Paintstrokes on the Digital Canvas

Well, my Facebook activity level has only grown & matured over time, since I joined it. Spreading events & causes; sharing, commenting on & tagging photos & activities; writing a few notes; leveraging the status updates to help myself and my friends & extended network; and so much more.

Over this period, I have noticed one habit of Facebook, which apparently loads of you might have noticed.

One fine day every three or four months, the UI/UX team of Facebook suddenly gets into the action mode & decides to do a makeover of Facebook by implementing the ‘coolest’ UI/UX features they came up with.

I really appreciate your effort and commitment towards giving us an amazing experience, but give us a break and don’t shove it up our *** by abruptly changing the look and feel of Facebook. While surfing through Facebook lately, I noticed one feature of Facebook – viz. Friends Lists – that Facebook is killing with its own abrupt UI implementations.

Do you use Facebook Lists?

• Yes! I do :)
• No. I don't
• What's Facebook Lists? I dunno.
• Well. I never knew there was something called Facebook.

View Results

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I’m not sure how many Facebook users use Lists. But those who do, are really benefited by it, because it empowers them to organise their FB contacts.

[Update: In response to Harsh Lunani's comment on Facebook, I realised I need to demonstrate where actually the Facebook Lists feature is hidden! Their UI doesn't tell people about it! So below is a short update to the post.]

Facebook Requests Section

You  need to go to the Facebook Requests section on the right side of your Facebook homepage.

Facebook Lists

Here when you want to confirm people, you can add them to multiple lists! This feature is also available when you want to add friends.

Even before this subset of users recovered from the overhead of categorizing loads of our previous friends, whom we had added before the introduction of Facebook Lists, the new Facebook UI has a feature to retract us from leveraging the semantics of the feature.

We are talking about the very well integrated Friend Requests feature on the top bar of Facebook.

Facebook Friend Requests

This new UI element is very very handy and useful. But, it skips out on adding this new friend to a list. So, if I am a user of Facebook Lists, and I am particular about adding my friends to lists, then it is virtually of no use to me. And there is another set of users who are particular, but not always conscious about it. So, even if they started categorizing their friends earlier, they’re now missing out on doing that if they confirm their friends using this bar.

What do you think about this? Leave a comment or participate in our polls to give us some feedback.

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Facebook, Social Media, UI/UX, Usability Facebook, Usability

I had been wondering the other day that the ek-do people who had read this blog must be wondering: “Arey! Wassup?”

We’re here working our a**es off! We just started with the development of our first product yesterday & are very glad and joyous about it, while taking care of the few projects that we’ve got from our clients.

Kaustubh – an IITB student in his 2nd year – had come in for a short while to intern with us & wrote a wonderful blogpost comprising a few quick-reference mindmaps for the Twitter API. That’s coming up next for you to check out.

And if you’d be interested in knowing what is coming further, Aziz – our All-rounder – is working on mindmaps for the formats of the twitter stream API, which we would be very very glad to share with you!

I’ll keep updating this blog with more about our product, once the product says: “Hey! Let me out! I wanna go meet people!”

General

Created this while peeking into WordPress code after a long long time!

Hope this is useful & handy to you!

Gist of WP Plugin Development on a whiteboard – Click to see full-size image

[Update] Our new intern, Anirudh, just came across an interesting, comprehensive & useful WordPress Plugin Development Crash Course which also has a very detailed screencast video, as Anirudh puts it. We share it here with you because we thought it might be useful to you! BTW, there are two bit.ly links on the diagram for you to follow. They point you to the official WordPress Codex pages for plugin development.

Wordpress Development, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

This is something that came up from my long discussion yesterday evening with Pravish, who’s joining us as the Techie Captain at Digital Canvas.

The Startup that will grow

Cartoons, Entrepreneurship, Startups Cartoons, Entrepreneurship, Startups

What's happening with the FB privacy settings? Click to see larger cartoon

This cartoon has been made after reading this, this and this. It has been made just for fun. But, I do have a few things on the serious side to add to it too

I totally stand with Sanjay’s viewpoint & perspective about the whole thing. He’s very practically drawn the analogies and there’s nothing more that can be added to it.

There’s a concern Mahesh has raised about large set of friends. Let me put it in a situation, totally within his perspective:

Mahesh has 4151 friends, as of now. He’ll definitely have his employees, his friends, his family, his relatives and so many more of his real & virtual contacts, all in his Facebook friends list, creating complex overlapping groups/networks of people.

Assuming, if he goes down to a booze party with 10 old friends. And wants to post photos/videos from that booze party and wants to share it with all these 10 people, 20 of his current close friends, and a couple of people here and there and doesn’t want to share it with anyone else.

I see it as a valid concern! The problem lies in the fact that a lot of users do not know that such a feature already exists on Facebook!!

Lets see it in images how, this can be achieved. I will demonstrate this by going into one of my photo albums on Facebook.

Since I want only a selected set of friends to see it, I go to Edit Info & select Customize... in the Privacy setting.

I first add my friend Pranshu to it.

Followed by this, I add a FB list I'm maintaining, viz. Community - Kolkata

I want all my Web Designer friends to see it. So I add my Web Designers FB list as well!

I want another of my friend, Ankita to be able to see it. So I add her as well. Followed by this, I just save these settings & voila!!

Whoa!! Whoa!! So I can add my Facebook lists here!! That makes it so cool & controllable!

Wait. There’s a problem. This is a problem which a lot of us have been facing & will face.

Facebook lists is  the amazing feature in concern here, which was introduced in the end of 2007.

A lot of people joined Facebook much earlier and already had a lot of friends on their list, some of them with the number of added friends large enough! Different people started using lists at different points in time. The result of this, is that come what may, even if we put in enough efforts to create lists out of our contacts, I’m sure there will be extremely few of you readers, who will have a `totally` updated and maintained set of Facebook lists!!

So, what it essentially boils down to is that we have the superpower of maintaining our privacy and share with full granularity, but we’ll have to sit down and categorize our contacts into lists. Trust me, though my categorized contacts are not completely managed, but to the certain extent that they are, it helps me a lot in certain situations, like inviting people to an event, or suggesting Fan Pages, etc. There can be various uses of maintaining these lists, just like the one demonstrated above!

So, from now on, whenever you add a friend, make sure you mark him on the relevant lists, right away!!

Other aspects of this topic are also open for discussion here! So, drop in your comments.

Cartoons, Facebook, Social Media Facebook, Facebook Lists, Facebook Privacy, Social Media

Digital Canvas started off last year on the 11th of November, 2008. For all this while, it has been my brand to offer professional design & development services!!

Over this period, I’ve gone through a real roller-coaster ride, learning a lot from all the work I’ve done under the DC banner, as well as from all the community work that I do.

I am thrilled to actually be starting to work on my own product ideas now!!

In fact, had it not been my colleagues at HeadStart Network Foundation and indirect mentors – Aditya, Arpit, Sumit, Pallav and so many more people I have interacted with over the last few years – I am not sure what path I would have taken, if not this plunge!!

So, here I am ready to become us!! We’re now building up our team!! Details available on our homepage!!

General HeadStart