According to Facebook's new search feature, only two of my 526 friends like cats. Judging by the number of cat photos filling my feed every day, this is obviously not accurate ... read the FULL STORY.
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Ryan Block, the former editor in chief of Engadget and the co-founder of Gdgt wasn’t upset by Instagram tweaks that may have led millions to leave, nor was he bothered by the concerns about privacy that have dogged social networking giant for years ... FULL STORY.
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Facebook is the focus of a new protest after altering the terms of service on its photo-sharing site Instagram, allowing the social networking service to sell photos people have uploaded or related information. 
 It’s hard to tell whether Instagram will experience a massive outflow of users, but the backlash has been plentiful and harsh. FULL STORY.
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There's no easy way to look up someone's mobile-phone number. White pages? Nope. Directory assistance? Uh-uh.

It's something that drives telemarketers and pollsters crazy, as there are millions of people, especially young ones, who don't have any landlines and can't easily be reached by strangers.

But it turns out Facebook has been openly listing mobile numbers all along, as Indian security researcher Suriya Prakash discovered recently.

Needless to say, he wasn't happy about it.

"I would consider...

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Facebook wants you to advertise … to your friends.

The world’s largest social network, which announced Thursday that it has crossed the billion-user mark, has struggled to make money from its enormous pool of users. The solution: Turning individual users into advertisers.

“I thought it was a joke at first, to be honest,” explained Cameron Yuill, founder of digital media technology company AdGent. “Now they’re going to charge me $7 to tell my friends something?”

Facebook announced W...

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The trade commission says that Facebook must now submit to biennial privacy audits and obtain users' express consent before sharing information.
 
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has inked a final settlement with Facebook over the company's privacy practices.

Under terms of the settlement, Facebook has agreed to provide users with "clear and prominent notice" anytime their information is shared. But before that can happen, Facebook must obtain its users' "express consent" before sharing any i...

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NEW YORK, N.Y. - The Wall Street analysts who know Facebook best are giving the company's stock a mixed review. Think: like, not love.

It marked the end of the 40-day quiet period following Facebook's initial public offering. Analysts at banks that led the IPO were finally allowed to give public opinions on the stock, offering the first glimpse of what the IPO's underwriters really think about Facebook.

A flood of analyst reports from 33 banks gave Facebook's stock a mix of "Neutral" and "Buy" ...

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Facebook is launching a new type of mobile advertising that targets consumers based on the apps they use, pushing the limits of how companies track what people do on their phones. The social network is tracking the apps that people use through its popular Facebook Connect feature, which lets users log into millions of websites and apps as varied as Amazon.com, LinkedIn and Yelp with their Facebook identity. The company then targets ads based on that data, said people familiar with the company...
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In a big vote of no confidence before Facebook’s IPO, General Motors is pulling its ads from the platform, calling them “ineffective,” according to a Wall Street Journal report.  The automaker determined that its ads on the platform “had little impact on consumers,” according to the report, which cites “people familiar with the matter.” GM will continue to market via Facebook’s brand Pages, which, of course, are free.  The article quotes GM marketing chief Joel Ewanick as sayi...

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(CNN) -- Something strange happened Monday on the Internet.

Facebook -- the once-underdog social network founded by a kid in a hoodie in a dorm room -- may have officially cemented its status as a titan of the tech establishment it once challenged.

What changed? Facebook -- no longer a feisty startup but a 3,000-person, soon-to-be-public corporation with $3.9 billion in cash and an $85 billion to $100 billion valuation -- spent $1 billion to gobble up a much-smaller competitor, the photo-shar...

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LONDON –  Internet giant Facebook is accessing smartphone users' personal text messages, an investigation revealed Sunday.

Facebook admitted reading text messages belonging to smartphone users who downloaded the social-networking app and said that it was accessing the data as part of a trial to launch its own messaging service, The (London) Sunday Times reported.

Other well-known companies accessing smartphone users' personal data -- such as text messages -- include photo-sharing site Flickr,...

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Facebook is making headlines this week for a flaw that exposed personal photos marked private--including pictures of Mark Zuckerberg and his dog. The glitch is Facebook’s fault, and Facebook responded quickly to address the issue once it was discovered. But, don’t believe for a second that this is the last time private information will be exposed online--on Facebook, or anywhere else.

Privacy advocates like to paint Facebook as anti-privacy. I believe that Facebook has a thin line to walk...

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Are you hungry for a piece of the Facebook IPO? If so, then pull up a chair. There's plenty of room at the table ... because the other guests are fleeing.

This may come as a surprise to you. After all, for months all we've heard about this stock sale (whose actual sale date remains unknown) is that it's going to be the hottest thing since Google (GOOG). Valued at the stock prices quoted in private transactions on the stock sale website SecondMarket, Facebook was "worth" $52 billion in Februar...

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Fox News - Eight hundred million users are not enough. Facebook, the world's biggest social network, is now building profiles of non-users who haven't even signed up, an international privacy watchdog charges.

The sensational claim is made in a complaint filed in August by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner. It alleges that users are encouraged to hand over the personal data of other people -- including names, phone numbers, email addresses and more -- which Facebook is using to create ...

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Facebook is getting more heat over two controversial practices--tracking users after they log out and new automatic "frictionless sharing."

The tracking, done with cookies on users' computers, has prompted criticism from lawmakers and now a lawsuit, while privacy groups and regulators in Ireland are concerned about a new sharing feature that automatically posts user activities to news feeds without users intentionally doing so.

A blogger wrote last weekend that he discovered that his Web surfin...

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off some of the most drastic changes ever made to the company's service. And though Zuckerberg is excited by those changes, many folks across the Web aren't so quick to celebrate.

The fear among some users relates to what some say could become a potentially worrisome privacy situation on the social network, led by Timeline and changes to Open Graph.

Timeline provides users with a way to view "the story of your life," according to Zuckerberg, including a col...

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(CNN) -- A couple years ago, a Microsoft researcher named Gordon Bell embarked on a personal experiment: He would wear a video camera around his neck all the time and keep this "life recorder" always turned on, so it would record everything he did.

It was like an external memory drive for his brain, he wrote in a book called "Total Recall."

Sounds pretty sci-fi, right? Not so much. The "real-time sharing" updates Facebook announced Thursday aim to do something quite similar -- only for the In...

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(CNN) -- The ire and angst accompanying Facebook's most recent tweaks to its interface are truly astounding. The complaints rival the irritation of AOL's dial-up users back in the mid-'90s, who were getting too many busy signals when they tried to get online. The big difference, of course, is that AOL's users were paying customers. In the case of Facebook, which we don't even pay to use, we aren't the customers at all.

Let's start with the changes themselves. Until now, the main thing that sh...

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(CNN) -- Here we go again.

Facebook has made big changes to users' pages, and people are responding in droves with their metaphorical "dislike" buttons.

News Feeds were popping with not-so-gentle complaints Wednesday as many of the social-networking behemoth's 750 million users began seeing the overhaul.

"This is absolutely the worst of the many wrong-headed 'improvements' you have made, and that's quite a feat," a user named Franklin Habit wrote on the site's official Facebook page. "I think Fa...

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(WIRED) -- OK, here's the deal. A big corporate PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, tried to entice USA Today to lambaste a Google feature called Social Circle, on privacy grounds. It also encouraged a security blogger to write an op-ed attacking Google on the product.

Burson would not say the name of its client. But instead of taking the bait, USA Today did due diligence and consulted experts who said that Social Circle was small potatoes compared to more pressing privacy stories.

Instead it published...

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Facebook and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg have been hit with a lawsuit seeking more than $1 billion in damages over a page on the social network which called for a "Third Intifada" against Israel.

Facebook this week shut down the "Third Intifada" page, which had almost 500,000 fans, but the lawsuit filed in a court here claims that the social network showed "negligence" by not quickly responding to appeals to remove the page.

Besides awarding damages, the complaint calls on the court to bar Fac...

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When an entire generation of computer users first poked our doe-eyed faces onto a young internet, many of us were greeted with a single, encompassing, monolithic face peering back: the AOL Home Screen. To call it a young internet isn’t even fair – it was a mature, thriving AOL. It was ubiquitous, it was powerful, it was everything – and it ended up destroying itself, too flawed by design to last. And nobody’s learned a lesson.

How do we know nobody’s learned shit since the days of th...

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Click on a link and pollute your friends’ walls
 
By ZACH SCHONBRUN Columbia News Service 
 
 NEW YORK — Andy Hall is tall and slim, always has been, and his secret to staying slender does not come from a pill.

So when he woke up recently to see messages from far-away friends asking him about the possible benefits of a weight-loss supplement, Hall, 25, was momentarily confused.

Then he checked his Facebook wall.

It seems that the night before, Hall had inadvertently clicked a faulty link that sc...

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I really cannot believe the crap Facebook comes up with!

 
 (CNN) -- Stalk much?

Facebook Breakup Notifier, a new app for the site, is super simple -- and will probably be super popular.

It lets users pick certain friends whose relationship status they'd like to monitor. If one of those relationships changes, the user gets notified by e-mail.

"You like someone. They're in a relationship. Be the first to know when they're out of it," promises the app's website.

So, if that old high school flame sudd...

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The No. 1 reason why people don't sign up for Facebook is not a concern about privacy, but rather a concern about wasting time, according to a report Wednesday.

In November, 56 percent of people who decided against becoming Facebook users cited time-wasting as the reason, according to Wedbush Securities. In September, 52 percent gave that answer.

Privacy was cited as the reason by 42 percent of the Facebook naysayers in November, down from 48 percent in September, according to the survey.

The...

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Excuse me for raining on the Facebook parade, but yesterday's news about the $450 million investment by Goldman Sachs (GS) and $50 million from Russia's Digital Sky Technology didn't move me the way it seemed to move others. This despite the suggested $50 billion valuation, as big and beautiful a number as the stock market has seen in some time. I am certainly not moved in the same way it appears to have moved Goldman's own clients: the Wall Street firm has pledged to line up another $1.5 bil...

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(CNN) -- All signs for Facebook appear to be pointing up.

Mark Zuckerberg is Time's Man of the Year, the movie about him seems likely to be an Oscar winner, and now Goldman Sachs is raising $1.5 billion from its favorite investors on behalf of the social networking company.

At the very same moment, Facebook's only real competitor --NewsCorps' waning social networking site, MySpace -- is shedding employees and expenses, most likely in hopes of a fire sale.

But appearances can be deceiving. In ...

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(CNN) -- Fears of a serial killer stalking women in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, have prompted some residents to take matters into their own hands -- and onto the internet, with frightful results for one man. Many residents of the city have joined a Facebook page titled "Catch the Kensington Strangler, before he catches someone you love," and police say a male Philadelphia resident was falsely accused of being responsible for three strangulation murders and three other assaults that have o...

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- Michael Fertik is the CEO and Founder of ReputationDefender, the online privacy and reputation company. The views expressed are his own. -

Facebook already knows a massive amount about you.  They know your age, what you look like, what you like, what you do for fun, where you go, what you eat, whom you know, whom you know well, whom you sleep with, who your best friends and family are, and, again, how old they are, what they like, and so on.

On top of that, Facebook has a well-known history...

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The social network is trying to change the messaging game with its new service

By Brad Stone

The annals of obsolete communication technologies are growing all the time. There's the telegraph, the answering machine, the fax, and the paper-based letter, all artifacts from an analog era where messages had resonance hours, even days, after getting them.

Now Mark Zuckerberg wants to add e-mail to that list. In a rollout on Nov. 15 of its revamped messaging system, Facebook's 26-year-old founder de...

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Ignorance is bliss, so don't read any further if you don't want to panic about Facebook and Twitter security.

Digital Society, a self-professed security think tank, has given failing security grades to both Twitter and Facebook. Both sites are vulnerable to attacks that can give someone partial or full control over your account, the group claims.

According to Digital Society, the main problem with Facebook and Twitter is that neither site allows full Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protection. Bot...

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration  has warned a pharmaceutical company that its use of the Facebook Share button to promote a cancer-fighting medication violates FDA requirements for disclosing information about drugs.

The FDA, in a letter sent to drug-maker Novartis Pharmaceuticals July 29, tells the company that its use of Facebook Share to promote Tasigna is incomplete and misleading.

This is likely the first time the FDA has issued a warning to a pharmaceutical firm for using Facebook t...
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By David Kirkpatrick, contributor
Following those discussions, Zuckerberg went back for his sophomore year at Harvard and created an increasingly sophisticated series of website experiments. They culminated in February 2004 with to the creation of what was then called "thefacebook.com." As I report in my book, Zuckerberg says he didn't get the idea for "thefacebook" until late in the fall semester of 2003, and did most of the programming in January 2004.

Zuckerberg concedes that he performed se...
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Why do I hate Facebook? The ridiculous, time-wasting applications, that’s why.

I wasn’t particularly interested in signing up to Facebook originally, but since all my friends were on it I gave it a go. I could see the appeal too, don’t get me wrong; connect with old friends, share photos, etc. Unfortunately, this has got completely overshadowed by people throwing snowballs at each other and finding stray cats on their farm. I began to hate Facebook a while ago, but now it’s got ...

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I have been asked how it will be possible to maintain this blog? Well how I see it is, I only want to ride this into the Meltdown of Facebook, Then nobody will talk about Facebook anymore. It is articles like these that peak my Interest for this blog.

Not surprisingly, Facebook's half-hearted attempts to kick its data-sharing addiction have not exactly wowed the privacy cognoscenti. Last week a consortium of groups -- including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Privacy R...

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This article really had me laughing ... this guy Ryan tells it well.

Facebook, I absolutely fucking despise it, the whole idea of its existence is one which makes me feel sick to the stomach. The very mention of its name by somebody, anybody, first thing in the morning makes me want to puke on my Shreddies. It was great at first, a tool for getting in touch with old friends, until you become hooked and begin to despise it. But you know that you can't delete the bleeding thing because you would...
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This article is from Ben Racicot - EzineArticles.com Expert Author

July 2006. My MySpace was pretty cool. I spent some time figuring out HTML and a great background image! I was so cool... Until my stupid brother hacked it and turned it entirely homosexual. Sounds funny and it was. Remember MySpace when it first began in 03? Very different.

In July 2005 MySpace was bought for $580 mil. by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Turned out to be a good investment for Murdoch, on August 8, 2006, searc...
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In my quest to figure out the monster Facebook is becoming, I am always finding great articles that should be shared. This one is from Kate Dickman of the Boston Internet Examiner. She may be onto something.

The demise of Facebook; it seems like a rather "out there" thought don't you think?  Well according to leading internet/tech industry site TechCrunch, Facebook's future is certainly in limbo.

As of late, the site is reporting major financial woes that comes as no surprise with the current ...
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Facebook was founded (by one guy? ... yes that is up for debate) in Feb. 2004 with $716 million in funding.

Below is an article I found called the age of facebook.
by Michael Arrington 

Two years ago It wasn’t clear that Facebook had what it took to become one of the great technology companies. They had conquered the college market and were destroying the hopes and dreams of MySpace. But they were also reeling from the Beacon debacle and hadn’t pro...

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