Facebook Happening Now Feature

Facebook is engaged in limited testing of a new feature known as the Happening Now sidebar and the beta sidebar alerts offers comprehensive status updates in real-time, including what their friends are sharing, who they are friending, along with other status updates in real-time.The Happening Now toolbar sits to the right of a user’s newsfeed and scrolls through updates in real-time, automatically refreshing and emphasized by past previously launched features like real-time commenting.

Facebook is currently testing a new version of the news feed that displays liking and commenting activity by a user’s friends in real time and it’s odd that it would show up directly next to the most recent feed. Docked to the right hand side of the screen, it displays real-time updates from your friends, such as wall posts, comments and check-in information, allowing users to see how their friends are interacting with one another all from the main screen. However, users have taken to Twitter to blow the whistle on a major bug with the feature not fully rolled out to the 700 million users, involving friends permissions.

European regulators are looking into Facebook’s method of delivery on the facial recognition features made available to users on Tuesday. Three users, @dezinezync, @benjacob and @hackatac who discovered the bug, explained to me on Twitter the implications:

“Say a user’s photos are viewable to friends only, and this user is not in my friends list. If a friend of mine comments on the photo of that user, I can see it from the ‘Happening Now’ feed.”

There appears to be a permissions error where those who are not in their friends list can see photos of people, even though the album is restricted to who can see it. Effectively, if your Facebook privacy settings are not locked down, it’s a “wild west scene for all to see”, another discovering user described. For now, you can limit this bug by setting your permissions onFacebook to ‘friends only’, as it is unclear how far this bug spreads, or whether it goes beyond photos only. Facebook told The Next Web:

“We are currently testing a feature within the news feed that gives people the ability to see what their friends are commenting on and liking, as these actions are being taken on Facebook.

This test includes a small percentage of Facebook users, just a fraction of a percent. In the coming weeks, as we learn more from this test, we’ll keep making improvements and may expand it to more people.”

While this is not yet a fully rolled-out feature only featuring on a select number of profiles this permissions error is indicative of a permissions error which could fall deeper into the site. Spokesperson Jaime Schopflin told me that Facebook refutes this ‘bug’, and that “this is how photos work”. “When a person tags their friend in a photo, the photo is posted to their friend’s Wall where their friends can see it.” Users can disable this feature by unchecking the “Let friends of people tagged in my photos and posts see them” option in the main Facebook privacy settings.

 

Twitter Integration For iOS

Apple announced that it’s bringing deep Twitter integration to all of its iOS-based devices and to many of its own apps, including Camera, Photos, Safari and Maps. That integration also extends to Contacts, where you’ll be able to link your contacts to their Twitter handle and keep their information updated.

Apple brings deep Twitter integration to iOS, which allowing users to easily tweet and share their photos, locations or even bookmarks from Safari. iOS 5 will also now sync your contacts with their respective Twitter profiles automatically. Selecting this option will allow you to do three things; install the official Twitter application, enter your own Twitter credentials to enable integration, and finally synchronise Twitter handles with contacts on your phone. Twitter is enabled in Safari, Photos, Camera, YouTube, or Maps – you won’t need a separate client if you want to tweet your location, share a photo, video or a webpage. In each of the applications, hitting the share button will instantly reveal a “Tweet” button, which will load the editor displayed in the screenshots above. When you are finished editing the tweet and hit Send, you will hear a audible ping, letting you know that your message was sent successfully. Earlier we showed you that Apple provides the option for you to install the official Twitter application. Once you have done so, authenticated within the app (we were hoping it would utilise the details we had already entered) and enabled Push Notifications, you will be updated each time you receive a new Tweet, as you would an email or text message. decision to partner with Twitter is a logical one. The implementation is basic but it works and doesn’t take away from third-party applications that are able to deliver more in terms of functionality.

 

Google Makes Image Search Easy

Google has always been about upgrading its services to make things faster for everybody and they’ve just introduced a new update to their search engine to make it easier to look for images. Whenever you search for something on the regular search, Google will try to determine if you’re looking for images or not and if it believes that you’re looking for images rather than text, it will show you more image results than regular text links in the search results.

Google has made significant improvements to its image search functions this week, rolling out the latest updates to Google Images and Google will now automatically try to figure out whether or not you are looking for images, even before you remember to hit the Images tab. “Starting this week we’re making it easier to quickly find great images right in your Google search results,” reads a recent post from Google software engineer, Grant Dasher. “Drawing from last year’s broader update to Google Images, we’ve integrated many of the features we introduced at that time into our main search results. Images will now appear in a tiled layout, with hover previews that give you a larger thumbnail and more information about a particular image.” Basically, if Google thinks that your query has “high image intent” then they will start to automatically show you lot more photos, pictures and other images on the page. The Google engineer gives the example of a search for [nebula pictures] which “instead of just three or four pictures at the top of the results” throws up “more than a dozen beautiful pictures filling up most of the page.”

 

Facebook Brings Major Update To Its Mobile Website

Interactive Information Designer at Facebook, Lee Byron has updated his blog stating that the largest social network on the planet Facebook has launched a major update to its mobile website. Facebook has now launched a ‘Unified’ Mobile Website for Touch Screen phones and other smartphones.

Earlier, Facebook had two separate websites: touch.facebook.com for Touch Screen Phones and m.facebook.com for other mobiles. But from today forward though, m.mobile.com will be the only mobile version of Facebook, writes Mashable’s Ben Parr.

Lee Byron Comments:

“There will no longer be a difference between m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com, we’ll automatically serve you the best version of the site for your device,”

The new website is made possible through a new UI framework that incorporates XHP (a PHP extension that incorporates XML), Javelin (Facebook’s lightweight Javascript framework) and WURFL (an open source mobile device database). The framework is dynamic enough to detect the UI and limitations of individual devices and adjust to them automatically.

The new website is made possible through a new UI framework that uses XHP (a PHP extension that incorporates XML), Javelin (Facebook’s lightweight Javascript framework) and WURFL (an open source mobile device database).

 

Facebook Targets Google

Facebook gets busted for actually hiring a PR agency to try to plant anti-Google stories in the press and plan to plant anti-google stories in the press.Facebook hired hotshot public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to urge major news outlets to take a very close look at Google’s privacy policy and legal issues surrounding Google’s Social Circle feature, allows users to see information that’s publicly available for those they’re connected with in Google Chat and Contacts.

Mark Zuckerberg‘s Facebook admitted it had hired a public relations firm to highlight supposed flaws in Google Inc‘s privacy practices but denied it had intended a smear campaign against the search giant and tapped a major public relations firm to plant negative stories about archrival Google‘s competing services, the social-networking giant acknowledged after being effectively caught red-handed by an online news site.The episode highlights the increasing friction between two of the most prominent companies in Silicon Valley as they battle over talent, acquisition targets and now public perception. It also underscores the growing importance of strategic communications in the competitive arsenal for information companies, whose success depends on winning the trust of users.But largely, it’s an embarrassing backfire for Facebook, as the clumsy PR stunt has grabbed attention instead of the issue the company was hoping to spotlight.“This allows Google to appear to be the good guys and Facebook the bad guys,” said Carl Howe, analyst with the Yankee Group.

The plan began to unravel after Soghoian posted the pitch online, revealing that Burson had offered to help write and place an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Politico and elsewhere. USA Today followed up with a story suggesting the firm was engaged in a “whisper campaign” to spread negative news about Google and concluded that the claims were “largely untrue.”The mystery remained about which client was behind the PR effort until the Daily Beast reported that Facebook, when confronted with evidence, had fessed up.Google has increasingly been weaving social features into its services, notably adding “social search results” that include things like the public Twitter updates from a person’s connections that might be relevant to a given query. Google pays Twitter for that information feed.The initial pitch from Burson claimed that Google is also scraping data from sites like Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo and revealing secondary connections – say, the friends of your friends – without the permission of user. Google didn’t respond to inquiries from The Chronicle.

Facebook has been on the receiving end of plenty of privacy criticism itself for, among other things, increasing the amount of information that is accessible without asking permission from members.The fact that one tech company was pitching negative stories about another comes as little surprise to many journalists, but for the general public, it sheds a glaring and unflattering light on how parts of the industry operate. Big-league public relations is often a bare-knuckle affair, focused as much on bashing rivals as lauding oneself or clients.Different companies operate according to different standards, but it’s not uncommon for major businesses to attempt to draw the eyes of journalists to the questionable practices of rivals, by highlighting issues they might not have noticed or sharing damning documents.“It is a staple of the political and public relations world to not only tell the attributes of your own client, but to voice the demerits of one’s opposition,” said Sam Singer, president of Singer Associates Inc., a crisis PR firm in San Francisco.The major reason this incident became big news is that Burson didn’t disclose the client it was working for, a violation of standard industry practice, he said. The ethics policies of the Public Relations Society of America state that members shall: “Reveal the sponsors for causes and interests represented.”

 

Facebook Accidentally Leaked User Data

Facebook apps have been leaking access to millions of Facebook users’ accounts, including profiles, photographs, chat and other personal information because of an old bug that overrides individual privacy settings and this affected hundreds of thousands of apps before it was discovered by researchers from security company Symantec.The bug exposed user access tokens to third parties, like advertisers and analytic platforms, the tokens serve as a spare set of keys that Facebook apps use to perform certain actions on behalf of the user or to access the user’s profile and also each token is associated with a select set of permissions, like reading your wall, accessing your friend’s profile and posting to your wall.

 

Symantec discovered that third-party Facebook applications had access to  users accounts and profiles for years and could see your profile, photographs, chat messages and collect your personal information even if you had set it to private.This could constitute as the most widespread leak the site has suffered to date.Facebook has since confirmed the issue existed and plugged the leak, so this can no longer be exploited. But with 20 million applications installed by users per day, this represents a huge potential leak of personal information.Symantec explain how access tokens, or spare keys that are granted to you by Facebook, can be used to authorise certain actions on behalf of the user. These are set up by the application installed, through the permission request box. Though these keys will expire after a short time, some of these tokens allow applications to access your data while you are not using the site.

It is suggested could have Facebook passed on these access tokens in the URL to the application developers, which could then be passed on unknowingly to advertisers and other third parties.Facebook denies these claims, stating that there are inaccuracies and that a thorough investigation showed no evidence that information was being sent to third parties.This is not the first time Facebook has suffered a breach. Not only has it had to contend with its own internal code reaching the public site, which led to a full site shutdown late last year, but has also been targeted by malicious code writers and suffered serious worm attacks through rogue applications.The bug exposed user access tokens to third parties, like advertisers and analytic platforms. The tokens serve as a spare set of keys that Facebook apps use to perform certain actions on behalf of the user or to access the user’s profile. Each token is associated with a select set of permissions, like reading your wall, accessing your friend’s profile, posting to your wall and so on.

For years, certain Facebook IFRAME apps that rely on an older form of user authentication turned over these keys to third parties, giving them the ability to access information that users may have secured in their privacy settings. Symantec has confirmed that Facebook has fixed the underlying bug, but tokens already exposed may still be widely accessible. The only comfort the company offered was that the third parties who were accidentally granted access to the data may not have realized their ability to access this information.While many access tokens expire shortly after they’re issued, Facebook also supplies offline access tokens that remain valid indefinitely. Thankfully, Facebook users can close this potential security hole by changing their passwords, which immediately revokes all previously issued keys. If you use Facebook apps, go change your password on the social network as soon as possible.Facebook sees 20 million pass installed every day. There’s no way to know precisely how many apps or Facebook users were affected by this flaw, but Symantec estimates that as of April 2011, almost 100,000 apps were making the leak possible. That’s just for last month though: over the years, hundreds of thousands of apps may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties, according to the security giant.

When a user opens up an app to install on the social network, Facebook first sends the app a limited amount of non-identifiable information about the user (their country, locale, and age bracket) so that the app can personalize the page. Then the app sends the user to a permission dialog page using a client-side redirect. If the app uses a legacy Facebook API as well as the deprecated parameters “return_session=1″ and “session_version=3″, Facebook subsequently returns the access token by sending an HTTP request containing the access tokens in the URL to the app host. The Facebook app can then inadvertently leak the access tokens to third parties. Worse yet, the URL that includes the access token is actually passed to third party advertisers as part of the referrer field of the HTTP requests.It’s no small coincidence that Facebook announced that it will be permanently retiring its old authentication routine. The company is still working to transition apps from the old Facebook authentication system and HTTP to OAuth 2.0 and HTTPS.

Facebook is requiring all sites and apps to migrate to OAuth 2.0, process the signed_request parameter, and obtain an SSL certificate in the next five months. The company says that the sheer number of Facebook apps prevents the company from forcing developers to make the switch immediately. Here’s the timeline the company has announced:

• July 1: Updates to the PHP and JS SDKs available that use OAuth 2.0 and have new cookie format (without access token).
• September 1: All apps must migrate to OAuth 2.0 and expect an encrypted access token.
• October 1: All Canvas apps must process signed_request (fb_sig will be removed) and obtain an SSL certificate (unless you are in Sandbox mode). This will ensure that users browsing Facebook over HTTPS will have a great experience over a secure connection.

 

Make Money on Facebook by Watching Commercials

Facebook has created a new promoting programme that financially motivates users to watch certain commercials. Users who watch commercials distributed on the Facebook network are rewarded on the basis of a credit system – each commercial brings the viewer 1 credit worth 10 cents. This is not an important reward but the prospect of gaining some money may be just enough for some users who usually spend a lot of time on Facebook and wish to put that time to better use.

Paid commercials will be shown especially in games, such as Crowd Star, Digital Chocolate and Zynga.

Facebook is also working with Sharethrough, SocialVibe, Epic Media and SupersonicAds to provide the programme with commercials and with TrialPay – a polling system whose participants receive money in exchange for their answers.

Dan Greenberg, CEO at Sharethrough said that Facebook’s idea represented a shift from the traditional commercial system which interrupted programmes. Facebook offers commercials for entertainment and users will want to see and send them forward to their friends.

Earnings cannot be transferred on the credit card, yet the Facebook credit system offers users the possibility to spend the money for buying various products advertised in the commercials they have watched. Users can also purchase virtual goods available in the network.

 

Facebook To Buy Skype?

Two reliable sources say Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is talking to Skype about either buying the company or forming a joint venture and one of the sources said Facebook is considering a buyout of Skype at a price of between $3 billion and $4 billion, other source told Reuters the deal won’t be a purchase by Facebook but rather a joint venture between Facebook and Skype.

Facebook and Google Inc (GOOG.O) are separately considering a tie-up with Skype after the web video conferencing service delayed its initial public offering and are reportedly in a bidding war for Skype, which could create a communications powerhouse.Two sources with direct knowledge of the discussions told Reuters that Skype is considering a possible purchase or joint venture between Facebook or Google. Skype, which uses voice-over-IP or VoIP to stream live video and audio calls, boasted 124 million users this last month alone and stands to gain even more should it agree to either deal.Should Skype join with Google, it gains solid backing from a deep-pocketed protector. Google, meanwhile, would gain a vast improvement over its current chat client.Skype is doing fine on its own, raising over $860 million in 2010, but a partnership with Google would help the company go public with a bang, eclipsing others recent IPOs like LinkedIn‘s offering, an important boost for Skype as more and more tech companies flood the market.

Skype‘s video chat and desktop client would help Google compete against other tech companies. Google Talk does not support video chat like Skype, making it inferior to rival Microsoft‘s online collaboration suite Lync. Furthermore, Google‘s services are all online while Skype has a desktop app; if the two companies can combine these interfaces users will find it much easier and faster to communicate than ever before.Should Skype hook up with Facebook, it would inherit the social network’s reach, over 600 million users, and increase the flow of calls across its network. Skype would also reportedly earn between $3 to 4 billion if Facebook decided to bid for its loyalty. And the transition would be easy, as Skype users can already call their Facebook friends from the Skype desktop application; any partnership would likely make voice and video calls possible from inside Facebook as well.Facebook would be happy to buy Skype, sources say, as CEO Mark Zuckerburg is reportedly interested in extending its reach to voice and video calls to draw people to spend even more time chatting on the site.

 

Facebook Accidentally Resets Email Notifications

Facebook accidentally turned on email notifications for some users. The social network lets users pick and choose what event on Facebook results in an email sent to their inbox (there are now 73 notification options to choose from). Unfortunately, the reset turned them all back on.

The glitch got a lot of attention and was posted on the Known Issues on Facebook webpage:

Email notifications: Some people are suddenly receiving email notifications for settings they had turned off, and the checkboxes are now checked. We are currently working on a solution to this problem.

The issue has since been fixed, according to Facebook. “Yesterday evening, we discovered a bug that caused a small number of people to start receiving notifications they had previously turned off,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “We have since resolved the issue and apologize for any inconvenience.”

As of 11 hours ago, Facebook was still working on the issue, and it has yet to comment on the problem in the company’s blog.

 

Linkedin Goes 100 Million Mark

The social networking LINKEDIN has recently went beyond the amazing 100 million member mark. This is especially good news for advertisers that leverage LinkedIn as a part of their B2B online marketing initiatives, as it means they will be able to reach a larger audience of prospects more effectively.

From linkedin blog:

LinkedIn reached a major milestone: 100 million professionals worldwide.

We’re now growing at roughly one million new LinkedIn members every week, the equivalent of a professional joining the site at faster than one member per second.

We’re making great progress toward our ultimate goal: to connect all of the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.

LinkedIn which was established in May 2003 claimed ultimately that its purpose is to provide professionals the ability to link up with other likeminded individuals. It has already integrated Facebook and Twitter so that your professional followers can see your tweets displayed on your profile.

LinkedIn recently updated its on-site advertising platform as well to provide advertisers with more control over their campaigns, which should increase the relevancy of their efforts.