Webware

Earlier this week I wrote a post about how I didn't like that I couldn't alter the Facebook Connect privacy settings for updates from Foursquare, an iPhone app that shares my location through a GPS-enabled city directory. It didn't make sense to me that Facebook Connect information was automatically visible to anyone who had access to posts on my "wall," whereas privacy settings on a third-party app embedded directly on my profile were much more fine-tuned, allowing me to restrict them to specific subsets of friends.

I've been e-mailing back and forth with Facebook, and I've gotten some clarification on how the process works. Privacy controls for embedded apps aren't as simple as I'd thought. I can opt to block the "box" for a third-party game like Mafia Wars or Farmville, as the privacy controls indicate, but activity from those apps--i.e. if I just picked up a new weapon in Mafia Wars--will still show up to anyone who can see what I post on my Facebook wall, like status messages and new friend connections. (You can, however, block individual Platform apps from posting to your wall in the first place.)

"Activity from apps and Connect sites are grouped with the activity you take on Facebook (which then appears on your wall), all of which can be blocked from a select group of people using publisher privacy," Facebook representative Malorie Lucich explained to me via e-mail. "So, for example, if you don't want your boss seeing your Mafia Wars activity and your usual Facebook activity, you can block her/him from viewing your wall."

Everything on the wall, therefore, is treated as a single unit. Except not quite: With status messages and content posted directly through Facebook, as part of Facebook's new privacy controls there's now a drop-down menu that lets me choose exactly who can see that message--the public Web, friends of friends, only my friends or "networks," or stratified groups of friends. That's great, because I can post a status message asking for Christmas present suggestions, and opt to block it from my family or other potential gift recipients.

For third-party apps, I'm not so lucky. I'm sure I wasn't the only Facebook member who figured that blocking the Mafia Wars "box" from a certain list of friends would also block activity updates on my wall. According to Facebook, it doesn't.

I'm also sure I'm not the only one who would like to use Facebook Connect with a service like Foursquare that isn't normally public; I liked some of the comments that would appear on "check-ins" pushed to Facebook (when I checked into a restaurant, for example, a few people responded with their favorite menu items, and another asked about the variety of beers on tap). But wanting to keep them restricted to half or a third or a quarter of my Facebook friends is not always just a matter of privacy--the majority of my Facebook friends have no interest whatsoever in which coffee shop I just checked into on the likes of Foursquare or Gowalla, and out of courtesy I don't want to plaster it all over everyone's news feeds. I'd like Foursquare's implementation of Facebook Connect, theoretically, to only be visible to close friends and people who live nearby.

Facebook is, and should be, proud of the wealth of data that gets shared on members' "walls." On Friday morning, I used my status message to solicit tips for an upcoming tropical getaway, and got some terrific suggestions from people in my "social graph" whom I hadn't talked to in ages. This was a great example of something that I'd like to open up to my entire Facebook network. But when it comes to information that's local, sensitive, or otherwise private, I'd like to be able to restrict it. As Facebook Connect grows bigger and more diverse, these instances are likely to come up more often.

So if I had to come up with a most-wished-for new Facebook feature, this might have to be it.

YouTube is pushing its Facebook Connect integration further by allowing its users to see the videos that their friends share on Facebook. YouTube users had previously been able to find their Facebook friends on YouTube as well as update their Facebook profile with their various actions from the site.

While it's nice to see YouTube embracing Facebook more and more, it stops a bit short of being an impressive Connect implementation. YouTube is getting there, but seems to be lagging behind a little in this department. An implementation that shares, on Facebook, what you are watching, on YouTube, would certainly make sense, although it might clutter up users' Facebook profiles if they are a prolific YouTube watcher. For now, the addition of this new feature is a welcome inclusion and serves as a great way of getting trusted recommendations for videos to watch on YouTube.

YouTube's new Facebook Connect feature.

(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)

YouTube said this feature is in "test mode" for the time being. In my testing, I was not able to get this feature to actually work. This can be sometimes be expected while YouTube irons out the kinks with new features that aren't quite ready for prime time. If anyone has better luck, let us know in the comments.

Looks like Facebook will be throwing another big "F8" developer conference in the spring, after taking 2009 off. According to a sparse post on the company's developer blog, the event will be held April 21 and 22 in San Francisco. No more details are currently available.

"F8 has always been about empowering a community of developers to hack, to build and to delight users," the post reads. "We're looking forward to continuing this tradition at our third F8 in San Francisco on April 21-22, 2010. Please save the date!"

This is a big deal because Facebook's past two F8 conferences have marked the debut of some of its biggest products: in 2007, the groundbreaking Facebook developer platform, and in 2008, Facebook Connect. It's likely that the 2010 version will involve some kind of high-profile launch, too.

What could it be? The obvious possibility is Facebook's long-rumored payment platform or virtual currency system, which currently only powers the internal "gift shop" feature along with a few test developer apps and nonprofit partners. This is more or less Facebook's worst-kept secret: it's been in development for quite some time, but appears to have been repeatedly modified internally. Once said to be a straight-up PayPal competitor called "Facebook Wallet," the project has evolved to fall more in line with the meteoric rise in virtual goods-based social gaming, one of the biggest and most profitable runaway hits on Facebook's platform. It could also mean that Facebook starts to make some serious money from transaction fees and become a real power player in the e-commerce space.

Still, we don't know for sure. We'll keep you updated as more details become available about F8 2010 over the coming months.

This post was updated at 11:42 a.m. PST with a link to the post on Facebook's developer blog.

Privacy advocates opposed to new privacy regulations at Facebook are attempting to get the attention of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, according to a complaint filed Thursday on behalf of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and several allied groups.

"These changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook's own representations," the complaint says of Facebook's new regulations, which push more content public, and make even more data available to third-party applications and advertisers. EPIC's goal is to force Facebook to restore the old settings and add additional controls for members.

"We've had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes, and we're disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them," a retaliatory statement from Facebook read. "We're pleased that so many users have already gone through the process of reviewing and updating their privacy settings, and are impressed that so many have chosen to customize their settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of Facebook's user empowerment and transparency efforts. Of course, the new tools offer users the opportunity to decide on privacy with every photo, link, or status update they wish to post, so the process of personalizing privacy on Facebook will continue."

It's one thing when Facebook users start complaining about new features that they deem excessively creepy--just look at the outrage that surrounded the News Feed, now a mainstay of the site, when it launched in 2006.

It's a bigger fish entirely when government regulatory bodies get involved, particularly the FTC, which has major sway over the advertising and marketing industries. It was only when privacy groups flagged concerns about Facebook's Beacon advertising program two years ago that participating advertisers started to pull out amid bad publicity. A class action settlement over the Beacon program was resolved recently.

Since then, Facebook hasn't had a privacy-related debacle on the same scale. Much of the philosophy behind Beacon was baked into its Facebook Connect universal log-in tool, which shares information from third-party sites on Facebook profiles and lets users log into other sites with their Facebook credentials. But with the public-relations pitch geared toward making the entire online experience easier for users (fewer passwords to remember, no more registration headaches) rather than helping advertisers exploit social-networking channels, the debut of Facebook Connect wasn't subject to the same scrutiny.

The controversial new privacy standards at Facebook have been a long time coming, considering the fact that the social network started to publicly set the groundwork nearly six months ago with a series of announcements about modified privacy controls. It's clear that the company was trying to avoid the sort of press bloodbath that came after the debut of Beacon.

That didn't happen. Facebook has already backtracked on one component of its new privacy regulations, one which made users' friends lists publicly available. It's unclear as to how much EPIC's coalition, not to mention the FTC, will prioritize this most recent controversy.

Behind Facebook's traditional willingness to make tweaks and modifications to new features and products, if they spark some kind of concern among government regulatory bodies or marketers, is a fight that the company will not give up easily. What it all comes down to is that Facebook's once-watertight log-in wall--remember the time that representatives mulled banning a blogger who'd posted Facebook-hosted photos publicly?--is getting in the way of the social network's potentially central role in one of the digital world's crazes du jour, searchable real-time information.

Search companies have been announcing big deals to pull Facebook status messages and Twitter tweets into results, and the media business has gone nuts over the potential to harness the "real-time Web."

Facebook, dependent on advertising revenues and still looking to expand its base of more than 350 million users, obviously wants in on this. But if it doesn't have enough status messages, shared links, and other information pulled into search results, it stands a chance at losing ground to the much-smaller Twitter--already the top name, in terms of a massive, searchable clearinghouse for up-to-the-minute information.

Plus, there are marketers and advertisers for Facebook to consider: more search results equals more page views and more ad revenue, and more public information on users' profiles means more ways for the advertising industry to reach them. But if those same marketers and advertisers are the ones pressuring Facebook to change course, in terms of user privacy, it could cause some friction between the social network and the businesses that have finally begun to accept it as a choice destination for their ad dollars.

Now EPIC is alleging to the FTC that Facebook's new regulations can be outright dangerous: "Dozens of American Facebook users, who posted political messages critical of Iran, have reported that Iranian authorities subsequently questioned and detained their relatives," an item in the complaint reads. "Under the revised privacy settings, Facebook makes such users' friends lists publicly available."

That's not good PR for Facebook, which has repeatedly pitched itself as a destination for open dialogue and grassroots organization across zones of political and ethnic conflict.

Lately Google seems to have put forth most of the little niceties that turn forgetful, or otherwise inept, people into functional members of society. Late Wednesday Facebook rolled out one of its own features that falls within that category. Now those who are lucky enough to be in a relationship can plug in when their love affair began. Facebook will then send both of those users a reminder (in the form of an event) when it's coming up.

Facebook users in a relationship can now add in their anniversary dates in order to get Facebook to send yearly reminders.

(Credit: CNET)

Right now the feature has the same privacy level as a relationship, so if your friends can see it, they can also see the date. Although they will not be alerted to it the same way they are for something like a birthday--something Facebook says could eventually change.

Maybe this is the first step in Facebook creating something similar to its now-removed friends timeline feature, but for relationships, so that users will be able to get a chronological view of every relationship other users have had. Though in truth, this is likely just another way to make it easier to sell advertising for things like chocolates, flowers, jewelry and "sorry I missed our anniversary" cards.

We didn't know much about Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies before it invested $200 million in Facebook this spring. But it's been in the news a lot more recently: Russian newspaper Kommersant reported Thursday that the firm has purchased more Facebook stock, sending its stake in the massive social network past 5 percent at a $10 billion valuation. Its original stake was 1.96 percent. It's reportedly still looking to buy more.

A Facebook representative told CNET via e-mail that because it's a private company it opts not to discuss shareholder percentages.

According to the Russian-language publication (first referenced in English by Quintura), DST's increased stake comes from its offer to purchase employee stock as part of the buyback program announced this summer. It's continued to pay $14.77 per share, Kommersant added. But if DST's stake is indeed over 5 percent now, it's purchased far more than the $100 million originally stipulated in Facebook's terms (its total stake is now over $400 million, according to Kommersant).

That's not all DST has been up to. Earlier this week, social gaming company Zynga--arguably the most profitable company to grow out of Facebook's developer platform--announced that DST had led a $180 million funding round designed to "fuel Zynga's growth and...facilitate liquidity for employees and investors." It's a "passive investor," meaning that it will not take a seat on the company board.

"Our earlier investment in Facebook and now in Zynga underscores our premise that social networking and social entertainment will define the next generation of the web," DST head Yuri Milner was quoted as saying in a release from Zynga.

Additionally, earlier this month another Russian newspaper reported that DST was in talks to acquire ICQ, an instant-messaging service that AOL is looking to sell off.

This post was updated at 7:56 a.m. PT with comment from Facebook.

Facebook last Wednesday announced new privacy settings that give users some additional control over what information they share, while taking away the ability to hide a few pieces of information from the general public.

One particular piece of publicly available information--users' friends lists--caused a bit of an uproar from a number of sectors, including business people who don't necessarily want to expose their professional networks to the public and their competitors. It is also a concern to some parents who might not want their kids--or a list of their kids' friends--to be widely available.

Facebook quickly backtracked. A day later, the company announced on its blog that users can now uncheck the "Show my friends on my profile" option in the Friends box on their profile so that your friend list won't appear on your publicly viewable profile.

Unfortunately, they weren't very clear on exactly how you make the change. ... Read more

Mark Zuckerberg should be proud: The top search term of 2009, according to Experian Hitwise, was not "porn," "poker," or "Britney Spears." It was, for the first time, "Facebook."

In 2008, Facebook had been the tenth most searched term on the Web, according to the traffic company's annual survey of search queries.

The rest of the list for 2009 is also made up of "navigational" searches, which Hitwise reps say actually always dominate top search queries despite the common wisdom that top searches tend to be for online gambling or racy pictures. In spot No. 2 is last year's leader, "myspace," followed by "craigslist," "youtube," "yahoo mail," "google," "yahoo," "ebay," "facebook login," and "myspace.com." If you add up all four Facebook-related terms in Hitwise's top 300 search terms, they make up slightly over a percent of all searches on the Web. The #1 term alone accounts for 0.67 percent.

Meanwhile, searches for "porn" came in at No. 16. Britney, unfortunately, didn't crack Hitwise's top 300, but the most searched for celebrity was Michael Jackson at No. 95, and "Twilight" hottie Robert Pattinson came in at #221. (Hitwise representatives say that they are currently reevaluating the data to see if recently beleaguered golfer Tiger Woods has moved up in the rankings, too.)

Update at 2:10 p.m. PST: So where's "Twitter" on Hitwise's list? It's hanging in there at #56, the company says.

Exchange virtual currency

(Credit: Currency Connect)

Beginning in the first quarter of 2010, social sites IMVU and MyYearbook will launch a virtual currency exchange allowing users from either service to exchange currency between the sites.

Currency Connect is billed as a "cross property virtual currency exchange" system similar to how you would change U.S. dollars into euros if you were traveling in Europe. Users simply swap their currencies depending on what site they are on. Overall this is not a bad idea as I still find it surprising that users pony up real money for virtual money that can never be taken out of a specific site.

But, it does make me wonder when a bigger payments vendor, like PayPal, will get into the game and offer more of a de facto universal virtual. It's all well and good that two large-ish sites have launched this effort, but it can't be long before other social sites like Facebook join the fray. And, ultimately the site or currency with the most users is likely to be the one with the most users.

This opens up an opportunity for other sites with large user bases such as Google and Yahoo to offer a currency program. If users are already joining multiple social-networking sites, there is no doubt that they are also using search engines and instant messaging.

On the technical side, the service uses a simple set of REST APIs that implement the various checks and balances of the system. Security is maintained through tracking methods and server-to-server connections, which will initially limit how many sites can participate in the service. Again, a larger online service might have an easier time deploying a fully distributed, trusted service that didn't require point-to-point connections.

It's clear that virtual currencies have become an important part of social networking and gaming infrastructure. But, sooner or later fickle users will change their allegiances. A currency exchange offers a palatable escape method but still doesn't ever let you turn your virtual currency back into real money.

(Via VentureBeat)