facebook

Facebook has made a deal with state attorney governors to better protect child members from online predators. The site is developing a system to ensure new members are telling the truth about their age, and they'll also add in an automatic warning ... to under-18s whenever they are about to give personal information to an adult. In addition, they'll crack down on members who change the date of birth listed on their profile. As with a similar agreement made earlier this year by rivals MySpace, only Texas decided against signing-up. It's not yet clear why they've opted out this time, but in the ... (view more)

Facebook appears set to settle a long-standing legal row over claims founder Mark Zuckerburg stole the idea for the site from Harvard colleagues. ConnectU, a site for keeping in touch with current and former college classmates, launched the lawsuit ... in question way back in 2004. Its founders, brothers Cameron and Tyler Vinklemoss and Divya Marenda, said Zuckerburg had taken the idea when he worked for them in 2003. This work involved setting up Harvard Connection, a dating site specifically for the university. The lawsuit claimed Zuckerburg deliberately took his time on the project because he ... (view more)

Sometimes, there's a good reason that the "privacy policy" has been placed almost invisibly at the bottom of the page, and that when you click on the link, it presents you with a mountain of microscopic legal-like gobbledygook in a document 24-pages ... long. The reason the policy is placed in a small, out-of-the-way location is simple: the site owners don't really want you to realize that you've just agreed to allow any information they collect about you or your PC to be distributed across the Internet for the rest of your life. But you'll miss that because you won't bother to read beyond the ... (view more)

MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, Friendster, Twitter and of course Facebook have changed the Internet. By leading the Web 2.0 charge, social networks have had a big influence on how we interact online. Last week, Google announced that it would join with Yahoo ... and MySpace to form the Open Social Foundation. The new group will work together to promote the application programming interface (API) OpenSocial. APIs are the source codes that programmers use to develop applications for use on social networking sites such as Facebook's SuperWall and Scrabulous. (Source: news.com ) The idea is to promote a ... (view more)

Got a thing for America's most glamorous gadabout? Then take a trip down Facebook lane, where a glitch in the social networking page has opened the door to very private pictures of Paris Hilton for anyone to see. A Canadian computer technician ... recently discovered that a freshly-implemented security measure was anything but secure. The new barrier, designed to prevent random profile visitors from flipping through personal photo albums, can easily be circumvented by simply guessing the ID of a photo. Surprisingly, Facebook never checked to make sure their new barricade actually validated ... (view more)

The head of Facebook is recovering from a disastrous on-stage conference appearance and the irony is that rival service Twitter made things far worse. Mark Zuckerburg was speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference and Festival, an ... annual event that recently added technology to its music and film remit. His appearance took the form of an interview conducted by technology journalist Sarah Lacy, a columnist for Business Week. She repeatedly interrupted Zuckerburg, asked 'softball' questions and even gave away news that Facebook is planning a French launch, an announcement he'd ... (view more)

Internet users are spending less time on social networking sites. Why? Because they are fed up with excessive advertising; although sites like Facebook and MySpace are still increasing their audience, the average time each user spends on the site is ... falling overall. The average MySpace visitor now spends 203.9 minutes on the site each month, while Facebook visitors are logged in for an average 172.1 minutes. Though Facebook has had more 'online buzz', its users appear to be getting bored with the various applications. Meanwhile, MySpace has copied some of the more popular Facebook features, ... (view more)

Love Facebook? Many do. The social networking site can officially be proclaimed the web's new number one phenomenon, drawing the young and old into a complex and entertaining framework that employs concepts from dating to games to, of course, ... photos. Unfortunately, all that popularity makes it a dangerous place -- a bit like downtown NYC -- and vulnerable to some pretty significant flaws. (Source: itbusiness.ca ) According to security analyst Elazar Broad, another critical vulnerability has been discovered in Facebook's Aurigma ImageUploader control. It's not the first problem to affect this ... (view more)

Toy firms Hasbro and Mattel have launched legal action to shut down the popular Facebook feature Scrabulous. The application allows users of the social networking site Facebook to play Scrabble against one another. Around two million people have ... used the feature, with almost 600,000 estimated to play it every day. It's an entirely unofficial game, and the toy companies have described it as a "gross copyright and trademark infringement". Though the feature doesn't specifically use the term 'Scrabble', there is no attempt to keep secret that it's based on the original board game. (Source: bbc. ... (view more)

Facebook has come under much scrutiny since its popularity exploded during 2007. With the year rounding out, we can think back to all the buzz created by a social networking site that asked for an individual's private details and then neatly handed ... them to Microsoft's advertising division. Questions of voyeurism and greed continue to dog Facebook. Now, a controversial study is examining the controversial web site. Researchers at Harvard University have decided that they'd like to know what the racial and ethnic interests of Facebook users might be. The analysts recently gained access to the ... (view more)