Skype to Facebook Video Calls Finally Possible

admin    FB, IT News, Skype    

Last summer, Skype and Facebook announced a partnership and a deeper integration. Using Skype technology, Facebook users could have video calls inside the site. But, despite being based on Skype, they couldn’t call a friend using the Skype client or the other way around.

Now though, this has become possible, with the latest beta releases of Skype for Windows and Mac.

Skype users can start a conversation with their Facebook friends from the desktop client. It doesn’t matter whether their friends have the client as well, they can answer from the site and have a video conversation without the platform they use getting in the way.

“Today we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Facebook has reached yet another milestone with the launch of Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows allowing you to conduct a Facebook-to-Facebook call from within Skype,” Skype announced.

The feature has been a sorely missed one and it’s easy to see why. Without being able to connect with Facebook friends and start a video conversation, the integration wasn’t that useful to existing Skype users.

“Initiating a Facebook-to-Facebook call from within Skype is quite easy; all you need to do is connect your Skype and Facebook accounts. Then, select a Facebook friend and hit the video call button in Skype- your friend simply picks up the call from Facebook,” Skype explained.

If you’ve been using the video call feature on Facebook exclusively, the new addition doesn’t really mean much to you. Since you can start a video call on Facebook without even having a Skype account, the desktop client probably doesn’t mean much to Facebook users.

But there are plenty of Skype users out there and the ability to now chat with many other friends, who you may not have convinced them to join Skype. And now, they don’t have to.

 

[softpedia]

Anonymous Ingin Tumbangkan Facebook

admin    FB, Hacker, IT News, Security    

Lagi-lagi ulah peretas internet Anonymous yang kabarnya ingin mencoba menumbangkan situs jejaring sosial Facebook. Hal ini didasarkan atas pendapat grup ini bahwa data yang tersimpan di Facebook telah disalahgunakan, dengan cara dijual ke pemerintah dan perusahaan keamanan yang bertujuan untuk memata-matai orang.

Menurut video yang diposting oleh Anonymous di YouTube, grup itu akan berusaha melakukan aksi nya pada tanggal 5 November nanti,dan turut mengajak semua orang yang ingin berperan. Namun seperti yang kita ketahui dari akun Twitter @GroupAnon, bahwa tidak semua anggota dari Anonymous ini akan ikut serta,bahkan tidak setuju, dalam proyek kali ini karena ternyata beberapa anggotanya merupakan pegawai Facebook sendiri.

Akankah Anonymous berhasil untuk menumbangkan situs raksasa yang mempunyai 750 juta pengguna? Dan juga mengembalikan reputasinya setelah gagal untuk menumbangkan Amazon?

[teknoup]

Update Status Facebook Melalui Google+

admin    FB, Google, IT News    

Kalau update status Twitter menjadi status Facebook sepertinya sudah banyak yang menggunakan. Nah status Google+ yang dapat diupdate menjadi status Facebook sepertinya belum banyak yang belum mengetahuinya. Dibawah ini adalah cara-cara mengupdate status Google+ menjadi status Facebook anda, cara ini juga terbuka untuk meng-update status twitter sekaligus.

Untuk mengakali hal tersebut ikuti langkah-langkah berikut:

1. Buka alamat http://facebook.com/mobile
2. Login
3. Copy-kan alamat email di bawah ulpload via email (No 1)
4. Login ke akun Google+ anda
5. Pilih fasilitas Circle atau lingkaran
6. Pilih tambahkan orang baru, pastekan alamat email , kemudian enter. Berikan Nama dan tambahkan ke lingkaran anda, kemudian simpan. (no.2)
7. Lihat di bawah layar, pilih undang ‘nama yang Anda masukkan di atas’ (no. 3)
8. Kalau berhasil, pada status FB anda akan terlihat seperti no. 4
9. Buat status baru di Google+. Pilih lingkaran di mana nama yang di atas dimasukan. Jangan lupa memberi tanda centang pada ‘kirimkan juga email kepada 1 orang yang belum menggunakan Google+’. Kemudian klik bagikan (no.5)
10. Apabila berhasil status Google+ dan Facebook Anda akan sama (hasil lihat no 6 dan 7)

[teknoup]

How to update Facebook in Google+

admin    FB, Google, IT News    

Ever since the Google+ beta launched a few weeks ago, obsessive social networkers have complained about the lack of Facebook integration preventing users from cross posting between sites.

Fortunately, an application dubbed “Google+Facebook” created by an Israeli company known as Crossrider aims to solve this problem by allowing Google+ users to view Facebook streams and update their status from within the competing social network.

“It’s something we created in less than a day,” Crossrider co-founder Koby Menachemi told Reuters. “The product is not perfect, yet you can view (Facebook) streams and update your status” while using Google+.

Google+ is Google’s brand spanking new social network designed to compete directly with Facebook.
The nascent platform already has 10 million users, compared to Facebook’s 750 million.

Facebook won’t allow users of its site to import friends, pictures, or other information into Google+ based on the site’s terms of service, a major source of contention for those with an established Facebook presence.

“It’s a site within a site,” Menachemi said about the application. He added that Crossrider hopes to continually improve the service stating, “If users want a feature to post updates on both networks, we will. If they want to comment on their Facebook screen, we will do it.”

Considering both Facebook and Google’s stringent terms of use, it’s quite possible that the application will be shut down or blocked in the coming weeks.

Note: There has been some criticism of the app on Crossrider’s own website, with a number of comments referring to the software as malware. As expected, Menachemi denied the allegation, but emphasized he would not remove the negative comments from the Crossrider site.
[tgdaily]

Facebook Vibes outed in video calling code, related music service seems a lock

admin    FB, IT News    

You never really know what you’re onto until you look, but who knew “looking” involved “digging through source code?” Software guru Jeff Rose had his curiosity piqued yesterday with the proper launch of Facebook Video Calling, and rather than just being satisfied with things working, he took it upon himself to see how exactly things were coming together under the hood. Turns out, the program grabs a startlingly small download link called FacebookVideoCalling.jar, which in turn uses LiveConnect to allow the Java applet to fetch a few other things. This enables the program to source your Facebook user ID (as well as an application ID), and from there, the installer has permission to use two things: a video chat plugin called “peep,” and something else dubbed “vibes.” Curiously enough, only one of those two were launched to the world, so logical skeptics are obviously opining that Facebook has a connected music service up its sleeve. ‘Course, there’s no indication that said service will actually use the Vibes moniker, but we could definitely ponder worse titles. So, Mark — three months from now, another impromptu press event, announcing something even more awesome? We’re so there.

[engadget]

Facebook Luncurkan Group dan Video Chat

admin    FB, IT News    

Facebook reportedly planning new HTML5 platform

admin    FB, IT News    

Yahoo Mail Baru Sudah Dirilis Dengan Integrasi Facebook

admin    FB, IT News, Yahoo    

[teknoup]

Scaling the Messages Application Back End

admin    FB, IT News    

Facebook Messages seamlessly integrates many communication channels: email, SMS, Facebook Chat, and the existing Facebook Inbox. Combining all this functionality and offering a powerful user experience involved building an entirely new infrastructure stack from the ground up.

To simplify the product and present a powerful user experience, integrating and supporting all the above communication channels requires a number of services to run together and interact. The system needs to:

• Scale, as we need to support millions of users with existing message history.
• Operate in real time.
• Be highly available.

To overcome all these challenges, we started laying down a new architecture. At the heart of the application back end are the application servers. Application servers are responsible for answering all queries and take all the writes into the system. They also interact with a number of services to achieve this.

Each application server comprises:

• API: The entry point for all get and set operations, which every client calls. An application server is the sole entry point for any given user into the system. Any data written to or read from the system needs to go through this API.
• Distributed logic: To understand the distributed logic we need to understand what a cell is. The entire system is divided into cells, and each cell contains only a subset of users. A cell looks like this:

Understanding Cells

Cells give us many advantages:

• They help us scale incrementally while limiting failure scenarios
• Easy upgrades
• Metadata store failures affect only a few users
• Easy rollout
• Flexibility to host cells in different data centers with multi-homing for disaster recovery

Each cell consists of a single cluster of application servers, and each application server cluster is controlled by a set of ZooKeeper machines.

ZooKeeper is open source software that we use mainly for two purposes: as the controller for implementing sharding and failover of application servers, and as a store for our discovery service. Since ZooKeeper provides us with a highly available repository and notification mechanism, it goes a long way towards helping us build a highly available service.

Each application server registers itself in ZooKeeper by generating N tokens. The server uses these tokens to take N virtual positions on a consistent hash ring. This is used to shard users across these nodes. In case of failures, the neighboring nodes take over the load for those users, hence distributing the load evenly. This also allows for easy addition and removal of nodes into and from the application server cluster.

• Application business logic: This is where the magic happens. The business logic is responsible for making sense of all user data, storing and retrieving it, and applying all the complex product operations to it to perform various functions. It also has a dedicated cache that acts as a write-through cache, since the application servers are the only entry points to read/write data for any given user. This cache stores the entire recent image for the user and gives us a very high cache hit rate. The business logic also interacts with the Web servers to respect user privacy and also apply any policies.
• Data access layer: The data access layer is the schema used to store the user’s metadata. It consists mainly of a time sequenced log, which is the absolute source of truth for the user’s data, and is used to back up, retrieve, and regenerate user data. The schema also consists of snapshots that represent the serialized user objects understood by the business logic. This layer is designed to present a generic interface to the application servers while making the underlying store pluggable.
• Metadata store: Each cell also has a dedicated metadata store. We use HBase as our metadata store. The data access layer interacts with HBase to provide storage functionality. Late last year we talked about our Messages storage infrastructure, which is built on top of Apache HBase.

Finally, the whole system has a number of cells, and looks like this:

Other Messages Services

The Messages application back end needs to parse email messages and attachments, and also provide discovery of the right application servers for the given user. This is achieved with the following services:

• MTA proxy: This service receives all incoming email messages and is responsible for parsing the email RFCs, attachments, large bodies of email, and so forth. These parsed out values are stored in a dedicated Haystack cluster (which is the same key/value store that we use for photos). Once the proxy has created a lightweight email object, it talks to the appropriate application server and delivers the message. But talking to the appropriate application server involves figuring out the cell and machine a particular user resides on, which brings us to the discovery service.
• Discovery service: This consists of a map of user-to-cell mappings. Every client needs to talk to the discovery service before it can contact an application server for any request. Given the stringent requirements, this service needs to be very highly available, scalable, and performant.
• Distributed logic client: These clients listen for ZooKeeper notifications and watch for any changes in the application server cluster state. Each application server cluster or cell has a dedicated client. These clients live in the discovery service process, and once the discovery service has mapped the user’s cell, it queries that cell’s client, which executes the consistent hash algorithm to figure out the correct application server node for the user.

The Messages application back end also relies on the following services:

• Memcache dirty service: The application servers query message counts from the home page very frequently to accurately display the message notification jewels. These counts are cached in memcache in order to display the home page as quickly as possible. As new messages arrive, these entries need to be dirtied from the application servers. Thus, this dedicated service runs to dirty these caches in every data center.
• User index service: This provides the social information for each user, like friends, friends of friends, and so forth. This information is used to implement the social features of messaging. For example, on every message that is added to the system, the application server node queries this service to determine if this message is from a friend or a friend of friend and directs it to the appropriate folder.

The clients of the application back end system include MTAs for email traffic, IMAP, Web servers, SMS client, and Web Chat clients. Apart from the MTAs, which talk to the MTA proxy, all other clients talk directly to the application servers.

Given that we built this services infrastructure from scratch, one of the most important things was to have the appropriate tools and monitoring in place to push this software on almost a daily basis without any service disruption. So we ended up building a number of useful tools that can give us a view of the various cells, enable/disable cells, manage addition and removal of hardware, do rolling deployments without disrupting service, and give us a view of the performance and bottlenecks in various parts of the system.

All these services need to work in tandem and be available and reliable for messaging to work. We are in the process of importing millions of users into this system every day. Very soon every Facebook user will have access to the new Messages product.

At Facebook, taking on big challenges is the norm. Building this infrastructure and getting it up and running is a prime example of this. A lot of sweat has gone into bringing this to production. I would like to thank every individual who has contributed to this effort and are continuing to do so. This effort involved not only the Messages team but also a number of interns and various teams across the company.

[facebook-engineering]

Facebook Ingin Menambah 9,400 Karyawan Baru Hingga 2017

admin    FB, IT News    

Berbeda dari Nokia yang dikabarkan akan memangkas jumlah karyawannya sejumlah 4,000 orang, Facebook malah dikabarkan akan menambah 9,400 orang karyawan baru lagi setidaknya dalam enam tahun kedepan, menurut laporan MercuryNews.

Situs jejaring sosial terbesar tersebut memang sedang mengalami peningkatan besar-besaran. Bulan Februari lalu kantor Facebook juga telah pindah ke lahan seluas 79 hektar untuk mengakomodasi pengembangan bisnisnya. Saat ini juga Facebook dilaporkan telah memiliki total 2,000 karyawan secara global, 1,400 diantaranya ada di kantor Palo Alto yang akan menampung kapasitas maksimal di tahun 2017 mendatang.

Peningkatan jumlah karyawan hingga lebih dari 5x lipat mungkin terlihat sulit dipercaya untuk diraih dalam waktu 6 tahun lagi. Facebook pun masih belum berkomentar mengenai berita target penambahan karyawannya tersebut.

Yang jelas bila benar memang dilakukan, maka pengembangan karyawan ini akan dilakukan secara bertahap dalam berbagai gelombang, kemungkinan gelombang pertama baru akan dimulai bulan Juni/Juli mendatang. Tunggu saja perkembangan berita ini.

[teknoup]