Good or Bad: Facebook Acquired Malaysia Octazen Solution

Few days ago, I caught word from Chee Aun on Twitter that Facebook acquired a Malaysian company; Octazen Solution.

I’m always very excited and curious whenever I hear an acquisition of a Malaysian company by an international entity. To me, this represents our potential and richness of hidden talent in Malaysia.

And it was a Facebook acquisition!

If you’re in the web industry, you won’t let this slide by you. Because Facebook has become a multi-billion business, you’d be more curious than the cat. And so I purred.

But was it for good or bad?

The discussion of the acquisition at TechCrunch is very interesting. Octazen customers and industry players have come forth saying they (Octazen) are an information scraping company.

This now has many questioning if Facebook acquired the small company for its talents (owners) for the good or other reasons.

What will Facebook do with all that data?

Is the phrase; world domination, included in their plans. Or, even more optimistic, to overrule Google itself?

Well, we can only wait and see now.

WordPress 2.9.2 Not a Major Upgrade

I just found out WordPress released a mini upgrade to its current version; 2.9.1. However, there really is nothing major and to be worried about, if you’re wondering – unless, you run a multi-author blog.

Looking Into Other People’s Trash

Thomas Mackenzie alerted us to a problem where logged in users can peek at trashed posts belonging to other authors. If you have untrusted users signed up on your blog and sensitive posts in the trash, you should…

Source: WordPress

As the WordPress team shared, unless you’re worried about your content being exposed by other authors whom you thought you could trust, it’s best you upgrade.

But if you’re the only author of your blog, then there is nothing to fret.

How to Lead The Eye in Website Design

In website design now, I always say it’s not only aesthetics but how website designers should communicate their design to the objective(s) of the website or webpage.

Recently, Firebug had a website redesign. From that, I’m taking away and sharing with you my observation; how a subtle design led my eye.

Sunken Arrows

Besides the huge bug and red button, your eyes would naturally fall to the benefit columns. However, before reaching the 1st item of each column there’s a subtle sunken arrow.

These arrows are subconscious pointers to lead your eye to these columns. Instead of boxing content up, the designer gave more free space around the content but used the sunken arrows to make sure you read this content.

Design with Reason

In college and university, designers are asked to prepare rationales of their concepts. Same thing here, almost. Only here, your website design is taken to another level considered how a user will interact with your design.

Google Adds Buzz Into Gmail

The new buzz word in town is Google Buzz – pun intended. But many (including myself) are still wondering why did Google create or introduce Buzz as a service? Plus, they’ve already integrated it into Gmail.

I’ve many questions regarding the Google Buzz service:

1. What is it suppose to be?
2. How do we use it?
3. How is it different from Google Wave?
4. Is Google trying to introduce a new social network platform?

But I would definitely want the answer to Q1. Because without knowing what it really is for, I’d think it’s merely a Twitter competitor.

Google Improves User Experience For Images

Google recently modified how it display image details in Google Images. It’s maintained the catalog style presentation of its search results but improved the image details page.

Previously, Google previews the origin website when you clicked on the selected image from the results. But they’ve removed the frame and decided to concentrate on the image details alone.

Whether it was a good move or not, some LowYat forumers don’t agree. But this is what I personally thought and said:

From a user experience point of view, this actually improves image browsing. Reason being is after you click on an image, it loads the window like a slideshow. It allows you to cycle through images than having to click back.

You still can see all of the images from your query in the slider below. But you’re not accustomed to this that’s why you think it’s a waste of time.

However, you could always click the back browser button or even “back to image results” placed beside the search button to return to the familiar catalog style presentation.

The biggest benefit of this new presentation is it cuts down loading time too. Previously, when you click a selected image, it uses a frame and loads the website on the bottom portion.

Google has now removed that and only focused on the image. Thus, improves the image search experience who uses their search for images.

I should also add, Google has made image previews much larger. But this is dependent on the image itself. If the image is too small, then it won’t fill the preview space.

Generally, I think Google should’ve done enough homework to make these improvements. It’s very unlikely of them to goof up – especially, user experience.