Facebook is planning to roll out the new, redesigned profile this Spring. Their aim is to make things simpler, cleaner and more relevant for the users, without stripping them off with their control over their profile and privacy. And as for developers, they can create more meaningful engagement with users, offer new integration points in profiles, and provide distribution for engaging applications.

Developers have been given a beta period to test out their applications with the redesigned Facebook. The new design uses tabs to split up different types of information, still keeping it simple and easy-to-use. Being a developer myself, I was very excited to try out my Facebook application with the new profile. And to my surprise, it worked like a charm :)

Try It Out!

If you would like to try out the new Facebook profile design, click here. Remember, many features might won’t work as its only open for developers to test their applications.

Now even non-developers can use the new design. For more information on how to, click here!

Let’s take a look at the drop down menus in the top menu bar.

User Menu

From this menu, you can view or edit your Profile, edit and privacy and account settings. Or if you need to, you can also log out from here.

Friends Menu

Friends menu allow you to view your friends list, recently updated profiles, online friends and allows to further invite or find friends using your email address book.

Applications Menu

Add, remove or manage Facebook applications added in your profile.

Inbox Menu

Here you can manage your private messages, view your Inbox, sent messages, notifications and fan page updates, or compose a new private message.

Let’s move on to the tabs now.

Tabs

• Feed: Shows your mini-feed updates
• Info: Shows your basic, contact, personal, education, work and custom application information.
• Wall: All the wall posts
• Photos: View and manage your albums, add, edit or view photos.
• Boxes: Here everyone can see all the applications added.

Overall, I feel the new design is way better than the current one. It’s more easy to use, and I like the idea that all the applications are in a separate tab and won’t load if we try to open our Profile page. There was one missing thing that I hope to see in the final release of this layout, the Social-Feed. It helped me lot to catch up what’s going in my friends profiles.

Facebook Preview

To preview the upcoming improvements to Facebook, be a fan of the official Facebook Previews page.
Do let me know what you think of this design, and did you like it or not? I’ll be looking forward to know your views.

Facebook Links

• Add me
• Join Sizzled Core group
• Add Sizzled Core application
• Be a fan of Sizzled Core

I hope you all enjoyed the second wave of Orkut themes. If Orkut users can get third-party themes, then why can’t Facebook users? I’ve compiled a list of the best Facebook themes currently available for download on the Internet. The life-span of these themes is not much as Facebook keeps changing their code. The themes given below have been hand-picked by me and were all working fine. They are also being regularly updated by the original designers.

Requirements

There are two basic requirements before you can use the themes.

• Mozilla Firefox (Download it from here!)
• Greasemonkey/Stylish add-on for Firefox

Free Facebook Themes
If you already meet all the requirements, then let the themes begin!

Spring Theme

Download this from here.

Summer Theme

Download this from here

Black, Grey Theme

Download this from here.

Glossy Header Theme

Download this from here.

Facebook Black

Download this from here.

Pink Theme

Download this from here.

If you missed the second wave of Orkut themes, you can catch it right here!

Recently, I’ve have seen many Facebook members complaining that Facebook has started deactivating and deleting accounts for small reasons. Like for instance, last week, my friend found and added about 20 of his old friends in about 24 hours. The next day when he woke up and tried logging in, he found that his account has been disabled for adding too many friends in a very short time. A petition group has been set up by the members to stop Facebook for doing this. All those who want Facebook to stop deleting accounts, join here. This group already has more than 10,000 members. I’d really appreciate if you’d invite your friends too.

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Yes, finally. After lots of petitions and blog posts, Facebook has finally rolled out an important feature that was needed by many. Facebook’s Private Messaging feature has been updated with a basic search functionality.

Now you can search your Facebook messages in Inbox through the newly added search functionality. Previously, there was no other way to find messages, other than going through the pages one by one. So users have thousands of messages in their Inbox, and finding old messages for them was a very difficult task. And most of the times, old messages became essentially unfindable.

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Hey friends! I have made my first Facebook application. Now all the Facebook addicts can add this blog’s feed and read all the latest articles right from their profile using the Sizzled Core RSS Feed application.

I was really impressed by TechnologyBites for making a RSS feed application using the tutorial by HowToForge. So using that tutorial, I started working on my own and in 3 hours of playing with that ‘developer’ stuff, I finally completed my app.

(Click the image to enlarge)

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