24 Feb
Friday , February 20, 2009
Everyone worries about the drunken photos of themselves posted on Facebook that could leak out to the wider world — whether it’s to that cute guy or girl, your parents, or, worse yet, future employers.
But that isn’t the half of it. Facebook has nothing on cell phones, which have become the most powerful weapon of privacy invasion ever. Continue reading
23 Feb
Everyone worries about the drunken photos of themselves posted on Facebook that could leak out to the wider world — whether it’s to that cute guy or girl, your parents, or, worse yet, future employers. But that isn’t the half of it. Facebook has nothing on cell phones, which have become the most powerful weapon of privacy invasion ever.
23 Feb
“I am the IT Administrator for a regional restaurant chain, and as of late I am noticing more and more people sending me invitations to sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc. Continue reading
19 Feb
AUBURN, Maine – Three weeks after setting up a page on Facebook, a central Maine police department is crediting the social networking Web site with helping solve a vandalism case.
19 Feb
Deborah Gage, Chronicle Staff Writer
18 Feb
On an otherwise placid holiday weekend, one blog’s commentary on a change to Facebook’s terms of service created a firestorm of banter on the Web: does the social network claim ownership to any user content on the site, even if the user deletes it?
18 Feb
BARCELONA, Spain (AFP) – Sixty mobile phone operators have linked up to develop new “chat” functionality for subscribers that will replicate the experience of online programmes such as MSN Messenger, according to an industry initiative unveiled Monday.
17 Feb
BARCELONA, Spain (AFP) – Facebook users spend almost 30 minutes a day on the site poking and messaging their friends on average, with access patterns similar on mobile phones and computers, according to a British study.
The research tracked access to Facebook by mobile phone subscribers in Britain and found that the social networking phenomenon was the top site for users measured by browsing time.
Users accessing Facebook on their mobile phones spent on average 24 minutes on the site compared with 27.5 minutes daily by computer users, the study found.
Mobile phone users accessed the site on average 3.3 times per day, compared with 2.3 times for computer users, with the most avid mobile fans 18-24 year old males who spent on average 27 minutes on the site.
The study, carried out by mobile phone industry body the GSM Association, aimed to provide insight into the surfing habits of mobile phone users with a view to encouraging advertising.
The most visited sites by mobile users were the portals of the mobile phone network operators, the study found.
“That’s probably not surprising because it’s generally the homepage set on your mobile,” explained the marketing director for the GSM Association Michael O’Hara.
Google was the most visited off-portal site.
13 Feb
Updated Friday, Feb. 6, 2009, at 11:55 AM ET
In the past few weeks, a chain letter called “25 Random Things About Me” has wormed its way through Facebook at an alarming speed. The exhibitionistic format has remained surprisingly intact: In addition to rattling off 25 facts about themselves, “Random Things” authors are supposed to tag 25 of their Facebook friends, prompting them to write their own note and tag 25 more people, and so forth and so on.
Whatever your take is on the content of these notes, they do present a fascinating case study in how trends spread online. As USA Today noted Thursday, it’s difficult for Facebook to measure the trend precisely because the letters are written using the generic Notes application, which can be used for any type of message. But a representative for the site did tell the newspaper that use of the Notes app has more than doubled in the past week.
In an attempt to get a handle on how the “25 Random Things About Me” phenomenon began and spread, Slate is running a simple survey for Facebook users. If you have written such a letter or noticed that any of your Facebook friends have, please take a second to answer the following questions, using the news feeds on your profile to determine when you were first swept up in this trend.
10 Feb
MIAMI — Katherine Evans said she was frustrated with her English teacher for ignoring her pleas for help with assignments and a brusque reproach when she missed class to attend a school blood drive.
So Ms. Evans, who was then a high school senior and honor student, logged onto the networking site Facebook and wrote a rant against the teacher, Sarah Phelps.
“To those select students who have had the displeasure of having Ms. Sarah Phelps, or simply knowing her and her insane antics: Here is the place to express your feelings of hatred,” she wrote.
Her posting drew a handful of responses, some of which were in support of the teacher and critical of Ms. Evans. “Whatever your reasons for hating her are, they’re probably very immature,” a former student of Ms. Phelps wrote in her defense.
A few days later, Ms. Evans removed the post from her Facebook page and went about the business of preparing for graduation and studying journalism in the fall.
But two months after her online venting, Ms. Evans was called into the principal’s office and was told she was being suspended for “cyberbullying,” a blemish on her record that she said she feared could keep her from getting into graduate schools or landing her dream job.
“It was all very quick the way it happened,” said Ms. Evans, now a freshman at the University of Florida.
She is suing the principal of her school, Peter Bayer, for ordering her suspension. She is asking for no monetary compensation beyond her legal fees, said her lawyer, Matthew Bavaro, and she simply wants to have the suspension removed from her record.
A lawyer for Mr. Bayer and the school, Pembroke Pines Charter High School, has yet to respond to the legal complaint, filed in December, and refused to comment on the pending litigation.
Mr. Bavaro said he viewed the suspension as an attack on Ms. Evans’s right to free speech. He cited a 1969 case, Tinker v. Des Moines, in which three Iowa students were suspended for wearing black armbands to protest the government’s policy in Vietnam. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which eventually ruled in favor of the students.
But educational disciplinarians disagree.
“You can express an opinion on whether someone is a good teacher,” said Pamela Brown, assistant director for the Broward County School District who oversees expulsions. “But when you start inviting people to say that they hate a teacher, that crosses the line.”
Though Pembroke Pines does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Broward County district, it does use its disciplinary guidelines, Ms. Brown said, pointing out that there are rules against threats of physical violence, verbal threats, nonverbal assaults and disruption of the school’s function.
“We don’t want teachers to work in fear, looking over their shoulders when they walk to their cars after school,” she said, adding that Mr. Bayer “thought that what the young lady did was serious enough to warrant a three-day suspension.”
Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said he was appalled by the school’s position.
“Since when did criticism of a teacher morph into assault?” Mr. Simon said. “If Katie Evans said what she said over burgers with her friends at the mall, there is no question it would be protected by free speech.”
8 Feb
2009-02-06
With MySpace and Google releasing similar applications, Facebook has already moved to allow users to port their data around the Web via Facebook Connect. In the next stage of building open distributed-identity frameworks across the Internet, Facebook officially joins the board of the OpenID Foundation.On Feb. 5, Facebook announced that it would join Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, VeriSign and Yahoo as a corporate board member of the OpenID Foundation, an organization formed in June 2007 to promote an open framework for user-centric digital identities on the Web.
Facebook joins two months after its Facebook Connect, which enables users to sign into other sites using their Facebook user names and passwords, went live. Some 4,000 sites and desktop applications are currently involved in Facebook Connect, and the company claims it has utility for the enterprise.
Facebook Connect offers enterprises “a more robust intranet with social capabilities to interact,” David Swain, manager of platform connections for Facebook, said in an interview. “The enterprise could use their own authentication system and then have their [employees] use Connect from there, or they could use Facebook’s authentication system.”
Google’s own social networking effort, Google Friend Connect, already uses OpenID as a foundation; the service launched as a beta hours before Facebook Connect on Dec. 4.
“It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web,” Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering for Facebook, said in a statement. “As a next step in that effort, we will be hosting an OpenID Design Summit in two weeks here at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto.”
In Palo Alto, designers from Facebook, the DiSo Project, Google, JanRain, MySpace, Six Apart and Yahoo will discuss how, according to a news post on the OpenID Web site, “existing OpenID implementations could support an experience similar to Facebook Connect.”
Facebook’s representative on the board will be Luke Shepard, a member of Facebook’s Platform and Connect team.
5 Feb
In one of the more sordid accounts of online predation we’ve read recently, the Associated Press reported on Thursday that a Wisconsin teen used a fake Facebook profile to blackmail his classmates into giving sexual favors.
Eighteen-year-old high school student Anthony Stancl is accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring of 2007 and November of 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves.
Stancl then told many of them that unless they engaged in some sort of sexual activity with him, he would put the photos or videos on the Internet. At least seven of them have said they were coerced into sex acts, which Stancl allegedly documented with a cell phone camera.
There were about 300 photos of underage males, some of which were as young as 15, on Stancl’s computer, police in the teen’s hometown of New Berlin, Wisc., told the AP. Stancl had originally come under police scrutiny in November, after he issued a bomb threat that temporarily closed New Berlin High School.
The emergence of the case comes at a time when social-networking safety is back in the spotlight. After a subpoena from the Connecticut attorney general, the News Corp.-owned networking site MySpace handed over the names of 90,000 registered sex offenders that had profiles on the site, and pressure mounted for Facebook to do something similar.
What’s important to keep in mind, lest this incident set off more hysteria about the dangers of teens and Facebook profiles, is that this sort of activity could have happened over an instant-message client, another social network, or an online message board.
It’s true, however, that the Internet can cloak a criminal in anonymity or a fabricated identity–in one particularly tragic case, a woman posed as a teenage boy on MySpace and allegedly harassed a 13-year-old girl to the point of suicide.
A recent report from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concluded that threats to minors online are more complicated than the stereotype of a lone adult seeking out vulnerable teens: in the case of Anthony Stancl, for example, the sexual predator was one of the victims’ own high-school classmates.
5 Feb
MILWAUKEE – An 18-year-old male student is accused of posing as a girl on Facebook, tricking at least 31 male classmates into sending him naked photos of themselves and then blackmailing some for sex acts.
“The kind of manipulation that occurred here is really sinister in my estimation,” Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel said Wednesday.
The students go to New Berlin Eisenhower High School in New Berlin, which is in Waukesha County about 15 miles west of Milwaukee.
Anthony Stancl, of New Berlin, was charged Wednesday with five counts of child enticement, two counts of second-degree sexual assault of a child, two counts of third-degree sexual assault, possession of child pornography, repeated sexual assault of the same child, and making a bomb threat.
Stancl’s attorney, Craig Kuhary, said Stancl plans to plead not guilty to the charges and hopes to reach a plea agreement with the district attorney
“It’s too early in the case for me to make a statement, other than the fact at some point we are going to go into events that had taken place earlier that might have had some impact on what he did here,” he said. He wouldn’t go into specifics.
The incidents allegedly happened from spring 2007 through November, when officers questioned Stancl about a bomb threat he allegedly sent to teachers and wrote about on a school’s bathroom wall. It resulted in the closing of New Berlin Eisenhower Middle and High School.
According to the criminal complaint, Stancl first contacted the students through the social networking site Facebook, pretending to be a girl named Kayla or Emily.
The boys reported that they were tricked into sending nude photos or videos of themselves, the complaint said.
Thirty-one victims were identified and interviewed and more than half said the girl with whom they thought they were communicating tried to get them to meet with a male friend to let him perform sex acts on them.
They were told that if they didn’t, she would send the nude photos or movies to their friends and post them on the Internet, according to the complaint. Stancl allegedly used the excuse to get the victims to perform repeated acts, the complaint said.
Seven boys were identified in the complaint by their initials as either having to allegedly perform sex acts on Stancl or Stancl on them. The complaint said Stancl took photos with his cell phone of the encounters.
Officers found about 300 nude images of juvenile males on his computer, according to the complaint. Prosecutors said the victims were as young as 15.
A preliminary hearing for Stancl has been scheduled for Feb. 26. The maximum penalty if convicted on all charges is nearly 300 years in prison.
5 Feb
Posted on Wed Feb 4, 2009 1:06PM EST
– To commemorate the fifth birthday of Facebook, the ultimate social networking site, here are five reasons it has changed the face of Internet communication forever. 1) Facebook created the definitive social networking experience. In a world where most of our daily communication comes in the form of e-mail, IMs, and other Internet-based methods, Facebook has fused these elements in one package. With more than 150 million active users, Facebook is, quite simply, where it’s at. It has e-mail; it has IM; it has Twitter-infused status updates; it has everything one needs to find and reconnect with old high school buddies, make new friends, and build a cohesive online community. Facebook is used by businesses, non-profit organizations — even presidents. Practically everyone who values connectivity in this high-tech world of disembodied communication has latched onto Facebook as a central hub for engagement. 2) It has a streamlined, smooth interface. Facebook’s overhaul of its popular user interface caused quite a stir when it debuted. Groups gathered, hoping 1 million angry shouts would restore the look. Months later, people have accepted the alteration and no one has really made a cohesive argument for its original state for some time. But what’s most important about Facebook’s interface is that it’s easy to use, and relatively difficult to get lost within. Tabs guide users through the variety of posted items, and an iPhone app makes it easy to log in on the go. Put frankly, it’s beautiful in its simplicity. 3) It gave users an alternative to its crappy cousin, MySpace. MySpace is a mess; it’s like an HTML epileptic fit. Besides its reputation for being the stomping ground of sexual predators and its rather filthy casual sex underpinnings (it’s not nicknamed MeatSpace for nothing), MySpace complicated social networking with its failed ambitions. Everything MySpace has tried to do to separate itself as a different entity — namely MySpace Music — has been met with failure and criticism. Facebook took a different approach and focused on the core of its raison d’etre: social networking. Though Facebook accomplishes much more than that, its basic content stands alone. 4) It’s a hub for education and student communication. Schools and publishing companies flock to Facebook as a way to connect students with other students. Through study groups, help guides, and other forms of student interaction generally relegated to different sites spread all over the Web, Facebook has proven to be a successful and effective catalyst for student success. Sure, Facebook is a huge time-suck, and probably distracts more students from cracking books than motivates them, but when it does push students towards achievement, it wins. 5) Great apps. The death of Scrabulous shocked the Facebook nation. People had grown so accustomed to logging in and playing an alternate version of Hasbro’s Scrabble that when it disappeared, it was sorely missed. Thankfully it returned as Lexulous, and Hasbro has implemented its own fantastic iteration called — wait for it — Scrabble. But it was the moment that Scrabulous died that signified how important and cherished Facebook apps are to users. They’re easy to install, fun to use, and a great way to pass the time. In just five short years, Facebook has become a household name for communication. It has captured the minds and hearts of a generation and turned into a phenomenon unlike what its creators could have expected. So three cheers for Facebook, and to another great five years.
5 Feb
As Facebook hits its fifth birthday on Wednesday, it’s nearly impossible to find a recent news story that doesn’t refer to its growth with terms like “lightning-fast,” “exponential,” “skyrocketing,” or some other expression that would be quite at home in a space-age comic book from the 1950s.
That might be true now. And with an executive lineup sourced from Bay Area elite (including a handful of former Google leaders), high-profile conferences and parties, not to mention developer “hackathons” all over the world, it has all the makings of a landmark Silicon Valley craze. But don’t let that fool you: Facebook owes its early growth, and hence the foundations for its wildfire expansion of late, to its roots in a more buttoned-up tradition of the East Coast elite. The site’s conservative, calculated debut and blueblood allure were what sowed the seeds for Valley success.
Facebook’s origins at Harvard University, created over many dorm room all-nighters on the part of founder Mark Zuckerberg and his friends, are tech press canon by now. They have surfaced in dozens of magazine and newspaper articles, the occasional courtroom spat, and now apparently a book penned by Bringing Down The House author Ben Mezrich. What’s not talked about as often is that when Facebook, then called TheFacebook, made its quiet debut early in February 2004, it was just another entrant in a pack.
That was the same academic year that some colleges and universities launched online “facebooks” of their own as supplements to the paper directories that were then a staple in dorm rooms across the country. Plus, entrepreneurially minded students at a number of colleges, including several at Harvard in addition to Zuckerberg, were trying to best their alma maters by doing the same thing.
“When Facebook launched, the first week at Harvard was incredible because the adoption was through the roof,” said Sam Lessin, founder of start-up Drop.io, who was a classmate of Zuckerberg at the time, “and this was in the context of a lot of stuff other people had been doing online, including quote-unquote social-networking sites. The beauty of the product was that it was super simple and super easy to use.”
In keeping with its roots at one of the world’s most selective universities, Facebook’s initial allure was not that everyone had a profile, but that not everyone could have a profile.
When Zuckerberg and his team first launched the site, it was restricted to their fellow students at Harvard University. Then it began to roll out to the rest of the Ivy League and other prestigious universities: Stanford, Yale, and Columbia were the first three, in March 2004. A valid e-mail address from a participating school was required to sign up.
From a technical standpoint, this was smart because it allowed Facebook to manage its growth, avoiding overloaded servers and skyrocketing bandwidth bills. On the PR side, however, exclusivity fueled Facebook’s early buzz. MySpace, at the top of the social-networking heap at the time, was the massive nightclub where you might spot celebrities from afar. Facebook was the quiet cocktail lounge a few blocks away that required a password, but where you could be sure to see all your closest friends.
“There was a cachet to it. Everyone wanted in, and wanted to see what it was and how it worked,” Lessin said. When the site launched at a new school, he added, “you’d have this incredible initial bump of people who had heard about it and seen clippings or articles about it, and were excited to jump on board.”
With the exception of a short-lived file-sharing side project called Wirehog, Facebook’s team kept the site a purely networking-focused tool at the start. Although you’ve been able to “poke” your friends from day 1, the original Facebook had none of its current media- and information-sharing features; initially, you couldn’t even add friends from other participating schools, just your own.
But Facebook grew, both in accessibility and in flashiness. Members could start registering with e-mail addresses from corporations rather than just universities. It launched a photo album application that now hosts more than 10 billion pictures.
The “news feed” feature launched in September 2006, shortly before Facebook announced that it would let anyone join the site, setting off a brief wave of privacy-conscious member panic before becoming one of the site’s defining functions.
Then there was the developer platform, which hit the scene in May 2007 with the first of Facebook’s now-ubiquitous “hackathons.” Even after relocating from Boston to Palo Alto, Calif., and in spite of a billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo, Facebook hadn’t enjoyed much real “tech cred.” The platform changed that.
Creating a Facebook application soared to the top of Web companies’ priority lists, and even though Facebook’s traffic had started to take off when open registration launched the previous fall, this was when it really escalated.
With Facebook now five years old and reaching more than 150 million members worldwide, it comes into question whether it has abandoned those austere New England roots and that strategy of calculated growth in favor of Silicon Valley’s get-big-now attitude.
The Facebook Connect product lets third-party sites use Facebook’s log-in credentials for the first time, something that’s put it back at the forefront of the developer community. It’s also caught on in many countries outside the United States, with a big majority of its new registrants now overseas. That brings both technological implications–server power outside the States can be especially expensive–as well as political ones.
And no regular reader of tech blogs can avoid the constant coverage of Facebook’s ongoing search for a solid revenue model, the ultimate Valley narrative of struggle and all-too-frequent failure. But in a post on the company blog late on Tuesday, founder Zuckerberg hailed Facebook’s iterative nature and go-forth attitude, something that has become increasingly prominent since its westward journey into the Valley’s upper echelon.
“Building and moving quickly for five years hasn’t been easy, and we aren’t finished,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The challenge motivates us to keep innovating and pushing technical boundaries to produce better ways to share information.”
What Zuckerberg and his hundreds of employees ought to keep in mind is that even though Facebook’s willingness to change and evolve has been key to its success, so has its awareness that change should be steady and pragmatic. When Facebook moved too fast, as with the launches of the News Feed and the Beacon advertising program, members freaked out.
“They’ve built this incredible, incredible product that’s just incredibly successful and valuable and useful, but really, its roots were just super simple and super local,” Lessin reflected on Facebook’s early days. “Because they were able to do that, and grow in a very controlled way, by the time they really wanted to turn things on, they were able to.”
It’s like they always say: never forget where you came from.
Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline.
The Manilla Folder 
Recent Comments