Social Networking – Facebook News Feed Tip

Several months ago Facebook made a change to it’s default settings that you may or may not of been aware of.

Michael Daras

Facebook is NOW Sharing YOU with OTHERS

PASS THIS ALONG… To STOP the Automatic Facebook SHARE Setting… As a Facebook User (by default) your Personal Info is NOW being SHARED with other websites WITHOUT your Authorization.

To IMMEDIATELY turn this setting OFF:

• Check out the OTHER SETTINGS on this page and ENABLE/DISABLE as per your comfort level.

  If you are fairly fluent in Facebook,
  continue reading "Social Networking: Facebook is NOW Sharing YOU with OTHERS"

Facebook Change – Your Personal Info Given to Third-Party Websites

Facebook is expected to announce some big changes coming to its social networking service, including an expansion of Facebook Connect.

CLICK HERE to read the FULL article from CNNmoney.com.

Michael Daras

Ever wondered how many people used Facebook? How about in the United States? Which cities have the most Facebook users? If these statistics don’t bear out the social networking phenomena growing in the United States, I don’t know what will. The opportunity for Information Marketing has NEVER been greater so get out there and spread the word.

Michael Daras

Starting today, YouTube will look dramatically different for everyone.

That’s because the Google-owned video website will be rolling out its redesign to all users over the next few hours — the rollout should be complete by 7:00 p.m. today.

Michael Daras

Facebook is in the midst of launching a new Privacy Tool and will keep its feedback doors open until 12:00am PDT on April 3, 2010.

As per the Facebook Site Governance Team:

“In response to your feedback, we’ve improved the Friend List visibility option described HERE.

Now when you uncheck the “Show my friends on my profile” option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won’t appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out.

This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications.

Thanks again for your comments and suggestions.”

Michael Daras

Ali vs. Frazier. Connors vs. McEnroe. Facebook vs. Google. Stay tuned because these two heavyweights are primed for “The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile.”

Facebook and Google are both vying to dominate the web through 3rd-party connections and social commerce. Here’s a look at their strategies and how they’ve fared so far.

Michael Daras

There will be lots of news leaking about Facebook’s product announcements at their upcoming F8 Developer Conference in April. That’s because they’re already starting to test out a lot of the new stuff with third party developers, and once two people know a secret, it isn’t really a secret any more.

One of the new features we’ve been hearing about is the extension of Facebook Connect and the Facebook API to allow publishers to add a “Like” button to any piece of content on their site.

Sound trivial? It isn’t. This is likely part of Facebook’s Open Graph API project that will incentivize third party sites to interact deeply with Facebook by sharing content and associated metadata.

Today you can “share” content with Facebook via a simple button (you can see our implementation at the top of this post). The new Like feature goes way beyond the Share button, we’ve heard.

Good for publishers? Yes. But it’s also very, very good for Facebook as hundreds of thousands of websites will rush to format their content to exactly Facebook’s preference and send over all their data without a second thought.

One way to think of this, says a source with knowledge of the product, is this. Google spends billions of dollars indexing the web for their search engine. Facebook will get the web to index itself, exclusively for Facebook.

Yes, it’s a big idea. Or, as MG put it, the entire Internet will be turned into a tributary system for Facebook. And it all flows from a simple Like gesture, and a few other features we’ll be writing about shortly.

Michael Daras

Computerworld – Google today added an alert to Gmail that warns users of the Web mail service when their account may have been hijacked.

Using several criteria — including plotting the Internet protocol (IP) address of each successful log-on — Google determines whether to sound the alarm, which pops up at the top of a user’s account and reads “Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…” along with the location associated with the log-on.

If an account is accessed from one country, then again a few hours later from a different country, Google would likely sound the alarm. The assumption: The multiple and geographically divergent log-ons would be a clue that the account had been hacked, and was now being used to send spam, spread scams or distribute malware.

“It’s actually much more sophisticated than that,” said Will Cathcart, a Gmail product manager. “If we determine that an IP down the block [from you] has logged into your account, and has recently logged into lots and lots of accounts, we’ll display the warning.”

Cathcart declined to reveal details of the other factors that Google takes into account when deciding whether to trigger an access alert, saying only that the IP locating criteria was “a data point that most users can easily understand.”

The idea is to give users more information about activity on their Gmail accounts, Cathcart said. “This is an evolution of what we’ve done for some time,” he said, referring to the account activity records that users have been able to view since mid-2008.

“We’ve been doing a lot of compromised account detection work, and we wanted to give users information about why we think an account may be compromised. This way, we reach out to a lot more users, because we don’t need to be 100% certain that an account [has been hijacked] before we block it. Now we can be just 99% sure, and give the users the information so they can take action.”

Michael Daras

You would be surprised at HOW MUCH information Google has about you.