New Facebook Privacy Settings

Facebook just released an update to its privacy settings. Making it simpler for Facebook users to control the limitation of their privacy. Let’s dive straight in with the Facebook privacy tour if you’ve not recently logged into your Facebook account.

Tagging People in Status Updates for Dummies

I suppose not everyone realized you can either tag friends or Facebook pages using the @ method or even, by just typing a friend’s name in your list. So Facebook came up with a visual interface to tell you, where to do it.

Control Geo-tagging for Status Updates

The description confused me a little because it said I could add a specific place too. Does that include a Facebook Page of a restaurant?

Specific Facebook Wall messages for specific people

This was maintained from the previous update. But an important note as described is if you wish to hide the previous post from a select group, you can manually change it later – though you’re going to have to look for it, if say it was posted 2 years ago.

New Spiffy Facebook Privacy Landing Page

I guess to introduce the new Facebook privacy settings, they made a new landing page to remind users of the new status updates privacy settings.

In addition, having 3 large buttons to preset your privacy settings makes it feel setting your privacy is simple. But in all honesty, I’d highly recommend going with the Custom setting and taking the time to set up your privacy.

Moderate Your Tags

This was one setting I’m really glad Facebook implemented. The ability to review all tags of you by friends from status updates to photos. Meaning, for the girls, no more “why did you tag me in such an ugly photo?” or for the guys, less “she was just a friend” moments.

But note, you’ll have to enable the moderation because I believe it’s disabled by default. And these settings are inside your Privacy Settings page, under the heading; How tags work.

Kudos to Facebook for this privacy settings revamp. I hope you maintain this interface for a longer period of time.

Microsoft Office 365 Launch in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR – July 7, 2011 - Microsoft Malaysia held the Malaysian launch of Microsoft Office 365, the company’s newest cloud service, at a media event at The Westin Kuala Lumpur that followed the global launch in New York on June 28, 2011. Office 365 is now available in 40 markets, and it brings together Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft Lync Online in an always-up-to-date cloud service, at a predictable monthly subscription.

The service was introduced in beta last year with enthusiastic response and, in a few months, more than 200,000 organisations signed up and began testing it. Businesses using Office 365 are already reporting impressive results and reducing IT costs by up to an estimated 50 percent while boosting productivity.

Today, more than 20 service providers around the globe also shared plans to bring Office 365 to their customers this year. Bell Canada, Intuit Inc., NTT Communications Corp., Telefonica S.A., Telstra Corp. and Vodafone Group Plc, among others, will package and sell Office 365 with their own services for small and midsize businesses.

“By delivering enterprise-class collaboration and productivity tools to small and midsize businesses, Microsoft Office 365 is poised to be a revolutionary product in advanced emerging markets like Malaysia where 99.2% of businesses are SMEs,” said Microsoft Malaysia Managing Director Ananth Lazarus. “With a few clicks, Office 365 levels the playing field, and gives Malaysian businesses the ability to work more efficiently and effectively and to achieve greater success in both local and global markets.”

A Game Changer for Businesses of All Sizes

Office 365 is available in a wide range of service plans designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, ranging from the largest to the smallest.

With Office 365, people can stay on the “same page” using instant messaging and virtual meetings with people who are just down the hall or across the world. They can work on files and documents at the same time and share ideas as easily as they can share calendars. Office 365 gives people new ways to work together with ease, on virtually any device.

Microsoft Office applications are at the heart of Office 365. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Outlook and other Office applications connect to Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Lync to deliver a world-class solution for communication and collaboration.

“When Microsoft first showed us Office 365, we recognised that this was the way businesses would work in the future especially for the SMEs.” said SME Corporation Malaysia CEO Dato’ Hafsah Hashim who participated in the launch. “With Office 365, Malaysian SMEs are able to save both money and time, but most importantly, they are able to work together better – no matter where they are – not just within their own organisations but also with partners across their entire businesses ecosystem. The potential yield from these collaborations and synergies are nothing less than transformative.”

Stories from businesses that have tried Office 365 are available at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies.

Office 365 Partners

Microsoft is building a massive partner ecosystem around Office 365, including systems integrators, software vendors, resellers and other partners. Today, that ecosystem is expanding as the company partners in new ways with market-leading service providers. These companies will package Office 365 with their own services – from Web hosting and broadband to finance solutions and mobile services – and bring those new offerings to millions of small and midsize businesses globally.

“Microsoft is working closely with some of the best-known and most-trusted brands in Malaysia to make Office 365 even more accessible to all Malaysians,” said Lazarus. “Our customers will be able to rest easy knowing their cloud services are backed by Microsoft and some of the greatest service providers in the world.”

A list of Office 365 service provider partners is available here.

About Office 365

Office 365 offers a range of service plans for a predictable monthly price from USD2 to USD27 per user per month. With Office 365 for small businesses, customers can be up and running with Office Web Apps, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Lync Online and an external website in minutes, for USD6 per user per month. These tools put enterprise-grade email, shared documents, instant messaging, video and Web conferencing, portals, and more at everyone’s fingertips.

Office 365 for enterprises has an array of choices, from simple email to comprehensive suites to meet the needs of midsize and large businesses, as well as government organisations. Customers can now get Microsoft Office Professional Plus on a pay-as-you-go basis with cloud-based versions of the industry’s leading business communications and collaboration services. Each of these plans comes with the advanced IT controls, innovative security technologies, 24/7 IT support and reliability customers expect from Microsoft.

Availability

Office 365 for small businesses and Office 365 for enterprises are available now. Businesses can try Office 365 for free for 30 days by signing up at http://www.office365.com. Follow Office 365 on Twitter (@Office365), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MicrosoftCloudMalaysia) and the Office 365 blog athttp://community.office365.com for the latest information.

RM20,000 Competition Open To All Malaysians

In conjunction with the Malaysian launch of Office 365, Microsoft Malaysia is holding a contest on Facebook to encourage Malaysians to download and use the free 30-day Office 365 Trial.

All Malaysians 18 years old and above are eligible to take part. Contestants will have until August 3^rd, 2011, to submit a testimonial about their experience using Office 365 in 5,000 characters or less. Entries will be published on Facebook and visitors will be invited to vote for their favourite entries. The 10 most popular testimonials will enter a final round of judging by Microsoft.

The winning testimonial will receive RM20,000 and an HTC Windows Phone 7 smartphone, while the nine runners-up will each receive an HTC Windows Phone 7 smartphone.

To find out more about the contest please visit: http://apps.facebook.com/trysharenwin/

Jejak Kicau by Jibone

What’s your real name and why jibone?

My real name is J. Shamsul Bahri. That is how it is on my I.C. and birth certificate. Just ‘J.’ Which was partly why the nickname ‘Jibone’ was given to me by friends during my school days. That name have become my IRC nick and almost everything I register online.

What do you do professionally?

My ‘day job’ name card says that I am a R&D Engineer for System Consultancy Services. A system integrator type of company. I do some software and web programming. This job pays the bill.

Other stuff I do is I write and maintained several webzine/webblog. Jiboneus.com starts out as a personal blog now it’s a Webzine about arts, music, films and technology. Another recently launched website is WirawanWeb.com, it’s a webzine about all things web, from silly memes to serious stuff like online privacy and Internet censorship.

I am adopting the term Webzine because well, the term ‘blog’ these days refers to politics and personal stuff. Beside I am inspired by the whole ‘fanzine’ subculture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanzine

On my free time I like to play with web APIs. I call it my ‘web experiments’, Jejak Kicau is one of it.

What inspired you to create Jejak Kicau?

You remember the movie X-Men (not the latest one), where Professor X goes into the room Cerebro and he could ‘listen’ to the thoughts of others all over the globe?

Well, either we realize it or not, we are all putting our thoughts on the Internet – Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, photos and videos. Imagine if we could take a look at what’s on the minds of most Malaysian.

For the Bersih event, we could see half of it wants a fair and clean election while the other half are complaining about the traffic jams.

What inspired you to create Jejak Kicau?

I’m not sure about the goal, this is just a pet project playing with web APIs. I do have plans to include Facebook status updates via their public Graph API and other stuff from other social networks if there is a way to access it.

It could be a useful socia analytic tool tracking trends across different types of social network, or just a toy for tracking hashtags.

Share 1 thing you liked / learned from this project?

1 thing I learn from this project.. today, almost everybody have a handphone with a camera with Internet access. News no longer comes in a pre-package format. Tools like this brings the news straight to you as it happens. I’ll let you decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

What was your goal for this project?

Editor: It’s been so experimental that Shamsul told me there wasn’t really a goal to this as of now.

Lastly, what now?

There are a few enhancements I want to do.

1. Shorter URLs resolving to the long format, maybe with a title in it.
2. Include Facebook updates in the mix.
3. Twitter streaming API for better updates.
4. Smooth some of the rough edges.

I plan to put this up on a public github or something, once I clean up some of my embarrassing codes that is.

So I guess that’s all about me and Jejak Kicau.

Editor’s Note

I’ve always wanted to feature Malaysian heroes of our Internet for their driven ideas derived from inspirations or aspirations. This is one of them. Please contact me if you’ve a pet project you’d like to share and I hope you like this enough to make it permanent.

Don’t Lie to The Camera

Yesterday I posted about corporate videos and why I felt it’s truly a media worth investing for your corporate website. Today, I’d like to touch on adding your video to the social web.

Case study: KFC Malaysia apologizes

I’ve not seen the said video of the tampering, but what I want to highlight is the comments in the video. Yes, you have to pay attention to the video comments if you join the social web.

Customers may not be always right, but they’re not stupid

I read the first few pages of comments and found most agreed:

1. The speaker sways too much.
2. The dialogue doesn’t sound sincere.

Remember, once you know the purpose of a video, an experienced video team would be advising you. If they’ve no comments, you need to encourage them to give you honest feedback. It’s the only way you’ll know how a third party aka your customers may react to your video.

Make Your Corporate Video Fun

The #1 reason I want to work closely with videographers, especially if they understand online media, is because videos can play a humongous role in a corporate website. And before you read further, I’m writing this post from my personal observations.

Few years back, I stumbled on a website which introduced and promoted their service using video. Plus, their service is to create introductory videos such as what you would’ve seen on their website.

Video with actors or actresses

Video with people adds a strong human connection between your products and services. If you’ve a storyline going for you, even better – Mac VS PC.

Voice over videos

If you can’t get actors or your colleagues are too scared of the camera, voice overs work like the radio. Except, there’s still a visual. This video style is most commonly used for guidance purposes.

Don’t have the budget

The aim isn’t to shoot a Hollywood film. Think of its purpose and how you can keep it simple, while communicating its message to your customers.

You’re not alone

Ask your team to be involved in the idea process. But remember the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)  formula to stay on track. You can save the exploding car scene as a pet project.

Have confidence to be different

And lastly, you don’t have to execute a video like your competitor. Lighten up. Have fun with your video unless it’s a really serious message, like the presidential speech – even the US President knows how to have fun.

At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, President Barack Obama jokes about a sequel to the film the King’s Speech that hits closer to home. The President offers a sneak peak of the parody at the annual event.

So, once you know it’s purpose you’ll know what needs to be done.