Facebook Announces New Gift Options

Last night, Facebook announced the addition of hundreds of products to the Gifts application.

Facebook released the Gifts app earlier this month, which allows users to send a real life present to a friend with an upcoming birthday.

The option to send gifts appears on the events page on mobile devices and in numerous places on desktop devices, including profile pages and the News Feed. Now, a prompt appears notifying users of a friend’s upcoming birthday and invites them to buy a gift.

Facebook has made the application very easy to use: just click on the gifts option, choose a gift and send it to a friend. Users don’t even need to know their friends address. As soon as a gift is bought, the recipient receives a message asking them to accept it.



Products new to the Gifts application are from a range of retailers, including BabyGap, L’Occitane, Lindt and NARS Cosmetics. Users can even buy and send online subscriptions to websites like Hulu Plus and Pandora.

Currently, Gifts is only available in the US, but if Facebook continues its push into e-commerce, Gifts will almost certainly be released overseas.

Would you send a birthday present using Facebook?

YouTube Videos On Your TV Made Easier

YouTube are making it a lot easier for users to be able to watch YouTube videos on their television with just the click of a button.
Video sharing site YouTube have been working on the idea of watching videos from their site on your television screens with just one click since 2010 and today have taken the next step.
With an update to the YouTube app for Android and Google TVs, these two devices will automatically be synced on the same WiFi making the videos appear on your television screen.
Just find a YouTube video on your app for Android, click on the TV icon, and instantly the video will begin to play on your Google TV.



Using your tablet or mobile phone as a remote, you can then pause, skip, and scroll while the video plays on your TV. Because the devices are connected in the cloud, you can do other things whist your video is playing as well such as search for the next video or browse the web.
Although this will only  be available on Android apps and Google televisions at first, YouTube are asking for people to stay tuned to see this feature coming to more devices and screens in the future.

What do you think of this development?

Facebook Friendships Get a Timeline Upgrade

There’s a page for just about anything you can imagine on Facebook — including every friendship. Whether you knew they existed or not, friendship pages have been there since October 2010, displaying every jot of information the network has about you and any given friend.

Now Facebook is giving those friendship pages an upgrade, in order to make them look more like Timeline profiles. And as a bonus, it’s adding a new page for you and anyone you’re in a relationship with: the adorably-named facebook.com/us.



To see the friendship page you share with anyone else, go to their profile page. Then click the gear button on the right, next to “Message,” to reveal a menu with a list of options; Friendship page is the one you want.
Facebook is slowly rolling out the Timeline-style pages over the next few days, so you may not have it yet. If you do, you’ll notice you have the opportunity to edit the page, removing photos that are unflattering to that relationship. (They won’t be removed from Facebook as a whole, though; you’ll have to untag yourself in them.)

Like much else about the social network, it’s a revealing and slightly disturbing look at just how much information has been gathered on you. I tested it with a few friendships where I was sure that friend and I hadn’t been tagged in pictures together — but sure enough, there we were, often on opposite ends of the table at large dinner parties, in the Timeline-style cover photo.

What do you make of the new friendship pages? Does this soften your attitude towards Timeline? Let us know in the comments.