Facebook recently unveiled it’s new re-design to all it’s users, called Facebook Timeline, where it takes over the traditional profile based design and replace it with a brand new interface with heavy emphasis of time and well, not to mention age, many users would take time to understand the re-design and there’s a foreseeable backlash of users that would object against it.

However, this is certainly the right step of presenting users with useful and detailed information, as its now presented in a life profile, allowing any individual to learn more about one’s life. (And not whatsoever that’s recent).

I believe this is a response to Google+, extending the circles concept further with it’s wealth of information collected over the years, with a strong emphasis of history.

This is Facebook’s Brand New Re-designed profile (The photo was taken from one of my recent Toastmasters’ competition)

Immediately beside your titles are tiles / tabs, which you can easily update, add applications (which will be made available during launch) to include in your profile and it shows you interesting services and contents which you are linked to, for example, like Spotify (it will pull up your musical tastes)

But just for this example, I’ve included Tetris Battle in one of my featured applications, seems cool, don’t you think so?

Well, unless there’s further privacy concerns.

As you scroll down, you’ll no longer see lines of excel sheet sized status updates and photos, its more like a magazine styled design with a timeline at the centre, allowing you to navigate through your virtual life, and learning all about your past with dates at the side.

You can easily add a status, photo, place or any one of the diversified categorised, such as Work and Education, Family & Relationships, Living, Health & Wellness and Milestones & Experiences.

And yeah, you get this feature too in the timeline profile itself, at the sharing box located right below your personal information. And yes, you get access to the diversified categories!

As you scroll down through the timeline, it will show you a month by month summary on all the events you had RSVPed and Friends you had made, so it’s easy to consolidate and have a one glance view on what you had done.

Through the new Facebook Timeline, I get to scroll through all my old and long met friends and probably see when I added them, since its heavily focused based on time (the past and present), the content are modified in such a way where time becomes the content of wealth.

And if you didn’t notice, as you scroll down, you’ll get to see a large personal bar which you can share and add information about yourself automatically straight from the bar on top.

Scrolling through the timeline is like reading your own personal life magazine, it is fully customised based on what you’ve input to Facebook over the years, its a breeze to see what you had done, accomplished and experienced in both good and bad ways over your usage period in Facebook, and for some, it starts when they are born.

Some extra privacy details about sharing information in your timeline profile before I jump into the important Facebook applications, as usual, you could delete / hide the post from the timeline. And now, for those stuff and moments you are proud of, you can always feature them in the timeline.

And yes, not forgetting the Info tab, which you can learn more about the person in the profile that you are currently viewing. It’s now so much neater, cleaner and provides you with only information that you need. Nothing else.

Now, lets go through some of the crucial Facebook apps, one of them is Friends, it shows your friends in tiles, with their display pictures at the side. Looks like Windows Phone 7 tiles, it’s easy to comprehend, and instead of putting friends in alphabetical order, it shows friends that you always talk to. Some personalization algorithm there, I believe.

The photos application look similar to the friends app above, it shows you all the photos that you’ve recently added and Facebook still employs their same old tactics, more images will load when your scroll down (so there’s nothing to show other than this feature right now)

Using your check-ins, Facebook will now show you a map representation on the places you’ve been and classify it accordingly with the tabs located at the bottom, the places are also really interactive. For example, after clicking on one of the shiny dots, which represents the number of check ins:

Now moving onto Facebook Likes:

I wouldn’t say that Facebook had really invested time onto changing the Likes section, as it looks similar to the older Facebook profile under the info tab, but the interface looks cleaner and simple.

Facebook also provides an activity log, or a stuff that you’ve done over the past few years. Nothing in much detail, doesn’t need much explanation, what you see is .. what you get!

Alright, I believe that I had managed to cover some of the most essential features about Facebook Timeline, hit me up at @thejeremygoh if you’ve any more questions.

PS: After scrolling all the way down in my timeline, Facebook is seriously asking me to add my baby photo (Are you sure about that Facebook, this timeline is even thicker than my graduation yearbooks combined!)

J.

P/PS: If you’ve not got your timeline, you are probably not a developer, which you can easily sign up and do it here, which should look something like this:

I was heading to a 7-11 outlet at the rest area and it was a really small outlet, which only house a single staff.
A quick brief about Craze Hotties, it is a potato based snack with heavy chicken tasting like seasoning, it is really crispy which is shaped like a cylinder and its an item which 7-11 was selling for years.

Anyway just a quick idea here, the machine that appears to be ‘cooking’ or frying the snack just seems to be like a simple warmer after I found this gigantic snack right in front of the machine.

Not everything is legit. – probably just a random thought.

J.

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Adapted with official permission from Creative Stable. I took mostly it all from them and added loads more at the bottom of this article (Had asked some of my friends around for it)

J. - © Jeremy Goh | JeremyGohBlog.com]]> http://jeremygohblog.com/2011/09/15/special-symbols-and-characters-for-facebook-twitter-social-networks-and-instant-messaging/feed/ 0 http://jeremygohblog.com/2011/08/21/take-your-relationships-seriously-posterbanner/ http://jeremygohblog.com/2011/08/21/take-your-relationships-seriously-posterbanner/#comments Sun, 21 Aug 2011 07:10:00 +0000 Jeremy Goh http://jeremygohblog.com/2011/08/21/take-your-relationships-seriously-posterbanner/

After looking at some of the people in my working networks. If something that touches to the future, you have to secure and take it seriously.

Click on the picture for a high quality image.

Take it seriously and it will change your life drastically. However, on the contrary, things will change from time till time, it just comes from the perspective of how we react and adapt to the changes as it happens.

This picture is something that I had worked on. However, the original credit for the photo belongs to LowDensityLifestyle, credit to them for the above original image.

J.

(Credit: Anny Jacoby)

Well, stalking people isn’t a new meme, it had far existed in the olden days where people tailgate others on the streets and find out their whereabouts and what they were doing, to private investigators, where people pay a sum of money to get others (usually people who are more skilled to perform investigative operations) to find and follow their target for updates.

It wasn’t long before computers were born, and when the whole world revolves around it, that’s where people started to realize the potential of Information Technology, not only to provide up to date information but to provide communications between individuals to individuals. That was where IRC and different services like Yahoo and MSN were born.

Fast forward to to the late 2000s, many people find communicating to one another on the internet is too boring, building upon the concept of IRC, early social networks begin to emerge, like Friendster and MySpace pop out from the internet through college or interest projects.

Social Media is something which evolves from digital media communication from a 2 way to a multiple party and interactive communications between many users from the web. It also allows users to check on other friends to see what they are up to without needing to physically meet for coffee.

This had definitely raised a concern among many people, privacy reasons began to surface and something that I want to highlight in this article is Cyberstalking. It had became so easy to commit, even with people that has limited IT skills. Cyberstalking refers to unwanted individuals who monitor, track or harass an individual online usually with intentions in mind.

With the strong influx of many Social Media Applications, to name a few, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Plurk, Blogger, WordPress. It became an easy portal for people to share their private lives online, therefore allowing a loophole for people to retrieve such information and to use it for their advantage. I would dare not say that they are the cause for all this problems as I believe that they had definitely improved my lives across the last few years in terms of communications with many individuals that had parted ways across my life. Nevertheless, this had allowed the “Social Loophole” where people could reach you, and see what you have posted in the Social Media if you had accepted your friend request unless you had made your profile public for people to view.

There’s no definitive failsafe mechanism when it comes to Social Media as communications are interactive and real time, information could be shared in seconds, leaving very little time for users to respond. However, with the careful monitoring of your privacy settings, respond smartly, strong wary attitude of information that you have publicly posted in the internet you could prevent Cyberstalkers from grabbing hold of your information.

One easy way to check whether you have any information of yourself across the internet is to search your name or your internet nickname on any reputable Search Engine, like Google.

There is entirely no way to stop cyberstalking unless you entire unplug yourself from the internet, which I believe many disadvantages will soon surface as many people would find it increasingly difficult to contact you.

Should people monitor an individual online? In my opinion, maybe, as its purposes varies. However this is very controversial and many individuals still feel that is unethical and that had brought up many social implications. However, with the right knowledge, you can protect this from happening to you, before it turns into someone’s intention.

Take charge of your own information and you would never have to worry again.

Tell me what you think about Cyberstalking by leaving a comment below.

J.

Are you too constrained or work within the grill? Have you seen colours that spark if you remove the obstacle and having a bigger picture of things? It’s easy, its just chains in your mind that you need to untangle, but it needs time.

My mind came to an almost subtle blank when the idea of creativity in my mind. I am writing this to give myself an in depth thought about workflow management and creativity. Have we became too complacent with restrictions that we had basically shut off our creative nerves and work on the same procedures over and over again; without making changes to old working styles in the current generation.
Don’t you think so?
Many concepts that sparked on to my generation is a result of developed ideas and when ideas develops, the human mind must be able to catch on, if they don’t, they will be stuck to the never ending loop of old ideas and with the influence of new ideas, many people just lose the point of what they are doing. Which is clearly evident that many are unable to find the purpose of some procedures as they are outdated and irrelevant to the current generation.
However, newer ideas with well documented purpose can be seen in more recent and spun off start-up companies. Nevertheless, the newer companies do not have the experience and the ‘proven track record’ you see in older companies and as time passes by, the ideas will emerge and it needs to be rethought of again.
So I strongly believe that workflow management and creative ideas should work hand in hand but its just hard and no one really wants to review policies if everything is working fine.
I still remember one old saying “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it“, and if everyone just follows that same line there will virtually be no progression in the short nor long term and mistakes that happen will just be patched (With small amendments to procedures, here and there), which other mistakes could subsequently happen again, but in another form.
So in a nutshell, creative ideas is important, but more importantly, those ideas must not only be developed in products but in workflow and how it could benefit and increase productivity and in the missing link is the development of ideas, on how existing ideas could be developed for further use in future scenarios. A key point to note, ideas need to be properly developed before it is being implemented, or risk changes for the worst. So its good to have good experimentation with it first.
A clear and well developed workflow provides high productivity and efficiency but if it’s communicated ineffectively, it could provide adverse results.

That’s just what I am think right now. Probably just a thought that I needed to further develop on.

J.

Now if only the town council had an iPhone or Android app, we do not really need to memorize the sms format.
That was really old school; but brilliant progression for my area.
I love it when technology advancements were taken.

Props to Hong Kah Town Council for this SMS fault reporting service.

J

Although sometimes the manual taps can be dirty to press and be a hassle, at least I am not cut off from my precious water supply when automation fails or it being programmed to save water.

Oh wait and that’s a price to pay for the digital revolution.

Have something in mind about more water taps? Leave a comment below or @jeremy89632

J.

Less is more.

So what got me thinking is how do some people managed to accomplish so much more for less? (Being less time and less stress, to get things done) Compared to someone working for non stop and achieving half of that results. So looking across the horizon, it seems like that many of those people who wish to accomplish more of less have probably the same mindset. They have a clear goal to meet. (Not aiming wonderlessly around)
They like what they are doing and commonly motivated, so they wouldn’t mind to spend the extra mile in self discovery and exploration.
But before accomplishing less is more, my thoughts flowed back to something which you and I could relate to. It all matters about the attitude of your work, as it plays a really big part of self perception. Being able to accomplish more is clearly just on the surface of water. I think something which matters to you or feel that there is a belonging of what you do is already the first step of success. Being able to love what you do, even though sometimes there are details which is not very obvious to you is the first step to success. You would never take the second step, if you don’t take your first step to success.
I remembered watching a video a long time ago which I would love to share with you. It is a presentation about Zig Zaglar, a really famous American motivation speaker. View the entire video and continue reading once you are done.

I really learned somethings along the way.
- Do you always notice that people who are the problem ever recognize that they are?
- Have you ever notice that when you are going to lose something, than you will take ownership for it?
- You are not going to change anything else, unless you change you.

If you are going to lose something important or precious today, or even dying today, are you really prepared? I had a few friends which pushed their way to success by thinking this few points everyday. Have they ever been prepared and what do they really want to do during their last bit of life?

Step out of the comfort zone and I will see you on the flipside.
Because less isn’t really more; it’s more in you.
Keep it simple and start discovering what you love to do in your daily life and tasks and see the difference instantly.
The eyes are the wonders of the soul.

J.

Isn’t it interesting!

J.