Do you ever read through updates from your friends on Facebook and sometimes think you're in a really REALLY terrible and badly dressed version of a reality TV show? Well now a new app called Taploid aims to suck your soul straight out of your body by presenting all kinds of Facebook activity in the style of a dirty gossip magazine. Why? Well, just because.

The idea behind Taploid is quite simple:

"Using clever technology, we analyze your social net­work to give you funny and positive stories about your friends. Sometimes it's even hilarious. Welcome to The Taploid, the next generation of tabloid magazines."

According to the team, the app uses language analysis and data mining to sift through all of the recent information from your Facebook friends and then cherry picks the best bits to jazz up and serve back to you in a daily digest email packed full of aggregated stories.

It's an interesting way of taking data we might normally miss and packaging it up in a recognisable format, but it's also a bit stupid and, let's face it, a bit creepy too.

Then again as much as we bitch and moan about tabloids even the strongest amongst us get sucked in by the Mail Online from time to time, so sign up to Taploid and replace those shots of Kim Kardashian's bum and K-Stew affair stories with photos of your mates out in Leeds and news of your cousin's new diet. Just as exciting. We promise.

[Via Digital Trends]

Yesterday the whole of the world imploded when Metro France reported that old private messages are now appearing on user's timelines for all of their friends to see. OH DEAR LORD.

Although the rumours began over in France it wasn't long before people from all over the globe were scrolling back through their timelines (most of the problems seemed to occur in 2007, 2008 and 2009) and finding that some of their once private messages had been made visible.

Since everything started kicking off yesterday evening A LOT has happened, the story was picked up by every major news outlet, people started freaking out about what they'd said, others were frantically going through their Facebook accounts and making everything private and some users even went to extreme measures and deleted their profiles. FOREVER.

This morning, after an official statement from Facebook in TechCrunch, it seems that most agree there wasn't a private message security breach after all, but the messages we're seeing on our profiles are just old wall posts that were written back when we were all excitedly using Facebook, back when timelines didn't allow us to dig up the past, back when comments and likes didn't exist and back when we didn't have as much self restraint about what we said for all to see.

Here's a snippet of the statement:

"Every report we've seen, we've gone back and checked. We haven't seen one report that's been confirmed [of a private message being exposed]. A lot of the confusion is because before 2009 there were no likes and no comments on wall posts. People went back and forth with wall posts instead of having a conversation [in the comments of single wall post.]"

And...

"A small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline. Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy."

Although all of that certainly seems plausible (and makes perfect sense in retrospect), there are still many users who are still adamant the messages they saw were private and claim that Facebook is just trying to cover up its mistake by calling them all crazed liars.

Obviously it'll be fascinating to see how this all pans out, whether there has in fact been a leak among some users or whether it's all just us working ourselves into a frenzy. However in the cold light of day we don't think it matters too much whether it's true or not, because it's taught us some very, very interesting things about how we behave, our attitude to Facebook and all of the bitchy things we've been saying.

We're all saying too many bitchy things online

I was with a few different people when I heard about the "Facebook message leak apocalypse" and followed the story really closely online. The main thing that became apparent from everyone's crazed tweets was just how many people were worried that the scandalous/dirty/cheating messages or those bitchy things that were said by X about Y could be exposed (myself totally included).

Poppy Dinsey (@poppyd) the founder of WIWT.com summed it up brilliantly in a tweet last night:

"You know the scene in Mean Girls where photocopied pages from the burn book go all around the school? That's Facebook's privacy leak."

We don't think a (maybe fake) Facebook security breach will change humanity and stop us all being such dirty little gossipers, but maybe we should all take a long, hard look at ourselves and the things we've been saying and just be a little, well, nicer because there's always a chance someone else (i.e. Mark Zuckerberg) could get their hands on your burn book at anytime they please.

We now use the social network in very different ways

Even if some of those old posts were private messages and others were wall posts, it's clear that we did use Facebook in a totally different way a few years ago.

Now users generally write on timelines when they want to ask a quick question, share a link or post a photo, but back in 2007 posts that we know were on our profiles are much longer, rambling and full of things we wouldn't want others to be reading nowadays. We imagine a whole research paper could be written on this very subject, but it's partially to do with the design of the social network changing dramatically over the years and partially to do with us getting more savvy (or secretive and bitchy) when it comes to what we say and share online.

We probably need to spend less time on Facebook

When you found out about the security breach what were you most worried about? Bitchy things? Personal information? Those drunken messages you sent to your crush? (NOT GUILTY) Whatever it was it's scary to think many of us use the social network so much to write about super personal things and even if there wasn't a breach, just imagine if there was one an even more epic scale in the future? Scary, huh? Maybe we should take things into the realms of emails, call people or oh god talk about our feelings face to face? Scrap that, we'll stick with emails.

Some people get REALLY aggressive if someone tries to prove them wrong

It's no surprise that last night some users were getting really upset about having their private messages exposed and others thought they were all just being hysterical.

Twitter arguments are always fascinating, but last night it was even more interesting to see how defensive others got, so as well as being less bitchy, let's all be a little less agressive too, OK?

You've had your heart ripped out and stamped on by another human being, or you've been the one to do the ripping and stamping yourself, and although there might be serious things to think about like who gets the Xbox, how do you tell your parents you're an emotional failure and how do you split up your friendship group between you both, one of the questions on everyone's lips is should you stay Facebook friends?

To show how mature you are, or to just keep tabs on them now they're back on the market, many newly broken up couples choose to stay friends on the social network. However, according to researchers at Brunel University, staying connected online could bring about all kinds of nasty side affects, like distress and an inability to move on from the past relationship.

More than 450 people were surveyed for the study, which is published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, in an attempt to explore how we respond to still being connected to old flames online. Unsurprisingly, consistent Facebook stalking has been proven to exacerbate feelings of distress, increase feelings of sexual longing and makes people feel more negative about life generally in comparison to those who cut the cord long before.

Although the study is interesting and raises issues about how our relationships transpire online, what always surprises us is the assumption that our online and offline identities are any different, most people would agree keeping constant tabs on an ex in the real world is unhealthy, so it makes sense that it's now been proved (kinda) to be the same in the realm of likes, timelines and updates too. Maybe we should become top science, researchy types?

[Via iO9]

Looking like a Pinterest for your personal and branded social media platforms, RebelMouse aims to gather most of your digital footprint in one handy place for others to see (Facebook, Twitter and Instragram for now but we expect them to tie in other channels as the platform matures).

Besides the initial questions surrounding Facebook and how its privacy settings work, this startup looks promising. Still in beta, with a growing list of tech titans and social media personalities signed up to it already, the service could just be exactly what we've been waiting for.

So what is it that could make RebelMouse the next big thing in social curation?

RebelMouse clearly got the memo that visual content is compelling. Taking the formula of bite sized posts with a header, subheader and an image (already proved popular through the success of Pinterest), you're instantly drawn into the stories or updates as you scroll through a user's profile.

To remind you of that all-important image, RebelMouse has created its own share button 'Stick it!' (like the 'Pin it' of Pinterest or 'Take it to Branch' of.. well Branch) for when you want to share a story you've stumbled across on the web.

This brings me to the next point. RebelMouse also focuses on the user-experience. Like a blog come Twitter come Facebook, it makes it very easy to (re)produce content with just a couple of clicks. Hassle-free content creation and aggregation!

From the opposite perspective, for visitors it is a great way to learn about the person or brand in one go without having to look at all three of their social streams. Who knows what you might have missed when you were busy doing other things?

You can also invite 'collaborators' to appear in your stream, which will be very handy for companies or publications where their employees' social media activity is as important as the company's.

Design wise you are fairly limited to what your profile looks like. The current minimalistic look appeals to me, but when coming out of beta and into advance mode you will be able to 'hack your own CSS for your RebelMouse site.

But how does RebelMouse plan to make any money off its free service, besides the planned personalised iOS apps? According to Mashable '"[it] hopes to monetise organically by providing businesses an e-commerce platform, allowing people such as photographers and fashion designers to sell their wares in a dynamic, visual way. Another form of monetization they plan on is sponsored content'.

A note of warning though. When you sign up to RebelMouse (using your Facebook, Twitter or Instragram log ins), you're giving it access to grab your content from these profiles. If you, like me, use social networks for different purposes - private (Facebook) and public (Twitter/Instagram) - you should perhaps think twice before granting RebelMouse access to all networks. From what I could see, it only curated my 'public' Facebook updates, but I revoked access either way just to be on the safe side.

Are you ready to be curated?

This story was first published by digital content agency Sutro Digital.

Super smily Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid to rest rumours that the social network is making plans to develop a branded smartphone yesterday, stating that "the phone just doesn't make any sense."

While he was speaking at a TechCrunch Disrupt "fireside chat", Zuckerberg instead stressed that his ultimate goal was to have Facebook integrated deeply into all major mobile devices, including tablets, iPhones, or Android, Windows Phone or BlackBerry smartphones:

"The strategy that's different for every other tech company, which is building their own hardware, we're going in the opposite direction. We want to build a system which is as deeply as possible integrated into every major device people want to use."

In an interesting admission, Zuckerberg did however reveal that the company is seriously thinking about launching a search engine to rival the likes of Google and Bing.

Zuckerberg noted that Facebook already has multiple ways to answer questions, which is exactly how a forward-thinking search engine should work. He said:

"We're basically doing 1 billion queries a day and we're not even trying.

"Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. At some point we'll do it. We have a team working on it.

"Search engines are really evolving to give you a set of answers, 'I have a specific question, answer this question for me.'"

Google launches Google+, and Facebook are perhaps to launch Facebook Search? What's the world coming to?

[Via Tech Digest Via TechCrunch Image via Gpaumier's Flickr]

It's been five months since we first heard about Facebook's acquisition of the hipster photo app and today, two weeks after the deal was officially cleared by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), it's official, Facebook and Instagram are now an item. AWH.

For those worried that this means the end of your favourite photo app, fear not, the Instagram team assured its fans it'll only be changing location on its blog today (well for now anyway):

"While our team is making the short move to the Facebook offices, Instagram isn't going anywhere. The Instagram app and its features will stay the same one you know and love, and we'll keep working together to build a better Instagram for everyone."

In a blog post (that actually seems to have crashed under everyone's incessant clicking) Facebook also reaffirmed its plans to keep the two entities separate, (well for now anyway):

"As we said from the beginning, we are committed to building and growing Instagram independently.

"Instagram will continue to serve its community, and we will help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure. We also can't wait to work with the talented Instagram team to improve the mobile experience."

Interesting. But let's hope they don't start messing around with the Instagram mobile experience because it's about 4,545 times better than Facebook on our phones.

Remember the super creepy Take This Lollipop Facebook viral video, which made you think some crazy stalker was on the way round to your house to kill you or eat you? Uh it makes us shudder just to think about it. Well now the guy behind it, Jason Zada, has teamed up with Linkin Park to create a similar kind of online video for the band's latest single.

Just like Take This Lollipop, the Linkin Park video over at lostintheecho.com requires you to sign into Facebook, grant the site temporary access to your account and then your content is incorporated into the video. Clever, huh?

Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park told Mashable:

"I think we're at a turning point for the "music video." The whole idea of doing a static 3:30 movie or performance to sit underneath a song feels kind of boring,

"I never put personal pictures up on it, so ... half of the pictures were of dogs, landscapes, and random silly things. It was hilarious to watch this video pull those pictures and see the characters in the video break down in tears over a picture of a ham sandwich."

Now admittedly it does seem a little cheesy, but it's good to see Linkin Park experiment with something a bit different (did anyone else forget they were still knocking around?) and we welcome anything new from the guy behind Take This Lollipop.

Try it for yourself at lostintheecho.com.

[Via All Facebook Via Mashable]

The health and fitness app and gadget market has really exploded over the past few months (we even have our own website here at Shiny Media about that kind of tech called Connected Health) and although advances in the way we track our workouts has had a huge impact on this personal fitness movement, it's the social element that's really got people talking about it and most importantly moving off the couch.

According to Facebook, there are now 7,000 Open Graph apps on the social network and to celebrate this achievement the team have produced some stats about just how well health and fitness apps are doing.

Research from Facebook shows that popular workout app Nike+ Running experienced a 77% increase in traffic after implementing Facebook Open Graph. Endomondo has also experienced a lot of success after integrating with Open Graph, according to Facebook stats more than 90,000 workouts are shared everyday through the app and traffic from Facebook has increased by more than 150%. It's a similar story for both RunKeeper and Runtastic traffic apps too, which have both seen a 25% increase in traffic because of Facebook.

Although these stats are impressive and prove that it's more important than ever for developers to get their apps onto Facebook, it's also interesting to explore how different developers entice users into sharing their details online and hooking up all of their data into their personal profiles, something that might be a bit intimidating to fitness newbies.

So what makes people want to take their personal workout activities and plaster them all over their Facebook walls?

Well the team at the Facebook Developers blog think there are all kinds of reasons that make people start and then continue to see Facebook as an integral part of their fitness tracking and sharing experience. Some of the key factors are presenting maps and stats in a way that makes them interesting and easy to share, Facebook log-in prompts, adding in gaming elements or allowing you to tag, comment and like fitness activity.

So why do you choose to share all of your fitness activity to Facebook? Or does it annoy the hell out of you and you wish everyone else would stop?

[image via Meme Generator]

Facebook has launched a new version of its iOS app this week, which it promises will load faster, look better and provide users with a more reliable mobile experience.

The new version of the app, Facebook 5.0, is twice as fast as the older iteration when it comes to everything from scrolling through your news feed to opening photos.

Zuckerberg took to his page yesterday to show off the new app and wrote:

"We just released a new Facebook app for iPhone and iPad and it's a lot faster. Our team completely rewrote it from the ground up to focus on speed. It's a big step forward."

A Facebook rep spoke to the All Facebook blog and said:

"We've rebuilt the app from the ground up, so now the app opens much faster, and your news feed and notifications load right when you open Facebook.

"As you scroll down your news feed, all of your friends' stories appear faster than ever. A banner lets you know when new stories come in, and you can tap once to immediately see the latest updates.

"Tap on any photo and it opens right away. Pull down to close it with a single swipe."

If you don't already have the app (we secretly envy your life), then you can download it via iTunes for free. However, we imagine most of you will just need to check your updates to make sure you have the newest, fastest and shiniest version.

Another day another legal battle in Zuckerberg land as Facebook is being sued by a Chinese company, which claims to have created a feature identical to the Timeline long before the social network implemented its own version.

Cubic Network, a Pinterest-style start-up founded by Harvard graduate Xiong Wanli, has been using a chronologically scrolling page to present videos and pictures since February 2008. While it'd certainly be easy to mark the similarities to Facebook's Timeline (which was rolled out incrementally to users from November 2011) as purely coincidental, things take a slightly more suspect turn once you learn that Zuckerberg attended a talk by Wanli detailing the timeline feature. SCANDALOUS.

Wanli also claims the logo to Facebook's annual F8 developer conference is very similar to Cubic Network's own, and that the Chinese network's R&D centre was called F8 long before Zuckerberg founded his annual event.

Inspired, a rip-off, or merely coincidence? Well no one's quite sure and the courts will undoubtedly have to make that decision, but it's not as if Zuckerberg is one to back down from a controversial legal spat. Watch this space.

[Via Tech Digest Via The Register]

Oh don't worry, we've all been there. You got a bit drunk, you dropped your phone down the toilet, or left it on the bar, or just threw it somewhere and now you have no phone and no numbers. Awhh lots of sad little emoticons for you :( :( :(. But fear not because a clever new service called NeedNumbers.me is here to piece your life back together one Facebook friend at a time.

NeedNumbers.me removes the need for you to set up one of those "OMGZ I LOST MY PHONE AGAIN, WHAT A LOSER" groups and re-add each number separately, instead it connects up to your Facebook account and gives you a breakdown of every group and event you're part of. It'll then create a list of all of your friends and the phone numbers they've shared with everyone recently.

There's bound to be some repetitions and incorrect numbers, so you can then go through them, amend the contact details and have the numbers and contact details saved directly to your phone.

Now admittedly this isn't always going to work and people have pseudonyms and some people don't share their correct numbers, etc, etc, but it's certainly a clever and handy idea for the clumsy phone losing people amongst us.

[Via TechCrunch Image via Jo Jakeman Flickr]

Many of you probably didn't know that in the past if you tried to delete a photo on Facebook of you looking particularly drunk/falling over/kissing a random person, then it would have been removed from your profile straight away but stayed right there on Facebook's servers, meaning it still existed somewhere in the dark depth of the internet with a long and confusing URL.

Now admittedly it'd be hard to ever find those incriminating photos, but it's kind of not right that deleting something never actually, well you know, deleted it. But now the social network has finally got round to deleting the photos. Like actually. For good.

According to Cnet, Facebook will now only be holding onto photos for 30 days in its content delivery network (CDN) until they're gone forever:

"As a result of work on our policies and infrastructure, we have instituted a 'max-age' of 30 days for our CDN links."

However, the statement from Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens also stated that all photos still disappear from profiles straight away, and some of the CDN links could be gone in a matter of hours.

It's a little irritating that Facebook hasn't been deleting deleted content sooner, but it's probably only those who have no lives or have terrible things to hide that are really that bothered, right?

[Via Cnet]

Facebook is currently testing a new service called Mail a Postcard which, as you may suspect, allows users to turn their photos from the social network into actual REAL LIFE postcards, made of card, that you can touch. Mind. Blown.

The service powered by greeting card and gifting company Sincerely, allows you to pick a photo, add a message to the back of it and get it sent out to whoever you like, as well as offering options for you to have photos printed in different sizes too.

According to TechCrunch, the Mail a Postcard idea was created as part of a Hackathon project, but Facebook is trialling the service among users right now to figure out whether a) anyone actually cares about real life objects anymore and b) whether users would be willing to pay for the service.

If the success of the Postagram app is anything to go by then some people do still like mixing the worlds of online and offline when it comes to sending postcards and greetings cards out to friends and family, so maybe the idea of turning a Facebook photo into a real, physical thing that can be sent via snail mail isn't that absurd after all?

[Via TechCrunch]

We all know that there are lots of Facebook accounts out there that friends have accidentally duplicated, created for their cats or have just set up to sign into sites without their real name. Well now it looks like Facebook is set to crack down on these fakes, dupes and... um... pets and start getting rid of them.

On Wednesday the Facebook team admitted that more than 8.7% of the accounts on the social network fall into the fake/dupe/pet/ridiculous category, which works out at a huge 83 million. Wow, we don't envy the people tasked with working out what's fake and what's real.

The Chief Security Officer of Facebook, Joe Sullivan, told CNN:

"On Facebook we have a really large commitment in general to finding and disabling false accounts.

"Our entire platform is based on people using their real identities."

To make the whole process easier Facebook has identified three different categories for the 83 million accounts that need to be sifted through, there's duplicate, misclassified and "undesirable".

As you'd expect duplicate accounts are those set up by people who want to run around the internet signing up to things but don't want their real name attached to it, those that have accidentally created two accounts or those who have made accounts on behalf of other people. There are 45 million duplicate accounts knocking around and we think parents-to-be are the most guilty here as little Stu or Sarah shouldn't have their own account until they're 13. Tut tut.

Misclassified accounts are those that should really be pages, like accounts for pets or groups or companies. Presumably the owners of these accounts now just need to be nudged into changing them to pages, but that's much easier said than done, especially when 22 million fall into these category and many will probably have been abandoned a long time ago.

The finally category, the undesirables, allegedly make up 1.5% of all active accounts and include profiles that the social network feels really shouldn't be there, like spammers.

According to CNN Facebook completely removes any accounts it deems falls into any one of the three above categories, but it does keep the information on its databases. Some of the users that originally created these erroneous profiles are then restricted from creating another account, so we'd suggest you have a look through your old ones to see if you need to do any deleting or tidying up.

Oh and just in case you were wondering, Boo is completely safe as he has his own page, we just wanted to illustrate that there are A LOT of pets on Facebook.

[Via CNN]

No matter how many times you cull annoying people from Facebook at some point at least one or two of your friends, relatives or co-workers are bound to procreate. And what does that mean ladies and gentlemen? Well it means 3674876746 updates about little Sally or Stewie and 34598748768576 photos of them too. Sure they're cute, but we don't need to see hourly evidence of them being that way.

If you can't bring yourself to unfriend people just because they've had a kid or you don't want to constantly be hiding and unhiding their updates in case they say the odd interesting thing, then unbaby.me might be for you.

Unbaby.me is a Chrome extension that doesn't just hide baby photos from your Facebook news feed, but it replaces them with images of awesome things, like cats and bacon. If you're not a fan of cats and bacon then you can customise the extension to pull any image-based RSS feed from anywhere else too.

According to comments under Mashable's original article the extension works by analysing the words in the captions underneath the photos, so don't be surprised if one or two of the little scamps slip through the net.

[Via Mashable]

Facebook has taken a leaf out of Pinterest and Tumblr's book and will be rolling out a brand new look for photos over the next few weeks, which it claims will be "more beautiful" and "make viewing photos more enjoyable".

The changes will mean that your photos no longer neatly sit side-by-side one another below all of your albums, but instead they'll stretch to fit the whole screen. You can showcase the ones that make you look awesome by highlighting them in the same way you can draw attention to certain pieces of content on your timeline.

The new layout makes a lot of sense, because instead of seeing albums followed by photos you're tagged in there are now just three tabs, "photos of you", "photos" and "albums". After all, it's only the elite stalkers who really bother to browse through albums anymore, right?

Some users are noticing the new "mosaic" layout right now, but we expect you'll all start to see it over the next week or so.

[Via Facebook's Newsroom]

Despite the fact Facebook messages rarely "get lost" or "don't come through" it doesn't stop us from using those kinds of lame excuses when someone annoying tries to chat to us and we have to explain why we never responded. Well now it seems Facebook is making a number of new changes that'll make it pretty much impossible to ignore anyone without coming across as really really mean.

You may have already noticed that when you're using the chat functionality you can tell whether your last message was received and when, as it's marked as seen along with a timestamp. A similar feature is now coming to Facebook groups, which means that once something has been posted within a group a link in the top right hand corner will tell who the members that have read the update and when they last visited the group.

There doesn't seem to be anyway for users to opt out of the new "who's been lurking?" feature right now and even the group admins don't have the option to get rid of it either, which we're sure is bound to irritate the nine people who actually use groups regularly.

A group of clever Facebook engineers have finally brought us a way to see upcoming events in a calendar-style layout. So you can view everything you've been invited to in a given month at once, which is usually how calendars work...

Facebook's new Events Calendar feature allows you to flick between a list or calendar view and not only do you see the events you've been invited to, but you can see suggested events, events that friends are attending, photos of people who have a birthday coming up soon and even take a look at things going on at places you've checked-in to before and events pages you've liked are holding, whether it's a venue or a band. Wow, we're all going to be REALLY busy once the new feature kicks in.

You click on any event to be taken through to the dedicated page set up for it and can move back through months too, just as you would with a regular calendar. It's not particularly exciting or innovative, especially if you're good at organising your commitments elsewhere, but it's handy for Facebook social butterflies and will probably make us more likely to turn up to things.

Facebook product engineer Bob Baldwin told Digital Trends:

"A few of us created a Facebook group called "Social Calendar Dreamers" to spark discussion around making Events more visual. At the next hackathon, engineers from the events, photos, messages and other teams hacked through the night to build a better way to view events. By 6 a.m., we had a prototype that worked."

Some users have already noticed the added feature once they click through to Events Calendar, but if it's not been rolled out to you yet expect it in the next few weeks.

[Via Digital Trends]

Our sister site Connected Health explores the latest idea to get people moving from Nike Mexico, a Facebook auction that allows you to win cool stuff the more you run...

Most fitness apps reward users the more they workout, whether they get a shiny little badge (on their phones, not in real life unfortunately), climb up a leader board above their friends or gain access to exclusive content. But why not add a REAL incentive and allow users to win things for their efforts too?

Nike has a range of fitness apps, gadgets and apparel, but in Mexico the brand is working on a new Facebook application called the Subasta de Kilometros, which according to Springwise translates into runners' distances into currency action.

Users must download the Nike+ Running app that we've got here in the UK, or buy one of Nike's many training products that can also track important data like pace, distance and time, such as the FuelBand. Every time a user runs they must then take the gadget with them, collect the data and build up as many kilometres as they can over seven days. Each week a new auction is added to the Subasta de Kilometros app and users can bid based on how many kilometres they've managed to clock up (there's a minimum, so don't take a brief walk and expect to get in on the action, Nike are serious bad asses). If you've got the right amount of kilometres you bid and whoever has the longest distance under their belt wins the prize, which includes Nike clothing, Nike+ equipment and fancy footwear.

For now the Subasta de Kilometros app and challenge is only being held in Mexico, but we can see the idea of gaming within fitness apps being taken even further by other brands in other countries as an extra incentive to get people moving and keep them motivated.

[Via Connected Health Via Springwise]

Over the years Facebook has made a whole load of changes to the way we interact with the network, like more ads, a constantly scrolling news ticker of doom, trending topics, subscriptions and oh did we mention this thing called Timeline?

Although we've learned to love the changes here at Shiny Shiny, we were very excited to try out a new iPhone app, which promises to serve up all of your important Facebook data in an entirely unique way.

The app, called Gabi, allows you to view only the content that you really want to see, so you apply filters by asking a series of questions. So you can choose over 100 combinations of questions like "which of my pictures are most liked?" or "which of my friends' pictures are most talked about?" and you can craft your own so you only see the things that really matter to you. Once you've asked a question you get content served up to you and then can browse through likes and comments and even interact with the content yourself.

We love that the Gabi user experience is completely different to that of Facebook, it's got a dark colour scheme and large panels that you swipe from side to side to see the next photo, or status or video or whatever it may be.

You really have to try the app for yourself to understand how it takes your Facebook experience and makes it easier, prettier, clears away the clutter and most importantly (after years of being glued to the same silly blue Facebook screen), it just makes it feel a little bit different.

Available from iTunes for 69p.