We were really saddened to read reports today that a man has been charged with alleged murder of a couple in Tennessee because he was upset that they had unfriended his daughter from Facebook.

According to the Associated Press, a couple were shot in their home by Marvin Potter after events had escalated following a series of arguments over the social network.

The sheriff dealing with the case said, "It's a senseless thing" and we couldn't agree more.

We imagine there are a lot more factors at play here and Facebook certainly isn't to blame in any way. No one can really make any assumptions about this case yet, but in a way it's crazy to think that such a small action online could have led to such an escalation in relations offline.

[Via Associated Press]

Facebook has begun rolling out a new way to view photos that has the very same 'lightbox' look as Google+, with a huge photo in the centre and darkened edges.

Now if you click on any photo it'll pop-up to fill most of your screen and the background becomes dark. You can then scroll through photos with the arrows at the sides or 'tag' or 'like' a photo with the buttons that are in the bottom left hand corner.

Comments now sit on the right side of the photo and there are a couple of cheeky ads and sponsored stories at the bottom of some images too. I find it hilarious my face is currently helping to advertise French Connection and Danepak bacon. Nice.

Many online commentators (and Google+ advocates) have been moaning that the new photo viewer looks like a rip-off of Google+. Admittedly it does, but who cares. It makes our photos look better and we're not giving up the social network in favour of Google's offering anytime soon.

Do you have the new photo viewer yet and most importantly, do you like it?

We're all guilty of untagging horrendous and unflattering (usually drunken) photos from Facebook, but sometimes they're so bad you just have to delete them, or get your friends to. But now it's been revealed that those embarrassing/ugly/incriminating photos we so swiftly deleted may still exist somewhere online.

According to All Facebook, the social network has recently admitted that cached versions of photos may not be completely deleted and may still be floating around the web. Apparently they're not easy to find and the complex URLs will contain lots of letters and numbers, but anyone who knew the exact address would still be able to access them.

Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng first flagged up the problem three years ago, but it seems it still hasn't been rectified. In a series of emails back and forth between Facebook and Cheng a spokesperson wrote:

"The systems we used for photo storage a few years ago did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time, even though they were immediately removed from the site.

"We have been working hard to move our photo storage to newer systems that do ensure that photos are fully deleted within 45 days of the removal request being received.
This process is nearly complete, and there is only a very small percentage of user photos still on the old system awaiting migration. The URL you provided was stored on this legacy system. We expect this process to be completed within the next month or two, at which point we will verify that the migration is complete and we will disable all of the old content."

Given Facebook is SO huge it's bound to encounter these kinds of problems from time to time, but you'd have thought this issue would now be sorted three years down the line.

The fact some old photos may still be somewhere probably won't hurt or offend anyone in the long run (unless you've been doing really bad things and there was photo evidence on Facebook at some point to prove it), but it's more the principle that users don't have the ability to properly control content that belongs to them. But then again if that's the case, maybe they shouldn't be on Facebook at all...

[Via All Facebook]

Last night (after a crazy amount of speculation from the web) Facebook filed for its initial public offering (or IPO) and seeks to raise $5 billion (about £3.15 million) of funding, meaning you could soon own shares in the company!

However, if you're not bothered about being part of Zuckerberg's gang and you're more interested in the juicy financial details that have been revealed in the IPO process, then Ad Age has collected together some of the most interesting stats:

Facebook's total ad revenue in 2011: $3.15 billion
Share of revenue attributed to advertising: 83%
Amount of revenue sourced from Zynga: 12%
Amount Netflix spent advertising on Facebook in 2011: $3.9 million
Amount The Washington Post spent: $4.2 million
Facebook 2011 profit: $1 billion
Revenue generated from virtual goods: $557 million
Global monthly active users: 845 million
Daily likes and comments: 2.7 billion
Amount Facebook spent on advertising in 2011: $28 million
Likely Facebook market valuation: $75 to $100 billion
CEO Mark Zuckerberg's total 2011 compensation: $1.5 million
Mr. Zuckerberg's ownership stake: 28.2%
Mr. Zuckerberg's voting power: 56.9%
Mr. Zuckerberg's annual salary starting in 2013: $1

Sure it's fascinating to see so many financial details that we've never had access to before, but we're also interested in the figures that refer to how people are using the social network. More than 2.7 billion daily likes and comments?! That's a lot of cat and sloth videos...

[Image via Flickr]

This week Facebook has launched a new application called Timeline Movie Maker, which turns all of the content from your Timeline into, you guessed it, a fancy little movie just for you.

It whizzes through the years of your life, showing you a selection of videos, updates, photos, posts from others and changes in education and profession. Once you've watched it you can then play around with the soundtrack, replace some photos with others you prefer and make a different movie.

It may make a sweet little video (assuming you don't come across loads of photos of your ex or that friend you fell out with, in which case it could be kinda upsetting), but you do need to have the Timeline activated to see it. This makes us wonder whether it's a way for Facebook to get reluctant users to switch other more willingly. Or maybe we're just being too cynical...

Go and watch your own little life movie now at timelinemoviemaker.com.

Last year Facebook introduced the News Ticker, a way to see everything your friends are doing, from commenting on other people's photos to adding new contacts. Boring and a little worrying when you realise you've been sat watching it tick over for the past 20 minutes.

Back in October we wrote about the Facebook Classic plug-in for Google Chrome, which gets rid of the News Ticker for you and reverts back to the old look News Feed. However, if Chrome isn't your browser of choice you can now quickly toggle the News Ticker on and off, just look for the little arrow in the top right hand corner.

We like that Facebook has added this very simple option to hide or show the News Ticker, but wonder why it wasn't introduced last year? It would have prevented a lot of Facebook haters from whining even more than they usually do...

No, it's never going to happen, but printing supplier Cartridge Save has decided to combine the two things it loves, Facebook and printing stuff, to try and work out what it would look like, how much it would cost and how long it would take to read to print out every update, drunken photo and witty info page from the social network. We're sure that'd make for riveting reading...

There are no official figures from Facebook about how often users update their statuses, but a study conducted by Cartridge Save found that 62% of those polled write something new everyday. If you go on to apply that to how many people have Facebook (to get a rough estimate) you have 292 billion updates, which is 584 billion lines of text.

Take a look at what that equates to in terms of paper, time and cost in the infographic below...

www.CartridgeSave.co.uk conducted a study of 2,102 Facebook users from across the UK.

Ever since the majority of Facebook users were given the option to switch to the new Timeline-style profile back in December we knew it was only a matter of time before Zuckerberg and the gang forced everyone to make the switch. Now according to the Facebook blog it seems it'll be only "a few weeks" away before every user is migrated over to the rather revealing and 'scroll-y' new look.

Users will still get seven day's notice before their Timelines are published for the world to stalk, giving those who hate change just enough time to delete all of their drunken photos, choose a lovely cover photo and learn to love the new layout.

If Facebook changes in the past and the current hatred of Timeline among some users is anything to go by we can expect lots and lots of "I hate Facebook" and "Timeline sucks" groups, websites, commenters and angry Twitter users cropping up over the next few weeks too. Fun.

The online personalities we've created for ourselves nowadays may be much more realistic than they were back in the Myspace years (I know I'm not the only one guilty of posing, applying tonnes of make-up and Photohopping EVERYTHING, right?!), but even now they're still not completely accurate representations of our real lives. After all, you can't possibly express everything that happens from day-to-day online! So although someone may seem to have only the most idyllic, fun-loving, photos and status updates on Facebook, that doesn't mean every second of their life is filled with holidays, gorgeous friends and lovely clothes.

Although I'm sure we're all well aware of this, it's sometimes hard to not feel a little envious of that blogger with the designer wardrobe, time to cook cupcakes every night and a seemingly perfect job. But that green-eyed 'Facebook envy' feeling is only natural, right?

Well, a new study conducted by a team of sociologists at the Utah Valley University found that the way we view our lives and ourselves could very much be dependent on how much time we spend online, which is hardly good news for those of us who need to constantly check social media a lot as part of our jobs...

The research took around 400 students and asked them a series of statements about their lives, such as "life is fair" or "many of my friends have a better life than me". They were then asked all kinds of questions about Facebook, including how much time they spend on the social network, to see if there was any correlation.

The team soon found a pattern in that those who spend more time on Facebook start to think other people have a much better life than they do, which is a little worrying, but hardly surprising.

Two members of the team, Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge said:

"Those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives. Furthermore, those that included more people whom they did not personally know as their Facebook "friends" agreed more that others had better lives."

It's sad to think that browsing through the lives of your friends could have a negative impact on how you view yourself and your little place in the world. But, although in many ways the likes of Facebook and Twitter mean our online and offline lives are more closely connected than ever before, you still need to remember that photos, status updates and seemingly perfect lives can be tweaked, exaggerated and manufactured. The quicker you realise that and tear yourself away from the computer the happier you'll be - which sounds easy in theory...

[Via Digital Trends]

Today Facebook has launched a series of new applications that allow users to enhance their timelines and have interactions beyond the standard "like", "comment" and "share" functions we've become accustomed to.

Using a "user-action-object" language, Facebook now allows for more app-specific interactions. So, a cooking app for instance could have see Becca (the user) cook (performing an action) a Pot Noodle (object), or Anthony (the user) play (performing an action) Xbox 360 (object).

There will also be the possibility for apps to interact with each other (perhaps diet and fitness apps for instance) while Facebook is now open to all public app submissions too.

According to the official Facebook blog, some of the revamped apps include Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes and Ticketmaster and there'll be many more to come in the future for all kinds of different users and interests.

The team are also keen to point out that users will have control over what's shared and can quickly get rid of the app if it's not working for them. Those who are already really frustrated by the new Guardian app might tend to disagree through...

We've always been able to share our Instagram snaps through to our Facebook friends once we've taken them, edited them and added a caption to them. But according to the Instagram blog, from today users will now notice much better integration with the social network, including a dedicated photo album and bigger images.

Before, Facebook photos just seemed to be thrown into our profiles with little thought of how they'd look or where they'd get stored. If you choose to share through to Facebook now, your image will appear much bigger than before along with the caption you've added and a link to its public URL.

There are also better sharing features, so simply click "share" under a friend's Instagram image and you can paste it onto your own timeline, to a friend, a group or into a message.

Most importantly, there's now a dedicated album for Instagram photos where they'll go to live. We always found it strange that they didn't get saved anywhere, so we even set up an ifttt.com rule to combat the problem!

And finally, you really need to activate the new Facebook timeline to make your Instagram photos look extra specially good. So, if you've been holding off up until now, just go bite the bullet, you won't regret it if you're into mobile photography.

Tip: To find out how to add Instagram photos you've already shared into the new album, check out this guide from Instagram's support centre.

If you cast your mind back to last September, you'll remember that at Facebook's f8 developers conference the social network first revealed its new timeline, the annoying news ticker and finally actions. Yep, we forgot about those too.

Actions (or verbs as some called them) are set to become bigger than the Facebook "Like", but instead of showing your support or agreement with something they'll tell your friends how you're interacting with something. The main ones we know about are "Read", "Watch" and "Listen" and Facebook want to seamlessly tell your friends whenever you read, watch or listen to anything while logged in. It'll appear as a regular update on your timeline, in the news ticker and in the news feed and will totally depend on how you use the social network, but will be something along with lines of "Becca listened to Frank Sinatra". There'll be more actions to come in the future, but developers have the freedom to specify them when they tweak their apps in the coming months.

In some respects actions will become a brilliant way to find out more about your friends and discover new content. However, we can't help but think it feels far too intrusive. Even though we presume you'll be able to have control over which actions get shared and which don't, it may still feel like you're streaming your whole life through Facebook, which is what Mark Zuckerberg wants, but is it really what you want?

Quirky business card company MOO.com has teamed up with everyone's favourite social network to create a new kind of business card, which aims to bring together our online profiles and our offline networking habits, as well as celebrate the controversial launch of the new Facebook timeline.

The cards can be designed and customised by each user and you can feature any Facebook photo on the front and a favourite quote or saying on the reverse (is that sweet or just very very cheesy?).

Richard Moross, CEO and Founder of MOO.com, explains that this new collaboration is much more than getting your hands on a shiny new business card:

"It's clear that consumer habits of sharing business and personal information are evolving, and the lines between online social networking and offline business networking are not just blurring, but vanishing.

"This integration places MOO and Facebook at the leading edge of this new trend: seamlessly turning your dynamic online presence into a beautifully designed, high quality offline 'social' business card. We're very excited about this new and unique way to share your contact details, and other profile information, with friends in the real world."

We'd argue that the line between our online and offline personas disappeared a long time ago and the new cards seem a bit like a ploy to get us all embrace to the new Facebook timeline with open arms, but if it means we get our hands on some (potentially free) Moo.com merchandise, then we're not complaining.

Visit MOO - Facebook Cards to get yours and find out more, the first 200,000 people who sign up get 50 for free! Quick! QUICK!

It's no surprise that every time Facebook changes a feature, introduces a new layout or tweaks privacy settings that a large number of users get very angry. After all, many of us use the social network everyday and these new features are irritating, time consuming to get our heads around and most importantly, human beings just don't seem to like change. Ever.

So, Facebook's recent (pretty significant) overhaul of profiles, which sees them being replaced by timelines, has caused an uproar among disgruntled users who just want things back to the way they were in the good ol' days.

Many of these users have formed timeline hating groups and they're actively commenting on every blog post they can find to do with the new features to show their disgust. However, some are also turning to bogus services, which promise to remove the timeline and all mentions of it for good, but at a price. According to All Facebook, there are more than 16 timeline-related scams circulating at the moment that could be forcing users to download content, invite friends, watch videos and download malicious files.

The problem seems to be that nowhere on Facebook's help pages or blog does it say that once you've activated the timeline you can't revert back to the old profile, which is presumably why so many people are actively looking to these kinds of bogus solutions.

As far as we know there's been no official word from Facebook about whether the new timeline will become mandatory for everyone in the next few months. At the moment it's optional and users have seven days to review it and make sure they really want it before they're stuck with it for good.

Here at Shiny Shiny we like the new layout and think the timeline is interesting, looks better and allows us to stalk our friends with ease. However, that may just be because we know standing up to Facebook's decisions rarely results in any of us getting what we really want, so it's best to just embrace the changes.

[Via All Facebook]

Last week Facebook officially rolled out its new Timeline feature to all of its users, allowing them to opt in, sort through their content and then publish the lovely little stories of their lives once they're ready for the world to see them.

At the same time, the official Facebook blog announced that the new Timeline features would be coming to Facebook's mobile site, m.facebook.com as well as Android devices. However, Apple fans have had to wait a few more days, as only tonight has the Facebook app been updated to give iPhone users shiny new Timeline functionality too. Of course you still need to have published your Timeline from the web version of Facebook, but once that's activated you can now enjoy the slicker, prettier and much more revealing Timeline look on your phone as well.

Although an iPhone update for the Facebook app has been released this evening, there's no news on when iPad users can see it too, but we imagine it'll be on its way in the next few days.

As more and more users explore Facebook's new timeline feature we're seeing lots of our friends lament about how many of their photos and updates were taken or written under the influence of alcohol. So take a look back through your timeline now, in how many were you a little bit drunk? Honestly?

Well if you're anything like the rest of the UK more than three quarters of those photos you see there were taken on a drunken night out. We don't know whether that means we're fun-loving and jolly or just sad and unhealthy?

These results come from a study carried out by personalised photo book website MyMemory.com, which also found that 56% of those polled admitted that some of the photos weren't of innocent and jolly drunken fun, but could get them into actual trouble at work. Ouch. Let's hope that these users are busy removing photos from their timeline now so Facebook doesn't end up just becoming a personal scrapbook of debauchery.

The study also found that we're a little bit sneaky too, with 65% of respondents admitting they'd deliberately tagged an embarrassing photo of their friends and a huge 93% admitting they've had to go on a huge untagging spree in the past.

These results may show that as a nation we tend to drink a little too much, but let's remember that the only times people tend to get snap happy with their cameras is during a big event or night out. Or at least that's what we keep telling ourselves...

If you're finding tonnes of drunken and embarrassing photos but do want Facebook's new timeline, then dedicate a bit of time this weekend to going through and deleting anything incriminating. To do this just go to the dodgy photo or update, click on the little pencil in the top right hand corner and then choose to either "remove from timeline" or "delete post". There we go, all evidence of that time you jumped on top of a statue in your underwear has been removed from history, now where's the clever little memory erase pen from Men In Black to get rid of it from your friends' memories too?

The study polled 1,781 Britons aged 18 and over with a presence on Facebook.

[Image via The Pink Princess]

Facebook's long awaited new timeline feature, which turns your normal profile into a long history of every silly update and drunken photo you've ever uploaded, is now available to everyone according to the official Facebook blog.

We first heard about the timeline back in September at Facebook's f8 developers conference, and since then a select few pretended to be developers to get their hands on it early (not us, no, we'd never do that...) and lucky New Zealanders officially got in on the action first. But today any Facebook user can go ahead and activate the timeline by clicking on the prompt they should see on the main dashboard.

Once you've activated the timeline the girl from The Ring calls you and tells you that you've got seven days. No that's a complete lie, once you've activated the timeline Facebook gives you seven days to review all the stupid stuff you've done before everyone can flick back through your life and see it. So get rid of those embarrassing photos of your ex and your ranting updates in your own time over the next week then (and only then) should you publish it for your friends to see.

The Facebook blog gives you a detailed rundown about the whole process, including how to hide and delete any incriminating/silly/intoxicated content.

Some of you may think this is old and boring news, but others may be shocked to hear that you don't just have one inbox on Facebook, you have two, one called Messages and one called Other.

You're only alerted with an email or a notification when a friend sends you a message, it pops straight into your Messages inbox and you usually read it next time you log-in. However, people that aren't your friends can message you too and their communications with you go into the Other inbox.

Other sits right below the regular inbox, so chances are if you spend a lot of your time on Facebook you'll have had a play around with it before, but lots of people are getting very frustrated that they weren't officially told about the sneaky Other inbox, as they've been missing out on all kinds of important messages. Although, I personally find that quite hard to believe. My Other inbox for some reason contains messages from events that I'm going to, as well as messages from random weirdos who have found me through pages that I've liked. Nice.

Whether it's a folder for spam and creeps or contains a few hidden gems, we thought we'd let you know about the Other secret inbox so you can go check for yourself. From what we can see there's no way to change your notifications so you get an email when an Other message arrives, so be sure to keep checking back.

Back in September at Facebook's f8 developers conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced a whole host of new changes to everyone's favourite social network, including apps, different verbs other than like and oh yeah TIMELINES. So where are they Zuckerberg? Huh?

For anyone that's forgotten what timelines are, they're going to be the clever little things that replace our profiles and look like Tumblr-ish stories of our whole lives with a line down the middle, content at each side and a big cover photo at the top. You may have heard lots of people talking about them already because if you're super impatient (yes that's us) you can fool Facebook into thinking you're a developer and get one early - Mashable showed us how to get our hands on a timeline a few months ago.

However, if you're not willing to go down that route there hasn't been any mention of when they're going to be rolled out to everyone. Well, until today. All Things D reported this morning that Facebook will today roll out its new timeline, BUT only to the people of New Zealand for the time being. Great news if you're a New Zealander, not so great news if you're based anywhere else and want to show off your new timeline features to all of your friends.

It makes sense that Facebook would try a country specific trial to begin with, maybe to iron out any issues or just gauge how well it's being received on a smaller scale. But come on Facebook, you promised us the timeline months ago now, why not consider it an early Christmas present?

Over the weekend Mashable wrote about a new Facebook ad campaign called "Unexpected Babies" from Olla Condoms, which basically aims to send friend requests to Facebook users from their unborn sons. Yeah, we're not sure what to think about it yet either...

The Brazilian agency behind the idea, Age Isobar, took a male user's name and created a new profile adding Jr. on the end. They then sent the user a friend request and if he chooses to visit the profile he sees an Olla Condoms advertisement and a link to the brand's website.

Since then the blogosphere has been talking about and analysing the campaign, with many admiring it and many others slamming it.

So is "Unexpected Babies" a stroke of creative genius, a little bit creepy or just spam that's probably violating a lot of Facebook's terms of service?

Well firstly you can't deny it's a pretty clever and unique campaign, which many have suggested has been used to raise the profile of the agency and the brand behind it rather than actually scare users into using condoms in future. Chris Matyszczyk of Cnet explains that many Brazilian ad agencies are known for creating ad campaigns that rarely run but are solely used as award submissions. We're not sure whether that's the case here or not, but there's been no word from anyone who's seen the friend requests "in the wild" just yet.

Others have suggested the ads are a little creepy and could really shock the users in question. However, I'm pretty sure once they realise it's an ad and not some sign from a Facebook fortune teller that they'll be more amused than scared.

The thing that presents the biggest problem for a campaign of this nature is the fact that Facebook has many clauses in its terms of service that mean it could probably never happen on a large scale. Facebook is strict about fake profiles and acting to delete those using a nickname or a completely made up person altogether. Although we imagine a few slip through the net for various reasons, a large campaign which takes lots of current names and adds Jr. on the end would presumably be picked up by the Facebook police pretty quickly.

So whether you love it or hate it, let's applaud the "Unexpected Babies" campaign for being a little bit different but not get too angry as Facebook is bound to put an end to it before it even begins.