Talking of hotspots – please understand they are the little squares you notice, when your mouse scrawls over the photographic image of the Homepage. They are there to tell you more particulars about the photographs you are watching.

And when you crawl over the photo in the bottom right corner, a quick caption appears to show these particulars, including the name and agency of the photographer. This does not end there – if you click the arrows – you can find the home page images for the last 7 days. For this all you need is to install Microsoft’s “Silverlight Version 2” open source facility.

If you see a nice photograph and want to share it with your friends? No problem – just go to Bing Photo sharing application on Facebook – and you are done. Want to see previous Bing Homepage images? – here is Long Zheng – a private site, which brings the Bing Image Archive. This site enables you to see all background images presented at Bing, on a calendar format of the day, when that image was displayed originally.

About the Photo Contest announced by Bing.com

While you indulge about images, please note that Bing.com team has announced their first ever photo submission Contest on Facebook. They have chosen the theme “Summer Travel” for this Contest and the winner selected out of this Contest will have his or her photo get displayed on Bing Homepage, on August 3rd, Monday.

For obtaining more details about the Contest and participation terms and conditions, you can go to Bingo photo contest on Facebook. Accordingly you can upload your photos and plunge head on in the contest….. who knows?

{Source}

Facebook, the renowned social-networking site and very popular amongst netizens have made a thrilling announcement late Friday as well as early Saturday. They are going to offer the chance of claiming a personalized Web address, by any of their 200 million users worldwide. This will be available on First-Come First-Served basis and so better you join the already lengthy Queue at your earliest.

The new facility is revolutionary in that Facebook users can create their own online address distinctly and put their personal profile as they choose, like Facebook.com/nehasingh.  What is more they can make use of this Facebook page allotted as their personal home page and fill it with whatever info they want – advertise business; introduce to others; and tell the world whatever they want to.  MySpace is already doing this.

This announcement caught up many Facebook members late night as a surprise, and many of them changed their plans for Friday night to settle down grabbing the chance, before others do.

Scott Roewer, a professional Organizer in Washington D.C. wants to say that he is a sole proprietor and so he finds this very useful to promote his business and signed up quick at midnight. He is already making use of Facebook and Twitter in this regard.

Bryan Christmas, 27, another Facebook member said “I wanted to make sure that I had Internet access in San Francisco at 9.01 pm to spend few precious minutes on this. I have altered my week end plans”.

Facebook says that the intention of “vanity URLs” is to make easy finding of profiles when searched, instead of a sequence of numbers being used presently, to locate Facebook profiles. The new facility virtually means grabbing of land space in Facebook as no one can make use of a similar name, entered by someone else. When the name is confirmed it can not be changed either.

What the legal experts say about “vanity URLs” is it might lead to disputes in Court room for trademark rights, in some cases. For example, if a third-party registers the name of a brand or celebrity inadvertently, it will create problems.

Howard Weller, a trademark attorney in New York, representing celebrities says it could be a quagmire (a situation or predicament from which it is difficult to extricate oneself) and would lead to cases of cybersquatting – individuals squatting and claiming domain names in an effort to sell them for big profits, as happened when Internet came into being.

It should be remembered that Tony La Russa, baseball manager sued Twitter, the social networking site last week, as he found somebody used his name in unauthorized profile.

Facebook is confident about preventing cybersquatting, by taking adequate steps of restricting tens of thousands of names, inclusive of well known brand names and companies, politicians, celebrities etc. Additionally, Larry Yu, spokesman of Facebook says that its members will be allowed to submit requests for several days, in respect of terms objectionable to them.

Further safeguards taken by Facebook are – it won’t allow transfer of names registered by its members to others and claiming a name will be allowed to its users, who already have an account prior to the announcement of this special feature on June 9. However this restriction will be lifted on 28th June.

Larry Yu is confident that Facebook is not sure about how many people will be opting for this feature, but they have taken sufficient steps to ensure the service of the site is not affected adversely.