500 million users and growing, Facebook leads the way in social networking. But time and again, Facebook had to face fire from many privacy groups. Even this week, Facebook was very much in the news, when profile data of more than 10 million Facebook users surfaced on an torrent site.
Networkworld reports that four students, Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Soafer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy of New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences are already on their way to release a decentralized and open source alternative to Facebook called Diaspora, that will give users full control over their privacy.
According to the developers, Diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.
“We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive. With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today’s centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network. Diaspora will be easy to use, and it will be centered on you instead of a faceless hub,” says the description about the project on it’s Web site.
This Diaspora project began after they were inspired by Eben Moglen’s, director-counsel and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), talk on privacy on the ‘Net.
This four young and talented programmers also managed to raise their goal of $10,000 for the project, within six weeks of posting the project on April 25 with almost 6500 backers pledging a total of $200,641 according to the project’s website.
In regards to privacy on Facebook, we have three groups of users – users who are not satisfied by the way privacy is handled, users who are indifferent to their privacy for the services provided, and lastly, the ones who doesn’t know any better.
How this new service will effect Facebook and it’s usage will be known when the first iteration (which they aim to) launch in September.
Over 50% of all Facebook users play social games on Facebook, but which games are the most popular? The numbers are in. We’ve got a list of the top 25 Facebook games for the month of July 2010. If you’re a fan of playing social games on Facebook, you’re sure to find some great ones on this list!
- FarmVille
- Texas HoldEm Poker
- Treasure Isle
- Cafe World
- MindJolt Games
- Birthday Cards
- Mafia Wars
- PetVille
- Pet Society
- FrontierVille
- Happy Aquarium
- FishVille
- Restaurant City
- Bejeweled Blitz
- YoVille
- Social City
- Zoo World
- Hotel City
- Happy Island
- Happy Pets
- Family Feud
- Country Life
- Farm Town
- Ninja Saga
- Bubble Island
Social gameing on Facebook is growing in popularity. 2010 looks to be the year of the social game.
Half of all users on Facebook now play social games. More impressively, 40% of total usage time on the service is spent on these types of games. That’s significant, obviously, because a large amount of the Internet is on Facebook.
The social games industry is expanding as well, and it’s not all about Zynga. Social games maker Playdom was acquired by Disney a couple of days ago for a deal possibly worth more than $750 million.
In view of the recent news about 100 million Facebook profile being leaked, we would like to bring to you a short tutorial on how to exclude yourself from such situation.
The profile data that were leak were actually nothing new. All the information is already available if one searches it. The listed users are those who have not bothered to remove themselves from being listed on public search engines.
Here is a quick How To:
1. Log in to your Facebook Account.
2. Select the Privacy Settings options from the Accounts tab.
3. At the bottom of the following page, you will find the settings for ‘Applications and Websites’. Click on the ‘Edit your settings’ link.
4. On the following page, you will find a ‘public search’ at the bottom of the list. Click on the ‘Edit Settings’ button located at the far right side.
5. Now you’ll see a description of the public search settings and at the bottom of the description, ‘Enable public search’ with a check box in front of it.
Uncheck the option and congratulations, “you have just removed yourself from public search.”
For many Facebook users worldwide Aug 1, 2010 will be a gloomy day… no wait!! Facebook isn’t closing down or nothing catastrophic is going to happen, but for all the people who loved using the Facebook Gift Shop, will have to contend with third-party applications for giving and receiving gifts.
Facebook announced this decision at the beginning of this month. This is just a reminder guys..for we got roughly two days to make the most of this Facebook product.
The end of the Gift shop will be a bittersweet moment for all those people who loved to sent and received gifts. But, the memories will remain and so does the gifts that you have sent and received..
But we all know that the end something is the beginning of another. So, with Facebook’s decision to close down the Facebook Gift Shop to focus on improving other products, let’s open way for other new-and-improve products from Facebook as we say farewell to Facebook Gift Shop.
Last but not the least, do share with us your favorite gift and the gifts that you’ll cherish. As for me, i’ll forever cherish the Penguin Love, Weekend Bubbly, and the Jock Strap 
Facebook helps police crack Philippines murder case
Mark Dizon,28, who is accused of murdering nine people including three foreigners and six Filipinos in Angeles City was arrested later this week.
He was reportedly identified through his photos in Facebook by a niece of one of the murder victims and law enforcers posed as New People’s Army (NPA) to lure him. He was apprehended him when he surfaced in San Fernando City to meet the so called communist rebels.
Read More:
Cops in Delhi falls into their trap
While on a lighter side, policemen in Delhi, India, are on the receiving end for violating traffic rules according to a report by Hindustan Times.
Delhi Traffic Police set up a Facebook page in May promising to take immediate action to complaints posted on its fan page. Three months later, as many as 29 police vehicles were found guilty of violation of traffic rules through photos uploaded by eager Delhiites, and disciplinary proceeding against the violators have been launched.
Read More:
Couple Reunites After 53 years Through Facebook
In yet another story of reunion through Facebook, Melody Longino found her lost flame after 53 years. When she opened her Facebook account on May 11, 2010, she saw a notification from Facebook – a friend request from William McCrary, a name Melody had not heard in more than fifty years.
The two meet for the first time, way back in 1957, when a handsome 17-year-old Marine got on the Greyhound bus to Texas that Melody was traveling in.
“He left to go on to California and I went up home. We kept in touch for a couple years by mail and we went our separate ways. We were young,” Longino said.
Read More:
Law student gets £10,000 after being branded a paedophile on Facebook
Raymond Bryce, a law student of Stanford, was awarded a £10,000 in libel damages after he was branded a paedophile on Facebook by his friend Jeremiah Barber.
Barber reportedly posted child porn on the Facebook page of Bryce with a comment saying, “Ray, you like kids and you are gay so I bet you love this picture, Ha ha,” over a £80 debt. Though the post was removed within 24 hours of posting it, Mr. Barber later pleaded guilty and was ordered to carry out 150 hours unpaid work along with a £1,200 costs bill.
Read More:
100 million Facebook users data have been leaked on an internet.
The file contains user account names and URL for each user’s profile page, from which anyone can easily access the user’s details such as address, date of birth, phone number or email address. Once a user’s profile is access, it is also possible to access the details of their friends even if they have made themselves non-searchable.
The directory of the personal details of users, a massive 2.8 GB torrent compiled by hacker Ron Bowes of Skull Security, is reported to have surfaced on an internet file-sharing site.
Ron Bowes reported used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, and collected data not hidden by the user’s privacy settings.
Mr Bowes siad he did it to highlight privacy issues, to which Facebook replied that the details in question was already public information.
Isn’t it terrifying???
Are you on the list??
You can check whether you name is in the list or not by going through this link.
If you are in the list, you might be wondering how your name got there.
If your name is there then, the ‘Public Search’ in your privacy settings must be checked. You just need to uncheck the option to hide yourself from public searches.
I would like to repeat what Jame Nixon wrote on Thinq, “There’s absolutely nothing illegal about what Bowes has done – the information is, after all, publicly available – but perhaps the existence of a stalker’s online black book might finally persuade less security-minded Facebook users to get their arses in gear,”
If you are on the list, then i would like to remind you that the information was there all along, right from the time you made you Facebook account.
Just make sure to protect yourself in future.
Check out the Facebook Help section to more about privacy settings and how to do it.
Just yesterday, we posted a new about Google’s plan of developing a new service to rival Facebook, but Facebook have completely turned the tables by rolling out a new beta application called Facebook Questions.
Facebook Questions lets its users pose questions to and share answers with millions of people around the world.
Although asking questions or advices is not a new thing on Facebook, this new feature will certainly push Facebook users to relay on Facebook Questions instead of going to Google or other search engines.
Remember when you posted, “Feeling bored..dunno wad to do” or “Just broke up with my GF/BF,” on you Facebook status and the overwhelming response or advice that you got??
Facebook Question is something similar, but on a larger scale. It will allow you to pose question to the entire community and the probability of getting a right solution is very high when a question is answered by the collective knowledge of more than 500 million users and beyond.
“Facebook Questions helps you tap into the collective knowledge of the more than 500 million people on Facebook,” Blake Ross, the company’s director of product, wrote in a blog post.
“For example, if you’re vacationing in Costa Rica and want to know the best places to surf, you can use Facebook Questions to get answers from nearby surfing enthusiasts,” adds Ross in his blog. “Because questions will also appear to your friends and their friends, you’ll receive answers that are more personalized to you.”
What’s more, users can also add tags to their questions like movies, photography, cycling etc..and the question will be show to people who have expressed interest in the particular topics resulting in more informative answers.
Though this new Facebook application is still in beta mode and only available to about one percent users, this new application will surely take away a significant amount search engine traffic which happens to be dominated by Facebook.
When this new application will be rolled out completely or how the final product will function is unknown, but one thing that bugs me at the moment is, how fast can i get the answer to my question with this new Facebook Q&A application?
