Archives: April 2009

Yesterday we wrote about the fbaction.net phishing scheme. As of today the site has been blocked but now a new site is replacing the old version and it’s called fbstarter.com. Apparently the spammers are pretty aggressive in their campaign to get Facebook users’ email addresses and passwords. While Facebook is going after the spammers, this most recent set of spammers appears to be quick to set up new sites.
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Earlier this week Facebook officially opened the stream API and with it came many new opportunities for developers. The most significant opportunity is the one provided to widget developers. Facebook let’s developers post audio, video, and best of all: flash application directly within the feed. Right now it appears that there are few restrictions although the feed API is still not fully implementable.
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Chris Kelly, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, formally announced today that he has formed a committee to explore running for California Attorney General in 2010. No, Chris isn’t formally announcing himself as a candidate but this is essentially a step in that direction. Chris has also recorded a video which announces the creation of an exploratory committee (which we’ve also embedded below).
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In the last half hour I’ve received multiple emails from people about a new phishing scam making its way around Facebook. The service lures users to enter their information at a site FBAction.net which displays a false Facebook login page. Within a short amount of time, users that enter their email and password find that their password has been switched and all of their friends have been emailed from the account.
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SlideShare, the social network for creating and sharing presentations, has revealed the updated version of its Facebook application today, with more interconnectivity between the SlideShare network and users’ Facebook profiles. What you share on SlideShare can become automatically shared on Facebook, and vice versa.
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Yesterday evening Facebook released a set of swine flu charts and maps that tracks the conversations surrounding swine flu. While it’s an interesting map it doesn’t really explain much. While there were some initial correlations between the level of conversation and the location of swine flu occurrences, comparing the lexicon maps to Google’s H1N1 Swine Flu map illustrates very little correlation between the two.
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Yesterday, during their Technology Tasting event, Facebook formally announced support for OpenID. For the past two and a half years I have been following the evolution of OpenID as it has emerged to become the leading standard for digital identity. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the standard as one company after the other pledged support yet failed to become a relying party, only issuing parties (meaning you can use their site for logging in to other sites).
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When you think of the government, you probably don’t think of forward thinking but apparently someone in the GSA is as they’ve officially signed an agreement with Facebook. The agreement is relatively basic but it lays the ground work for government agencies to use Facebook for any purpose. For example a government organization could decide that they want to use Facebook as a recruiting tool and 90 of the steps to posting the jobs will have been accomplished.
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We regularly hear stories of people losing their jobs due to things they’ve posted on Facebook or of relationships that have been broken up due to their public Facebook activity. Facebook can be a great supplement to your existing relationships but if used incorrectly it can be devastating. People post information that they don’t expect to become public but within a short period of time, most information becomes revealed and the users learn their lesson. We’ve compiled 10 signs that you’re a Facebook Noob. If you don’t know what the term “Noob” means, check out the Urban Dictionary’s definition.
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I’ve written countless times about Facebook’s “privacy facade” and how it could develop potential problems in their global expansion. Today, some developers and bloggers were disappointed that Facebook did not open up unrestricted global access to users’ streams. This means that developers cannot develop tools to analyze the information being shared on Facebook in aggregate unless every Facebook user installs their application.
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