Scam Alert: My Total Profile Views Today Facebook App Spams Your Friends

Facebook 'to seek consent for privacy changes'

Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has defended
its privacy policies

Privacy campaigners have welcomed a report that Facebook is to ask users to opt into any changes in the way it uses their personal information.

The social network previously announced alterations to its members' settings without asking for fresh consent.

The website is changing its policy after an investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

Facebook is not commenting on the story at this time.

The report suggests the site has also agreed to privacy audits by an independent organisation over the next 20 years.

However, it says the FTC does not prescribe how consent should be obtained.
Suspicion

"Facebook has historically been extremely resistant to transparency in its own operations, so we welcome measures that would force the company to obtain express consent of its users," said the London based advocacy group Privacy International.

"However, it seems likely that the FTC's demands will only present a temporary obstacle in the path of Facebook's ambitions to collect its users' information.

"Faced with reams of small print, most users are likely to automatically agree to policy changes, with each change bringing us one step closer to Zuckerberg's vision of a privacy-free future."

The website's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was questioned about the firm's privacy policies on the US television network PBS' Charlie Rose show earlier this week.

"You have control over every single thing you've shared on Facebook," he said, "You can take it down."

He also said other search engines and advertising networks gathered "huge amount of information" about internet users through cookies, which he claimed was "less transparent than what is happening at Facebook".

Complaints

The FTC's intervention is being linked to the Washington-based campaign group, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

It filed a complaint with the commission in December 2009 claiming that privacy setting changes "violate user expectations, diminish user privacy and contradict Facebook's own representations".

EPIC noted that the website's users, security experts and others had voiced opposition to the change.

The organisation filed a follow-up complaint in 2010 claiming the social network had violated consumer protection law.

This year, EPIC also asked the FTC to investigate Facebook's use of facial recognition software on users' uploaded photographs and changes that gave the firm "far greater ability to disclose the personal information of its users to its business partners".
Knock-on effects

Facebook says it has more than 800 million members who have used the site at least once in the past 30 days.

The Reuters news agency recently reported that the site's revenues totalled $1.6bn (£1bn) in the first six months of the year thanks to its popularity with advertisers.

Facebook does not release detailed results as it is not a publicly traded company, although there is speculation it will float its stock in 2012.

Legal experts say any settlement with the FTC is likely to have implications for other internet firms.

"Users are not social networking sites' primary customers, advertisers and marketers are," said Andrew Charlesworth, director of the centre for IT and law at the University of Bristol.

"While the FTC settlement indicates sites must be more open about the ways they make personal data available, and provide users with greater control, Facebook and others will already be rethinking the techniques they use to persuade users to keep their personal data publicly accessible."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15692542

Preparation for Google+ to rival Facebook

Google will be rolling out major enhancements for its social networking platform Google+, such as integration of search and Google Docs, over the next three months in a bid to bridge the gap with rival Facebook.

According to a Financial Times report on Wednesday, the Internet giant will be looking to compete better with market leader Facebook with major improvements to its Google+ platform. The first round of enhancements will include incorporating Google Docs, the word processing application which will make collaborating on documents easier "within days", and its search function with the networking platform, noted Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of engineering, in the report.

Subsequently, all of Google's Web offerings "are going to be fundamentally changed by the Google+ graph", he added.

Users of multiple Google services, for instance, will be able to rely on a single system for sharing across the different platforms and not have to wonder whether to share content using Google+ or YouTube, Gundotra explained.



He also said the company is delighted with the more than 40 million users who have registered for its social networking service, but acknowledged the figure is still less than a tenth of Facebook's user base. The executive declined to say how many daily active users the platform has, though.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who sat in on the same interview, noted that Google was cleaning up its multiple brands in order to make them less confusing and said Google+ would be one of the core products going forward.

While in the past, the company wanted to let "a thousand flowers bloom", Brin noted that once these flowers bloom, "you [would] want to present them in a coherent bouquet".

Google had earlier showed its determination to streamline its operations by shuttering Buzz, Photovine and Fast Flip, among others, in recent weeks.

Source: http://www.zdnetasia.com/google-preps-google-for-facebook-challenge-62302588.htm

Upcoming Facebook App: Know How Much Electricity YOU and Your Friends Use!

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Friends can compare energy consumption, compete to improve. The free app is set to release early next year. It helps consumers make smarter energy decisions.

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An upcoming Facebook app from OPOWER lets you compete to use less energy than your friends.

(CNN) -- Add energy consumption to the laundry list of things you can share with online friends on Facebook.

OPOWER, a company that uses game mechanics to encourage people to use less energy in their homes, is working with Facebook and the Natural Resources Defense Council to create an app that will let people share data about how much -- or little -- electricity they're using at home.

The app is expected to be available early next year, according to Facebook and OPOWER.
"It's not that sexy of a topic. People don't spend a lot of time thinking about their energy use -- so we're really excited to bring this conversation to life" with the upcoming app, said Marcy Scott Lynn, who leads sustainability programs at Facebook.

The hope is to get friends to compete against each other to use less energy, and to hold each other accountable for energy-use-reduction goals, said Ogi Kavazovic, a spokesman for OPOWER.
"A person in London could compete in energy usage with a person in California," he said.

A feature called "Friend Rank" lets Facebook friends see who in their social network uses the least energy per day. Another lets the app's users compare themselves to people who have similar-sized homes. The app also will let people compare their energy use with the Facebook community at large.

"People will be able to benchmark their home energy use against a national database of millions of homes. All benchmarking will be done on an aggregate level, ensuring complete data privacy," OPOWER said in a statement.

The app will automatically upload energy consumption data if a person approves that functionality.

"Everything you do related to this app will be a choice in terms of whether or not you choose to sign up for it; what you choose to share, if anything; how much of it gets published to your news feed; or whether you share it with your friends or invite your friends to use it," said Lynn, from Facebook. "It's entirely a choice
model."

The Facebook app essentially builds on how OPOWER already works. The company uses smart meter data from 60 utilities in the United States and the UK to give customers more detailed information about the energy they're consuming. Bills from OPOWER, for example, tell people how their monthly energy use compares to their neighbors, on average.

If they're doing well, or beating the average, customers get a smiley face on their bills.
It's a subtle effort to promote do-goodery, but the company says it's effective at getting people to use less power.



An average OPOWER customer uses 2 to 3% less energy, CEO Dan Yates told CNN last year.
NRDC, the environmental group, says the app will offer energy savings tips for users.
The point is to give people more information about how they're using electricity, said Jenny Powers, an NRDC spokeswoman.

"Right now you get your electricity bill and it's just one big charge and you have no idea what that means or how you can compare it with others," she said. "This sort of thing finally makes it relevant -- puts it into perspective, and offers solutions about how you can go about cutting that bill back, without losing any of your everyday comfort."

OPOWER currently reaches about 55 million homes, Kavazovic said. A person's utility must sign up with OPOWER and approve the Facebook app in order for the customer to activate the service.

The app could make these kinds of services more popular, Powers said, causing a "snowball effect" in which more utilities will want to sign up.

"In every other part of our daily consumption, we're able to find good deals -- coupons at the supermarket, sales at the hardware store. But we never catch a break on our electric bill," she said in an e-mail. "This app will collectively empower people to find their own hidden deals right within their bills."

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/17/tech/social-media/opower-facebook-energy-app/index.html?eref=rss_tech&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_tech+%28RSS%3A+Technology%29

Facebook Redesigns: A History of Hate and Love

Facebook users love to rage about redesigns, and new changes to the site’s News Feed have already triggered the predicable response. Users are complaining about the changes, which emphasize algorithmically important status updates instead of recent posts, saying that they don't want Facebook prioritizing status updates, and that they'd rather just see everything in chronological order.
The real news would be if Facebook users didn't get worked up over design change. The latest outrage is just one of many backlashes that Facebook has endured, none of which seem to accomplish much --except to give angry people something else to write about on Facebook.

Let's do a little rewind to see how Facebook users have complained over the years:September 2006: Facebook introduces the News Feed, which showed all your friends' latest activity in a single timeline. This was before the age of status updates, when cruising through individual profiles for scraps of information was the thing to do.
Protesters organize "A Day Without Facebook" to show their displeasure with perceived privacy violations, and declares "Mission Accomplished" when Facebook adds the ability to hide activity from the News Feed. But as far as I can tell, this option is no longer available.
September 2008: Facebook rolls out a redesign to all users, breaking different areas of the site into separate, customizable tabs. Users decry the redesign as "very very ugly" and organize protests with hundreds of thousands of members. Tabs have since been moved to Facebook's left sidebar, but the idea behind them remains to this day.
March 2009: Facebook launches another major redesign, this time around status updates to better compete with Twitter. The feed updates in real-time, while highlights appear on the right side of the screen. (Essentially, this is the opposite of how updates appear in Facebook's latest redesign.)
The backlash is bigger than ever, as 1.7 million users cry out in protest. Facebook makes a few tweaks to placate angry users, but sticks with the new design, at least temporarily.

October 2009: Facebook redesigns its home page again, introducing an algorithm to decide which status updates should be displayed first, rather than relying on chronological order. Some events that were removed from timelines early that year are added back, including friend acceptances and relationship statuses. In other words, Facebook makes concessions after the big backlash of March 2009.But users are still not satisfied, and more than one million of them protest to change Facebook back to the way it used to be. Some users beg Facebook to bring back chronological order for news feed updates.
November 2010: Facebook quietly reduces the font size of news feed updates. Users complain on Twitter. Facebook responds -- on Twitter. Weird.
December 2010: Facebook overhauls profile pages, most notably by boiling down user information into a summary at the top of the page, and by adding a strip of photos underneath the short summary. Comments on Facebook's blog post are almost entirely negative.
June 2011: Facebook tests a "Happening Now" feature on some users, showing the latest status updates in a separate feed on the right side of the screen. Early guinea pigs hated it. Some of them formed a "Facebooks 'Happening Now' Haters Group" to commiserate.
The Happening Now feature was a precursor to the News Ticker, which Facebook rolled out to all users this week.
I wonder what would happen if Facebook suddenly changed its design back to the way it was in 2004.

1 Trillion Pageviews Daily: Guess Who's Site?

Social networking giant Facebook garnered more than 1 trillion pageviews per month in June and July according to latest data gathered by DoubleClick a subsidiary of Google. There’s no doubt that’s Mark Zuckerberg was in gazillion happiness knowing his website was the most visited on the internet.

In June and July, Facebook registered approximately 870 million and 860 million unique visitors, respectively which is interestingly 120 million more than its registered users. The average per visitors were approximately 1,160 pageviews in July alone and that’s remarkably stunning. Facebook also shares that the site were that sticky as each users averages around 25 minutes reading statuses, viewings photo galleries and casually playing games.

So from this, we know that you hear that Facebook activity is declining –maybe not for now but everything will come to its end, like Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple CEO.

Source: http://www.techgeeze.com/2011/08/facebook-hits-1-trillion-pageviews-per-month.html