Webware

It's been a Monday of social-media security embarrassments: Twitter has confirmed the existence of a bug that can force one user to follow another.

The bug appears to have originally been noticed by a Turkish blog, followed by the blog Webrazzi, which successfully tested it out and forced the Twitter accounts of industry luminaries like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Evan Williams to follow a dummy profile. The flaw allowed members to add followers to their own accounts, basically, by tweeting "accept" followed by "@" and any given Twitter user name.

Twitter spokesman Sean … Read more

With Facebook's security and privacy standards under fire from all sides, suffice it to say that this is not a good time for one of the company's investors to fall for a Facebook phishing scam.

On Saturday evening, a Facebook event invitation was sent to some of the over 2,300 friends of Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners venture capitalist who sits on Facebook's board of directors, asking "Would you like a Facebook phone number?" As it turned out, this was a scam: Users who entered their passwords in response to the spoof message from … Read more

One month after an executive shakeup that saw the departure of CEO Jay Adelson, social-news site Digg announced that it is laying off around 10 percent of its employees. That amounts, most likely, to fewer than a dozen people.

"This is one of the hardest decisions we've had to make recently but we strongly believe that it is the right decision for the long-term health of the company," founder Kevin Rose, who took over for Adelson, said in an e-mail to employees that was subsequently posted to the company blog. "In order to achieve our goals, … Read more

Some Facebook users' live chat messages and pending friend requests were briefly visible to their contacts this week, as the result of a bug in the massive social network's "Preview My Profile" feature. Facebook confirmed the contents of a video posted to TechCrunch Europe on Wednesday that demonstrated the flaw, and has temporarily disabled its live chat software, but denied that it was a large-scale security problem.

What exactly happened in the video? Facebook's privacy settings offer a feature called "Preview My Profile," which lets you type in the name of someone on your … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--With a new tool called Spindex, Microsoft's Future Social Experiences Labs division is diving into a niche where many have failed: social-media aggregation.

Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft's FUSE labs, unveiled the tool onstage here at the Web 2.0 Expo on Tuesday afternoon, saying, "we kind of call it the impossible project."

Spindex will launch with an array of data that isn't typically found in a social-network feed dashboards like Seesmic or TweetDeck--a genre of app that has been thrown into limbo in the wake of Twitter's decision to launch official mobile and eventually desktop clients. … Read more

Since quoting Twitter posts is all the rage in journalism these days, Twitter's launching an official way to do it.

According to its Twitter Media blog, on Tuesday, the company will either unveil, launch, or roll out (they're being awfully coy about it) a way to embed tweets on third-party sites with a bit of HTML.

"No, really. It's very simple," the blog post explained. With "just a snippet of code, you'll be able to use to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets."

It'll look like a screen-grabbed image of a tweet, … Read more

Two nonprofit groups with a history of criticizing Facebook's privacy policies put out splashy messages on Friday to voice their opposition to the social network's latest changes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a timeline of Facebook's privacy policy modifications over the years, and liberal activist group MoveOn.org launched a Facebook group called "Facebook, respect my privacy!" in response to its new "Instant Personalization" option that shares a significant amount of profile data.

The two groups' tactics are somewhat different. But like a cadre of U.S. senators who have recently raised concerns … Read more

Twitter announced Friday that it's made another small acquisition: Cloudhopper, a start-up that makes it easier to connect to mobile text-messaging (SMS) carrier services around the world. The two founders of Cloudhopper, which had already been partnering with Twitter, will join the company full time.

This is key for Twitter as the company attempts to make inroads in communities where cellular data access and smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry are less common. But Twitter's history with SMS has been spotty: High costs initially forced Twitter, which only just unveiled a concrete business model, to disable text-messaging functionality in a number of countries. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the company's F8 developer conference on Wednesday to unveil what he said is "the most transformative thing we've ever done for the Web." It's called the Open Graph.

There was no introduction: Zuckerberg just walked onstage in jeans, sneakers, and a black hoodie and started talking about Facebook's past F8 launches. In 2007, it was the original Facebook Platform. In 2008, it was Facebook Connect.

There are now more than 400 million people on Facebook, four times as many as there were the last time … Read more