Ramakrishna Goverdhanam

Facebook‘s all-new design for displaying photos now appears to be rolling out to quite a few users. It features larger images, a lightbox-type UI and other features that put Facebook in even more competition with Flickr on the casual and social photography front. We got wind of these new Facebook Photos features some months ago around the end of September. And while some users have had this feature for a while, we were beginning to wonder why Facebook was delaying a general roll-out. However, Facebook did confirm yesterday that the new photo viewer was on its way to all users soon; and tonight, we’re seeing this new interface from several accounts. One major benefit, from Facebook’s perspective, is that users will be able to browse through many photos in the lightbox layer without disrupting the underlying page and “losing their place.” Other features include hi-res photos, photo-download links and bulk tagging options. In fact, as we noted last fall, many of these feature up...

Facebook provides a number of ways to help you protect yourself and your account, and today they are announcing new features to help make your experience on Facebook more secure. First, they're launching one-time passwords to make it safer to use public computers in places like hotels, cafes or airports. If you have any concerns about security of the computer you're using while accessing Facebook, they can text you a one-time password to use instead of your regular password. Simply text "otp" to 32665 on your mobile phone, and you'll immediately receive a password that can be used only once and expires in 20 minutes. In order to access this feature, you'll need a mobile phone number in your account. They're rolling this out gradually, and it should be available to everyone in the coming weeks. Second, the ability to sign out of Facebook remotely is now available to everyone. These session controls can be useful if you log into Facebook...

On Facebook, you have two options for processing friend requests — confirm or ignore. Today, we’re learning that Facebook is replacing the “Ignore” button with a “Not Now” button, that when clicked, will place the friend request in a separate section called “Hidden Requests.” Inside Facebook was first to report on the new “Not Now” option, and Facebook (Facebook) has since confirmed that it is indeed replacing the current “Ignore” option for all members and will be rolling it out to everyone in the next few days. The “Not Now” alternation will change how you process friend requests moving forward. You can continue to confirm requests as usual, but if you’re not interested in friending a wannabe connection, you’ll now need to click the “Not Now” button. That action will not ignore the request, but hide it, relegating it instead to a new “Hidden Requests” menu for future processing. “If you choose ‘Not Now’, the other person will never be notified that you have hidden their request...