Delhi police have started a facebook page to help ease traffic problems in the capital city of India.

From NYT

The traffic police department started a Facebook page two months ago, and almost immediately residents became digital informants, posting photos of their fellow drivers violating traffic laws. As of Sunday more than 17,000 people had become fans of the page and posted almost 3,000 photographs and dozens of videos.

It is a cool thing here in India where red tape and bureaucracy slows down everything. A government department using Internet, especially a social networking site like facebook is refreshing.

By Lingaraj G J - Flickr

It will be interesting to see if the police allow the people to film cops breaking laws themselves.

Thanks to Facebook, I got to know about the existence of this greasemonkey script FB Purity. It cleans your live feed from unnecessary junk like xyz is now friends with zyz , xyz has joined zzz group and all app notification.

You can block app notification from appearing on your feed in facebook itself but you cannot block other stupid notification from appearing on

your feed without blocking your friends. The script comes handy here. What’s more you can filter text for blocking. It will give stats about how many apps and extra have been blocked. Just click show besides it if you are curious to know.

However, Facebook is trying to bully the scripts maker in removing the script. It has deleted the scripts original fanpage of 5000+ fans. It, however, resulted in the script getting free publicity and more and more people using it. I don’t know why Facebook is doing this as the script only manipulates what we see in OUR browsers.

Now facebook might have realised why Google does nothing about Adblocking scripts and softwares. The “Streisand Effect“.

More people visited Facebook  than Google, gaining the No 1 spot in the US the previous week, according to hitwise. Google does not minds that as long as these people are using Chrome to visit the site.

Google whose revenues comes from advertising dollars by means of cpc and cpm ads from its search results and publisher sites cannot match the viral nature of facebook.

Google has been trying hard to push its web browser Google Chrome. Though initially it did well in getting users its growth has been stagnant. It is still far, far behind the much hated and obsolete IE6.

With facebook advertising, it might get lot of people recommending chrome to others by means of share and like buttons. And hopefully more users.

Facebook has plans to launch a webmail like Gmail, yahoo mail, etc codenamed Project Titan according to Michael Arrington of Techcrunch.  Facebook can launch email addresses with the use of the usernames/vanity url chosen by its users. Like mine is facebook.com/arunkamath (You can add me as a friend) will be arunkamath@facebook.com.

It will be great for sharing links, videos, images and other leisurely fun stuff. However, I cannot trust Facebook to use its mail for anything other than sharing cool stuffs from internet.

Many people are now hooked on to facebook. so, it is obvious that they might like to chat with friends. However, Facebook chat is the worst tech product from a big company after, maybe,  Ie6. YOu just can’t have a conversation using it.  I am sure most of your conversation would be limited to HIs and Byes.

What’s more, with email attached with facebook will help agencies in tracking you down with ease. It would be a disaster in countries like China(I don’t know whether people can access FB in China).

Recent Gawker news about how a bug in code resulted in messages being sent to wrong recipients. It reports that several text messages, some hilarious and some intimate, where received and read by wrong people. Just imagine this happens with FB mail. If your mail goes to wrong person, it wouldn’t take him more than a minute to trace you down.

I would trust Twitter mail more than Facebook’s as twitter has little information about it’s users except; of course, unless you tweeted it.