As people post more and more of their private information to Facebook, they are starting to worry about things like privacy. Facebook has an extensive privacy policy, but some are beginning to wonder how seriously Mark Zuckerberg and others in the company treat it. I truly doubt most people take the time read the privacy policy, or even care about it, but they should. Here’s an interesting quote I found recently from a New York Times technology columnist, about Mark Zuckerberg’s views on privacy.
If you’re having trouble logging into your Facebook account you’re in luck, you’ve come to the right place. Back in October we wrote up an article called Facebook Technical Support with some really useful tips for getting logged into your Facebook account as soon as possible. Make sure and read through the comments, you’ll realize that you’re not the only one having trouble.
If you’ve landed on this page chances are you’re having trouble with your Facebook Login in one way or another. If this is in fact the case, one of the first things you should do is visit the official Facebook Help Center. This is a page within Facebook.com that is designed to help you solve your Facebook problems quickly and easily. It offers help sections for using facebook, facebook applications and features, facebook security, help discussions, and more.
If you can’t find help at the Facebook Help Center, you might want to try reading our Facebook Technical Support or Facebook Login help articles.
A Russian computer hacker has posted the login and password information for 1,500,000 Facebook users for sale. The accounts are being sold in groups of 1,000 for a price of $45 per batch. It is unknown how the information was stolen, however there are only a few options that make sense. The accounts could have been obtained by a phishing scam, where Facebook users were tricked into entering their information. Another less likely, but plausible possibility is that Facebook’s database was somehow compromised.
This serves as a reminder to only enter your Facebook Login information while at the site Facebook.com. If the address in your browser bar says anything other than Facebook.com, be warned, you may be giving your Facebook Login information directly to a hacker.
Today Facebook released a new feature that will present a suggested list of pages a user may be interested in, based on pages that other people in the same demographic have said they like. Using like data from the newly implemented social graph API, Faceabook knows which pages people would recommend to their friends. With this data they are able to produce a list of pages that the user will likely be interested in. Facebook stated that they will only suggest pages and sites that are seeing a high level of user engagement on the network. And like Google pagerank, the suggestions are algorithmically selected, not sponsored.
After word from Kevin Rose and Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo that Google was working on a Facebook competitor Called “Google Me”, everyone wants to know, is it real? Is Google really building a social network to compete with Facebook? Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, was recently asked about the “Google Me” and he responded:
“That would be a product announcement and I won’t say.”
There isn’t any hard evidence to back it up, however it does make sense that Google would want to operate a social network of their own, and buying Facebook is out of the question. Coupled with the recent launch of Google Buzz, a Twitter competitor, and Google Wave, it’s very possible that an app to compete with Facebook is their next goal. Stay tuned for more “Google Me” news at it develops.
Facebook has added a useful new feature to their photo application, automatic face detection. In the past when you uploaded photos to Facebook you were required to manually draw a box around a person’s face and then tag their name to add them to the photo. A new algorithm now automatically detects faces in photos, all you have to do is click and tag. This is only a small improvement, but with 3 billion photos being uploaded to Facebook each month, it could amount to a huge amount of time saved.
The next logical step will be to add image recognition and auto tagging, which is a scary thought. Even if the technology is already available, I think most users would be too freaked out by a feature like this. It would also require a huge amount of processing power to run an image recognition and auto tagging script on every photo uploaded.
The rumor mill is in full force. Yesterday Digg CEO Kevin Rose mentioned that Google is hard at work on a product to directly compete with Facebook. Dubbed Google Me, this product would attempt to replace and dethrone the king of social networking. Information is still scarce, and as usual Google has yet to comment on Google Me. I bet the executives at Google wish they would have just sucked it up and bought Facebook years back when they may have had a chance, now they’re forced to compete. It’s going to be a tough battle, although Facebook is king now, it’s conceivable but unlikely that Google can create a better product and steal users away from Facebook. Stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.
Facebook is used to fast, prolonged growth, however there are only so many people in the world. As their growth begins to slow down, they must look to new countries and emerging markets to grow the user base. Facebook is now aggressively looking to countries like China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia for their next phase of growth.
Although Facebook is still growing at a fast rate, the weekly growth rate has fallen off significantly in recent months.
Mark Zuckerberg stated:
We saw our exponential growth rate continue for a very long period of time, and it still does at a super-linear rate, though not quite 3 per cent a week any more. Now for the first time we are focused on doing some specific things in specific countries.”
Facebook currently has 500 million global users and they are trying hard to become the first social network in the world to reach 1 billion users.
It appears that a lot of people are unhappy with Mark Zuckerberg these days over the Facebook’s recent privacy concerns. This became very apparent recently during the D8 conference where Mark was grilled during an interview by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. They literally made him sweat during the interview, to the extent that he was forced to take off his signature facebook hoodie, revealing a somewhat strange symbol stitched into the lining.
It’s time to cut Mark some slack folks, he’s only human. He’s 25 years old and responsible for creating one of the fastest growing, most successful, game-changing companies of all time, don’t be jealous.
Besides, haters gonna hate… They always do.
