By admin on March 27, 2010
Imagine visiting a website and finding that it already knows who you are, where you live, how old you are and who your Facebook friends are, without your ever having given it permission to access that information. If you’re logged in to Facebook and visit some as yet unnamed “pre-approved” sites around the web, those sites may soon have default access to data about your Facebook account and friends, the company announced today.
Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, told us in an email that “the right way to think about this is not like a new experience but as making the [Facebook] Connect experience even better and more seamless.” There will be new user controls made available, but this is a new experience: this makes Facebook Connect opt-out instead of opt-in. …
Posted in News, Social Media | Tagged Facebook, privacy
By admin on March 27, 2010
Facebook confirmed today that it is working on a location-based product but said that it has re-evaluated its plans to focus more on places like restaurants.
As part of a larger blog post about clarifying language around privacy controls, Facebook deputy general counsel Michael Richter said today that the company now has “different ideas” that are “even more exciting” than what it previously planned to do with location. More details will be available, including regarding privacy, as the company finalizes the product …
Posted in News, Social Media | Tagged Facebook, location, privacy
By admin on March 19, 2010
Pedophiles are using Facebook to lure children, and the authorities are not happy about it.
Under governmental pressure, Facebook has stated that it has “no objection in principle” to adding a ‘panic button’ to the website for kids who feel that they may be in danger.
What function the button would actually have has not been released in great detail, or if there is a time schedule in mind. Renewed calls for a panic feature comes after a high-profile murder involving a child and a Facebook stalker, pretending to be someone who he was not …
Posted in Social Media | Tagged Facebook
By admin on March 17, 2010
There’s an email going round asking Facebook users to reset their password. The email is a fake and contains a virus, do not open or follow any of its instructions.
Facebook is reportedly in the process of letting its users know, but be sure to let anyone you know be aware of the email.
The message says the following:
Posted in Security, Social Media | Tagged Facebook
By admin on March 13, 2010
Buzz, Google’s controversial attempt to unseat Facebook as the most mainstream of social activity stream readers, just made some much-needed changes that Facebook could learn from as well.
Buzz users now have more granular control over what social interactions with content trigger an email sent to their email inboxes and explicit explanations for why each piece of content was sent by email to them. These changes are a good start but ought to extended into the body of Buzz as well …
Posted in News, Social Media | Tagged Facebook, google buzz, stream readers
By admin on March 6, 2010
Social Networking site Facebook is now offering its users the opportunity to share cash with each other, real cash that is.
You can send and receive small payments via a Facebook application called Buxter and the company behind Buxter that will process the transactions is online payments company ClickandBuy …
Posted in News, Social Media | Tagged ClickandBuy, Facebook, Facebook Payment
By admin on February 27, 2010
Facebook is about to become a quieter, less annoying place for users. The company just announced that it has deprecated “application notifications” and will require apps to use other, less intrusive methods of sending news to users. It’s a big step in the ongoing anti-MySpace-ification of Facebook. Though to be fair, MySpace recently instituted something similar. Now your “notifications” section on Facebook will just be for things like comments left on your posts.
It’s a good move that puts the interests of users ahead of short-term benefits for app developers and monetization …
Posted in News, Social Media | Tagged Facebook, myspace, notifications, ux
By admin on February 4, 2010
The influence that Facebook is having on the enterprise now goes beyond making the corporate world a more Web-oriented place – its impact now goes deep into the code.
Facebook announced this week that it has rewritten the PHP runtime, translating it to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This is no small feat. Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao said that the rewrite significantly reduced the CPU usage on its Web servers by an average of about 50% depending on the page …
Posted in Programming | Tagged Facebook, hiphop, php, runtime
By admin on February 3, 2010
Last time some websites reported that Facebook was planning to release a JIT compiler for PHP, a huge step toward making the PHP runtime – and PHP-based sites and apps – faster by taking the interpreted language (a.k.a., more human-readable code) a few steps closer to the bare-metal ones and zeros machines actually read.
We’ve been updated that the PHP runtime has in fact been rewritten, with an extra step: The PHP is translated to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This project, called HipHop, has been in development under great secrecy at Facebook for the past couple years and has just this morning been open sourced …
Posted in Programming | Tagged Facebook, hiphop, php, runtime
