BBC: The once dominant MySpace has turned to the company that stole its crown, Facebook, for help to drive users to its ailing site. The two launched Mashup with Facebook, to let MySpace users log in to their Facebook accounts through their MySpace page. This means users can port over their likes and interests listed on Facebook. In turn users will get a stream of entertainment content based on these preferences. ...
Facebook has announced a new product that will compete directly with the e-mail services provided by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and AOL. Facebook believes traditional e-mail is too slow and cumbersome; it needs be brought into the modern world of messaging. The site has thus launched Facebook Messages, which merges texts, online chats, and e-mails into one central hub. Users see all of them in their Social Inbox and can reply in any way they want. The social networking giant says this product is the biggest it has worked on to date. ...
Thousands of female Facebook users had their accounts inexplicably disabled today. They did not violate Facebook’s terms of use but nevertheless, they are seeing messages claiming their accounts are “inauthentic,” according to Me & Her. Facebook has confirmed the issue and is asking users to scan and upload a copy of a valid driver’s license in order to reactivate their accounts. The mass-deactivations are a small percentage of Facebook’s total subscriber base, but the number of users affected is easily in the thousands. ...
Mashable: Facebook’s running out of servers to handle its 500+ million users, so it has decided to build a new data center in North Carolina that will cost a whopping $450 million to complete. The announcement was made by North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue, who said that the facility will take 18 months to complete and will employ 35 to 45 workers to operate (not including the 250 jobs that will be created during its construction). It is being built in Rutherford County, which is to the west of Charlotte. ...
CNet: The latest security fiasco on Facebook’s application platform may involve business pages rather than personal accounts: Sendible, a company that makes software for businesses to manage accounts and presences on various social-media services, looked like it was hit by a virus or hacker on Tuesday afternoon: TechCrunch pointed out that Sendible-managed brand pages on Facebook appeared to be posting malicious links. Now Sendible’s claiming it wasn’t their fault. “Just to clarify, Sendible was not hacked,” the company posted to its Twitter account. “One of our users has discovered a major flaw in Facebook’s security.” Sendible’s Twitter account then quoted the user in question, who said, “i wanted to post only on a few Facebook walls as a fan – and for some reason, posted as the page Owner. weird,” and Sendible added “This appears to be a bug in Facebook’s API as the posts should have been displayed as the user profile and not the page owner.” ...
Reuters: Google Inc will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users’ information, highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants. Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users’ email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users’ information. ...
David McCandless recently gave a presentation about data visualization in which he unveiled this graph, which tracked 10,000 Facebook status updates to determine precisely when people in relationships broke up. The results look like this: Note the huge surges around Spring Break, the beginning of Summer, and two weeks before Christmas, as well as the sharp decline on Christmas Day itself. The majority of the breakups are announced on Mondays (Garfield was right – lasagna is awesome. Non sequitor.) The graph also doesn’t show what happens when someone in a relationship makes a detailed graph about ending relationships, but I’m guessing that’s been an instant breakup one out of one times. ...
(CNN) — Facebook is the biggest name in social networking. But overnight, it got smaller. The font size on much of the site appears to have shrunk — a tweak that has folks complaining about their poor, News Feed-browsing eyes. By Wednesday morning, users had taken to Twitter to sound off on the change, mostly for the negative. “Eye doctors everywhere must love the smaller default font on Facebook this morning. Eyes squinting everywhere!” wrote Twitter user esilverstein. ...
On average, response times and availability of five major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace) has improved this past quarter, according to Web analytics company AlertSite. This is great news given that all of them (save for possibly MySpace) have a quickly growing number of users. Despite a few outages, however, Facebook is still the fastest social network in terms of average response time. In the most recent third quarter (July 1 to September 30), Facebook shaved 0.02 seconds off its second quarter average response time, down to 1.00 seconds. Twitter and Myspace came in the last two spots with average response times of 2.93 seconds and 3.61 seconds, respectively. That being said, Twitter’s performance improved the most over the last quarter among the social networks studied: more than 35 percent. ...
Mashable: Facebook is rolling out a new breed of Pages called Friendship Pages that pull together the public wall posts, comments, photos (based on tags) and events that two friends have in common. The Friendship Pages feature was cooked up by Facebook software engineer Wayne Kao and then brought to life in an internal hackathon event. The Pages are designed to the tell the story of two friends on Facebook through their shared activity. ...