Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of senior Facebook Executives attended a special edition of the London Facebook Developer Garage.

Their arrival signifies the start of a European expansion in conjunction with the continued push for developers and sites to adopt the Open Graph Protocol. At the event a number of interesting statistics were announced by Zuckerberg and the other executives.

50% Facebook users log on every day
26 million active users in the UK
50% of ‘likes’ from social plugins are from Europe alone
47% European viewers of the ages 12-17 watch TV while using their laptops (Forrester research)

“People don’t talk to share – they share to have something to talk about” – Douglas Rushkoft

The major announcement was that Facebook has now reached 26 million unique users in the UK. Also announced was 50% of all “Likes” originate from within Europe, which is about 50 million out of the reported 100 million likes so far, an early indicatator of the popularity of the Social Plugin platform.

Mark Zuckerberg

“Every year that goes by we get more access to information – it’s a really exciting time to be developing”

Facebook has created a movement of designing for people – the whole platform is built around people.

“Facebook is the most engaging web platform ever built, because it’s about people“

Three new things Facebook have introduced recently:

1. OpenGraph
2. Social Plugins (Over 300,000 websites are now using social plugins.)
3. Instant personalisation


“I think we’ll look back in a few years when the web is much more personalised and wonder how it ever wasn’t personalised.”

The event marked a good turning point for all European based Facebook Developers and it will be good to see more of a Facebook presence outside of their Palo Alto offices in California.

This weekend I hope you are not planning to do late night party!! Because you may miss your chance to get your much awaited facebook vanity url. Yes, now you can get yourself a url http://facebook.com/yourusername. Facebook has just announced on its blog that it users can starts registering for their facebook url from June 13 midnight 12:01 am Eastern Time.

You may want to hurry up for this as it will be on first come first serve basis.

Following are some of the Rules and Regulations.

* Facebook username must be at least 5 characters long
* Alphabets (Aa-Zz), numbers (0-9) and period (.) are allowed in the username
* Only one vanity url will be allowed per account. So think twice before your register a username
* Facebook reserves the rights to “remove and/or reclaim any username at any time for any reason,” and will work with intellectual property rights holders to prevent users from claiming trademarked terms as their usernames.

So if you are planning to get yourself a name which is quite common, then you may want to set yourself a reminder.

The much awaited Homepage that Facebook promised early this month, got finally released today. This refresh brings a revamped page with an improved share box (called the Publisher), new filtering controls, a real-time stream, and a highlights area that shows important items from the stream.

One of the biggest changes is that Facebook is getting rid of the distinction between private profiles and public pages. The 5,000-friend limit will be dropped from the public pages. Facebook doesn’t want Twitter to become the way large companies and public figures connect to fans. Up until now, Facebook Pages haven’t really been the place fans go to connect with their favorite celebrities or brands. For that, they’ve started going to Twitter, where they can get updates in real time.

Thanks to updates to Facebook’s privacy settings, users will now also be able to follow others without having to become actual ‘friends.’ This is basically the same ‘friendship’ model that Twitter has implemented on its service.

It will take a while before all the accounts will be moved and new interface will be rolled out. So be patient until it arrives to everyone.

Facebook launched a new home page with a new tagline “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”

No longer advertising as being a social utility, although I suspect we haven’t heard the last of it. The old tagline was “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you” and was used by Facebook customer service reps to claim Facebook wasn’t a social network and that people should use it primarily to connect with offline friends.


I think they replace “people around you” with “people in your life” is most likely more and more people was using facebook as “getting know new friends” other than “connect real friends in your life”