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.

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

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.

Amid backlash, Facebook tries to save face

Facebook’s latest modifications make it pretty clear that the company is eager to spread its brand even further across the Web — and that’s left some privacy advocates a little freaked out as they look at the vast amount of personal information that Facebook has on hand.

But Facebook, of course, maintains that this is all ultimately good for the Internet and everyone on it, and that it’s in everyone’s best interest to jump on board:A post Tuesday on the Facebook developer blog explains that the new “social plug-ins” are now implemented on over 100,000 sites, and that they work.

Social plug-ins were one of Facebook’s big announcements at F8, the developer conference that the social network held last month.

They take its existing Facebook Connect product a few steps further by bringing users’ Facebook friends lists to external sites and showing them their friends’ activity. A news site, for example, could show which stories your Facebook contacts have been recommending and commenting on.

More at Amid backlash, Facebook tries to save face

Understanding Facebook’s privacy aftershocks

The social network modified its policies for handling user data once again as part of its F8 conference and release of the Open Graph API, and ever since it became clear that more information is being set as public by default and more is being shared with third parties, concerned Facebook users have been on jittery alert, perhaps prone to overreaction, concerned that something even bigger may be about to change.

More at Understanding Facebook’s privacy aftershocks

HOW TO: Get Notified When Someone Hacks Your Facebook

Facebook just announced a tool that notifies you by e-mail or SMS text message when someone logs into your Facebook profile from an unknown computer.

The idea is to help you recognize when a hacker has broken into your account so you can respond quickly by either changing your password (if that’s still possible) or contacting Facebook.

More at HOW TO: Get Notified When Someone Hacks Your Facebook

Any Way It’s Sliced, Appeal of Social Media Grows

Following my earlier post, it is still undeniable that social media appeal is still on the rise. Facebook is not the only one around. Sure it is the most popular, but there are many others that you are probably using. Individuals and corporations are jumping into the bandwagon to create and be part of the buzz online.

You’ve heard of Meetup, the online social networking portal? A couple of consumer marketers are bringing out campaigns that could be called “meatups.” More at Any Way It’s Sliced, Appeal of Social Media Grows

Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook

Facebook, ah yes, another story about this social networking tool. There are some people who use them regularly (I’m one of them), and there are some that completely avoid it like a plague. I personally think it is a balancing act of knowing what to share out there. Not an easy task especially when there are changes in the privacy settings that were sneaked in every now and then. More often than not, I miss those changes until I read about them somewhere.

There are 4 nerds in NYC who are frustrated with these changes and are taking their own steps by starting something on their own. Read more about it here : Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook

How to Opt Out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization

Here’s another story about Facebook and it’s privacy issue. It is pretty hard to keep track with the changes sometimes but I will try to keep up and share with you whatever news that comes my way.

This week, Facebook introduced the “open graph,” a giant expansion of the “social graph” concept on which Facebook is built. The word “open” alone should be a tip-off that there are significant new privacy issues to weigh.

In the open graph, Facebook sees us as connected not just to other people – our friends — on Facebook, but to myriad things all over the Web. These things could be favorite bands, news outlets or restaurants.

Confused? Read more about it here How to Opt Out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization

Five hidden dangers of Facebook (Q&A)

Facebook claims that it has 400 million users. But are they well-protected from prying eyes, scammers, and unwanted marketers?

Not according to Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online.

She says your privacy may be at far greater risk of being violated than you know, when you log onto the social-networking site, due to security gaffes or marketing efforts by the company.

Facebook came under fire this past week, when 15 privacy and consumer protection organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, charging that the site, among other things, manipulates privacy settings to make users’ personal information available for commercial use. Also, some Facebook users found their private chats accessible to everyone on their contact list–a major security breach that’s left a lot of people wondering just how secure the site is.

Read more via Five hidden dangers of Facebook (Q&A)