Social media buttons. Everyone loves them and we all use them. They can express how you feel without you having to exert any energy at all in 1, thinking 2, actually writing something sensible.

But there really ought to be more of them. Here are five that should be launched asap, but almost certainly won't be as the social media powers that be are scared we might not use them in a dignified manner.

1 Facebook - So What - Ideal for when you see the eighteenth Buzzfeed post of the day in your stream or when a friend overdoses on the cutesy dogs pics.

2 Twitter - Like - When you want to tell someone that you like their tweet, but don't want to retweet it, and no that isn't what the favourite button on Twitter is for.

3 LinkedIn - Non-recommendation button - When you worked with the person they were a complete arse - and you guess that they probably still are.

4 Facebook - Dislike button - for when something not good happens to your friends they get ill or lose their job etc

5 Facebook - WTF - Very different from the So What button this is for expressing complete surprise at a situation. AKA the Golly Gosh button.

6 Facebook - WAATP - Nothing to do with the excellent football site, this is actually for expressing surprise about semi-naked pics of your friend on their recent holiday.

7 LinkedIn - Kerching - For when those too good to be true business offers start cluttering up your news feed

Any others?

WTF pic credit

There's a good bit of gossip over at Bloomberg. The news site has a scoop on the future of Facebook Home - apparently it is coming to Apple's iPhone.

The user interface, which has been optimised to work with Android devices and debuted on the HTC First could hit the iPhone later in the year.

Talks between Apple and Facebook are ongoing, but the news site had this to say

After debuting the software, called Home, for Google Inc. (GOOG)'s Android operating system earlier this month, the operator of the world's biggest social-networking service is speaking to Apple and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) about expanding to other platforms, Adam Mosseri, director of product at Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, said in an interview on Bloomberg West yesterday. The talks are ongoing and nothing has been finalized.

The sticking point is likely to be that Apple has a much tighter control over the applications that it passes for the iPhone than Google seems to have for Android phones.

So it could be that it won't be the full version of Home that arrives on the iPhone but a cut down version instead.

Cnet has lots of reasons why it thinks it might not happen, but if Home is a success I think this is one app that Apple will work hard to get an agreeement with Facebook on. The last thing Apple needs at the moment are high profile popular apps that are only available on Android.

If you fancy the HTC First - the handset announced yesterday that runs Facebook Home, the social network's home screen on steroids - you will have to wait a while.

The device goes on sale in the United States on 12 April, but won't land in the UK until the early summer where it will be an EE exclusive.

In addition to Facebook Home the First runs Android Jelly Bean OS, sports a dual-core Qualcomm 1.4GHz processor, includes 16GB of storage and packs a 5 mega pixel camera.

Pippa Dunn, chief marketing officer, EE, said: 'We're proud to have been chosen by Facebook and HTC to be their UK launch partner for the HTC First. In combining our unique superfast network with the latest integrated Facebook experience, customers will constantly be at the centre of conversations with their friends.'

Peter Chou, CEO of HTC said: 'Along with our partners and fellow innovators--EE in the UK--we anticipate excitement from customers when the HTC First becomes available, putting a user's friends and family at the centre of their mobile experience.'

I assume you have all caught the Facebook news from yesterday. If not go here. Suggesting that apps were a legacy from the PC age Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new wrapper for Android homes called Home that is embedded in a six handsets - three each from HTC and Samsung - and will be available to download via the Google Play Store.

The 'wrapper's customise the home screen of an Android phone enabling notifications, images and messages to appear on the main screen of the phone.

Its nearest cousin is the way in which Amazon has wrapped its content around the Kindle Fire Android powered tablets.

It is an interesting move but is it enough to make you want to run your phone via Facebook?

Well it is a shift in emphasis that Facebook needed to make. It has to get more people using Facebook on their mobiles so it can present mobile advertising to them.

Zuckerberg said."The home screen is the soul of your phone. It sets the tone. We feel it should be deeply personal." And: "It's putting people first in your phone."

So in order for consumers to let Facebook lodge on their home phone the company needs to deliver a pretty compelling set of features.

Well slowly but surely over the past year or so that is exactly what Facebook has been doing.

Want to make a call? Well Facebook recently introduced its free Messenger calling service in the UK. So if you and your Facebook buddy both have the service live and a Wi-Fi connection you can chat without paying.

Want to listen to music? Well don't bother firing up your Spotify app you can listen to your tracks on Spotify via Facebook. Image - well they have Instagram. Want to read the news - well several sites have Facebook apps.

You get the picture. It has always been the stated aim of the company for Facebook to be the internet for people and with Facebook Home on the mobile it could mean that people spend more of their time using the company's services.

What I think Facebook are hoping for is that Home goes viral. In that users download it and show it off to their friends outlining all the benefits, who then go and download it. It is fair to say that with Android they have good chance too for even though the OS is highly customisable a lot of phone owners barely tweak their home screen at all.

The next question for Facebook then is getting the Home feature to work on iPhone or Windows handsets. It is not a move that you can't see Apple freely and readily making, but if Home becomes massively popular on Android it may have no choice.

It looks like Facebook has an interesting year ahead.

In a couple of days time Facebook has a press event in the US where it has invited journalists to 'Come see our new Home on Android.'

However if you were expecting a minor tweak or two to its Google app, forget it. The gossip is that this is something much bigger.

Rumours of Facebook phone have been buzzing for years now and on Thursday it seems like we will finally (sort of ) get it. We may also get a Facebook skin that you can download as your home screen.

Several sites, most notably this one, are running with the story that Facebook will unveil a HTC handset called the Myst, which will be running a tweaked version of Android 4.1.2 (Jelly Bean). The big change is that Facebook will be totally integrated into the handset so that when you switch the phone on the first thing it does is log you in.

There's also a Facebook powered home screen which will at the very least give you notifications as well as displaying contacts that you can now make voice calls too using Facebook Messenger.

The Myst phone apparently sports a 4.3inch screen, 1.5Ghz processor, 1GB RAM and packs a five mega pixel camera too.

The big question is whether you will be able to download a version of the new tweak and install it on your Android phone. Also will it work with any Android OS, or just Jelly Bean?

So what do you think? Surely the upgrade will be available across all Android handsets - well Jelly Bean ones at least. And as for the phone I am not sure how many people are going to be tempted into buying a mid-range HTC handset purely on the strength of being able to access a Facebook skin/launcher - especially if they can get that via the Google Play store anyhow.

Well, we will find out soon enough.

Good news for the UK's Facebook users. The Facebook Messenger app, which lets users make free calls to each other using mobiles, is now available here too.

It was launched in the US in January and has been a significant success. Now the app, which is still in beta and only for iPhone users, is available here and as long as you have it on board your smartphone and can access a Wi-Fi/3G connection you can make a call. The other caveat is that the person you want to contact also uses Messenger.If they don't have Messenger open than you have the option of leaving a message.

Making a call is fairly straightforward. As long as you are both online you fire up the app choose who you are going to call and start ringing.

Let's hope that the Android version isn't too far behind.

The WSJ has a report today that Facebook is considering using Twitter style hashtags to help people stay up to date with breaking stories and key conversations on its social networking platform.

According to the paper hashtags are currently being tested so that users can track conversations about specific topics. The paper also notes that Facebook has been using hash tags by stealth since its acquisition of the Instagram image sharing service which uses them

The paper says

Facebook is testing whether to follow Twitter's lead and allow users to click on a hashtag to pull up all posts about similar topics or events so it can quickly index conversations around trending topics and build those conversations up, giving users more reason to stay logged in and see more ads. Instagram, which Facebook acquired last year, already uses hashtags, allowing users to sort photos by the symbol.

So is this a god idea - of just further evidence that Facebook is becoming more like Twitter and vice versa?

Well in some ways people are already using hash tags on Facebook. People who joint post to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously have to keep to Twitter's rules - so that means less than 160 characters and sometimes use of hash tags.

Some Facebook users will post hash tags to highlight certain topics to underline to their friends that they are posting about a specific issue.

I could see hash tags on Facebook working well. It will be interesting to see how they operate though. Would you just be presented with posts from your friends? Or would you also be able to see fan pages? I guess to make it work properly you would also need to see posts from people you aren't friends with too.

Got a secret crush on one of your Facebook pals, but can't bring yourself to declare your love for them. Well there's an app for that.

There;s a new free Facebook app which will at the very least give Cupid a bit of a nudge and may even bring you together.

Both Interested enables users to chose a trio of Facebook friends that they have the hots for and enables them to send an anonymous message letting them know that they have a secret admirer who is one of their Facebook pals.

If your crush wants to find out more then they like the app and it will then send email to both parties telling them who it is and maybe bringing them together. If your crush isn't interested then it all stays anonymous - unless of course they share it with everyone via social media...

It is an interesting little app which is capable of causing all kinds of mayhem. Forget to log out of your Facebook account and you might suddenly find yourself sending anonymous love messages to all manner of hotties...

Incidentally there is a similar app that works on a much more direct way here.

So, as expected the big Facebook news focused on a major revamp of the news feeds. The first in nearly five years.

Essentially what Facebook has done has added some cosmetic changes to the feed to make it look more vibrant and colourful, and added a series of other elements to the feed so that you can see images, news articles etc.

Now you can choose between the following feeds

- All Friends - a feed that shows you everything your friends are sharing
- Photos - a feed with nothing but photos from your friends and the Pages you like
- Music - a feed with posts about the music you listen to
- Following - a feed with the latest news from the Pages you like and the people you follow.

Interestingly the new design means that now Facebook has the same look and feel on mobile, tablet and web.

There's no specific time as to when the new feeds will be rolled out, although Facebook has invited people to, visit www.facebook.com/newsfeed and add themselves to the waiting list.

The web changes will happen first, followed by Apple iOS ones and then finally Android.

At the conference Mark Zuckerberg said that he aimed to "give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper in the world. The News Feed was primarily text but now that we have these cameras in our pockets News Feed has grown to 50 percent photos and visual content.

So how do you feel about the revamp? Facebook users are notoriously resistant to change and if previous upgrades are anything to go by the tweaks won't be popular at first, but then we will get used to them.

This could be an interesting one. British based company FooTalk has announced an upgrade to its app which will enable Facebook users to talk to anyone in the world freely via their smartphone.

Facebook Calling currently enables users to make free calls, but only inside North America. FooTalk's tweak means that Facebook's UK users can make Facebook-related free calls, but they will need the app.

Also the FooTalk service works across the globe.

The app, which is available for both iOS devices (iOS5 and above), or Android devices (version 2.1 or later) already enables people to make free calls to each other using Wi-Fi in a manner not unlike Skype.

Now though it has incorporated Facebook more deeply into services. So Facebook contacts are listed in a separate tab of the FooTalk address book, which clearly identifies which Facebook friends also have FooTalk and are available for calling.

The uses can make the call if a person has FootTalk and if the person they are calling doesn't have the service it will offer them an invitation for FooTalk and allow the caller to leave a message on their wall.

"With Facebook now connecting over 680 million mobile users, we want to offer people the chance to take this connection over and above simply sharing status updates and images" commented Graeme Hutchinson, co-founder of FooTalk.

"We believe this is the next step in how we will use social media to communicate and have made this functionality as simple and easy to use as possible, ensuring that even the least technical Facebook users can connect with each other on a call as well as in the usual way."

Now this is a really smart idea. Over the past few years there have been countless ways to see the info from your Facebook feed in different formats. Flipboard,the magazine style version of your feed for the iPad is one that comes to mind and is still massively popular.

Now here's a Facebook app that also has huge potential - Social Studios has developed an app that turns the information from your Facebook news feeds in to a daily personalised TV show.

You can watch the video above to get an idea of how it works, but basically it mixes videos, images and status updates to let you know what has been happening that day to your friends.

To give it that TV show veneer the company have employed Noa Tishby - who is probably hugely popular in the US but means zip to Brits - to present it. So she says things like 'here's your top three videos for the day' before presenting that cat video your sister posted and your mate's band's gig footage etc.

It is a really sweet idea and I think it could be massively viral very quickly. It is still in beta and I couldn't get it to work in London this morning, but it should be available and everywhere soon.

It does have some drawbacks. You have to use Google Chrome to watch the video and also it doesn't seem to work (yet) on tablets or mobile devices.

It will probably seem a little cheesy to British users too given its very American Entertainment Tonight type format.

However it is clear that the LA/Israeli based start up is on to something. Imagine if they could mix in hyper local news too. Or maybe news about musicians or film stars you are passionate about? What about your own personalised music show with clips and interviews from the rock stars you love?

Anyhow check it out - you have to downland the app from Facebook - as I think this could be huge.

We all know that Facebook's "Other" inbox is just a bit stupid. It allows random people to get in touch with you, but then when they do it doesn't alert you, it just files the messages away and more often than not they go unnoticed for a LONG time. It would be much more beneficial for users to never be able to contact strangers or to just have an occasional alert system whenever they do. Anyway, we're not here to tell the Facebook team what to do, because it's really down to the stupid users to mess everything up anyway.

The biggest Facebook communication fail we've come across in a long time hails from the US this week, where Clayton County police in Georgia used Facebook to tell a mother about her son's death. Don't worry, they didn't write it on her wall or anything, but they sent a note from a secret undercover account, which meant it went straight into that darned Other inbox and stayed there for weeks while the family were searching for their son.

Due to the fact it was sent from some weird, dodgy-looking account, even when the message was read the family weren't so sure it was legitimate.

According to Digital Trends, Clayton County police issued a statement, which read:

"Society has accepted social media as a major form of communication. We make every possible attempt to apply best practices when handling these sensitive matters. We will continue the traditional methods of personal face to face contact as we integrate this new tool of social media."

In other words, we messed up royally and won't try and use the interwebz again in future.

Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/police-use-facebook-to-inform-mother-of-sons-death-message-unseen-in-other-inbox/#ixzz2LXmZ8dLA
Follow us: @digitaltrends on Twitter | digitaltrendsftw on Facebook

You can stalk people on it, get hit on by people you never spoke to at school on it and now you can use Facebook to transfer money between your mates too.

Azimo allows Facebook users to send money "securely and cheaply" to their friends across the globe at a minimum charge.

For those who don't make regular transfers and payments this will probably be no big deal, but if you have friends and family abroad, you'll often find you spend a small fortune on the cost of making a transfer to people overseas. However, Azimo's new offering on Facebook aims to reduce costs and charges, offering a flat fee of £5 to transfer up to £500, and make the whole process much easier too.

Michael Kent, the Founder of Azimo, said:

"With more than a billion people around the world using Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, it seems only natural it should become a channel for sending money.

"We surveyed our UK remittance customers and found nearly three quarters regularly use Facebook - and of those, over 60 per cent were in touch with the person they wanted to send money to."

It certainly makes sense to add in a money transferring feature to Facebook, but it may be a problem for those concerned with privacy and/or the fact the social network is slowly taking over EVERY avenue of our lives, like some kind of really lame version of the Matrix.

[Via Telegraph]

Last week we were all exposed to the horror that was Bang With Friends, a Facebook app thing that hooked you up with mates that you want to "bang", who also want to "bang" you, because apparently the world of the internet isn't gross and sleazy enough and some people find it really hard to get laid. Well hot on the heels of that rather worrying Facebook sex app comes Would Love 2, which works on the same principle, but makes it sound like it's linking people up to go on nice dates rather than casual sex sessions.

Would Love 2 is an iOS app that allows you to scroll through your Facebook friends and select which you'd be happy to "date". These contacts are then saved in your "locker" and kept completely private, unless someone you've selected happens to select you too... then DING DING DING, the app will alert you both to the match and allow you to take it from there.

Although Would Love 2 could be used in much the same sleazy way as Bang With Friends, the premise is at least a little different, with the former being solely about... Well... BANGING and "finding friends who are down for the night" and the latter being focused more on "taking the rejection out of dating". Whether it's used to help lonely people find their soulmates remains to be seen, but at least it seems just a little less scumbag-y than Bang With Friends... Maybe.

Find out more: http://www.wouldlove2.com/

There are tonnes of things that annoy us about Facebook, like photos of our friends' ugly babies, chavvy status updates DAT SOUND LYK DIS and of course lots of over-sharing about illnesses, arguments and fertility issues. Really swear words are the least of our worries - in fact they make mundane updates just a tad bit more interesting - but if you're offended by profanities, then a new app called FaceWash is for you.

FaceWash scans through everything to do with you on Facebook, including your profile, news feed and photos you're tagged in, removing all of the naughty words from existence.

We can't really understand why you'd need to download FaceWash, but maybe if you spend a lot of your time stalking people and your boss is fine with your social media obsession but not your use of curse words, then it could be just the solution you've been looking for.

Start using FaceWash now if you want your online life to be more "professional" or, you know, boring.

Awh it's hard to be a single guy when everyone else is having lots of sex and buying their girlfriends chocolates and kittens. But fear not, because a Brazilian company has decided to set up a dating site with a twist, the twist being the girls aren't real, they're just pretty Facebook fakes to fool everyone else into thinking you've got a girlfriend. Genius! We see no problems or issues with this plan WHATSOEVER.

NamoroFake.com asks that you hand over just $39.99 of your hard earned cash - we're sure REALLY lonely people can think of another way to spent nearly $40, but each to their own - to create a fake Facebook profile full of cutesy photos, updates and all of the other bits and pieces of information to dupe your mates into thinking she's a real life human being.

But fear not, it's not even as if these women are completely made up, apparently men are lonely and women are poor, so many of the profiles are copies of actual people who hand over their details for a 50% share of NamoroFake.com's profit. This is great in making the whole messy lie as convincing as possible, but still doesn't solve the problem of what to do when someone asks you to bring her round for dinner...

The whole idea behind the site is to make lonely people feel a bit less lonely, but it's primary function is to make exes jealous. However, if you'd rather impress a potential lover than make an old one feel crappy about themselves, then you can purchase an ex-girlfriend too, which presumably in some people's warped minds makes them more appealing to the opposite sex.

It's almost as creepy as the virtual girl who'll sit and smile at you. Almost.

[Via Cnet]

So we've all been waiting eagerly - well, kind of - to find out what Facebook's big new announcement will be this evening and, like many predicted, the social network has added a new smart search engine called Graph Search.

Yep it sounds a bit like some mathematics term we probably should all remember from Secondary School, but in actual fact it's a way of sifting through the data about photos, people and connections that live on facebook.com.

The new search feature will appear as a big search bar at the top of each page you visit. You'll be able to start new searches and will then be served up data under that title, so the Facebook team use the example of "people who like things I like". You'll then have a page with that title at the top and a list of people who into the same stuff as you.

Once Graph Search is up and running, you'll be able to use it to find data about four distinct things, people, photos, places and interests. Over on the Facebook Newsroom the team outline the kinds of searches you'll make to find each type:

People: "friends who live in my city," "people from my hometown who like hiking," "friends of friends who have been to Yosemite National Park," "software engineers who live in San Francisco and like skiing," "people who like things I like," "people who like tennis and live nearby"

Photos: "photos I like," "photos of my family," "photos of my friends before 1999," "photos of my friends taken in New York," "photos of the Eiffel Tower"

Places: "restaurants in San Francisco," "cities visited by my family," "Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India," "tourist attractions in Italy visited by my friends," "restaurants in New York liked by chefs," "countries my friends have visited"

Interests: "music my friends like," "movies liked by people who like movies I like," "languages my friends speak," "strategy games played by friends of my friends," "movies liked by people who are film directors," "books read by CEOs"

It's not the big web search competitor some were speculating about earlier today and the team are keen to point out the differences:

"Graph Search and web search are very different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: "hip hop") and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: "my friends in New York who like Jay-Z") to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that's been shared on Facebook. We believe they have very different uses."

Facebook users just love to constantly use the site then whine about how it's not private or secure enough and it's clear the team have already prepared for that kind of criticism by pointing out that Graph Search has been built "with privacy in mind" and no matter what you search for the privacy and settings of each separate piece of content will be respected.

There have been mixed reactions to the news so far, with many wondering why a network that's dedicated to connecting you with people you know is suddenly so concerned with helping you find new people. Some of the searches certainly do seem a bit like a creepy dating tool and social media is sleazy enough without an added way for scumbags to find us. However, when it comes to helping you find out more about your friends then it seems like a good idea. We think.

Obviously social media land is already speculating about what the news means for businesses, as searches that are concerned with pages were mentioned at the event, like "sushi restaurants that my friends have been to in Los Angeles", which could open up places, events and brands to an even wider audience.

Read the official Graph Search post over on the Facebook Newsroom. You can sign up to the beta version of Graph Search here: facebook.com/about/graphsearch.

Facebook is holding a big, top secret, super special event at its headquarters in California this evening, which has lead to all kinds of speculation today about what Zuckerberg and the team will be announcing or unveiling to a sea of hard to please tech journalists.

No matter how secretive tech events are nowadays, we can usually all guess what's going to happen, but so far rumours about Facebook's shindig this evening range from the social network launching a phone to beefing up its search offering. All we've got to go on is the invite that was sent to US journalists on the right, which makes it sound like the team could have been "building" anything from a new app to a bloody castle. So what might happen and what will it mean for us regular users?

A search engine within Facebook

We genuinely haven't got a clue what's going to happen tonight, but if we HAD to put money on it, then judging from today's column inches it's got something to do with beefed up search functionality.

Zuckerberg has mentioned his desire to add different levels of search integration into the social network a few times in the past, but it could range from a comprehensive Facebook-branded search engine, a Quora-style question and answer format or just a few more ways to search the web with the platform's current Bing tie-in.

The long awaited Facebook phone

Just like the search engine idea, we've been hearing rumours about a Facebook phone for as long as we can remember too.

However, we're pretty sure even Zuckerberg wouldn't have been able to keep the lid on a finished product without some random piece of hardware from some random factory leaking, so as interesting as it'd be we'll probably have to wait a little longer for the elusive Facebook phone.

A new way to send and receive messages

Granted this rumour is nowhere near as exciting or clearly defined as a new phone or way to search the web, but given Facebook's been tinkering around with Poke, rolling out a way for users to pay to send messages and playing around with a VoIP-based calling service, we'd love to see these changes all added to one new messaging package that'll really change the way we communicate with one another.

Then again the main benefits of Poke have been to send self destructive photos and paying to harass people you don't know just sounds like a breeding ground for weirdos. GREAT ZUCK, JUST WHAT WE WERE AFTER. NAKED PHOTOS OF STALKERS.

We first heard about the changes Facebook intended on making to all of our timelines AGAIN late last year and now it seems they're slowly being rolled out to users in New Zealand.

Now admittedly the changes are fairly minor, your timeline will soon consist of one larger column on the left that's reserved for posts that you and your friends have shared. The right-hand column will contain everything else, like recent activities, your friends list, the music you've been playing and so on. See, it really won't make that much of a difference. Although those that like featuring their big life events and showing off about stuff will now find that content doesn't get stretched across your whole profile anymore, but instead just sits at the top of the left hand column.

Interestingly a lot of US-based tech press have today been invited along to an event at Facebook HQ next Thursday. Although nothing has been officially revealed about what's going down at the event, the invite does read "come and see what we're building", which sounds rather exciting, right?

[Via Digital Trends]

Facebook has updated its Messenger application this week to allow people to send voice messages to one another, which could be cute and funny or just really REALLY annoying.

When you visit the Messenger application from an iOS or Android device today you'll see that when you click "+" next to the message box you now have the option to attach a photo, take a new photo or record your voice. Just hold down the record button, say what you have to say and release it again when you're done.

Facebook is certainly realising the importance of quick mobile messaging, as it launched its Snapchat-like disposable message application Poke just before Christmas.

Facebook Messenger is available from iTunes and Google Play for free.