Facebook, Twitter crooks just a click away

By Stephanie Chen, CNN

(CNN) -- (CNN) -- If you're on Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site, you could be the next victim.

Experts say cybercrooks are lurking just a mouse click away on popular social networking sites.

That's because more cyberthieves are targeting increasingly popular social networking sites that provide a gold mine of personal information, according to the FBI. Since 2006, nearly 3,200 account hijacking cases have been reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

It starts with a friend updating his or her status or sending you a message with an innocent link or video. Maybe your friend is in distress abroad and needs some help.

All you have to do is click.

When the message or link is opened, social network users are lured to fake Web sites that trick them into divulging personal details and passwords. The process, known as a phishing attack or malware, can infiltrate users' accounts without their consent.

Once the account is compromised, the thieves can infiltrate the list of friends or contacts and repeat the attack on subsequent victims. Social networking sites show there is ample opportunity to find more victims; the average Facebook user has 120 friends on the site.

"Security is a constant arms race," said Simon Axten, an associate for privacy and public policy at Facebook. "Malicious actors are constantly attacking the site, and what you see is actually a very small percentage of what's attempted."

Social Media Crimes

As some social networking sites experience monstrous growth, they are becoming a new -- and extremely lucrative -- frontier for cybercrime. Facebook says it has 300 million users, nearly the size of the U.S. population, and it continues to attract users outside the college student niche. From February 2008 to February 2009, Twitter, a micro-blogging site where users post 140-character messages known as tweets, grew 1,382 percent to more than 7 million users.

"They [cybercriminals] are very adept to using social engineering," said Donald DeBold, director of threat research for CA, an Internet security company. "Your friend is in trouble traveling in another country, 'I lost my wallet. I need help.' They exploit the curiosity aspect out of human nature."

A few decades ago, malicious software and viruses were usually the result of a prank, but Internet security experts say today's attacks are profit-driven. A study from the Indiana University in 2005 discovered that phishing attacks on social networks operated with a 70 percent success rate. These users had fallen for the scam, opened the foreign link and released personal information.

Cybercriminals are employing phishing and malware attacks for a number of reasons, including trying to redirect users to sites where profit is fueled by the number of visitors. They also try to elicit private information like passwords and bank account numbers to perform scams.

Early this year,Twitter experienced several phishing attacks in which a Web page that looked identical to the widely recognized light blue Twitter page was a hoax. The company warned users to double-check the URL to ensure they were visiting the correct site.

The Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 72,000 complaints about Internet fraud in 2008 that were referred to law enforcement agencies for further investigation. These cases involved financial losses amounting to $264.6 million, an increase from 2007. Each person lost an average of $931.

"Most of us would want to help a friend in need, but if it's an online friend, and they want you to wire money, you should double-check," FBI spokesman Jason Pack said.

Security experts said it makes sense that cybercriminals are turning to social networking sites. Personal information is abundant on sites like Facebook and MySpace. Each time users give out valuable information like birth dates or addresses, they could be providing hints about their password, security experts say.

The American Civil Liberties Union has expressed concern about the information visible through Facebook quizzes and applications.

"They'll have access to all that information, so they can sell it, they can share it, they can do an awful lot with it," Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for privacy-related issues with the ACLU, told CNN.com in September.

Many Internet security experts consider the first virus attack on the PC to have occurred in 1986. By the early 1990s, viruses transmitted on floppy disks became ubiquitous. When the World Wide Web became widely available that same decade, viruses, worms and malware became problems in e-mail accounts, frustrating users who clicked on messages thought to be legitimate.

In the new millennium, the most common form of malware attack has become known as drive-by downloads. While surfing on Google or Yahoo, spyware or a computer virus is automatically and invisibly downloaded on a computer, requiring no user interaction for the computer to be infected.

"We are on the verge from shifting from the Web being the No. 1 victim of infecting to social network," said Mikko H. Hypponen, chief of research technology at F-Secure Corp. His company sells anti-virus software and malware protection programs. "It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better."

Social networks are fighting the aggressive attacks from cybercriminals. Most sites have information pages dedicated to educating users about the risks of Internet scams. Users can become a fan of "Facebook Security" and receive updates on how to protect their accounts. One of the most common pieces of advice given by security experts is to change passwords frequently.

Facebook has also developed complex automated systems that detect compromised accounts. They spot and freeze accounts that are sending an unusually high number of messages to their friends. Company security officials said Facebook is a closed system, which can be helpful in erasing phony messages from all accounts.

At News Corporation's MySpace.com, the company creates blacklists of phony accounts to prevent people from clicking on a faulty link. Hemanshu Nigam, first chief security officer for MySpace, said the firm warns about suspicious links and educates users about the harm phishing and malware attacks can bring. "We are prepared for them," he said.


source: CNN.com

Defriending can bruise your 'digital ego'

By Breeanna Hare, CNN

(CNN) -- If you harbor a bit of angst over Facebook friend requests gone unanswered, a surprise "defriending" or being deserted by your Twitter followers, you're not alone.

Elaine Fogel has amassed more than 500 connections on LinkedIn, a professional networking Web site, by extending invites to those who appear to fit her wide array of career interests.

"Ninety-nine percent of the time, people just say yes," she said.

But then came "this one woman" who Fogel encountered on one of the 40-plus discussion groups she belongs to on LinkedIn. The woman offered interesting opinions, so Fogel sent her an invitation to join her network.

"She sent an e-mail saying, 'I only connect with people I know, and hopefully our paths will cross one day,' " said Fogel, of Phoenix, Arizona, her voice still carrying notes of disbelief. "I read that, and I said, 'Oh, my God, I've been rejected.' "

Fogel echoes other users who have felt the twinge of hurt and surprise from social media rejection. Some may think hers is an overreaction -- it happened online, with a woman she didn't know -- but recent research shows that our "digital egos" can bruise as easily as we do in person. In fact, rejection online may have the potential to sting even more.

"People tend to think that these relationships are trivial and not very deep, but this is what we're moving towards, having a lot of our communications play out over the Internet," Purdue University social psychologist Kip Williams said. "That's the way it's becoming; this is how we interpret our worth. People care how many [online] friends they have."

Or, increasingly, how many Twitter followers they have. This year, a third-party service launched Qwitter, which allows Twitter users to determine who's stopped following them and which tweet may have turned them off.

Experts say rejection on social networks can hurt worse than an in-person snub because people are usually more polite face-to-face than they are online.

"I think the thing that is often clearly worse online is when it's relatively anonymous, and people use that as a cover and are more cruel than they would be otherwise," said Jean Twenge, a San Diego State psychologist who has studied the way social networking affects personality development.

Online rejection also doesn't lessen the physical reaction we have to emotional pain.

"Pain is divided into two components," said Baldwin Way, a UCLA researcher who studies the way human brains respond to social rejection.

"If you put a red-hot poker on your arm, one part of your brain says, 'This pain is on your arm,' and the other part says, 'Ow, that hurts' and is less concerned with where it is and more concerned about the emotional meaning of it," he said. "That [second] part also seems to be activated when someone's left out or excluded and rejected."

To Way's surprise, that neurological reaction holds true even when the rejection comes in a digital form, lacking the real-world body language, vocal intonations and other aspects that can influence the way rejection is perceived and felt.

"If you'd asked me a few years ago if you'd get the same effect online as you would in person, I'd say no way," Way said. "I thought doing something in person would have stronger effects than doing something online, but interesting data has come out in the last few years that show mental representations are just as powerful as the real thing."

These data include Williams' "cyberball" studies, which ask a participant to play a virtual ball-tossing game with two other icons. In one study group, the participant plays the game for the entire six minutes, but in the second group, he or she is included for only a fraction of that time and then ignored. The second group reports feelings of anger and lower levels of self-esteem.

Whether participants believe they're playing with humans doesn't appear to affect their feelings of rejection.

"Even when people get rejected by the computer, they feel bad," Twenge said.

Kenneth Loflin, a student who participated in Williams' study, got so frustrated by his fellow players that he gave the computer screen an offensive gesture.

"I'm a people person, and I like people to like me," he said.

The study also affected the way Loflin interacts online. Out of the 1,200 friends he has on Facebook, 400 of them he doesn't really know, many of them being friends of friends.

"I thought about defriending them, but I didn't want them to feel how I felt" during the "cyberball" game, Loflin said.

By contrast, Bruce Hammond doesn't have a problem giving the rejection slip to Facebook hangers-on.

"For the most part, the people that I'm defriending are the people that I don't have a relationship with: the people I haven't talked to in 15 years," said Hammond, 30, of Chicago, Illinois. "I don't let someone know if I'm going to defriend them. I just do it."

Similarly, Hammond doesn't expect any of his Facebook contacts to let him know before giving him the ax. If someone rejected him in real life, he would ask why the person felt that way, but when the relationship is online, his thinking changes.

"If I come on [Facebook] tomorrow and see I have 425 friends instead of 426, I'm not going to go through my list and see who did it and be upset with them," he said.

Cecilia Sepp, a Washington, D.C.-area consultant, said she avoids the issue entirely by limiting her online network to about 100 friends.

"I don't have a problem with defriending because I don't accumulate [enough] to have a high number," Sepp said.

"When I first heard that defriending was beginning on social networks, it was through a blog post by someone who was shocked that this person had defriended them because they didn't understand why," she said. "The person wanted to know had they done something, had they said something, should they ask, 'What did [I] do?' "

Sepp believes that online "defrienders" should extend the courtesy that Fogel's LinkedIn rejecter gave her: an e-mail explanation.

"You have no facial expression online; you have no tone of voice online; it's very easy to misinterpret phrasing in an e-mail. You have to be very careful about your wording and be more explicit with people when you're making or removing connections," Sepp said. "That's why it's so important to connect with people that you actually know."


source: CNN.com

Compete: Facebook Added 2.4 Million US Uniques in September

While monthly visitor numbers don’t tell the whole story about the health of a social network, in this case it was more of the same for top social networks Facebook and MySpace, and microblogging service Twitter in the US, according to Compete.



Facebook grew relatively slowly in September according to Compete, by 1.93% to 125 million. MySpace, however, fell 9.66 percent to 50.1 million. Twitter, stayed at around 23.5%. None of the sites have seen any serious growth for the last few months according to these numbers, although Facebook and Twitter both grew quickly earlier this year. MySpace had actually been growing through June, when it reached 61.0 million.

Compete’s numbers tend to run on the high side compared to other analytics companies, although similar directional trends are usually visible across multiple results. You can see the same trend for September in Hitwise’s market share results from yesterday. The internal data that Facebook makes publicly available showed an 8.6% increase in September to 88.3 million monthly actives. Neither comScore nor Quantcast have released their September data yet.

Diditz Makes It Easy To Post Facebook Photos To The Web

There are already a number of applications that allow sharing of photos and videos from a Facebook album — including the company’s own widgets. But a new application called Diditz lets you post photos to the web in ways that make them especially accessible.

When you connect to your Facebook page through Diditz, the application automatically picks up your albums and allows you to create pages for them one at a time. You can select which photos from the albums to include on the shared page, add a brief description and searchable key words, then assign your album one of Diditz’s existing categories.



You have the option of sharing the page with only Facebook friends or opening up the page to the public. It’s then accessible from a link that the site provides — and of course you can post the new page to your Facebook news feed. If you choose to allow unlimited access to your page, anyone can find it and view your albums and videos from the Diditz home page. Facebook users that view your pics can even leave comments or post links to your photos in their own news feeds.



The application isn’t fancy, but that’s what makes it appealing. It’s especially useful to businesses trying to reach a web-wide audience. For example, if your album is public, it can be spidered by search engines and so could show up in search results. For those organizations with Facebook pages, there is an option for creating albums intended for pages.

And, for individuals, it’s a great way of sharing select photos and videos with someone that may not have a Facebook account and access to those albums otherwise.

Microbloggers, Meet the Microvideo

There are just some things in life that are better with a visual accompaniment, like business presentations, cooking classes and a film theory seminar.

According to Rey Flemings, chief executive of Particle, status updates posted to Twitter and Facebook should be included on that list. His San Francisco company created a service called Robo.to that allows users to publish 4-second videos that act as visual status updates.

“We already know what I’m doing, but what does that look like?” he said.
The idea behind the platform is simple: In addition to the microvideos, which can be uploaded from a webcam or a mobile phone camera and pushed out via Facebook and Twitter with a few short lines of text, Robo.to is meant to be a digital calling card online or a hub that houses information about an individual’s identity on the Web. That’s what helps separate the service from other microvideo services like 12seconds.

Though the idea is more likely to resonate with Web-savvy users who broadcast every detail of their lives online than say, your mom, the service has won a modest following since it came out of private beta in August, attracting more than 100,000 new members. It doesn’t hurt that pop singer Justin Timberlake, one of the lead investors in the company, is also active on the site, posting multiple video updates daily.

But as Mr. Flemings puts it, “We aren’t trying to create the next big destination on the Web.”

Rather, the idea is to supplement the deluge of messages flowing through social networks, adding context and additional information which can occasionally get lost in the flood, he said.

For example, after the Kanye West outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards, responses flooded both Twitter and Facebook. But what did those responses look like?

To answer that type of question, the company is unveiling a new feature Monday called “TV Mode” that will allow users to watch all the videos associated with a particular keyword or hashtag. Mr. Flemings described it as a Twitter search, or Twitter’s trending topics, but with microvideos. He hopes that it will help users “watch the conversation unfold in a new way.”

Previously, users could only tune into the short video updates posted by a single user or by the entire community, dubbed the Statusphere, and not hone in on one particular topic.

Although currently the service is available for free, eventually, Mr. Flemings says, the company will consider rolling out paid premium accounts or partnering with companies and marketers who want to host branded contests.

“It’s still very early for us as a service,” he said. “But we’re hoping to introduce a whole new method of short-form video communication.”


source: bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Facebook Starting to Roll Out More Efficient Ads Manager

A few weeks ago, Facebook told us it would start testing a new ads manager and bulk uploader soon. Now, some advertisers are starting to see the new version of the ads manager, which providers much easier campaign management, in-line editing, search, and easier navigation.

As you can see by clicking on the image below, the new interface allows for much more efficient campaign management than the current ads manager. This will be welcome news for advertisers who either manage multiple in-house or client campaigns. Choosing a campaign at left will load all active ads on the right. However, whenever ads are edited, they’ll still need to be reapproved by the Facebook Ads team.

Here’s how the new ads manager looks:



How were advertisers chosen to participate in the test rollouts so far? “A small group of advertisers from our active advertiser base was randomly chosen to participate,” according to Facebook. “We will roll the new Ads Manager out to all advertisers over time.” The FAQ for Facebook’s new ad manager can be found here.

Facebook says it will also soon start testing a new tool for advertisers to bulk upload many ads at once, instead of manually creating them in the standard campaign manager or through third-party scripts. Agencies, app developers, and direct response advertisers who often want to target and test hundreds or thousands of specific creatives will soon be able to do so much more easily.

source: insidefacebook.com

The 20 Fastest Growing Facebook Apps: Mostly Social Games, As Usual

This past week was typical, in terms of which Facebook applications we saw gain the most users. Social games of various genres continued to gain millions of users. Similar to past weeks and months, Zynga’s virtual farming game FarmVille grew by 5.11 million monthly active users to reach 46.0 million, and the company’s role-playing mobster game Mafia Wars grew by 2.05 million to reach 23.2 million. They came in at number two and number four on our top 20 list.

However, number one goes to RockYou’s Birthday Cards, a full-featured virtual card-giving application. It was gradually declining over the last few months, started growing at the end of August, and reached around nine million users as of the first week in this month. Since then, it has for whatever reason found the curve in the hockey stick of growth: The app has gained 5.23 million MAUs in just the past seven days to reach 16.3 million.

Top Gainers This Week




Number four, Your Indian Name!, has seen even sharper growth, and quite abruptly at that. The app translates your name into Hindi, and lets you very easily post that information to your Facebook wall. It grew from 265 users to 4.13 million by the weekend (there may be a problem with the data here). The app’s creator, AppSphere Inc, has 57 total applications by our count.

Seven apps in total gained more than a million users. At number five was My Fishbowl, made by TwoFishes Interactive. The virtual aquatic life game had been slowly growing from nothing in early August, until September 15 when it hit its stride, er, stroke. It grew by 1.57 million to reach 3.30 million MAUs. Keep an eye on this one.

At number six was Causes, one of the only non-game apps on the list. It grew by 1.50 million to reach a stately 30.2 million MAUs. At number seven was Playfish’s Restaurant City, the virtual restaurant game grew 1.29 million to reach 14.4 million.


source: insidefacebook.com

Facebook Settling in to New 150,000 sqft Headquarters

facebook brought all its employees together into one building back in May, after having the various groups that comprise the company scattered throughout downtown Palo Alto. Now, architecture blog ArchDaily has given a glowing review of the new building, highlighting some of the details that make Facebook’s new offices unique.

The 150,000 sq. ft. building was once a high-tech manufacturing facility, and many of the original materials were re-purposed or recycled. The redesign is the first completed under the 2008 Palo Alto Green Building Ordinance. Designers Studio O+A polled employees throughout Facebook and kept everyone updated through photos and posts on the progress of the redesign.



The overall flow of the building is very relaxed and inviting, with executive offices located centrally to provide better access to all employees. The rest of the facility is mostly open work spaces and seating and congregation areas. Employees are encouraged to move furniture as they see fit, write on some walls and add art where needed.



Overall, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants to be careful that the new building doesn’t give employees the feeling that the company has “arrived,” but instead left the new offices relatively plain.

“I want to remind people…we’re way closer to the beginning than the end,” he recently said.


source : www.insidefacebook.com

First Look: Argentinian Developer 3happybytes Reaching 26 Million Facebook Users

As Facebook has grown around the world in the last couple of years, international developers have taken a deeper interest in building applications on its platform. We’ve already covered a big one out of Hong Kong, called 6 Waves, but there are many others. Most notably, we’ve recently discovered a company called 3happybytes out of Argentina — a country that has been seeing a boom in web technology recently.

The company’s suite of applications currently reaches 26.7 million monthly active users, making it the fifth largest Facebook developer by portfolio-summed MAUs, according to our AppData analytics service. Certainly, as with every other developer on the list, some users have installed more than one app made by the company, so its monthly unique visitors is likely lower.

The company was founded earlier this year by Walter Souto, Javier Pelitz, and Fabian Muller. However, its web site only lists an email address.

So, what sort of apps does the company make? Very simple ones, from what we’ve seen. We’ve just started tracking the company, so our historical data is limited. Still, three of the company’s apps are among the fastest growing on the Facebook Platform. One, Friend of the Day, has quickly surged to nearly six million MAUs over the last few days. You simply install the app and it automatically tells you who your top friend is that day — it apparently decides from among your friends at random. Another app, Enemy of the Day, is basically the same concept. Install the app and find out who the company has randomly decided is your top enemy. It has grown from 5.67 million three days ago to 6.56 million today.

A third is called Death’s Time. It rather humorously randomly decides on a date and manner of death for you. Personally, it predicts that I will die on April 18, 2024, at 10:23 am. The cause of my death? “Motorcycle accident while dressed as Elvis.” Sounds plausible. Other people seem to be amused, too. It has grown from 9.9 million MAUs three days ago to 10.9 million today.


For all of these apps, and presumably the five others, you are asked to post the results — your top friend, your top enemy, your cause of death — on your wall, as well as on the wall of your friend or enemy. The simple, sensationalistic nature of these apps, combined with the ease of sharing your activities in them with your friends, appears to be driving the company’s growth.

Certainly, these apps are not as elegant as some of the games or utilities coming out on the platform today. They are more reminiscent of the early days, years ago, when nearly every developer was making simple, spammy apps. Still, perhaps the company can convert all of these users into something more sustainable. For now, it appears to be making money from a wide variety of remnant ad networks, quizzes, and the like. Perhaps, one day, it will grow into a more complex gaming company and start doing what many others already are — offering virtual goods that people are willing to pay for.


source: insidefacebook.com

Facebook Settles Beacon Case: No More Beacon, But There’s a $9.5M “Privacy Fund

Facebook tried to create a new form of advertising in 2007 with the launch of Beacon. In conjunction with a number of big-name brands, Beacon automatically tracked Facebook users’ actions on other sites, then displayed that information to their friends back on Facebook. The program is now officially dead.

A class-action lawsuit filed in 2008 has been settled today. There are two parts. One is that Beacon, as it has been, will be fully shut down — only a few accounts are still open and those will be closed. The other part is that Facebook will, from our understanding, fund an independent foundation to the tune of $9.5 million. The foundation will itself fund projects and initiatives that promote privacy, safety, and security causes.


The case was settled, not lost by Facebook. Here’s what a company spokesperson told me when I asked for more detail:

While we don’t admit any wrongdoing in this matter, we did want to get the episode behind us. And, we were particularly interested in an agreement that creates a foundation that has value for all users rather than just a few individuals.

The settlement has not yet been approved by the judge, and the case was just filed. It took place in the Northern District of California part of the US District Court, San Jose Division. We’ll update with a link to the settlement when it becomes available.

The original filing described some elements of Beacon that were particularly troublesome to the plaintiffs, per the original lawsuit. From that filing, via Justia:

Plaintiffs alleged that Defendant Facebook, Inc. and Defendants Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliates (i.e., Blockbuster, Inc., Fandango, Inc., Hotwire, Inc., STA Travel, Inc., Overstock.com, Inc., Zappos.com, Inc. and Gamefly, Inc.) violated their privacy.

More on the original lawsuit, via CNET:

If the user was not a member (of Facebook), Facebook still obtained the notification from the Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate. Information regarding user activities was sent in real time to a third party Web site–one which was not open or active in the user’s browser, and one which, in many cases, the user may never even have visited or heard of.

Facebook’s side of the story is that the company made a number of adjustments to Beacon in the weeks and months following the launch that met many user demands. This case was filed long after much of the outcry about Beacon had ebbed.

Future plans

I asked about the impact of this ruling on Facebook’s current efforts to share data with third-parties, including Facebook Connect. Here was the response.

Beacon was about our users’ actions on third-party sites. Facebook Connect is about using Facebook infrastructure to give users significant control over how they extend their Facebook identity on the web, and share their experience back to friends on Facebook

More statements, these from Barry Schnitt, Facebook’s Director of Policy Communications.

We learned a great deal from the Beacon experience. For one, it was underscored how critical it is to provide extensive user control over how information is shared. We also learned how to effectively communicate changes that we make to the user experience. The introduction of Facebook Connect – a product that gives users significant control over how they extend their Facebook identity on the Web and share experiences back to friends on Facebook – is an example of this. We look forward to the creation of the foundation and its work to educate Internet users on how best to control their privacy; engage in safe social networking practices; and, generally, enjoy themselves more online by having knowledge that gives them a greater sense of control. We fully expect the foundation to team with other leading online safety and privacy experts and organizations that have been working diligently in these fields.


source: www.insidefacebook.com

Log in to Facebook with Your Username Instead of Your Email Address

This is a very small update, but shows how Facebook is trying to make itself a more central part of people’s lives. You can now log in to the site by entering your username and password instead of your email address and password like before.

Sure, many other sites let you do this. But the more interesting part is that Facebook has been promoting usernames for months, having let people get usernames in vanity URLs earlier this year. For example, my personal profile is now at www.facebook.com/EricEldon. Now, I can log in as EricEldon. The significance, or what there is of it, is that Facebook wants you thinking about using the site on its terms, rather than, say, in terms of the Gmail or Yahoo account you’ve been logging in through in the past.



source: insidefacebook.com

Prepare Yerselves for Pirate Day on Facebook This Saturday

It’s that time of year again. No, I don’t mean the onset of autumn, nor Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday coming up next week. It’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day this Saturday, September 19 — an odd meme from the 1990’s that has found millions of new fans this decade through the internet. If you want
to read Facebook in Pirate English, here’s how.



Facebook has translated its site into Pirate English. Last year, you were able to access the dialect within the normal language chooser available in your account settings. But Pirate English doesn’t appear to be on the list at this point (although maybe Facebook will make it available on Saturday?). For now, if you want to read Pirate, follow this link to Facebook’s ajax language-picker page.

“English (Pirate)” is visible as one of the English dialect options, along with US, UK and “Upside Down” English. Just pick the pirate option and you’ll see Facebook’s masterful site translation go into effect.




source: insidefacebook.com

Facebook in challenge to Google

Facebook has turned up the heat on Google by purchasing content-sharing service FriendFeed, say industry watchers.

Many expected Google or even Twitter to buy the company, which has been praised for its "real-time" search engine.

This type of search is valuable because it lets you know what is happening right now on any given subject.

"Google look out, Facebook knows the real money is in real-time search," said respected blogger Robert Scoble.

"Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting," Mr Scoble told the BBC.

Back in May, Google founder Larry Page admitted that the search giant had fallen behind other services like that of Twitter.

"People really want to do stuff real time and I think they (Twitter) have done a great job.

"We've done a relatively poor job of doing things that work on a per second basis," Mr Page said at the time.

'Warning shot'

Many in Silicon Valley agree that this deal has changed the game.

"Facebook was unable to acquire Twitter so this is the next best option," said Ben Parr, associate editor of Mashable, a news blog covering social media.

"FriendFeed is well known for having some powerful and intelligent technology that allows users to aggregate everything they do online and do it all in real time.

"With this acquisition, Facebook is gunning directly not only at Twitter, but at Google. This is a warning shot to those two companies," Mr Parr told BBC News.

Mr Scoble noted that FriendFeed's real-time search could stretch back 18 months compared to a few days for Twitter.

Silicon Valley commentators have long regarded FriendFeed as an inspiration for many of Facebook's features.

These include the ability for users to import activities from third parties services like YouTube and Flickr to letting users comment or say they "like" something in another user's feed.

"FriendFeed has in effect been the R&D (research & development) department for Facebook for some time now," said Mr Scoble, who is one of the service's most popular users with nearly 46,000 subscribers.

"They have the best community technology out there and Facebook should continue to use them to try out new features and test them out before transferring them over to Facebook."

The deal

The purchase caught many in Silicon Valley by surprise, even though the two companies had been talking on and off for the past two years.

"This is an 11th hour deal," admitted FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor.

Industry commentators had expected Google to make a bid for the company, especially given the fact that its founders all used to work there.

"FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request" is how Mr Taylor described the buyout, in a tongue-in-cheek reference to how Facebook users ask one another to become part of their friend network.

He continued in a similar vein in his blog post.

"As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle.

"Our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world."

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was equally complimentary.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information.

"As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and the company's four founders will be given senior roles on the social networking site's engineering and product teams.

FriendFeed will continue as it is for the moment independently.

"Eventually, one way or another, it's hard to see FriendFeed as it stands now, continuing on," said MG Siegler of Silicon Valley news site Tech Crunch.

"Facebook will begin to take up too much of the FriendFeeders' time, and it will languish. It's sad, but that's the web. Not every service can flourish. There simply aren't enough users with enough time to use all of them."


Source : BBC News

Facebook strips down to Lite site

The world's biggest social networking site has launched a slimmed-down version for people with slow or poor internet connections.

Facebook has said the Lite site will be faster and simpler because it offers fewer services than the main site.

Initially it is meant to support users in developing countries and where bandwidth constraints make the current version too slow to use.

At the moment it is only available in India and the US.

The company said around 70% of its more than 250 million users were from outside America. Countries in Southeast Asia and Europe are seeing a massive increase in growth where fast internet connections are more common.

News that Facebook was testing the Lite site was first leaked in August.

'Twitter-like'

The options on Facebook Lite are limited to letting users write on their wall, post photos and videos, view events and browse other people's profiles. There are no apps or special boxes.

"It appears, at a quick glance, to be a better site for Facebook newbies or for anyone who finds the current site overwhelming and noisy," said Rafe Needleman at technology website Cnet.
"The new layout feels almost Twitter-like."

Terence O'Brien at Switched.com gave the slimmed-down version of what he called "ol' blue" the thumbs-up because it "strips away distractions".

"The simple site loads noticeably faster, is easier to navigate, and is much easier on the eyes thanks to the lack of people sending you 'virtual booze' or asking you to join their 'vampire fraternity'.

"The new layout seems like a direct challenge to Twitter, which can attribute much of its success to is simplicity and portability," said Mr O'Brien.

'Worldwide rollout'

Many industry watchers said they believed that even users with good internet connections might well flock to Facebook Lite because of its new look and ease of use.

"That is what some US users are planning to do," said Eric Eldon of InsideFacebook.com

"Indeed the reaction from US users has prompted Facebook to release it intentionally for US users, something it hadn't previously planned on doing."

Mr Eldon said he believed a "worldwide rollout doesn't seem too far away".

Facebook has acknowledged this is a possibility in a statement on the site which said the firm was "working on translating Lite into other languages".

So far those who have posted comments on Facebook seem to like the company's new Lite approach.

"It's good to see Facebook listening to their users," wrote one user.

Another said: "Facebook Lite should be great for college campuses like mine that are hung up on bandwidth."

Having no third-party apps on the site also garnered a fair amount of support.

"The no-apps thing is killer. There's nothing about them I'll miss," noted one user, while another said: "Whatever you do, please, PLEASE do not allow the quizzes, games, or apps to ruin this pristine version of Facebook."

Anyone who switches to Facebook Lite and does not like it can switch back to the fuller version of the site.


source : BBC News

Facebook grows and makes money

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, San Francisco

The world's largest social networking site just got bigger with the announcement it has 300 million active monthly users from around the globe.

Facebook also revealed that it has started making money ahead of schedule.

The company had not expected to start turning a profit until sometime in 2010.

"This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

"We are succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. We are just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone.

"We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the web," Mr Zuckerberg said in a blog post.

"Milestones"

The news that Facebook had passed these two benchmarks was made at TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco, a conference for start ups.

Facebook hit the 250m user mark back in July. It is estimated that the site is gaining around 5m new users a week or 50m in the last 75 days.

"Passing these milestones to me means we can continue to fund our development and our innovation and be self sustaining as we grow this network," Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's vice president of engineering, told BBC News.

"We think 300m is a just a step on the way to get as much of the entire world on the social network communicating with the friends and family and the people they want to communicate with."

"That Facebook is able to continue this growth and build a "cash flow positive" business is an impressive feat," said Nick O'Neill of AllFacebook.com.

"If the company can cover the cost of scaling to 1 billion users and still manage to break even, there's no doubt that the company will have a great opportunity to rake in billions," added Mr O'Neill.

Facebook's Mr Schroepfer said the company has worked hard to get more money flowing in than out.

"The growth of the network has certainly helped us go cash positive and the engineering team has done a lot of innovation on our ad products as our business is primarily advertising funded.

"As more and more of the world gets on the network, people and advertisers realise the power of sharing information whether its about a movie preview or a car." said Mr Schroepfer.

Look out Twitter said Ben Parr who is associate editor at the social media blog Mashable.com.

"If Facebook continues to open up its platform and adopt Twitter's best features, it could spell trouble for the Twitterverse. The world's largest social network is on the warpath," warned Mr Parr.


source : news.bbc.co.uk