Facebook Watch

Facebook just settled a lawsuit in which the plaintiffs, former Harvard classmates and employers of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, alleged that Zuckerberg stole ideas from them in the creation of Facebook. From this Reuter’s article:

The dispute centred on accusations Zuckerberg copied ideas for Facebook after being hired as a Harvard University sophomore by the Winklevoss brothers and a third partner to write code for a site called Harvard Connection.

Through the settlement, Facebook effectively agreed to buy ConnectU, the successor company to Harvard Connection founded by the Winklevoss brothers, partner Divya Narendra, for cash and common stock.

The DataPortability initiative announced this morning that representatives from both Facebook and Google have joined their DataPortability Workgroup. If things work out right, this could prove to be a watershed moment in the fight for user’s data rights on the web.

The DataPortability group states their philosophy as such:

“As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.”

Traditionally, most websites, especially in the realm of social networking, have offered very little in terms of data portability. This means that when a user enters data, such as by adding friends or posting content, the data is locked in to the site, and thus the user is locked into the site. If he wanted to try out a different social networking site, he would have to start afresh, not being able to carry his own data with him. Data portability isn’t just about migrating data between competing websites, though, it also has countless other implications in how we access, backup, share, mashup, transform, and use data through the web.

At the dawn of an age where computer users will be storing more of their data in the internet “cloud” than on their local hard drives, the support of Facebook and Google in the DataPortability initiative could have quite a significance towards the success of the DataPortability project, as summed up well by ReadWriteWeb:

“The non-participation of Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market, was the biggest stumbling block to the viability of the project. These are two of the most important companies in recent history - what’s being decided now is whether they will be walled-garden, data-horders or truly open platforms tied into a larger ecosystem of innovation with respect for user rights and sensible policies about data.”

Here’s the story: An internet joker creates a fake Facebook account for Benazir Bhutto’s son and the ever-vigilant press immediately sets off to work reprinting fraudulent quotes from the late Pakistani Prime Minister’s son as if they were the real deal.

This is the forum thread where prankster Tonay and his ever-mature internet chums giggle over the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and West Wing references he’s managed to pass off as genuine statements from Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who was recently announced to be his mother’s successor as chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party.

This New York Times blog sets the record straight and calls out bad journalism on the part of numerous prominent news sources.

Prankster Playing Bhuttos Son on Facebook Fools News Outlets - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog:

“– Canada’s Globe and Mail and Agence France Presse quoted heavily from a section of jocular statements on Islam:

‘What’s Islamic extremism? It’s strict adherence to a particular interpretation of seventh century Islamic law as practiced by the prophet Mohammed, and when I say ’strict adherence’, I’m not kidding around.

‘Men are forced to pray, wear their beards a certain length. Among my favorites is there’s only one acceptable cheer at a football match: Allah-hu-Akbar. God is great.

‘If your guys are getting creamed, then you’re on your own,’

– London’s Telegraph headlined his admission that ‘I am not a born leader.’

– Australia’s ABC News highlighted his prediction that ‘my time to lead will come.’

– Radar Magazine and Huffington Post promoted some of the goofy details sprinkled throughout the profile: ‘Bhutto Boy Shows Buffy Facebook Love.’

– And MTV News took a little bit of all of the above.”

Journalists, please check your sources. A Facebook page with a person’s name on is not that person, nor was it necessarily even written by that person. I shudder to think about the possible fallout in the streets of Pakistan, not to mention what young Bilawal might face, if the wrong words were published as having come from his mouth.

Guess which country leads in Facebook usage: “‘Overall, 51 percent online Canadians are members of social network sites. And 80 percent of them are with Facebook. This shows how pervasive Facebook is in Canada. User numbers are galloping like nowhere else in the world,’ said Singh.”

“Syrian authorities have blocked Facebook, the popular Internet hangout, over what seems to be fears of Israeli “infiltration” of Syrian social networks on the Net, according to residents and media reports.”

See the full story at Yahoo news.

Update: It looks like President Assad of Syria has fired the communications minister who was responsible for blocking Facebook and several other sites. No word on the reason for the firing, nor whether Facebook will be unblocked.

On Tuesday evening, a 23 year old UCLA student was at UCLA’s own Powell Library when he was asked to show a student identification card. Not having it on him at the time, he was asked to leave. When the student refused to leave, campus police were called in, and the scene quickly turned into a horrific mess of stun guns and screaming. Here is a more detailed run-down of the situation.

The point is this: I heard about this incident, you heard about this incident, and the news media heard about this incident. Why? Because it was such a disgusting abuse of police power? It was, but similar incidents occur unfortunately all too often. This story was most likely spread so far and wide because the incident was recorded and posted on YouTube. (The video in fact is today’s most viewed and most discussed video on YouTube.)

And how did this story come to my attention? Through the Facebook news feed, the very same controversial feature that spawned this site back in September. When Facebook added privacy controls to the news feed, they very cleverly omitted the option to hide when you join a group. Therefore, on my Facebook homepage I was greeted with the news earlier that several of my friends have joined groups outraged by the Taser attack, of which there are probably a dozen already (”I forgot my BruinCard.. please don’t TASER me”, “Save a Student, Taser a crazed Police Officer”, “UCLA sucks cuz they taser their students”, etc.). Thus, in the very same manner that the Facebook news feed fueled its own backlash, the news feed has shown itself to be both an extremely effective zeitgeist of and inciter of social movements. I find Facebook to be quite brilliant and unique in this regard, and I expect to see many more instances in the future of Facebook acting as the lightning-fast “grapevine” through which opinion travels.

Facebook has been using the same bland blue-on-white color scheme since its inception. And while it may be more of a feature than a drawback that Facebook doesn’t allow users to customize their profiles à la Myspace, let’s face it: Facebook could use some color.

That’s where Facebook Auto-Colorizer comes in. This Greasemonkey script analyzes the colors in a user’s profile picture, and then automatically adjusts the color scheme of the page to match it. Pretty cool. If you’re not familiar with Greasemonkey, it’s a Firefox extension that allows you to install scripts which transform webpages. .

A study recently conducted by Anderson Analytics claims that Facebook is the second most popular website among college students.  While Facebook has held second place since last year, interesting movement was shown by Myspace, which moved from fourth to first place, and Youtube, which pull third place out of nowhere.

Surely as a response to the news that Facebook is being opened up to anyone, not just students, Facebook has posted a notice reminding users about its privacy controls:

Since we started adding high schools and companies last year, pretty much everyone has been able to use Facebook. As the site grows, we’re constantly adding more privacy controls like the ones we added last week in response to your suggestions about News Feed. You can expect to see more soon, but in the meantime we want to highlight some things you may not have known.

How do I control who sees my information?

• Show different information to different people using privacy controls.
• Hide info from specific people (even friends) using limited profiles.
• Make yourself invisible to someone on the site by blocking them.

Who can see my profile now?

• Your friends.
• Other people at [your school].
• We will never allow any random person to see your information.

Who can get on the site?

• College students with a .edu email address.
• High School students with an invitation or a school email address.
• People can register for a company using their work email address.
• In the future, people will be able to register for regions. But not yet.

What does this mean for me?

• Probably not a lot since privacy has always worked this way.
• Still, make sure your privacy controls are set the way you want.
• If you have suggestions for improving privacy, send them here.

Notice that the fact that they’re opening to the world is very understated in this announcement.  The privacy controls should keep Facebook from turning into quite the free-for-all that Myspace has become, but they haven’t announced any intentions to prevent the fake profiles and spam profiles that will surely proliferate with the opening up of Facebook.

Facebook was first a service for Harvard students. It then expanded to include other universities and colleges. Next it started taking in high school students. And now, incredibly right on the heels of the News Feed controversy, it intends to open its doors to the public at large.

This isn’t really all that surprising. It used to be that a Facebook user was only affiliated with people in his or her college’s “network.” But when Facebook made the addition several months ago of being able to affiliate yourself with employer and geographical networks as well, it started to give away Facebook’s ambition at becoming the next big social networking site.

While its membership may be less than a tenth of Myspace’s, Facebook’s corporate backing (eg. Microsoft) puts it in a strong place to contend with the News Corp owned site. Many people prefer Facebook, however, for its sense of exclusivity and privacy (at least to the extent that it takes more than a trip to www.facebook.com/yourname for your mom to see photos of you hitting a beer bong, as it is with Myspace). While Facebook will still restrict certain information based on geographic affiliation, this latest move seems prove Facebook’s status as one fish in the ever-expanding pool of Friendster clones.