First of all, you log in with Facebook Connect upon launching RockMelt. There's a left sidebar of easy Facebook access, including a row of "top friends" that you can select, and you can drag or drop content from the main browser (like links or videos) to immediately share it with one of them in Facebook Chat. (Unfortunately, there is not yet support for other instant-messaging clients.)

Then, on the right side bar, is a customizable list of favorite sites and services, with yellow indicators to tell you when there's new content from a blog you read or the people you follow on Twitter. There's a browser button to share content on Facebook or Twitter (and more services to come); the company even has its own URL shortener, http://me.lt.

The search box at the top is also different than your average browser's. It loads up a list of results in a drop-down menu, and begins "preloading" all of them so that you can flip back and forth between individual results at maximum speed.

"It changes the way you search because it makes it so much faster and so much lighter-weight," co-founder Eric Vishria explained.

The term "social browser" has been thrown about before, namely three years ago with the launch of Flock, a Firefox-based browser loaded with a dizzying number of social features. RockMelt certainly looks a lot cleaner. Built on Chromium, the foundation of Google Chrome, it aims to be fast, too.

Will people actually switch over to it? Vishria raised a statistic that in the past three years, 500 million people have switched browsers, so that getting them to switch again may be less difficult than it sounds.

RockMelt employs about 30 people, has been in the works for two years, and has raised about $10 million in funding from the Andreessen Horowitz venture firm as well as other investors like Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital and ubiquitous angel investor Ron Conway.

And its odd, vaguely geology-evoking name? It "came out of a three-week brainstorming sesion where we had a million different names," Howes said. Added Vishria: "Easy to spell, easy to remember, and the domain was available."

Related articles

• RockMelt(R) Re-Imagines the Browser Around Friends, Feeds, and Sharing (marketwire.com)
• Here's a Better Name for RockMelt: The FaceBrowser (Plus BoomTown's Two-Dude Video) (kara.allthingsd.com)
• RockMelt, Social Web Browser, Creates New Way To Surf Internet (huffingtonpost.com)
• A new Social Web Browser to be launched by RockMelt (topinews.com)
• RockMelt browser slithers onto interwebs (go.theregister.com)
• RockMelt: The Video. Where's The "Leave Me The F%$K Alone" Button? (techcrunch.com)
• With Social Browser RockMelt, Can Users Finally Close Their Tabs? (nytimes.com)
• RockMelt Is the Newest Social Browser (nowsourcing.com)
• RockMelt: Social browsing done right? (guardian.co.uk)
• RockMelt: A New Browser with a Social Network Bent (dailyfinance.com)

MySpace rolls out a new design to attract users

MySpace, a wannabe social network, pokes back on Facebook with a redesign, which actually looks quite promising. MySpace was once the kooky, colorful king of the Internet.

It let you mercilessly rank friends, post sepia cell phone photos, wallpaper your page with a full body shot of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. It was a virtual bedroom littered with things you loved.

But in just a few years, it fell hard. Today, MySpace has roughly 130 million users. Facebook has 500 million. And a hit movie devoted to its salacious rise and young CEO.

Fans of the world, welcome to the new MySpace. It's not powered by data, it's powered by you.

Wednesday was marked as the beginning of the new MySpace, with its stripped-down logo of my[_____], and a video touting the above message. The changes will continue to roll out through November. Instead of traditional social networking, it aims to be a "social entertainment destination," a place for celebrity news, television, music and video games. The new look is cleaner, with simple tabbed browsing and fewer, better placed advertisements. People will use profiles to talk about movies and stars, to suggest music to friends. They'll get recommendations in the vein of Netflix.

MySpace was born in 2003 on the heels of a similar site, Friendster. It immediately became popular with young people and bands seeking free tools to meet people and market themselves. 

"I think MySpace is dead," said Ingle, 19, of Joplin, Mo. "I don't really log onto that thing anymore. Wasted a lot of my youth on that thing, promoting and making friends and talking to kids. MySpace kind of oversaturated the music scene." The gap narrowed. By 2007, Facebook had attracted 30 million users, gaining on MySpace's 68 million. MySpace revamped to look more like Facebook. It added status updates, more photo and song space. But many people were already gone. "It was like MySpace for grownups," said Chris Stainton, 40, member of Tampa '80s band Rubix Cubed. "So I switched over to Facebook from MySpace."

MySpace has pushed news of its redesign through viral videos and chat forums. The website also has the open ears of 298,779 fans on its "Facebook page".

Related articles

• Yep, I'm Too Old for the New MySpace (technologizer.com)
• MySpace Redesigns Site Around Entertainment, Content (informationweek.com)
• MySpace seeks mojo with redesign, new features (news.cnet.com)
• MySpace Redesigns With Entertainment Focus (mediabistro.com)
• MySpace Revamps Site To Recapture the Magic (tech.slashdot.org)
• Praise for MySpace's new look -- but that logo? (cnn.com)
• 'New MySpace' Narrows Focus to Entertainment (abcnews.go.com)