Google aims to store all human knowledge

Google is building the largest store of information in human history - a knowledge base that autonomously gathers and merges data from across the web to provide unprecedented access to all facts about the world.

The search giant is building Knowledge Vault, a type of knowledge base - a system that stores information so that machines as well as people can read it.

Google's existing knowledge base, called Knowledge Graph, relies on crowdsourcing to expand its information.

However, humans could only take it so far so Google decided to automate the process.

It started building the Vault by using an algorithm to automatically pull in information from all over the web, using machine learning to turn the raw data into usable pieces of knowledge.

Knowledge Vault has pulled in 1.6 billion facts to date. Of these, 271 million are rated as "confident facts", to which Google's model ascribes a more than 90% chance of being true, 'New Scientist' reported.

Tom Austin, a technology analyst at Gartner in Boston, said that the world's biggest technology companies are racing to build similar vaults.

"Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and IBM are all building them, and they're tackling these enormous problems that we would never even have thought of trying 10 years ago," he said.

Google researcher Kevin Murphy and his colleagues will present a paper on Knowledge Vault at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in New York.

FB's new Scrapbook lets you keep your baby photos in a single place

Congratulations -- you've just had a baby and now you want to show off your little munchkin on Facebook. There's only one problem -- your baby isn't on Facebook, and can't be till he or she is at least 13 years old, according to Facebook's terms and conditions.

Most parents work around this by tagging their significant other in any photos featuring their child, but that's a roundabout way of doing it. Facebook is now in the process of rolling out Facebook Scrapbook to make this easier.

Parents can choose a tag for their baby (a real name or anything else they want) and use it to have all their pictures in one handy location that can be easily shared with friends. A Scrapbook can also be a private album if the parents choose to make it so.

Scrapbook is currently available in the US only, so if you're there, head into Facebook's Family and Relationships section in Settings. Only you or your partner can add photos to the Scrapbook or change privacy settings. Once it's set up, Scrapbook appears as its own photo album within your photos.

Facebook's new feature 'Scrapbook' to collect, organise photos

New York: The popular social networking site, Facebook, has introduced a new feature called 'Scrapbook'. The feature will help in collecting and organising photos of your children at one place. It will also share the photos with other friends on the social networking site.

The new feature 'Scrapbook' creates a photo tag for your child even if he or she is not on the social networking site and then creates a Facebook album of the photos in which he or she is tagged, CNET reported.

It is found by the social networking site that many parents tag their partner in photos of their kids in order to share those photos with their partner's Facebook friends. With a "Scrapbook", you can set it up to co-own the album with your partner, which lets both of you tag your kid in photos and then have both your friends and your partner's friends see photos of your kid when you share them.

Steps to create a scrapbook:

You need to be in a relationship with your partner in Facebook to set up a co-owned 'Scrapbook'

Go to your Facebook profile to create a 'Scrapbook'.

On the About page, choose "Family and Relationships" and you will see a banner at the top to Create a "Scrapbook" for your child with a blue "Get Started" button.

Head to your profile, tap "Update Info" and then tap the "Get Started" button for mobile Facebook app.

You will need to add your kid as a family member on Facebook while creating a 'Scrapbook'

If you are uncomfortable giving Facebook the proper name for your child, you can use a nickname or initials.

There is no facial recognition technology at work here, which means only the photos you tag are added.

"Your child's 'Scrapbook' does not have its own privacy setting, but the individual photos do. When people visit a Scrapbook, they'll only see a photo if they're included in that photo's audience," Facebook said in a post.

"The profile and cover photo of your child's Scrapbook are visible to anyone who can see at least one photo in the Scrapbook," it further read.

Hackers Attack GreatFire.org, a Workaround for Websites Censored in China

For years, a group of anonymous activists known as GreatFire.org has monitored online censorship in China, provided access to blocked websites and collected messages deleted by censors.

This week, unidentified hackers have tried to put an end to those activists’ efforts with an unprecedented attack. In a post to its blog Thursday, GreatFire.org said it has experienced a massive so-called denial of service attack.

The method is one that hackers frequently use to foil websites by flooding them with multiple requests — so many that they go offline and viewers see a blank page. GreatFire.org creates encrypted versions of 12 websites that are blocked in China. These are known as mirrored websites and grant users within China access to the content.

On Thursday, GreatFire.org said it was receiving 2.6 billion requests an hour for its mirrored websites. On Friday, access to the mirrored websites was inconsistent in China.

“We are under attack and we need help,” GreatFire.org said. “This kind of attack is aggressive and is an exhibition of censorship by brute force. Attackers resort to tactics like this when they are left with no other options.”

Meanwhile, the Reuters news agency reported that its website was inaccessible in China on Friday. The websites of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have previously been blocked in China.

“Reuters is committed to practicing fair and accurate journalism worldwide,” said Caroline Drees, a spokeswoman for Reuters.

GreatFire.org’s name is inspired by the Great Firewall, the term often used to describe China’s Internet censorship. About two million people in China access GreatFire’s websites each month, a co-founder of the group who uses the pseudonym Charlie Smith, wrote in an email exchange.

It was unclear who was responsible for the attack, which began Tuesday from inside and outside China, Mr. Smith wrote. GreatFire.org noted in its blog post that its tactics were the recent subject of a report in The Wall Street Journal, which appeared online Monday.

The timing for the attack was a mystery. “Maybe that WSJ story,” Mr. Smith wrote. “Maybe because there have been some excellent Chinese-language news pieces and perhaps somebody who supports the authorities took issue with them. In the past there has rarely been rhyme or reason on the timing of such attacks.”

GreatFire.org’s mirroring services provide unrestricted access within China to a range of websites, including itself and the Chinese language version of The New York Times, which has been regularly blocked in China. Some of the others are Deutsche Welle, BBC News, China Digital Times, Google.com, and Boxun, a Chinese-language news website. GreatFire.org says it does not mirror The Wall Street Journal. GreatFire.org works directly with some, but not all, of the websites it mirrors.

GreatFire.org is partly funded by Open Technology Fund, a United States government-financed initiative under Radio Free Asia. Last year it provided $114,000 in funding, according to its website. Mr. Smith declined to comment on any financial backing.

The Chinese government has in the last year ramped up efforts to prevent its citizens from accessing critical news coverage from abroad and from communicating on social media platforms that the government cannot directly censor.

China has long disrupted many of Google’s services. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube remain blocked. LinkedIn agreed to censor its content to operate in the Chinese market last year.

GreatFire’s mirroring websites circumvent the Great Firewall by channeling Internet traffic through cloud services, such as one available from Amazon. The difficulty for the Chinese government is that it can’t just shut off Amazon’s service, because it is used broadly by many major Chinese corporations.

Emails to the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Chinese embassy in Washington went unanswered as of Friday evening. The Associated Press quoted Zhu Haiquan, a spokesman for the embassy, as saying: ‘‘As we have always stated, Chinese laws prohibit cybercrimes of all forms. The Chinese government is making great efforts to combat cybercrimes and safeguard cybersecurity. Jumping to conclusions and making unfounded accusations is not responsible and is counterproductive.’’

The hacking is costing GreatFire up to $30,000 per day in additional charges, Mr. Smith wrote. However, he wrote that he was confident that the group’s services would not be disrupted for good.

“The authorities will not cut off access to the world’s Internet infrastructure because they know that it is valuable,” Mr. Smith wrote. “If anything, this should accelerate the development and deployment of collateral freedom as a strategy to achieve freedom of access to information in countries like China.”

Snapchat blocks third-party apps

While releasing its first ever transparency report, Snapchat has announced that it has cut-off all third-party applications from accessing its data, in a bid to show its users that it takes their privacy seriously.

Steven Levy, Backchannel, said that the company had been working to make it harder for third-party apps to access data on its app and finally they have managed to close the hole entirely, The Verge reported.

The recent restrictions meant that Windows phone users too would not be able to use any of the third-party apps they relied on to use Snapchat so far.

Tim Sehn from Snapchat, said that the firm considered it a competitive advantage to care for their users' privacy and security.

The company did so because of last year's mishap, in which few developers had hacked ways to develop apps that supported Snapchat's features, leaking thousands of supposedly private user photos .

Snapchat also released its first-ever transparency report which had the details of all data requests the company received from governments around the world.

How 'free' mobile apps drain your resources

There's no such thing as free -- especially when it comes to smartphone apps! A new study by a team, including an Indian-American engineer, reinforces this conventional wisdom.

"Ads in 'free' apps drain your phone's battery faster, cause it to run slower, and use more data," said William Halfond, co-corresponding author of the study.

The findings of the team will be presented at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Italy in May. The researchers found that apps with ads use an average of 16% more energy. That lowers the battery life of a smartphone from 2.5 to 2.1 hours on average.

"A phone's Central Processing Unit (CPU) is like its brain. Ads eat up a lot of that brainpower, slowing it down.

"Apps with ads take up an average of 48 percent more CPU time -- 22 percent more memory use and 56 percent greater CPU utilisation," explained co-researcher Meiyappan Nagappan from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), New York.

The team compared 21 top apps from the past year and measured their effect on phones using analysis tools loaded onto a Samsung Galaxy SII smartphone.

Since the ads themselves are content that has to be downloaded, apps with ads cause smartphones to use much more data -- up to 100% more, in some cases.

On an average, these apps use around 79% more of the expensive network data, the study found. The researchers hoped app developers would take note of this study.

"Right now, they're kind of clueless," Halfond said.

The iPad is 5 years old. Here's how far it has come

April 3 will mark the five-year anniversary of the very first iPad's release in the US. Since then, we've seen the launch of 9 different tablets, 9.7 and 7.9 inches in size. The release of a tenth model is imminent.

iPad (released in April 2010): on January 27, 2010, Steve Jobs presented the very first Apple touchscreen tablet device, a new revolution three years after the iPhone. In a 9.7 inch format (1024x768 pixels), it uses iOS and grants access to thousands of dedicated apps. It came out in the United States on April 3, 2010 before gradually conquering the rest of the world in both its wifi and wifi/3g versions.

iPad2 (March 2011): the second iPad, much thinner and lighter than the first, distinguished itself with the addition of cameras on the front and back of the tablet, along with a model in white.

The New iPad (March 2012): This next incarnation is marked by the arrival of the Retina display (2048x1536 pixels) but also by the integration of Siri, Apple's voice-activated assistant that debuted with the iPhone 4S. It was also the first 4G/LTE compatible iPad.

4th generation iPad (November 2012): Besides a faster processor, a better frontal camera and a new connecting cable (Lightning), this tablet didn't present any new major improvements.

iPad mini (November 2012): This 7.9 inch (1024x768 pixels) version of the iPad allows Apple to sync with Google (Nexus 7) and Amazon (Kindle Fire) at a moment when the small tablet market was in the spotlight. The iPad mini is also more affordable.

iPad Air (November 2013): This iPad was much lighter and thinner than any before. Besides that, only its new chip and color (Silver or Space Gray) set it apart from the previous model.

iPad mini 2 (November 2013): One year after its release, the iPad mini 2 transforms in turn and now it too boasts a Retina Display and A7 chip, the same as in the iPad Air.

iPad Air 2 (October 2014): Lighter than ever, this iPad is the first to offer the digital fingerprint Touch ID, already present on the latest generation iPhones, and an anti-glare display. The processor and main camera's specs are improved, as is the RAM, now upgraded to 2GB. It's also available in a Gold color.

iPad mini 3 (October 2014): Offered in the same color options as the iPad Air 2, the latest generation iPad mini also boasts Touch ID. Other than that, it uses all the same technology as its predecessor.

iPad Air Plus? (2015): There are constant rumors of a new 12.2 inch iPad that would complete Apple's range of tablets and directly compete with Microsoft's Surface Pro. Whether or not that size is in the works, the next-generation iPad is expected in 2015.

Google wants to eject ad injectors

A study conducted in partnership with University of California Berkeley, reveals that one in 20 PCs accessing a Google-owned website is running potentially risky ad-injecting software.

The analysis of over 100 million page views found that ad injectors were installed on both Windows PCs and Macs and that they had infiltrated the Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers. What's more, of those computers running an ad injector, 50% were running two, and nearly one-third had four or more.

An ad injector is an extension that comes to life when a PC is logged on to the web. It replaces the advertising that would usually be displayed on a webpage in the browser with different ads that the ad injector's creator wants you to see instead. Depending on what that ad is, the extension can be benign or malicious.

Their use has received a healthy dose of attention in recent weeks thanks to the outcry surrounding Superfish, an ad injector that Lenovo preinstalled on a number of its PCs.

As Google software engineer Nav Jagpal, puts it: "Injectors are yet another symptom of 'unwanted software' -- programs that are deceptive, difficult to remove, secretly bundled with other downloads, and have other bad qualities."

For instance, rather than serving up ads, they could serve up malware. Over one third of the ad injectors running on the Chrome browser examined as part of the study were identified as outright malware.

"In broader terms, the question of just who ultimately controls the information presented to users is of great and increasing importance -- it's one of the most vital issues the digital world faces," UC Berkeley EECS professor Vern Paxson said in a statement about the research. "Ad injection undermines the integrity of user interactions and surreptitiously inserts control separate from either of the communicating parties."

Google and UC Berkeley will present the full findings of their research in May but have chosen to publish some headline facts this week to raise awareness and to motivate other companies to act on the issue.

For instance, as a direct result of the study, Google has disabled 192 extensions for the Chrome browser which it estimates affected over 14 million users. However, it doesn't have the same levels of absolute control over other companies' web browsers or bundled software.

Microsoft launches document scanner app 'Office Lens'

Microsoft has launched a mobile document scanner app for iOS and Android smartphones called Office Lens, which will allow users to take snap photos of documents, receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards, sticky notes and more.

Office Lens works with OneNote. It was first launched a year ago as an application designed only for the Windows Phone.

Office Lens was launched on Apple's App store and on Android phones, alongside other Microsoft applications, including Office and Outlook. This is a part of the company's newer strategy to embrace other platforms outside its own.

According to TechCrunch, Office Lens identifies the text on the images it captures using optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to locate the file using the keyword search in OneNote or in Microsoft's Cloud storage site, OneDrive.

Users can also convert the images they scan of paper files and whiteboards into Microsoft Office formats and more, including Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and even PDFs and JPGs. These files can then be inserted into OneNote as images.

Office Lens also offers a business-card scanning function that lets users turn cards into contact details which they can add to Outlook or your phone's contact list.

Microsoft's app also offers the ability to create an online archive of your scans in its own OneDrive service.

A preview for the product is available on Google+ for Android users. There they will be able to test the version ahead of its public debut. The app is available on the iTunes App Store for iOS users.

Microsoft now has over 100 iOS and Android applications in total. It has already launched some of its most popular products and services to competing mobile platforms like iOS and Android, including by launching Office for iOS late last year, as well as Outlook for iOS and Android, various MSN properties, OneDrive and more.

TCS, Accenture, Oracle in race to acquire 90% stake in Elitecore

"Leading IT players including Accenture, Oracle and TCS are in talks with the fund," said another person involved in the transaction.

Tata Consultancy Services, Accenture and Oracle are in race to acquire around 90% stake in IT services provider Elitecore Technologies from global private equity fund Carlyle.

The fund that invested Rs 50 crore in the company eight years ago is expected to make more than nine time returns with the company now being valued at Rs 500 crore, three people with knowledge of the deal said.

In 2007, through its Carlyle Asia Growth Capital Partners, the fund had invested $10.3 million for a 33% stake in the company. It then invested $3 million to hike its stake in the company.

Subsequently in 2012, the network separate entity while the remaining businesses of the group was housed under the Cyberoam Technologies. Last year, Carlyle sold their 80% stake in Cyberoan to UK-based Sophos Group for Rs 500 crore. "The fund is expecting similar valuations for the network security business under Elitecore," a banker with knowledge of the deal said.

"Leading IT players including Accenture, Oracle and TCS are in talks with the fund," said another person involved in the transaction. Emailed query to spokespersons of Accenture and Oracle did not elicit response while spokesperson of TCS declined comment on market speculations.

Elitecore is promoted by US-based Hemal Patel and Benjamin Casado both technocrats. Attempts to reach the spokesperson of Carlyle and Elitecore over phone went unanswered.

Founded in 1999, Elitecore is an IT company is a provider of integrated policy, charging and revenue management. Most of its clients are in sectors such as telecom, hospitality and enterprises in more than 40 countries such as South East Asia, Saarc, Middle-East, Europe and Latin America.

The company is growing its profits at more than 53% compounded annually while its revenues are growing at more than 150. The company has its R&D and global support management centre in India. For Carlyle Growth, this would be another blockbuster exit after it made around 8 times returns on Cyberoam and three fold returns on exiting their investment in Tirumala Milk Products last year for Rs 1750 crore.

"Through these three exits, the entire growth fund has been returned. Rest is all a profit," a consultant said on condition of anonymity. Its other investments include South Indian Bank, Edelweiss Financial Services, India Infoline, Visen Industries and Star Health and Allied Insurance.

HTC Desire 826 launched in India at Rs 25,990

HTC Desire 826 has a 5.5-inch Full HD screen and runs on the Android 5.0-based Sense UI. It is powered by the 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 615 processor with 2GB RAM.

Taiwanese manufacturer HTC has launched its Desire 826 mid-range phablet in the Indian market at Rs 25,990. At this price, it will be pitted against handsets like the 64GB OnePlus One and Xiaomi Mi 4, along with the newly-unveiled Gionee Elife S7.

The all-new Desire 826 has a 5.5-inch Full HD Super LCD3 screen and runs on the Android 5.0-based Sense UI. It is powered by the 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 615 processor with 2GB RAM and comes with 16GB built-in storage with microSD card support up to 128GB.

The latest HTC model sports a 13MP camera with LED flash on the back and a 4MP selfie shooter in front. Powered by a 2,600mAh battery, this handset has connectivity features like 2G, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1 and microUSB 2.0.

The front-facing BoomSound speakers of HTC Desire 826 come with Dolby Audio technology. The manufacturer also plans to release its Dot View covers for this phablet.

Faisal Siddiqui, president, South Asia, HTC, said, "We at HTC understand our consumer and design products to sit their being. The HTC desire 826 is yet another effort of ours to combine superior quality features in a stunning smartphone at a smart price."

Teenagers unaware of social media privacy risks: Study

Most teenagers upload personal information on the social media networks like Facebook without considering the risks involved, says a study.

Researchers from the Pennsylvania State University found that they were not really thinking at all while posting private pictures or information, or at least were not thinking like most adults do.

What our model suggests is that teenagers do not think this way — they disclose and then evaluate the consequences.

"Adults often find this very difficult to understand and paradoxical because they are so used to considering possible risks of disclosing information online first and then taking the necessary precautions, based on those concerns," said Haiyan Jia, post-doctoral scholar in information sciences and technology.

"The process is more experiential in nature for teenagers," Jia added.

For the study, the researchers used data from the Pew Research Centre's 2012 "Teens and Privacy Management Survey."

The survey gathered information on social media behaviours from 588 teenagers in the US, most of whom were active users of sites such as Facebook.

Teenagers are often more exposed to online risks because they are using social media as a platform for self-expression and as a way to gain acceptance from their peers.

When teenagers begin to struggle with privacy concerns, they often try to find possible protective actions to mitigate risk.

Those remedies include seeking advice from adults, removing online information or going offline completely.

"A parent's first impulse may be to forbid internet or social media access, but completely avoiding risks may cause other problems," according to researchers, who presented their findings at the "computer-supported cooperative work and social computing" conference on March 17.

First, we cannot imagine a teenager growing up and avoiding the internet and online communications in this age.

"But there is also a danger that without taking on the minimum risks, teenagers will not have access to all the positive benefits the internet can provide, nor will they learn how to manage risk and how to safely navigate this online world," Jia said.

"It is a lot like learning to swim. You make sure they enter the water slowly and make sure they know how to swim before you let them swim on their own and in the deeper parts," the authors said.

How to Accept a Friend Request on Facebook

When you receive a new friend request from Facebook, a little red flag appears over the Friends icon in the big blue bar on top of each page. You may also be notified in your e-mail or on your phone. The number in the red flag indicates how many Friend Requests are waiting for you.

Clicking this icon opens the Friend Requests menu.

To accept the Friend Request, click the Confirm button. You now have a friend. To reject the request, click Not Now.

When you click Not Now, Facebook may ask you whether you know that person outside of Facebook. In other words, is this a Friend Request from someone you know or someone you don't know?

If you click No — meaning, "I have no idea who this person is" — Facebook prevents that person from friending you again in the future. If you click Yes, meaning "Yes, I know this person but I'm not sure I want him looking at my stuff," Facebook hides the request. In other words, you can go back to it in the future and confirm it at that time.

To get back to hidden Friend Requests, open the Friend Request menu and click See All at the bottom of the menu. This takes you to a page where all your outstanding requests (including hidden ones) appear. You can then confirm or permanently delete a request.

You can also access hidden requests by going to the Timeline of the person who sent the request. There, the Add Friend button is replaced with a button to accept the Friend Request. Click the button to become official Facebook friends.

Some people worry about clicking that Not Now button. If you're not sure what you want to do, you can always leave the request untouched. But never hesitate to click Not Now for someone you really just don't want to be friends with. Facebook won't notify her that you ignored her request.

How to Manage Facebook’s News Feed and Live Feed

Your Facebook home page gives you two views to help keep up with family and friends: News Feed, which is an aggregated and summarized view of your friends' activity, and Live Feed, which is a constantly updating real-time view of what people are doing.

News Feed and Live Feed are meant to be complementary. In other words, while News Feed may be interesting first thing in the morning, once you've read all of it, Live Feed will keep you updated as things happen.

On the flip side, if you're busy and can't keep up with everything that's happening with Live Feed, News Feed will make sure you see the important stuff. You can switch between News Feed and Live Feed at any time by clicking the links at the top of the page.

If one of your friends posts too frequently or too obnoxiously, you don't have to avoid your home page. Here's how you can "hide" someone from News Feed.

From the Live Feed view, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. Click Edit Options.
This brings up a dialog box to Edit News Feed Options.
Type the names of any friends you want to hide into the "Hide" box on the right.

This doesn't remove the friendship, just makes your Live Feed a little bit more manageable.
If you have a lot of friends (and it's okay if you don't), you can make sure your most interesting ones always show up by adding them to the "Show more" box on the left. You can also increase the number of friends who appear in Live Feed, which will mean more stories will move through your home page on any given day.
Click the Save button when you're done.

How to Build Your Business’s Facebook Friend Network

Building your personal friend network on Facebook can have a resonating effect on your professional persona. By encouraging your friends to become fans of your business's Page, your updates appear on their News Feeds and increase your Page's exposure to all their friends. All good Facebook marketers know that their friends can be valuable viral enablers within Facebook.

Finding Facebook friends

You can find friends and contacts by using several search and import capabilities within Facebook. To start, follow these steps:

Go to your Home page by clicking the Home link on the top navigation bar.
Click the Friends link on the right side of the page.
The Friends page appears.
Identify someone with whom you want to be Facebook friends.
You have several options for locating potential friends:
- If you want to import contacts from your e-mail client, click the Find Friends link and enter your e-mail address and password. Click Agree to give Facebook access to your contacts and then decide which contacts you want to add as friends.
- Click the Other Tools link at the bottom to find former high school classmates, current or past college classmates, or current or past coworkers. Click the appropriate link for the group you're interested in and then browse the list on the search results page.
- Enter a Facebook user's name or e-mail address in the default search box at the top of the screen or by navigating to the Facebook Search Page.
After you identify a Facebook member with whom you want to reconnect, extend a friend request by clicking the Add as Friend link to the right of that person's name within the search results.

You can also send a friend request from within someone's profile page. Simply visit that person's profile page and then click the Add as Friend button. (Note: Because you're not already friends, you have access only to profiles of members with a common network, depending on their privacy settings.)

The Send a Friend Request dialog box appears.
(Optional) Click Add a Personal Message and enter a message in the text box that appears.
If you enter a message, the person has a point of reference when she receives your friend request.
Click Send Request.
Your request is sent to the user's Facebook account.

Creating Facebook Friends lists

After you have a healthy number of friends, Facebook lets you organize your gaggle into lists, or groups. For example, you can create a work list that consists of coworkers or business contacts. Lists allow you to quickly view friends by type and then send messages to an entire list. Facebook allows up to 100 lists with up to 1,500 friends per list.

To create a list, follow these steps:

Click the Friends tab in the left navigation pane on your home page.
The Friends page appears.
Click the Edit Friends button at the top-right of the page.
On the page that appears, choose All Friends from the drop-down list, and then click the Create a List button.
The Create New List dialog box appears.
Enter a name for the list in the Enter a Name text box.
For example, enter Work Friends.
Select friends by clicking their profile pictures.
To find the friends to include in your new list, you can either browse your friends list or enter a person's name in the search field at the top right of the dialog box.
Click the Create List button.
A page appears where you can edit the new list's name, or add and remove friends from that list.

Facebook: Writing a Post or Asking a Group Question

If you are in a Facebook group you may want to write a post or ask a question of your fellow group members. Posts are status updates that you share only with the members of a Group (unless the Group is open, in which case anyone can see your post). You might post an update just to say hi or to start a discussion with Group members. To write a post, follow these steps:

Click into the Write Something text box at the top of the Group page (as shown in the following figure).
After you click into the box, you see the Post button appear below the text box along with buttons to indicate where you are and which other Facebook members are with you.
Type whatever you want to say into the box.
Click Post.
Your post appears on the Group wall, and Group members see it in their notifications and possibly in their News Feeds.

If you want to share a link, usually some sort of article, video, or other online content that you want the Group to see, simply type or paste in the complete link to whatever you want to share, along with your thoughts or opinions, into the text box for writing a Post.

Using the Question feature is great for polling a Group of people about choices big and small. To poll your Group, follow these steps:

Click Ask Question in the Publisher at the top of the Group Wall.
The Question Publisher appears.
Type your question into the Ask Something box.
Click the Add Poll Options link beneath the text box.
This expands the poll options
Type your first option into the first Add an Option box.
Facebook auto-completes these boxes as you type and assumes you are typing in a place, brands, article titles, or other non-friend entities.
Add more options until you're finished.
Facebook keeps adding more boxes as you fill up these first few, so just stop when you're ready.
Choose whether people can add more options.
A check box labeled Allow Anyone to Add Options controls this setting. Allowing this means people can add more answers to a Poll (so if before people could only choose Dog or Cat, Group members may be able to add Hedgehog as an option) Depending on how big your Group is, this may or may not be a significant choice.
Click Post.
The question then appears on the Group Wall and in member's notifications and News Feeds. They will be able to vote, Like, orcomment on the Question.

How to Add a Facebook Event Photo

Although not required, adding an event photo to your Facebook event helps make the invitation feel a bit more official. Although it's not quite the same thing as sending out letter-pressed, hand-addressed invitations, it's the next best thing.

To add an event photo, follow these steps.

From the event's page, click the Add Event Photo button in the top-right corner.
A menu with two options appears: You can either select from photos you have already added to Facebook or you can choose a photo from your computer's hard drive. Either option opens an interface for browsing photos.
Select a photo from your hard drive or from Facebook.
After selecting a photo from your hard drive, you may need to click Open. After you select your photo, it should appear at the top of the event with white text that reads Drag to Reposition Event Photo.
Use your mouse to drag the photo in order to position it properly on the screen.
Click the Save Changes button.

After you add your event photo, the Add Event Photo button is replaced with a Change Event Photo button that appears when you hover your mouse over the photo. Click this button to choose a new photo, reposition the existing photo, or remove the existing photo entirely.

How to View Videos on Facebook

You'll mostly encounter videos onFacebook in your News Feed with a big fat Play button in the center. Simply click that button to watch the video. It expands the photo viewer overlay (yes, the photo viewer is what you use to view videos), which makes the background darken and lets you focus on the video you want to watch.

The video plays on the left side of the screen, and the right side displays the video's title, description, and tags, as well as links to Like, Comment, and Share the video. Any comments or likes that have already been made also show up on the right side of the screen.

While the video is playing, you can hover your mouse over it to see the progress bar and to display the various links you can click related to the video. These appear in white toward the bottom of the video.

Here are the components of the photo viewer when you are watching a video:

Progress bar, Volume, and Full Screen: You can pause the video from the progress bar, as well as adjust the video's volume from the volume meter. Click the square icon to the right of the progress bar to expand the video and watch it on your entire computer screen.
Video Title: The video's title is at the bottom left of the viewer. If video doesn't have a title, the date and time of upload are displayed.
Tag Video: Click this link if you want to tag someone in the video.
Options: Clicking this link expands a menu of options, including a Report option if you ever see a video you think shouldn't be on Facebook.
Share: This link allows you topost a video to your own Timeline and share it with your friends.
Send: This link allows you to send the video to friends attached to a message. When you send a video, the message and video go to your friend's Inbox.
Like: Click this link to let your friends know that you like their videos.

S NAGA MALLESWARA REDDY

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