Facebook hasn’t made it very publicly known that you can update your brand Page on Facebook via their official Android app. Facebook indicates that the iOS app can manage Pages but they neglect to mention how to manage your fanpage on facebook with the Android app.

Well it’s possible, complicated at first, but not so hard once you know what to do. Here are the basic steps:

1. Open the Facebook app and go to the home screen (click whatever is in the upper left whether it says “News Feed”, “Messages” or “facebook”)
2. Click the “Friends” icon in the upper right corner
3. Click “Pages” on the bottom menu, in the middle
4. Select the page you want to update under “My Pages”
5. Upload (or take a picture) by clicking the Camera icon or post a Status update via the text field and the Share button

Enjoy :)

Ever tried to put an animated GIF on a Facebook tab? They work fine in the left sidebar boxes but unfortunately are cached by Facebook and served from their CDN. This causes the image’s animation features to be lost. However calling a remote stylesheet will allow the images linked from that sheet to not be cached and thus pull from your own servers directly and animate properly. Check out my example of an animated gif on facebook.

Code for your FBML tab:

<link href="http://example.com/stylesheet.css" />

<div id="Ani">animated gif from stylesheet</div>

Code for your Stylesheet:

#Ani {
	background: white url(http://example.com/animated.gif) no-repeat;
	width: 100px;
	height: 100px;
	display: block;
	text-indent: -5000px;
}

Facebook has taken their Like button a step further.  They now provide you the ability to Admin these Liked pages and send published wall posts as if they were a Fan page.  If you place a Like on your site, make sure to specify yourself as an admin via a meta tag:

<meta content='NUMERIC_FB_ID_HERE' property='fb:admins'/>

Then you can also get a view into your analytics via the Facebook insights. These pages show up in your “Ads & Pages” link that is now in the left nav (despite it never actually staying put if you choose Edit and move it up higher, but that’s cause Facebook likes to add features that aren’t quite ready for primetime.)

It’s quite simple to add the Facebook Like button to your blog.  If you don’t mind editing code and don’t want to deal with a plug-in you can simply drop in this bit of code (to your index.php & single.php files); note that the URL I’m using is based on a previous post for creating your own shortURL for WP:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http://joelnagy.com/p<?php the_ID(); ?>&layout=standard&show_faces=false&width=425&action=like&colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:425px; height:30px;"></iframe>

So please share the love and Like this!

Twitter is obviously a huge part of people’s lives, not many of these people, but many.  I for one see it as a great medium for learning news and interacting with my “real world” friends and even finding new ones.  It’s even a great resource for marketing oneself and helping to locate new jobs as well.

Twitter is akin to email where the basis for it is ver simple, it’s a transportaion layer for information.  This information is only limited by 140 characaters.  This still leaves the layer quite open.  The idea of distributing news via Twitter is among the many ways that illustrate the powerful nature of their simple transportation layer.  Riding on top of that layer is RiotFeed which has a few dozen or so Twitter accounts where they aggregate and categorize news on various topics such as Technology, Green Living, and Trends and Culture.  They collect news from other Twitter accounts and the web and put it into a single use news feed.  I do wish they would attribute Twitter resources with the @ sign, but that’s a small gripe.  The concept and the follow through are well done.

Even with Twitter being a single access point, the plethora of clients provide for a personalized way to retrieve the news.  I’m not going to go to Facebook for news, and with a limited number of alternative facebook clients and because of Facebook’s complex user interface you really need to go to the site to get the most of it. This shows where Twitter really shines.