The Social

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's been a matter of days since Facebook's new privacy controls went into place, and the company is already making modifications in response to user complaints that they expose too much information. Namely, the company has made it easier to prevent people from seeing who your friends are.

For one, Facebook no longer makes a link to a list of your friends publicly available, and it has added an option for members who want no one at all--including other friends--to see their connections. Third-party applications, however, can still access it.

"In response to your feedback, we've improved the Friend List visibility option," an update to Facebook's blog post about the new privacy settings read. "Now when you uncheck the 'Show my friends on my profile' option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won't appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications."

Facebook's reasons for making this move likely have something to do with the fact that it wants to be a safe place for professionals: in some fields of work, people may be uncomfortable with basically opening up their Rolodexes. There was a high-profile incident that highlighted these potential pratfalls of making one's Facebook friend list publicly available: Business Insider revealed earlier this week that Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne was keeping a list of journalists covering the company as well as their professional connections found through Facebook.

The new privacy settings give members more control over how much they share in general, but they additionally encourage them to make more content public as the site moves from a closed-off, login-required site to a potentially huge player in the new real-time search craze. But the company remains under pressure from not only its 350-million-plus users, but also lawmakers in multiple countries who have voiced concerns about how much the company is doing to protect users' privacy.

Not willing to let Facebook and Twitter completely own the market for searchable, up-to-the-minute information, MySpace announced on Wednesday a set of new developer application programming interfaces (APIs) designed to let third-party sites access more of its content.

The new APIs offer a variety of features: letting third-party sites tap into MySpace members' status and "mood" updates, incorporate real-time activity information (this is something we saw implemented earlier this week in Google's real-time search announcement), upload photos to MySpace from external services, and make public MySpace content more searchable.

Developer announcements used to come out of MySpace regularly as it tried to keep up to speed in what used to be a close race with Facebook for social-networking mindshare. These days, MySpace has been focused more on restructuring: with its traffic increasingly eaten up by the fast-growing Facebook, the News Corp.-owned social site assembled a new executive team with solid entertainment industry experience and chose to put entertainment front and center instead. It's launched a streaming music service, buying several smaller rivals in the process, and is putting the MySpace Music product front and center.

In fact, word has it, MySpace will likely be adopting the Facebook Connect log-in standard soon, in a move that further indicates it's given up the battle for social-networking market share and hopes to promote its content offerings instead. Wednesday's developer announcements, made in conjunction with the Le Web conference in Paris, play right into the revamped MySpace strategy: it's about getting that content further out onto the Web.

The question, then, is whether developers will bite. To provide an incentive, MySpace has launched a developer contest running until January 4 to find the best implementation of the new APIs.

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.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put out an "open letter" to the site's massive membership on Tuesday, explaining the site's revised privacy controls that are finally going into effect after being announced this summer, and additionally announcing the milestone that the site has reached 350 million active users around the world.

But CEOs are notoriously deft with spin, and Zuckerberg is a clever fellow. So, luckily, CNET has translated his entire letter for you! In italics are Zuckerberg's words. Below are the ones we found to be an appropriate substitution after extensive research, experimentation, and a little inspiration from a fluffy-white-cat-stroking supervillain.

It begins.

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

What he means: "We are taking over the freaking world. Eat it, MySpace."

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

What he means: "I KNOW ALL YOUR SECRETS. But I promise I won't tell that ex-girlfriend of yours whom you chucked onto Limited Profile setting after she dumped you even though I totally know you check up on her profile every three days because I know everything. Have you met my fluffy white cat?" OK, well, maybe that's a little bit fanciful.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks"--communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

What he means: "Some of my Harvard classmates wanted to brag that they get to live in Buenos Aires or Sydney. Or that they wanted to find hot girls who lived nearby. That worked for a while."

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

What he means: "I could be deceptively upfront and say that this was just getting messy and that it makes little sense for millions of you with only a passport in common to be grouped under the same label. But let's be honest. I am simply preparing you for the day in the not-so-distant future when you all willfully renounce your national affiliations and become citizens of the Grand Republic of Facebook. And I shall be your Fearless Leader. Did I mention I own a white fluffy cat?"

We're adding something that many of you have asked for--the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

What he means: "It's taken a while to get this out of the gates. But you'll dig it. When we launched privacy controls that let you see who sees what on your profile, a lot of you already had big friends lists (because you are totally addicted to my brilliant creation). So we're making it all less messy. And now you'll also be able to be more specific about controls on content, like letting your mom have access to the 'note' where you talk about how much you love her chocolate chip cookies but not the one where you ask for all your friends' phone numbers because you got crunked and dropped your iPhone in the toilet.

More importantly, this means that I can hand-pick which of you get to see each video of my white fluffy cat that I upload. Wait till you see the one where he chases a laser pointer! YouTube would die for it!"

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you're finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you're done you'll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

What he means: "We know the indoctrination process can take some time. So we'll be patient with you, minions."

We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online."

What he means: "The press loves to write about it when some numb skull puts all his Halloween party photos on Facebook and his boss sees them and sacks him. And that scares everybody and makes Facebook look less like the future of the open and connected social graph and more like an oozing vat of scandal and danger. I don't want that and neither does my white fluffy cat. So, please don't be stupid."

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

What he means: "My work here is complete. Now, Elliot, have you located the map of all the air vents in Twitter's new headquarters that are large enough to accommodate a mutant panther-raccoon hybrid?"

Disclaimer: CNET is unable to confirm whether Mark Zuckerblofeld, uh, I mean Mark Zuckerberg, actually owns a white fluffy cat.

Also, this post is not intended to be taken seriously.

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."