Facebook’s Rival?

WASHINGTON (AFP) – – Four US students who launched a new social networking site called “Diaspora” are stressing its ease of use and stricter privacy policy, in a bid to make waves in a field dominated by Facebook.

The version available to software developers since Wednesday is giving outsiders an opportunity to work on applications within its framework, ahead of a public launch due at a yet undisclosed later date.

“This is now a community project and development open to anyone with the technical expertise who shares the vision of a social network that puts users in control,” said the founders at the project site http://www.joindiaspora.com.

Billed as the “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network,” New York University programmers Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy showed off the site’s sleek white and gray interface with icons representing users, much like on Facebook.

Emphasis on privacy appears as a direct pull for the many complaints made about its giant rival in the field, and may serve as a tool to attract discontented users from Facebook’s half-billion-strong population.

To set up Diaspora, the students made an appeal in May for donations through the site Kickstater.com, a platform for projects to find investors.

Successful in their efforts, the founders collected over 200,000 dollars, including input from, mysteriously, Facebook boss and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

New Zealand jobseekers disapprove of social media vetting

Employers in New Zealand are using social media profile as part of the hiring process. Is this the way employers are hiring in the future?

http://www.humanresourcesonline.net/news/21246

Mobile Devices, Social Networking and Facebook’s Privacy Snafu

When I read that Apple iPad reaches 1 million sales faster than the iPhone, I guess the world is more than ready for mobile devices. You may know that tablet computing is not exactly a new technology. Microsoft have tried in the past and failed, but somehow the people at Apple has got it right.

Besides the technology and design of the iPad could factors such as the emergence on social networks have an influence to make it a winning formula? Or could saving the environment and convenience that it provide has something to do with it? I sure would love to read my ebooks and newspapers on the iPad if I have the choice. It is a lot easier than flipping through the morning papers in the subway without hitting someone in the face.

Because iPhone screen may not be big enough and it may not always be convenient to boot up a notebook (I know I have been in that situation many times), mobile device like this can make it easier to be constantly connected to catch up with the most up-to-date news in Twitter or Facebook. The latest stock market news or development of the oil spill, because BP turns to Twitter and Facebook, are literally at your fingertips. All these while chatting with friends on Facebook or running through emails.

Talking about Facebook, their privacy issue may still need more tweaking especially when it exposed users chats briefly. You can read about it more at Facebook privacy snafu exposed users chats.

How To Generate Buzz On Social Networks

There are so many social networks around right now to name. And I could not believe the amount of accounts that my buddy has signed up. Sometimes I do wonder how he keep up with all of them, if he did.

Sure social networking is fun and you get to meet nice people and even meet people that you thought that you have lost contact with since high school. But there are more to that. Businesses are using social networking sites to get their “fans” and clients together to talk about them online.

These are generally done online through social networking sites like Facebook, Friendster etc. Things have gone mobile ever since, and I am not just talking about mobile versions of Facebook, Friendster etc. There is a relatively new social network known as FourSquare. It uses GPRS/WiFi and GPS to locate your mobile device and lets you virtually “check-in” at your location. You can then find people around you and leave a comment about your location, say a café for instance.

I know it sounds a little geeky but here is an article about Creating Buzz On Social Networks.

Facebook Privacy Issues … Again

After much negative publicity about their privacy issues. Facebook’s CEO finally decided to speak up on his blog, followed by the change on the site. Here are the two links detailing the issues :

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook blog : http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=391922327130

The New Privacy Guide : http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php

Facebook To Make Privacy Settings Simpler

Facebook has certainly been in the spotlight lately in regards to its privacy issue. So what a CEO to do when that happens? He speaks to the press, The Washington Post to be exact.

More at : Facebook CEO: We Will Add Simpler Privacy Controls

From camp to couple through Facebook

This article shows that there is more to Facebook than just poking your friends, using it for business purposes, and for entertainment purposes. There lives that has been changed because of it.

Read more at From camp to couple through Facebook

Facebook Shared Personal Data With Advertisers Without User Consent

Facebook, the giant social network now under fire over its privacy practices, has been sending personal information to online advertising companies without its users’ consent, according to a Harvard Business School professor who filed a letter of complaint with the Federal Trade Commission Thursday.

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/awSPTP

Magazines to sell subscriptions via Facebook

GLOBAL – Synapse, a division of Time Inc, is collaborating with e-commerce developer Alvenda to allow Facebook users to buy print magazine subscriptions via Facebook news feeds.

The system, which Alvenda expects to make live in July or August, will also allow Facebook users to expand those blurbs of magazine content that are now common in the news feed into full articles, complete with advertising without leaving the news feed.

Facebook users that share a magazine article link with their friends will have the option of expanding the item into a full article with ads and an option to subscribe.

Fast-growing Facebook aims for more social Web

(Reuters) – Facebook’s user base is growing at its fastest rate ever, the online social network company said on Wednesday as it rolled out features that link the company’s platform more tightly with outside Web sites.

Facebook’s “open graph” would let people see information tailored to their lives and interests wherever they are on the Web, the company’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the f8 conference in San Francisco.

The idea, Zuckerberg said, is to make Facebook the center of the increasingly social and more personalized experience that people encounter when they use the Internet. Facebook also wants to make it easier for other websites to share information across Facebook’s user base of more than 400 million people.

“We’re building toward a Web where the default is social, every application and product will be designed from the ground up to use real identity,” he said.

Facebook users would be able click on a “like” button next to content on sites such as Time Warner Inc’s CNN and Walt Disney Co’s ESPN, and share the information on their Facebook profiles in a better way than the “share” button that many sites use.

Those sites in turn could display content from a Facebook user’s network. For example, a box on CNN.com could show that three friends “liked” a certain story.

Facebook has also partnered with review site Yelp and music discovery service Pandora, to enable more widespread sharing of users’ preferences across those sites.

In addition, Facebook and Microsoft, which owns a small piece of the social network, are launching a document creation and sharing application, based on Office 2010, that can be accessed through Facebook and an outside site.

Facebook, which has faced criticism for sharing too much user information, deflected questions about privacy concerns.

In a press conference following the keynote, Zuckerberg said applications on third-party sites will share no more information than before.

“I think what this actually means is that people are going to be sharing less of their information when they don’t need to around the Web,” he said.

GROWING FAST

Since its creation in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, Facebook has emerged as one of the Internet’s most popular destinations and is increasingly challenging established Web powerhouses like Yahoo Inc and Google Inc.

Facebook is the fourth-most visited site in the United States, and displaced Google in January to become the top U.S. site by total number of Web pages viewed.

Facebook’s event comes a week after rival social networking sensation Twitter held its developer’s conference in San Francisco, and announced that it had signed up more than 100 million users — marking the first time the company has revealed its number of users.

In September, Facebook said that it had recently turned free cash flow positive, meaning that it makes enough money to cover operating costs and capital spending.

Facebook director Mark Andreessen also told Reuters last year that the company would surpass $500 million in revenue in 2009.

Last year, Facebook received $200 million in funding from Russian Internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, in a deal that pegged the value of Facebook’s preferred shares at $10 billion. DST also bought more than $100 million of common shares directly from Facebook shareholders, valuing Facebook’s common shares at $6.5 billion.

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway. Editing by Maureen Bavdek and Robert MacMillan)

Fast-growing Facebook aims for more social Web