Facebook users are too willing to give out their personal information, security firm Sophos has found.
According to Sophos' Australian team, which conducted a study to see how likely Facebook users were to offer up personal information, 41 to 46 percent of the 100 people Sophos contacted "blindly accepted" friend requests from two fake Facebook users created by the security firm.
After becoming friends with Sophos, the security firm was able to access up to 89 percent of the users' full dates of birth, all of their e-mail addresses, where they went to school, and more. Half of all the users Sophos befriended displayed the town or suburb where they live. They even offered up information on family and friends.
Younger users were "more liberal" with their workplace or school information than older users. "Both groups were very liberal with their e-mail addresses and with their birthdays," the security firm wrote in a blog post Sunday announcing the results. "This is worrying because these details make an excellent starting point for scammers and social engineers."
The security firm added that "10 years ago, getting access to this sort of detail would probably have taken a con-artist or an identify thief several weeks, and have required the on-the-spot services of a private investigator. Sadly, these days, many social networkers are handing over their life story on a plate."
Sophos' concerns over the way Facebook users are keeping information private comes on the heels of a statement released last week by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg discussing why Facebook users need to use the privacy tools his company has created. On Sunday, Facebook also announced the formation of a safety advisory board, comprised of five Internet safety groups.
MySpace's rumored adoption of Facebook Connect could be happening in the near future--as soon as early 2010, Inside Facebook reports.
MySpace and Facebook have historically been rivals, with Facebook having ousted MySpace from their spot as the top social network, but their relations have been of a friendlier nature as of late. It appears as though MySpace has effectively given up on winning the social-networking war and is instead focusing on its already strong entertainment business, which includes the market leader, MySpace Music.
The extent of MySpace's Facebook Connect integration isn't yet known, but it is expected initially to leverage MySpace's media content, like music. This news comes right on the heels of Yahoo announcing a massive Facebook Connect implementation across all of its sites. Facebook and Google are currently battling it out for the Web identity crown. With Yahoo and MySpace out of the race, 2010 should prove to be an interesting year as Facebook and Google both try to carve out pieces of the market.
Onetime social-networking pioneer Friendster unveiled a new design on Thursday, and it's focusing on the demographic that has kept it afloat for the past few years: the Asian youth market. And according to Reuters, Friendster may also be sold to a buyer in Asia by the end of the month for at least $100 million.
Yes, Friendster still exists. The first big social network to take off, it was surpassed by the likes of MySpace and Facebook, and its popularity in much of the world quickly faded. Now, it says it has 75 million registered users (no word on how many are active), and that 90 percent of its traffic comes from the Asia-Pacific region. It started offering translated versions of the site two years ago.
New to the revamped Friendster are a suite of features designed to capitalize on the social-gaming craze: a virtual currency, an array of games, and virtual gifts.
Friendster CEO Richard Kimber confirmed to Reuters that the company was shopping itself to buyers, and that investment bank Morgan Stanley had been hired to handle the sale and that the company is working with "a shortlist" of potential suitors. It won't be the first time it's been looking to sell: CNET reported in 2005 that investment bank Montgomery & Co. had been hired for the same purpose.
Kimber, a former Googler, joined Friendster last year right around the same time that it raised $20 million in venture funding in a round led by IDG Ventures.
To show support for the global fight against AIDS, both Google and Twitter changed up their sites a bit Tuesday.
If you go to Google.com, you'll find a link under the search box that leads to several resources where you can learn more about AIDS, volunteer to fight the disease, and donate money to fight AIDS. It's no small contribution to the cause--Google's home page is undoubtedly driving considerable traffic to all the organizations the company lists.
Twitter has turned red for World AIDS Day.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Twitter has introduced a more obvious change to its site. Whenever a user adds the hashtag #red to their tweets, the message they update their status page with will be displayed in red to followers. Users can also add the hashtag #laceupsavelives to turn their tweets red. The change is part of the Turn Red initiative, which aims at battling AIDS in Africa.
You can learn more about Join Red and the fight against AIDS on the organization's Twitter page.
Twitter has had quite a year. Not only has it attracted worldwide attention and millions of new users, "Twitter" has been named the top word in the English language for 2009.
According to the Global Language Monitor, which examines language usage across the world, "Twitter" beat out "Obama," "H1N1," "stimulus," and "vampire" to take the crown. Interestingly, "2.0" came in at sixth place.
"In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the aftereffects of a financial tsunami, and the death of a revered pop icon, the word 'Twitter' stands above all the other words," Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor, said Sunday in a statement. "Twitter represents a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters. Being limited to strict formats did wonders for the sonnet and haiku. One wonders where this highly impractical word-limit will lead as the future unfolds."
To compile its data, the Global Language Monitor uses its proprietary algorithm, called the Predictive Quantities Indicator. According to the company, the algorithm "tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet." It also monitors blogs and social media. Word frequency, contextual usage, and "appearance in global media outlets" contribute to a word's popularity.
Click here to see a full listing of the top words, phrases, and names of the year--and of the decade.
Facebook is changing the structure of its company stock to a dual-class system, a move that hints the company may be looking toward an initial public offering--even though it says it has no plans to do so yet.
Here's how it works. Existing Facebook shareholders currently have Class A stock. That'll be converted to Class B stock, which has 10 times the voting power of Class A. Should those shareholders sell their stock when Facebook goes public, they'll be converted back into Class A stock--otherwise, they'll stay the way they are.
The story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which added the detail that this stock structure change will give founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg more power unless he opts to sell stock during an IPO. But while Zuckerberg and other executives have said that they eventually plan to take Facebook public, they continue to say that there are no concrete plans for it. Two years ago, Zuckerberg said that it was "years out."
"This revision to the stock structure should not be construed as a signal the company is planning to go public," a statement from Facebook read. "Facebook has no plans to go public at this time."
Professional networking site LinkedIn's platform, previously a closed offering for select partners, has opened up to developers at large, according to an announcement Monday on the company blog.
Well, sort of. Building an embeddable widget on LinkedIn, unlike Facebook's, still requires a stringent application process. But LinkedIn's own code has now been opened up so that developers can integrate it into their own sites. It's launched a developer site for those interested in features that let site users access their LinkedIn profile and contacts externally. They still have to request a key to get into the platform's application program interface (API), which means that LinkedIn widgets likely will not be coming to office prank-calling Web sites any time soon, despite that they could make it much easier to robo-call your boss and ask if his refrigerator is running.
One of the first participants, for example, is desktop Twitter client TweetDeck, which says that it will soon allow users to plug in their LinkedIn contacts' status updates alongside Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace contacts.
LinkedIn has about 50 million users as of last count.
Twitter's geolcation API in action.
(Credit: Twitter/Birdfeed)Twitter has now launched the geotagging API, or application programming interface, that it announced in August.
Users now have the option to opt-in to geolocation by clicking a box in their settings menu, according to Twitter. For now, the company said, the impact of geotagging will be in third-party apps. Users won't see a difference to Twitter.com just yet.
Twitter contends that including a user's location when he or she tweets could significantly add to its microblogging service. The company wrote in a blog post that the new feature should allow users to "better focus in on local conversations."
Several third-party tools, including Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, and Twittelator Pro are already supporting geolocation, Twitter said. It should be interesting to see how other developers will incorporate location-based information into their apps.
Offerpal Media, one of the companies at the center of a bitter dispute over misleading advertisements on social networks, on Thursday launched a revised policy designed to "forbid any offers that are misleading, deceptive or otherwise objectionable."
Companies like Offerpal are enlisted by many of the big gaming companies built on social networks like Facebook; they help those companies make money by letting game players earn points and virtual goods by completing offers and surveys rather than paying real money.
They make a lot of money doing so. So do the game companies, like Zynga and Playfish (recently acquired by Electronic Arts), which in turn advertise heavily on the likes of Facebook to recruit new players.
But then the negative press started to emerge: many of these "free" offers and surveys actually had hidden costs attached to them that weren't adequately disclosed. Some companies like Zynga started backtracking and going so far as to ban offers altogether. Facebook and MySpace, the two biggest social-network platforms, made very public revisions to their policies. But the controversy continued, and both Facebook and Zynga were named as defendants in a federal class-action lawsuit.
Offerpal, which replaced its CEO amid the controversy, has now come out and said that while it's setting a basic standard for advertisement quality, game makers and publishers enlisting Offerpal's services can opt to be even more stringent. "Offerpal will rate all offers by quality and allow its partners to select a quality level of compliance ranging from 'Level 1' for minimal restrictions to 'Level 5' for highly conservative restrictions," a release explained.
Will the new restrictions keep angry bloggers and consumers--not to mention lawmakers--at bay? More importantly, are they going to amount to anything more than smoke and mirrors? We'll see.
YouTube might still reign supreme in online video, but the big surprise coming out of Nielsen's VideoCensus release on Thursday is that Facebook is now the world's third most popular place to view video online.
According to Nielsen's latest VideoCensus numbers, which look at the number of video views in October, YouTube serviced over 6.6 billion streams. In a distant second, Hulu offered up over 632 million video streams. But it was Facebook with over 217 million streams in October that easily beat out Bing, Yahoo, and several other online sites. In September, Facebook was ranked tenth in total streams.
In October, Facebook placed second in total number of unique viewers: over 31.5 million. YouTube had almost 106 million unique viewers during October. Hulu placed fifth with 13.4 million viewers.
According to Nielsen, the amount of time Web users spent viewing videos on social-networking sites increased 98 percent year over year. In October 2008, users watched 503.8 million minutes of video; they watched 999.4 million video minutes in October this year. That growth far outpaced growth in number of online video streams as a whole, which grew 26 percent year over year.
Facebook has moved its way up to third place.
(Credit: Nielsen)"During the past year, online video viewing has become central to the Web experience," Nielsen Vice President of Media Analytics Jon Gibs said in a statement. "In conjunction with this increase, we are seeing remarkable growth in video viewing on social networking sites and it is only natural that these two trends would converge in consumers' minds, making sites like Facebook and Myspace.com, increasingly important distribution points for both consumer and professionally generated video."
But it was Facebook, not MySpace, that led the way in video streams on social-networking sites, nearly tripling MySpace's 85.2 million streams during October.
According to Nielsen, the "total time spent viewing video on Facebook" grew by 1,840 percent year over year. The number of unique viewers grew 548 percent over the same period. Total streams increased by 987 percent year over year.
"Facebook's rapid growth in online video during the last year illustrates the site's evolution from simply a communications focused tool to a media portal," Gibs said. "Social networking sites are evolving from a venue for catching up with friends to a platform for personal expression, allowing consumers to share their experiences in the full variety of content formats available online."
