facebook

As I highlighted recently, the British Government is becoming increasingly concerned that its younger officials are leaving the tools of their trade in vulnerable places.

Government laptops have been stolen from cars.

Now news emerges of a Senior Adviser to Prime Minister Gordon Brown losing his Blackberry.

Shortly after dropping his trousers.

Perhaps this sounds like one of those London stage farces so beloved of aging couples whose relationship is fueled by little love and much gin and tonic.

Perhaps it is.

London's Sunday Times reported that an exalted British Government functionary has already admitted that the incident, which … Read more

Social-networking giant Facebook has filed a copyright infringement suit against a German counterpart, according to the Financial Times.

StudiVZ is accused of "copying the look, feel, features and services" of Facebook, including its "wall" feature, according to the complaint filed Friday in California, the Financial Times reported.

The suit asserts that the sites are so similar that StudiVZ simply replaced Facebook's "blue color scheme with a red one."

According to StudiVZ's site, the Berlin-based company has 10 million users. The site was purchased last year by German publisher Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. … Read more

My favorite IM application, Trillian, has just put out a brand new build of its upcoming Astra product for alpha testers. New are Facebook notifications and quick shortcuts to jump straight to things like photo galleries and user profiles. Sorely missing from that, however, is Facebook's chat, which is what I think many Trillian users have been pining for (myself included). Free competitor Digsby has had Facebook chat integration since the beginning of May, shortly after the service was launched.

Scott Werndorfer, co-founder and head developer of Trillian, tells me his team is waiting on proper XMPP (Extensible Messaging … Read more

Only a year ago, there was a huge buzz around Facebook's new application platform. Big money was made by some, while others simply threw together whatever they could and released it to the masses in the hopes of being the next iLike.

Today, the Facebook platform is alive and well, but the hot new platform is the iPhone. People are lining up for hours to get their hands on one, and developers see dollars in those lines: Unlike with Facebook apps, you can charge for iPhone software, and developers keep 70 percent of the money collected through Apple's app store.

One of the 550-plus new iPhone applications was Facebook's own, a slightly amped-up version of the Web-based Facebook for iPhone Web site introduced late last year. It's more useful than than the mobile Web site, but it's still watered down from its desktop cousin, with just a contact list and a chat app. Notably missing are the other Facebook applications that have helped make the social network such an appealing service for both users and developers.

It would make sense if the next step for the Facebook platform was a mobile version--something where whatever you developed would work on both desktop and mobile devices, starting with the iPhone and later Android. In that regard, Facebook's mobile iPhone application is only the beginning, and just a preview of what's to come.

I think we'll see at next week's F8 event a product or service that will help developers shrink down their applications to fit into Facebook's mobile application framework. It's a move that goes squarely against Apple's engrained apps marketplace by having developers spend resources on coding for Facebook instead of themselves; however, the result will be the augmentation of the mobile Facebook experience that's closer to what people have gotten accustomed to on their computers.

Facebook's UI has already begun to change to match the finger-friendly style. The latest profile refresh has moved the applications from a sidebar to different tabs--the same look can be found in Facebook's iPhone-optimized Web app. Such a style could easily be shrunk down to fit a smaller screen, whereas the old one could not.… Read more

One utterly moronic trend that is deservedly near death are the venture funds specifically for Facebook applications. The company has the ability to turn on/off any features it wants and can replicate any external application that it sees as successful. Being totally dependent on that was risky from day one.

Open APIs or not, Facebook is not the internet. It's a site that wants to monetize it's users. Anyone who thought differently should certainly be singing a different tune.

From the Valleywag article:

On Thursday, Seattle-based mobile widgets maker Zumobi announced its graphics-rich application for BlackBerry. Originally developed for Windows Mobile phones, Zumobi's BlackBerry release marks the application's second platform appearance and hearkens a handful of other improvements.

As a widget organizer, Zumobi lets users add 16 "tiles" to the application's home screen. The number keys and pearl are used to navigate among the four quadrants, and then again among each remaining quadrant to arrive at the elected tile.

Each tile, created by partners, independent developers, or users online, serves an ad, ratings scale, forwarding link, and search … Read more

Facebook said on Wednesday that it fixed a hole that exposed the birth dates of members during a public beta of a new design for profile pages earlier this week.

Security company Sophos alerted Facebook to the problem and is suggesting that Facebook users input fake birth dates instead of real ones to prevent any similar problems going forward because of the risks from identity fraud.

"My advice to Facebook users would be, even if your data of birth is set to be non-visible, change it to a made-up date in case this kind of blunder happens again," … Read more

Scrabble is finally on Facebook. Officially. While the Scrabulous game has been online for a while and is wildly popular, it's had a sword hanging over its head since launch. Hasbro, owner of the Scrabble franchise, has threatened and tried to kill Scrabulous--while at the same time prepping to launch its own, official, Scrabble app on Facebook.

In conjunction with Electronic Arts, that official Hasbro Scrabble app is now up, in beta. How does it compare to Scrabulous? Pretty well. Too well, actually. While Scrabulous fans will see no reason to switch to the official Scrabble app, newcomers to … Read more

Depending on the day, the hour, the minute and the effects of my last pedicure, I change my mind about Facebook.

Why does Facebook think I may have changed something more?

My sex, for example.

I'm about as technical as the rules of Red Rover. I don't get particularly excited when someone invites me to bite their vampire or suck up their karma.

But I have had to seriously question myself and my life-choices when I received the following notice, splashed across my Facebook page.

It is headlined WHICH EXAMPLE APPLIES TO YOU?

The next line reads: Right … Read more