When thinking as to how the new uploader should function, Facebook had a few goals, most of them technical in nature. They wanted the new tool to no longer depend on Java, be compatible with future versions of Facebook's chrome, be easy to update and more. However, to the end user, the best part about the new uploader is that it allows you to start a photo upload and then leave the page to browse around elsewhere on Facebook (or even the web!) while the upload is underway.

To meet their goals, Facebook went with a browser plug-in that uses JavaScript APIs and a front-end created with HTML and CSS. The end result is a much improved experience. But like the Facebook blog post says, "while it looks like magic, it's really just a bunch of cool hacks." Hacks or not, regular Facebook users will greatly appreciate the upgrade.

Install the New Photo Uploader Tool

To install the new uploader, you must first visit the Prototypes page for the tool and activate it for your profile. Then, the next time you go to create a new album, you'll be prompted to install the Facebook plug-in. Once complete, you'll be presented with the new user interface which lets you browse through your computer's photo library and select the images you want to upload. This new interface is much easier to navigate - and more attractive, too - than the old Facebook uploader from days past.

Facebook says the new tool has several additional security mechanisms built in as well, one of the more interesting being a "kill switch" that can remotely deactivate the tool in the event that a security hole is discovered. While confident that the new uploader is already securely designed and architected from the start, the company has released it as a prototype first so people can report any security issues they may find.

Less technically-minded folks can simply activate the tool and use it, reporting any problems they find as well as far as user experience issues, crashes or other bugs. Depending on the results of the tests, Facebook will be able to correct any problems prior to rolling it out to all users. If you want to give the new uploader a shot yourself, you can do so by visiting its page here.

For now, Image Swirl only works for about 200,000 queries, though Google plans to include more in the near future.

Better Photo Search Through Smarter Algorithms

This new feature takes image search to a new level, as it doesn't just display the most relevant images. Instead, Google notes, these "are the most relevant groups of images." To create these clusters of related images, Google analyzes the characteristics of the images themselves, but the algorithm also looks at meta tags and other clues in the description of these images. Google uses the same algorithms to find and organize images of landmarks in its index.

In an interview with eWeek, Google Image Swirl Product Manager Aparna Chennapragada said that this new service is part of Google's drive to "go beyond just relying on text." Bing introduced its visual search feature a few weeks ago and is still ahead of Google in bringing these features to its core search product.

Image Swirl makes looking for images on Google a far more interactive and fun experience. For now, Image Swirl is only a labs product - and some of the results can be a bit off at times - but chances are that this feature will find its way into the search options panel on Google Images in the future.

One of Orb's best features is the OrbLive iPhone application which connects with your home computer over the internet to provide access to your media library of audio, video, and photos. Through the mobile application, you can access any of your media files and play stream them over either a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. In the Windows version of the software, PC's with TV tuner cards can also connect you to live, streaming TV in addition to the other shared media saved on the PC's hard drive.

To some extent, Orb competes with Apple's own offerings since it provides access to music and video from either a desktop computer or an iPhone. That's why it was somewhat surprising that Apple ever approved the company's iPhone application to begin with. Even more surprising is that they allowed it to function over 3G when similar products - like Slingbox's SlingPlayer for iPhone, another live TV streaming app - are restricted to Wi-Fi only.

No Live TV for Mac Users Yet

Unfortunately, the Mac version is debuting without the live TV streaming functionality. According to Joe Costello, CEO of Orb Networks, support for live TV support will be added in subsequent versions. In the meantime, however, Mac users can install the Orb software to stream music, photos, videos, home movies and webcam feeds stored in iTunes to their iPhones or to any other internet-connected device including netbooks, notebooks, media players, game consoles and more. All that's needed is the new Mac OS X desktop software (works on OS X Intel 10.5 or later).

Those interested in trying out the new Mac version can grab the installer from here: orb.com/en/download_orb. For now, the Mac software is available in English only.

Flickr has organized these third-party apps into a "garden," complete with user favorites, tags, descriptions and screenshots. The App Garden represents a significant evolution from the former "services" section on the user side, and the revamp includes new features for developers, who can now use the Garden as a tool to help users discover their products. Read on for details and a few spotlighted Flickr apps we thought were fun.

"When you click on one of your apps," Pachenko continued, "you will be taken to the owner view of your app page. This page is where you tell the world about your app - provide a description, link to a website, set screenshots, and add tags. When you're ready, change the privacy setting to public. That will make your app visible to other users and allow it to show up in searches."

Now, for end users, here are a few apps we picked from the Garden that we think you might like.

Bubblr Makes Comics

Make comic strips from your or others' Flickr photos with this fun, simple application from Barcelona-based shop Pimpampum. The app allows users to search for photos by user or by tag, string the pics into strips, and add captions, thought bubbles and speech bubbles. Creations can be shared via a user's blog, Delicious or email.

Flickr For Busy People Speeds Up Skimming

This delightful time-saver shows a compact grid of photos uploaded from a user's contacts during given time periods between 30 minutes and 8 hours prior to the current time. Below each user's avatar is the number of photos uploaded, and the avatars can be clicked to display (or hide) an array of thumbnails to quick digestion of the day's pics.

Suggestify Geotags Photos

This app lets users geotag other users' Flickr photos by suggesting a location to the photo's owner. That geotag information is stored with Suggestify until the photo owner approves or rejects the suggestion. If approved, the photo is geotagged and the user who suggested the geotag is credited with a special tag on the photo.

Flogr Turns Flickr Pics Into Photo Blogs

Flogr is a PHP/MySQL-powered photoblog interface that displays a main photo page with EXIF data and Flickr comments, a customizable thumbnails page of a user's recent pictures, a slideshow component, a tag cloud and an about page showing the Flickr user's profile. Users can also determine which photos are displayed by telling Flogr to only include images with certain tags.

Flickriver Surfaces Interesting Photos

This app is focused on delivering a seamless, quick viewing experience with minimal visual distraction. Users can choose to check out interesting photos filtered by user or by group. They can search for photos or simply browse to discover the most interesting photos on a given day. Flickriver also includes a keyboard-operated slideshow mode. Better still, Flickriver offers a dynamic badge for bloggers to showcase their images.

If you haven't been following the story (see our initial coverage here and here), the short summary goes like this: Chicago resident Firas Alkhateeb created an image that showed President Obama wearing the makeup of the Joker. He used an image of the President snagged from TIME magazine's October 23rd, 2006 cover. After uploading his photo to Flickr, an unknown third party doctored the image some more adding the word "socialism" beneath the picture. This doctored image started showing up plastered across cities nationwide as well as on numerous political bloggers' websites.

Flickr, after having received a DMCA take-down notice, removed the photo from Firas' account. They did this despite the fact that the image could easily be argued to fall into the grey area of "political parody" and the copyright infringement claim itself comes from a character with a questionable background himself and not, as it turns out, from TIME magazine, DC Comics, nor the photographer who took the original photo. Instead, the supposedly infringed-upon party, a Mr. Edward Przydzial, is a freelance photographer whose only proof of his claim comes from a LiveJournal post dated Oct. 9th. Blog posts are easy to backdate which makes the claim questionable in the eyes of the law.

To make matters worse, the case highlighted a problem with Flickr's takedown policy which appears to be "delete first, ask questions later."

Flickr User Suggests a Policy Change, Flickr Agrees

While for the most part Flickr is standing behind their actions, saying that the law leaves them no choice but to remove images upon receipt of a takedown notice, they have been open to discussion about better ways to comply with the letter of the law without impacting the Flickr community so much as before.

In a forum posting on the photo-sharing site, a Flickr user by the name of "The Searcher" debating the company's DCMA policy, offered the company a suggestion. Instead of simply deleting the photo page in its entirety, the company should just replace the image itself with a blank that reads "this image has been removed for copyright issues," wrote the user. Flickr's director of community Heather Champ replied saying she liked the idea and would push it up the food chain. And that she did.

According to her follow up post, Flickr decided to make a change to the way they handle takedown notices and, going forward, they will no longer delete the entire photo page, just the image itself. A screenshot of how this will look is posted here and, as suggested, it will feature text that reads: "This image has been removed due to a claim of copyright infringement."

As Champ explains, this notable change will preserve the photo's metadata while still complying with the law. Other policies remain the same. For example, members will still be warned, by way a private message, who is making the claim against them. Flickr will remove the image from the site and will store it so that it can be replaced in the event that the U.S. Copyright Team gives them the go-ahead to do so. Now, however, the existing title, description, comments, tags, notes, etc. on the original photo page will remain available and the photo can still be added to sets and groups. Champ says Flickr will also be reaching out to the copyright teams in other parts of the world to see if they're interested in enacting the same policy. (The current policy is specific to the U.S. where the DMCA law is enforced.)

Overall, the community received the news positively, even though it still allows Flickr to eschew any responsibility of investigating the validity of DMCA copyright claims themselves. The company will continue to delete away no matter who asks, it seems - a move that drew ire from Techcrunch's Michael Arrington who said they should have checked with their lawyers first before yanking the image. Photographer and rival service Zooomr exec Thomas Hawk also questioned whether the removal was simply sheer incompetence on Flickr's part.

Ultimately, the change is a good one. It's better for the online community and the photographer whose image is removed, while still respecting the rights of the supposed copyright victim. However, the real problem here may not be how Flickr deals with copyright claims, but the DMCA law itself.

Now you can annotate images from Wikimedia Commons in a fashion very similar to Flickr. The big difference with the new feature is that annotations can be added by anyone, and no account is necessary. While they don't show up directly in Wikipedia yet, a new version of the system that will appear in the free encyclopedia is under development.

Once you find the image you want, either by clicking through from Wikipedia or searching Wikimedia Commons directly, just click the "add note" button underneath any image on its own page. Then type in your text and either preview or save it. In addition to simple text notes, you can include wiki markup to add links or for styling, and if your annotation fails then you can add it manually through editing the page's code.

The image annotation gadget is basically just some JavaScript written by a Wikimedia volunteer and made standard on the site. If you're a regular user and you don't like the boxes showing up on your images, then you can turn it off via your user preferences. The advantage to logging in to add notes is that a history of all your annotations will show up in your user contributions history. According to the project's FAQ, a version will soon be available for use directly within Wikipedia.

Earlier this year, a company called Face.com brought facial recognition technology to Facebook by way of an application called Photo Finder which scanned through untagged photos and identified the people within them. Now, using the same facial recognition algorithms that made Photo Finder possible, the company is introducing Photo Tagger, an app which scans through select online albums to automate the tagging process.

About Photo Tagger

But where Photo Finder focuses on discovery, Photo Tagger focuses on productivity. With the new app, you can choose the albums to scan - whether your own or those belonging to your friends - and the app will process the photos they contain. Photo Tagger will batch the people it finds into groups and will then suggest tags for them. Once you confirm the tags, they're automatically pushed to Facebook where the people tagged are notified, just as if the process had been done manually.

Facebook users who upload a lot of photos will find an application like this extremely useful as it dramatically cuts down on the time it takes to tag images. Instead of having to go through each photo one-by-one, you can simply confirm the tags the application suggests. And surprisingly, it doesn't make a lot of mistakes. The facial recognition technology employed by both of these applications is incredibly accurate. In our tests, the most common mistake it made was to identify a picture of a friend's child as the friend themselves - a problem that has a lot to do with how facial features between related family members are so alike. But for the most part, the app identified photos correctly.

The Photo Finder app has already produced amazing results. It has scanned more than 1.5 billion photos so far and has identified more than 2.3 million faces. What's even more shocking about these numbers is that the app is still in closed alpha. Imagine how many faces it will scan when it opens up!

Get in on the Alpha

Photo Tagger will also launch in closed alpha but will probably be closed for a shorter period of time than the Photo Finder application. The reason for this is because Photo Tagger scans albums on the fly as opposed to scanning an entire network of inter-connected users and their photos like Finder does - a number which can be on average over a hundred thousand photos. Since that causes a bigger impact on the service's back-end than Photo Tagger, it will remain closed for longer while the company works out the kinks.

No matter, because out of the two applications, Facebook users will likely find Photo Tagger the more useful of the two since it offers a more direct purpose: tag these photos fast!

Photo Tagger launches today in private alpha. If you want in, you can click this link to add the app to Facebook right away. Only the first 100 ReadWriteWeb visitors who do so will be given access. Good luck!

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Using a tool called the Moment Maker, you create each "Moment" (as the shared media is called) by adding notes, assigning an emotion, adding the date, location, and the names of the people who were in the moment, in addition to the media itself. You can choose to add the photos and videos either from your computer, from publicly shared content on the web via a search tool, or from your own accounts at various online services including flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and Picasa.

A Few Stumbles

The Moment Maker tool is relatively easy to use, but could use a little simplification. For example, the first time you go to use flickr, the service needs to authorize your account. Although you're in the middle of "moment creation," thisMoment doesn't perform the authorization using a separate tab or pop-up window. Instead, you're forced to save the moment as a draft, head to your preferences, and authorize flickr from there. Had I known that I'd have to drop what I was doing to configure these settings, I would have headed to my preferences first, then created my Moment. Even better, some sort of walkthrough or prompt to set up your associated services in the beginning would have been useful. UPDATE: The company tells me that you won't see a prompt to link your services if you log in via Facebook Connect from a "moment" page, which, of course, is what I did. You might do the same, so I stand by my assertion that this process needs to be easier. Even the prompt you're supposed to see isn't as obvious as the link to "add a moment" at the top of the screen.

Another slight drawback was the search feature once connected to my flickr account. Although a search box is displayed, entering in a query returned photos that were clearly not mine, but pulled from the public stream. Considering that flickr Pro users like myself probably have hundreds of photos (or thousands!) to sift through, being able to search your own images is a critically important feature. There is a way to search your own images, but it's odd that it wouldn't be the default setting. Instead you have to click the link that says search images "from me" to find your own photos. I didn't even see this option the first time I used it!

Still, when you get through the challenges of locating your content, the end result is an attractive, side-scrolling slideshow of photos and videos which you browse through using the site's timeline feature. These slideshows can be set to public or private as you choose.

Social Sharing

If simple slideshow creation was all the site did, it would probably languish in obscurity since it's already somewhat competing with other photo slideshow creation tools like flickr and Slide. The addition of video and an attractive UI would only take thisMoment so far.

However, the beauty of thisMoment is that it lets you push the content out across the web. After creating a moment, you have the option to post it to Facebook and/or Twitter or email it to friends. Thanks to thisMoment's integration with these social web services, it also automatically identified certain contacts of mine already using the site and allowed me to select them from a list of "my connections" instead of having to type in email addresses.

Another change since the service was in private beta is that it now allows you to access embed codes for publicly shared moments and you can promote them on social sites like Digg, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, and others through a "share" widget located at the bottom of the slideshow.

Premium "Momentos"

At launch time, thisMoment announced content licensing agreements with The New York Times, the Time Inc. Lifestyle Group and Road & Track. These companies will offer branded versions of thisMoment called "Momentos." Surprisingly, these moments weren't featured on the company's homepage nor were they easily accessible via site navigation or search. That's an odd choice - you would think that if they have access to premium content, they would find a way to highlight it better.

In the future, thisMoment plans to expand their offerings to include an iPhone application - it should arrive in the App Store in a few weeks. A Facebook app is available now.

Flickr, which hosts a rapidly increasing number of photos, is increasingly using location as a means to organize photos. Earlier this year, for example, the company announced that it now hosts over 100 million geotagged photos and in order to make this data more accessible, Flickr also unveiled a new 'nearby' page on its web site, which displays a map with images that were taken close to another photo.

Flickr's mobile site is also becoming an increasingly valuable asset to the company. Last December, Flickr announced that traffic to the mobile site had increased by more than 50% over the last year, and it has made various smaller updates to the site since then. As smartphones become increasingly better at taking pictures and surfing the web, it is good to see that Flickr is bringing these two worlds together nicely on its mobile site.

When you launch the Postino app, you can choose to snap a photo or choose one from your library. You're able to adjust the image by zooming in and positioning it however you want and optionally choose a frame to go around the photo. Then you enter in your message, signature, and the address of the person you wish to send the card to. If you'd like, you can also optionally draw the signature on the phone's screen using your finger so it looks more like an actual signature.

If you enter in an email address, the "postcard" is sent virtually, like an e-card. If you enter in a street address however, a postcard will be printed out on high-quality paper and mailed for you. You can even have your GPS location included in the card! The only cost to you is the price of the "virtual stamp" - $1.99 (U.S.) which is paid via Paypal.

Postino is available now in the iTunes App Store for free.

The latest addition to their collection of utilities is a new, experimental Firefox extension called the Pixelpipe Media Uploader 1.0. With this add-on, you can upload media all across the social web either through drag-and-drop or by selecting from a chooser.

After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, you'll see that there's a new orange "P" button in your toolbar. Click that once and the Pixelpipe sidebar will display on the left side of the screen. The first time you go to use this tool, you'll need to sign in with your Pixelpipe account and authorize it to work in Firefox. Once that's done, you can then drag-and-drop any media into the sidebar to upload it to Pixelpipe which then, of course, shoots it out to any of the services you've configured. Alternately, you can right-click on any image on the web and choose the "Upload image with Pixelpipe Uploader" option from the menu that appears.

One of the nice things about the uploader is that you can add the title, any appropriate tags, and set the privacy levels before you click "Upload." That way, you don't have to actually go visit the sites afterwards to configure these sorts of settings. 

This new utility is just another reminder of how desktop software tools are slowly being replaced by browser-based services. Who needs the Flickr uploader anymore when you can drag photos to your browser and send them directly to Flickr, Facebook, and a slew of other sites with only a click or two?

If you want to try the new Pixelpipe Media Uploader, you can download the Firefox extension here.

Face.com's facial recognition software is able to scan through millions of photos in a relatively short amount of time. Although the results of the scan are not immediate upon adding the application, you're able to view them even while the scan is in progress. There's no exact time frame for how long this process takes - it depends on the number of friends and photos you have available among many other factors. However, Photo Finder does save its results for future use - if your friends later add the app too, it won't need to rescan the photos that have already been analyzed.

To begin using Photo Finder, you simply add it to your profile as you would with any other Facebook app. You then click the "Get Started" button and Photo Finder will launch its scan. There's nothing else you need to do until the scan is complete. You can leave the page to return to other parts of Facebook or even close the web page altogether - Photo Finder will continue to run as you've already granted it offline access when you initially added it.

After Photo Finder has finished its work, you can return to review the results. You can click on the "Me" button to see your own photos or click on the "Friends" button to discover those belonging to your friends. Next to each user, all the Facebook photos of that particular person are displayed. The ones in which they're already tagged via Facebook are outlined in blue and the ones where they've been "auto-tagged" by the application are outlined in orange.

On the auto-tagged photos, you can click a green checkmark to confirm the match or a red "X" if the match is incorrect. Upon hitting the red "X," you're presented with a dialog box where you can fill in the name of the person who is actually in the photo or you can click a button that reads "unknown" if you don't know who it is.

If you'd like, you can later navigate to the "Who's This?" section within the application to help tag all the "unknowns" in your network. The software also identifies how accurate a match is by displaying a percentage beneath each photograph.

To keep track of the photos of your closest friends, Photo Finder presents an option that allows you to add people to a "Watch List." This is a section of the application where all the related photos for those on the list are tracked.

Privacy Concerns?

The Photo Finder application may sound a bit frightening at first, given its capabilities to uncover long-lost and hidden Facebook photos. However, the company has taken great strides to make sure that its application respects your privacy. For one, the app will not tag photos within Facebook itself - they are only tagged within the application, meaning no one can see them unless they too are running the app.

Photo Finder also correlates its settings with your Facebook privacy settings. So, for example, if you've specified that a certain subset of your friends may not see your tagged Facebook photos, that is also reflected within the application.

When you're auto-tagged in a photo, you are the first one to be alerted via Facebook's notification mechanism. You can then either approve the photo or untag it (hide it from the other users of the Photo Finder app). If you untag yourself, none of your friends will be alerted to this action.

The Technology

The algorithm behind Photo Finder has been in development since 2007. Unlike many of the facial recognition algorithms out there today, this one does not require people to face the camera head-on in order for it to be accurate. Instead, it focuses on identifying people in "everyday photos" - that is, photos taken from different angles, out-of-focus shots, photos in low lighting, or those in which people are making odd facial expressions, etc.

That the algorithm excels at matching people with their pictures has been at least partially confirmed by an independent study conducted by the University of Massachusetts. Here, the Photo Finder team contributed but one aspect of their algorithm for examination and its accuracy far exceeded that of its competitors. You can see the results of that study here - the Photo Finder algorithm is identified as the "hybrid descriptor-based, funneled" model which is seen on the chart with the highest "true positive" rate.

Join the Private Alpha

The Face.com technology has been in private alpha testing for a number of months among a group of 150 users, mostly friends and colleagues of the founders Gil Hirsch (CEO), Yaniv Taigma (CTO), Eden Shochat, and Moti Shniberg. During that time, 20 million photos were scanned, identifying around 30,000 people.

You can join the private alpha by clicking this link here: http://face.com/invite.php?promo_code=S226566001

Only 100 members are invited.

The company is not able to confirm an exact date as to when the app goes public, only that they expect that sometime later this year, after tens of millions of photos have been scanned, they'll know better where they stand. They don't want to rush things - it's one thing to open up the app to select users, it's quite another to make Photo Finder available to scan the 15 billion photos hosted on Facebook. But one day in the not-too-distant future, that's exactly what they plan to do.

Face.com is currently angel funded and looking to raise a VC round.

According to the company, during a routine upgrade on Friday night, they ran into some problems with photo storage. The issue appears to have stemmed from several drives failing at once. Because simultaneous hardware failure such as this is rare, Facebook says they're still trying to figure out what happened.

In the meantime, though, the photos are being copied to new drives - a process that can take some time due to the large amount of data that was affected. The company asked users not to worry because they store photos in a way that maintains multiple copies of the data in case of hardware failures such as this. By early this week, everything should be back to normal.

The Cloud is Not Perfect

This recent issue with Facebook photos is just one of many cloud-based outages and issues we've seen recently - a trend that moved some to question the level of trust we should have for these online services. Over the past few weeks, we've seen the social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia completely fry and lose all their customers' data when the service's database crashed and took with it a half a terabyte of information. Unfortunately, no reliable backups were to be had.

But while Ma.gnolia may have represented the dangers of trusting a small startup with your data, Google has proved that even companies as large as themselves are not immune from problems. A recent four-hour Gmail outage from routine maintenance "gone wrong," caused a cascading failure in Google's European data centers.

And on the heels of the Gmail outage, Google Groups also went down for some time. All groups were affected for a short while.

These incidents led Google to follow in the footsteps of other cloud storage companies like SalesForce.com and Amazon in the launch of a Google Apps status dashboard so they could better communicate with customers whether their online applications were up and running.

In Google's case, repairs were made and customers were credited as necessary, but even so many businesses and individuals were affected in ways that can't necessarily be quantified so easily. Although some quickly rallied to Google's defense, reminding that Gmail's uptime is often much better than on-site hosted email systems, the point many folks are missing is that unlike in "the old days," not everyone keeps copies of their data on their computers anymore - so when the cloud shuts down, that data is just gone, albeit only temporarily in most cases.

Be Safe, Use More than One Service!

Still, even if you've switched over to cloud services for storing and accessing the majority of your data, you can prevent outages from affecting you. The trick is to store your data in more than one online service or use a hybrid cloud/desktop solution. For example, if your email is mission critical, use an IMAP-enabled desktop or mobile client. Those doing so during Gmail's outage were able to access their inbox to retrieve old emails - they just couldn't send and receive.

For photos, like the ones that recently went missing from Facebook, there are a number of online services where they could have been stored. Today, there's really no reason to only keep your photos in one spot. An easy way to upload photos to multiple sites is to use a tool like Pixelpipe which shoots photos, videos, and audio files to over 60 social networks, photo/video sites, and blogs.

Even documents can be stored in more than one location. Google Docs and Zoho may be the best known of the web office services, but you could also keep critical files saved to your computer then backed up using another third party backup service like Mozy. Or you could upload files to storage sites like Google's own Google Sites or Microsoft's "Sharepoint Lite" Office Live.

No matter what you do, there's always a chance of losing data, even if you only save files on your computer, completely eschewing the cloud altogether. But that's probably not as safe as keeping files in multiple online services. With the number of services available, an outage shouldn't mean we have to lose access to our files. Use hybrid solutions or spread your data across multiple services instead and you'll almost always be okay, outage or not.

Enjoysthin.gs lets you share all kinds of media, from images to videos to quotes to audio you call in and record from your phone. The interface is beautiful and the site is a real joy to use.

The user experience on the site is a real home run; from browsing through the beautifully displayed items from other users to interacting with the site's basic functionality. Creating an account is remarkably smooth and the plush, over-sized displays make us want to jump up and down and clap our hands.

Anyone can tag items, even those saved by other people, and you can view recent shared items globally by tag. Recent activities by your friends are displayed as another item in a big box when you are logged in. There's even an API for integration with outside services; though we dare anyone to try to make a cooler interface, it would be nice to see Enjoysthin.gs on FriendFeed.

There are clearly more features that are still needed, there are no RSS feeds or ways to view the most popular items, for example. Roden is hard at work improving the site, he added 31 new features in December alone. The new feature that lets you call in a voice recording is very cool - a message we recorded was posted to our profile page in just a few minutes.

You can befriend me at Enjoysthin.gs on this page. I'll probably be using the service for at least the next few days. Not because it's particularly popular, secure, supportive of data portability or anything like that - just because it's so damn much fun to use.

It's still up for debate how much personal information you should share with others on your Facebook profile. Some people would argue that the time for us to hide behind our masks is over. If we're professional, good employees at work and good sons and daughters at home, it shouldn't matter so much if a friend tags us in a photo which shows us tipping back beers at the weekend party. The fact is, everyone has a personal life and it shouldn't matter who sees it.

Others would say that those are precisely the sorts of photos that make it dangerous to use online social networks like Facebook for both personal and business networking. "Don't friend the boss," they would argue. It's just too risky.

Sharing Some Things, Not Others

The issue isn't really that black and white, though. You may feel it's OK for your colleagues to see some of your Facebook photos (like those from the conference you attended), but not others (like those from the party). You also may be a little uncomfortable with the boss reading your wall posts, especially if your friends have an odd sense of humor at times.

If you're not ready to expose everything about you to anyone who asks to be your online friend, it's time you learned how to use Facebook's friend lists.

A little over a year ago, Facebook launched a new feature called "Friend Lists." With lists, you can create groups of friends on Facebook, separating work from family and close friends. It's simple to use, but it's definitely an underutilized feature. In fact, most of the people who spend their days "Facebooking," never seem to take the time to worry about who's seeing what...until it's too late.

But now, as more older generations are going online and joining social networks, the "Should I Friend Mom/Dad/Boss?" issue is becoming more prevalent than ever.

How To Use Friend Lists

To get started with Facebook Lists, you first need to build one. You can do this from your Friends page. (Click "Friends" in the blue bar at the top). On the left side of the page, click the button "Make a New List." Give it a title.

Now you'll have the option to add your friends to the list. You can either start typing in names one by one or click on "Select Multiple Friends" to add several people to the list all at once. (To add people, just click on their photos.) When you're finished, click the "Save List" button at the bottom.

Once you have some lists created, it's time to figure out who gets to see what. To edit your privacy settings, go to "Settings" at the top-right of the screen next to the search box. When you hover your mouse over the link, you'll see a menu appear; click "Privacy Settings"on this menu. On the following page, click "Profile," the top choice in the list of options.

On the profile privacy page, you have the option of customizing exactly who gets to see what. You can modify the following areas: Profile, Basic Info, Personal Info, Status Updates, Photos Tagged of You, Videos Tagged of You, Friends, Wall Posts, Education Info, and Work Info. If you're unsure of what any of those things are, click the "?" next to the item to read a definition.

Using the drop-down boxes, you can customize who gets to see your info: "Only Friends," "Friends of Friends," or "My Network of Friends." To lock down your profile to friends only, you could set all these to "only friends." But since you have now created specialized lists, you'll want to use these instead.

To do so, click the fourth option from the drop-down box: "Customize." From here, you can add lists of people who should NOT be able to see this part of your profile. For example, if you wanted to block a list of work colleagues or those in your family from seeing your status updates, you could do so here - just type the name of your list in the box "Except these people" and save your changes.

Note: you can also block certain people individually just by typing in their names, but given the ever-growing number of Facebook users, you're probably going to need a Friend List at some point. We recommend biting the bullet and creating your lists now instead of treating everyone as a one-off. 

After you've saved your changes, you're done. You'll have your privacy back without having to change the way you and your friends use Facebook. Of course, keep in mind that nothing is foolproof - determined hackers can gain access to your account as can anyone who guesses your password....so maybe you shouldn't use your dog's name.

When lists are finally in place, you can assign new friends to a list right when you're accepting their friend request - just look for the option "Add to Friend List" before you click "Accept."

It may seem like quite a bit of work to set up, but you'll thank yourself for doing this later...like every Monday morning when you go back to work after a great weekend...or the next time you need to borrow money from mom and dad. You get the idea. Better safe than sorry.