Ruth Westheimer, the pundit who brought frank sex talk to middle America, stumbles in a discussion on NBC of the dangers of frank sex talk on social networks, calling Facebook "Facelift." Actually, that sounds like a great spinoff site for Mark Zuckerberg to target the over-40 set.
Kelly Killoren Bensimon is a busy woman what with her new TV show (Real Housewives of New York City), columns in Page Six and Gotham magazines, her busy social calendar, and the two kids she has with her ex-husband, famed photog Gilles Bensimon. But she makes time for Facebook, too! Just a few of her 484 online pals whose names you might be familiar with: Susanne Bartsch, Mark Birnbaum, David Blaine, Dennis Basso, Serena Altschul, Mark Baker, Bryan Bantry, Fabian Basabe, Georgina Chapman, Jamison Ernest, Cristina Greeven Cuomo, Donny Deutsch, Rocco DiSpirito Lauren Santo Domingo, Lisa Gastineau, Patrick McMullan, Minnie Mortimer, John Bartlett, Hud Morgan, Olivia Palermo, Alex Von Furstenberg, Anne Slowey, Russell Simmons, Linda Wells, Rob Wiesenthal, Bronson Van Wyck, Lara Shriftman, and, of course, Andy Cohen, the Bravo exec who was responsible for casting her in Real Housewives. [Kelly Killoren Bensimon]
Someone has created a very well-executed Facebook page for Prince William, a.k.a. William Arthur Philip Louis. He hasn't friended us back yet, but we hear that some of his Facebook friends include social-climbing socialite Olivia Palermo (who may be in on the joke, but probably figures one might as well friend royalty), actress Mischa Barton, and designer Chris Benz.
It seemed like only yesterday that Jonathan Abrams was waging an all-out war against "fakesters," or made-up public profiles on his social networking startup Friendster — because lord knows, we can't have people misrepresenting themselves on the Internet. Now it's Facebook's turn to play the heavy, with users of the PackRat application getting multiple accounts deleted. Players of the social card game were signing up under pseudonyms in order to give themselves an advantage in the social card game.Facebook has been notoriously stuck up about making sure users are identified strictly by their government names. Now both heavy users generating an excess of pageviews and an application developer that depends on the company's "platform" are feeling the wrath from above for sinning against the terms of service. Certainly the "tyrannical, omnipotent" style of divine rule didn't end up working so well for Friendster — Facebook is popular and growing, but punishing its most devoted acolytes like Job can't work in the long run.
The venerable Wall Street Journal has given up trying to age gracefully after being purchased by News Corp., and today the bandages will come off on a facelift that took six months to complete. The main difference will be that non-subscribers will get a more general-interest homepage full of links to free lifestyle content, while subscribers will have the page tailored to emphasize business news. But sixty percent of the site's traffic never sees the homepage, and pageviews-per-unique visit are actually falling. So bring on the social network!Meanwhile, just as the Journal is trying to expand its readership beyond managers and executives with expense accounts, Slate is introducing The Big Money — billed by the New York Times as "a Business Site for the Facebook Set," which includes a Journal-watching Twitter feed. Because as we all know, the Facebook set doesn't like to read anything over 140 characters.
Shortly after Facebook bought Parakey, the Web-desktop startup cofounded by star engineers Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross, Mark Zuckerberg talked about making his goof-off site the "social operating system of the Web." It was just one of a series of failed big-picture metaphors for the tongue-tied young entrepreneur. Facebook may never be an operating system. But is it such a terrible idea to make it look like one? The latest redesign is a virtual copycat of Windows.As Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer first pointed out, Facebook has removed its applications dropdown menu from the top of the screen and put it down in the bottom-left corner — you know, right where Windows keeps its "Start" button. Just like Windows, alerts pop up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Microsoft Windows isn't deemed sexy by San Francisco's Web-designer crowd, who brag about having to launch VMware to test out Google Chrome. But, like Facebook, Microsoft has a user base in the nine digits. Zuckerberg shows he hasn't just taken Microsoft's money — he's picked up some of the software giant's mass-market, commonsense design.
Yahoo's shares rebounded Thursday from five-year lows. The unveiling of a big redesign, the first in two years, revved up traders. But they may not have been as bullish if they knew, as Yahoo insiders do, that the homepage revamp, originally due in October, is months behind schedule and much less ambitious than hoped. Far from revealing a newly energized Yahoo, the delays reveal that the Internet company still suffers from the same problems that have hobbled it for years.Mismanagement and bureaucratic balkanization continue to rule Yahoo. The team developing the new homepage, both the front-end design and the back-end architecture, worked in a vacuum as executives above them kept getting reorged. The mockup of the new design looks great (and yes, the logo will be purple). But the amount of incredibly profitable front-page advertising space was significantly reduced. That's because nobody bothered to discuss the project with ad sales until months of work were done. Even then engineers had to step in to fix problem. Famously unproductive products chief Ash Patel touted third-party widgets, such as a tool that let Yahoo users view upcoming DVDs in their Netflix queue. But Netflix was a consolation prize. Yahoo's product managers have plans to include updates from Facebook and messages from Google's email service, Gmail, on users' homepages. But Facebook and Google have refused to give Yahoo access. What was supposed to be a big news event ended up as a tease for reporters to placate shareholders and stir up developer interest for an event this weekend. Instead of a seismic announcement to undo the publicity damage from the botched Microsoft deal, Yahoo will have to settle for the slightest of tremors. It's not the shakeup Yahoo needs.
Facebook users have to migrate to the site's new redesign starting today. I reached out to a friend of mine completely outside the tech industry — like most of Facebook's users — to see what he thinks. His answer: "The new profiles are very bad." Then I tried to tell him that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's goal is to turn Facebook into a social operating system. "Awful idea," he said. Personally, I like the new design and figure that people are whining about it because nobody likes change. But maybe you disagree? Take our poll below and let Zuckerberg know how you feel.
A tweak to Facebook's new site redesign, which goes permanent today, removed a link to "recently used applications" from the site's applications drop-down menu. Its got the third-part developers who make those applications up in arms because they say removing the link will make it harder for users to come back to their widgets. One developer wrote us to say "if this sticks today marks the end for 3rd party applications." The "Developer Feedback to Facebook" forum is full of similar complaints. "I already have users complain that they can't find apps again on the new profile after first using them. the latest changes will make it even harder," writes on developer. Another: "Yup, this is a very intense change. And pretty useless from a user experience point of view. Hopefully they roll it back immediately or it was just a mistake."
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to delude himself into thinking his site can bring peace to the middle east. The Israeli Army would like to say thanks, but no thanks. An Israeli intelligence officer says Facebook has "become a major resource for terrorists, seeking to gather information on soldiers." Officials told Yeshiva World News that Palestinian terrorist group Hezbollah monitors specific Israeli soldiers' activities on Facebook, cultivating online friendships in order to learn classified information and arrange kidnappings. (Photo by AP/Malla)
Facebook has 100 million users and around 0.7 percent of them have joined a group called "I Hate The New Facebook" in order to protest a site redesign which will be made permanent sometime this month. The group, founded by a high schooler named Nick Wagner exhorts users to do something, do anything: "THE NEW FACEBOOK WILL PERMANENTLY BE THE ONLY FACEBOOK. THIS IS A PETITION TO STOP IT. PLZ JOIN AND INVITE. Will be changed in a COUPLE OF DAYS!!!" Wagner also uploaded a screen shot of the site's new redesign, annotating it: "The New Facebook is Retared [sic]."Facebook will ignore this petition, just like it largely ignored users when a far greater percentage of them revolted when the Facebook News Feed came out. Why? Because that feature soon proved to be a crucial and useful element of the site, proving again that while Mark Zuckerberg may not know how to talk to other humans, he knows how people want to use his product better than those people themselves. Even you, Nick Wagner of Laval Catholic High School.
From the Department of ZOMG: Do you hate your stupid job and all the things you have to do at it? Do you secretly dream of writing things about The Hills (just like me!), like what the fashions are like and what the people are like to the other people on the show? Well you might be in luck. MTV, which airs the mostly-faked reality series about a dim archipelago of blondes who float, unmoored, around Los Angeles, is looking for bloggers! One in particular who will win the coveted role of Head Hills Finale Blogger when this fourth season teeters off the air some time in the coming months. And they're posting the application guidelines on Faceebook. You have to send a photo, just so you know tho. So you can't be fat or ugly or have brown hair (unless you are Audrina—you should apply, Audrina) or walk with a limp (you can tell that from photos!) or be a boy (gay people frighten Spencer and uncomfortably arouse Brody) or are Sarah Plain or Madeline Albright or maybe have a glass eye. What else is required? Let MTV tell you:
In an upcoming New York Times magazine, already teased online, Wired contributor Clive Thompson argues that Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr are not alienating us from one another as human beings, as social-network fearmongers claim. We're just becoming more digitally intimate, present in the lives of our 500 "friends," one update at a time. “Sometimes I think this stuff is just crazy, and everybody has got to get a life and stop obsessing over everyone’s trivia and gossiping,” a 20something Facebook user Thompson interviewed said. We know how well that goes.We can't stop — and that's okay, Thompson writes:
What did Microsoft get when it signed a deal in August to serve ads against search results on Facebook? The right to make money off the second-fastest growing search engine on the Internet, according to a ComScore study. Facebook served 173 million search queries in July 2008, up 10 percent from 157 million in July 2007. Facebook doesn't allow its users to search the rest of Web from its site. Even then, its search engine reached a sixth the size of Microsoft's own.A dandy of a deal for Microsoft? Perhaps not. Look closer at ComScore's chart and you'll see that the fastest-growing search engine is MySpace, which gets all of its search ads from Google. Google doesn't make much money from them, though, CEO Eric Schmidt admitted earlier this summer. Probably because no one searches MySpace for something to buy. Will Facebook prove any different?
The French government plans to create a database called Edvige that will log information about anyone in the country over the age of 13, including whether or not they are "likely to breach public order." The idea is to help crack down on crime, an issue President Nicholas Sarkozy successfully campaigned on. Other information that would be included?
PALO ALTO — Thursday night in a Crowne Plaza hotel, with an Elks Club banquet roaring next door, Netscape cofounder, Ning king, and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen sat down with Portfolio writer Kevin Maney for a Churchill Club interview. This wasn't exactly what Andreessen had planned. Back in May, he wrote on his blog that he planned to stop speaking in public: "Used to be, if you wanted to get a message out into the market, you would give a talk at a conference, a reporter would write down some of what you said and mangle the rest, and you'd call it a day.... Mid-year resolution #1: No more public speaking. Mid-year resolution #2: More blogging." Two weeks later, he stopped blogging. Here follows a thoroughly mangled version of his comments. Marc, you have no one to blame but yourself.On Microsoft:
Sheryl Sandberg's right! We've teased Facebook's overserious COO for talking up Facebook's need to sign up more users before figuring out how it's going to make billions of dollars off of them. But analytics firm eMarketer says only 42 percent of the Internet-using world knows about social networks. Translation: A lucky 58 percent are not burdened with worrying about whether they've made anybody's top friends list. Heck, while we're at it: Less than a quarter of the world's 6.6 billion people have access to the Internet. That means 5.97 billion people have no reason to have ever heard of Sandberg, let alone blame her for global warming, violence in the Middle East, and cat allergies. Not yet, anyway.
Elizabeth Coe sent 100 friends a link to her company's website. This feat got her booted from Facebook — and got her featured in the opening of a Washington Post story about Facebook's spam-fighting effort. Facebook is now banning users who ask too many people to be friends all at once, send too many messages, join too many groups, or "poke" too many people. "All I was doing is using it to communicate more efficiently, which is what I thought it was for," Coe told the Post, which goes on to explore the ins and outs of Facebook's unpublished rules.This much is easy to understand: Sending 100 friends a link to your company's site is spam by any reasonable person's definition, whether you think it's "efficient" or not. Facebook has to crack down on such behavior because its users are getting sick of a surfeit of irrelevant messages, whether they're from friends or advertisers. Web security firm Cloudmark says 37 percent of Facebook users have noticed an uptick in spam over the past six months. What's more, Facebook is dealing with an increasing barrage of worms, viruses, phishing scams, as well as security threats for which researchers haven't invented suitably scary jargon yet.
Nobody reads terms of service agreements, those legal documents new users have to click a box to say they've read. And the truth is, they hardly matter to anybody but the cyber-rights-now crowd who get worked up by articles on Boing Boing, and the paranoid lawyers at large Web companies who want to avoid money-fishing lawsuits. But sometimes they go far beyond protecting corporate interests into la-la land. Did you know that when you download Google's new Chrome browser, you agree that any "content" you "submit, post or display" using the service — whether you own its copyright or not — gives Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute" it? Google's ambitions for Chrome are even larger than we thought; by the letter of this license, Google will own all information that flows through its browser. But Chrome's terms of service are just the latest in a long line of ludicrous legalese.
