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
Video hub Hulu now lets its members amass friends lists much like a standard social-networking service, the site said Thursday.
You can now invite friends from your e-mail address books or Facebook and MySpace accounts, and then see a feed of what your friends have been watching, commenting on, or subscribing to.
In the event that you find this creepy or don't want your boss to catch on to the fact that you watch reruns of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia all day long you can disable these activity-feed features.
The announcement comes in conjunction with the one-year anniversary of Hulu's public debut. To mark the occasion, the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture will introduce over the next week a "bevy of new shows, more seasons of user favorites, and classic cartoons and movies."
Also new: a sort of trends page with rankings of the most e-mailed, searched, and embedded videos, as well as editors favorites. Not surprisingly, Saturday Night Live is a huge hit, and the most-searched name on the site is "Palin."
On the less pleasant side of things, Hulu's one-year anniversary comes at a time when the site is dealing very publicly with the invariable old media-new media gulf: pressure from content owners caused the site to ax its support for buzzworthy video software maker Boxee earlier this month.
(Credit:
Buddywave)
Buddywave is a free Windows-only browser, based off of Internet Explorer with some MySpace functionality built in. You have access to a MySpace profile builder (which is incidentally the same one we covered in our Mashcodes post) and a messenger that lets you create groups and manage your MySpace friends more effectively. There's also the ability to instant message and a picture viewer.
I'd prefer Buddywave be an extension or toolbar, as I've gone so long using Firefox, it would literally cripple me to use a new browser--especially just for MySpace use. However, Buddywave might be the first real application to address the problem of friends management and communication for what's obviously become a rather taxed element of the popular social networking site.
For more, see TechCrunch's review or the Buddywave screencast.
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