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Go ahead, share that status update – not just with all your friends on Facebook but with the whole wide Internet.
Facebook unveiled some incremental changes in its privacy policies today, giving users the ability to make some of what they put on the site available to the entire Internet. Sort of like what Twitter has already been doing for a couple of years.
Although the name Twitter didn’t come up in Facebook’s conference call, it had to be on the company’s mind, as the two firms vie to become the main platform where people share details of their lives.
Facebook had first announced the “everyone” option in March and shed some more light on it today. It also said it planned to streamline the process to make it easier for people to control who can see their activity on the site, and that it would provide a transition to give people time to learn the new rules.
The fast-growing social networking company said it aimed to make its privacy settings easier to use, particularly for newcomers to the site, so that people would know exactly who can read what they write or see their photos and videos.
“As we’ve added more controls and the ability to share information, we’ve also had additional privacy settings, and over time, they add up in piles, and it’s not as clean as people want,” Chris Kelly, the company’s chief privacy officer, said in a conference call.
Kelly said the company would put privacy controls in one easy-to-find spot on the site and would also include actionable items in the places where users post information so they could better manage privacy on individual pieces of information.
Most noteworthy was a “publisher privacy control” that the company has been testing. Right in the box where someone would write a status update – the brief dialogue at the top of someone’s Facebook page that announces to friends that person's latest thought or activity – people will be offered the choice to share the update with “everyone,” with only their “friends” or with a “custom” group, in which the person can pick which individuals get the information.
Facebook members also will have the ability to decide whether Facebook can share their information and activity with advertisers, according to Kelly.
In addition, Facebook said it would remove the site’s “regional networks,” which product manager Leah Pearlman said were confusing.
Kelly has posted information on the changes to Facebook’s blog, and the slide presentationis also available online.
[Update:Privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in an e-mail that Facebook has tended to get in trouble whenever it changes user settings.
"It will be very important that users are not opted-in to data sharing under the new settings where they had previously opted out with the original settings," he wrote. "Facebook also needs to do more to address data collection by third-party app developers. Too much personal information, made public by Facebook, ends up in secret profiles."
But Facebook said all privacy settings stay the same, until the user changes -- or in privacy-speak, "opts in" -- to new settings.In a statement, Kelly said, “We are simplifying some settings to give users more control over their own data, and requiring them to make an affirmative choice before these changes are made. User control is at the heart of Facebook’s privacy philosophy, and these improvements are all being made with a deep respect for that principle.”]
-- Dan Fost
 David Ebersman. Credit: Genentech Inc. Facebook announced today it had hired former Genentech Inc. executive David Ebersman as its chief financial officer. Ebersman, who will formally start in September, was at Genetech for 15 years, including as its vice president and CFO between 2006 and 2009. “We quickly recognized that David was the right person for Facebook," wrote Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a statement. "He was Genentech's CFO while revenue tripled, and his success in scaling the finance organization of a fast growing company will be important to Facebook.” Ebersman left Genentech in April, just after the firm was acquired by Swiss pharmaceutical conglomerate Roche in a $47-billion takeover. At the time, Facebook said it was looking for a CFO with "public company experience," after the departure of former finance head Gideon Yu. Yu, who himself had experience at Google's YouTube and Yahoo, both public entities, held the job for less than two years. Ebersman's hire suggests that Facebook may be ramping up its plans to go public, a milestone that Zuckerberg has often alluded to. -- David Sarno
 Traffic to news sites in North America saw a massive spike as the Michael Jackson story unfolded. Times are EST. Credit: Akamai.
As the news of Michael Jackson's fate unfolded, sites around the Web felt the strain of spiking interest. On Twitter, the volume of Jackson-related messages – up to 5,000 per minute at peak – put such a demand on the site that it slowed considerably. “We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in an e-mail response to our inquiry. “This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.” "Regarding performance," he added, "there were reports of slowness following the spike in activity. It highlighted an opportunity for improvement which we'll be acting on right away." Online chatterers reported slowness at other social hubs, including AOL’s popular instant message system and at the blog site LiveJournal. The Los Angeles Times website creaked beneath the weight of the story as well, with nearly 2.3 million page views in one hour, more traffic than during any single hour last Nov. 5, the site’s highest-traffic day. Facebook saw a frenzy of activity, too. A spokeswoman for the company said the number of status updates during the hour after the Jackson news emerged was triple the average. She said Facebook remained free of performance issues. Traffic to the leading online news sites throughout North America was at least 20% above average, according to Akamai’s Net Usage Index, which monitors online news consumption around the world. The intense interest among Web users was evident on sites that track which terms are most popular among users. Phrases such as “Rip MJ,” “King of Pop” and “Thriller” were among the most frequently used on Twitter, and on Google.com, “Michael Jackson died” became the most popular query. Updated, 7:27 p.m.: A statement from AOL noted the following: “At AOL our AIM instant messaging service was undergoing a previously scheduled software update which should normally prove routine. It proved not to be. There was a significant increase in traffic due to today’s news and AIM was down for approximately 40 minutes this afternoon." The statement also noted that, "Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth." Updated, Friday June 26th, 1:24 p.m.: Yahoo is reporting record traffic too: "Yahoo! News set a record in unique visitors with 16.4 million UV's in a day. Our previous record was on election day when we had 15.1 million visitors.Yahoo! News had 4 million visitors come to the site between 3-4 pm, setting an hourly record." -- David Sarno
MySpace tries to keep up its :-). Credit: Wes Baumsmith / Los Angeles Times. Once a site that defined social networks, MySpace is now struggling to keep up with newcomers such as Twitter and Facebook. The News Corp. property said Tuesday that it would lay off 420 people, a third of its workforce, as its market share of U.S. audiences slipped and its advertising revenue is projected to fall.
The troubles at MySpace illustrate the brutal competition among social networks, where popularity can be as fleeting as trendy teen fashions. In a story in today's Times, Charlene Li, an Internet analyst with Altimeter Group, said:
The speed with which a company like Facebook is able to innovate and keep things fresh is the key to survival in this space. There are new things like Twitter that come along. What does Facebook do? It does Twitter ... and it does it better.
That, ironically, was the painful lesson that social networking pioneer Friendster learned when MySpace came along.
-- Alex Pham
Credit: Abedin Taherkenareh / EPA
For a service that limits users to 140 characters, Twitter is finding its influence growing worldwide. The San Francisco company Monday delayed a crucial maintenance operation to accommodate the high volume of information flowing about the explosive election protests in Iran.
People both inside and outside Iran have been sending short text messages about the violence and civil disobedience that has engulfed the nation's capital, Tehran, for the last two days. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has defended his reelection last week, but the protests have grown more intense.
In a blog post Monday afternoon, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said his site's scheduled maintenance would be delayed from overnight -- daytime in Iran -- to 2 to 3 p.m. Pacific time Tuesday, which would be the middle of the night in Iran.
The work was "a critical network upgrade [that] must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter," Stone wrote. The servers that undergird the micromessaging site are run by NTT America, a division of Japanese telecommunications giant Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Co.
Stone noted that NTT America recognized "the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran" and was "taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide."
Twitter traffic about the situation in Iran has been dominating the service for the last several days, with topics such as IranElection, Tehran and Iranians among the most actively discussed on Twitter. News tidbits, photos and chatter about the protests have flowed around the world, becoming a key medium for news from the scene.
Twitter users worried that shutting down the service could cut off yet another information channel for those in Iran, where the government had reportedly blocked access to social media sites, such as YouTube and Facebook, in addition to cutting off mobile phone service.
-- David Sarno
 Want to claim www.facebook.com/robertdeniro? Fuhgeddaboutit!
Right now, most Facebook profile pages are given a url with a string of non-sensical numbers and letters, such as www.facebook.com/home.php?id=8756770&ref=name. On the other hand, if you want your own name as part of the company's URL, start flexing your fingers (mine, for example, could be www.facebook.com/alexpham). At 9:01 PM (Pacific Time) this Friday, June 12, the social network is letting each Facebook user sign up for one "vanity url" by going to www.facebook.com/username/.
Here are the rules:
- The username must be at least five characters long and be alphanumeric (A to Z, 0 to 9).
- Offensive terms and variations of offensive terms will be blocked.
- Names of celebrities and trademarked terms will also be blocked.
- User names cannot be changed or transferred to another user after they have been assigned.
- The first one to claim a user name wins.
Why do this? Facebook spokesman Larry Yu said the fast-growing network, which has 200 million users who have returned to their accounts at least once in the last 30 days, is trying to foster a "real name culture." In other words, people will be more comfortable in an online social network if they believe the other members are who they say they are.
"It also creates a level of accountability," Yu said. Users are less likely to behave badly if their actions can be traced back to their real-world identities.
It's also easier for users to promote. Imagine putting www.facebook.com/home.php?id=8756770&ref=name on a business card. So if you use Facebook to promote your business or group, you might prefer to a link that contains your name, for instance www.facebook.com/clinteastwood.
That is, if you're feeling lucky. Well, do you? Updated 9:46 a.m. Thursday, June 11: An earlier version of this post had an incorrect date for letting Facebook subscribers choose a username. It is Friday, June 12, not June 13.
-- Alex Pham
 Facebook announced today that Russian venture capital firm Digital Sky Technologies had bought $200-million worth of preferred stock in the Palo Alto, Calif., social networking company, or just under 2% of Facebook based on a $10-billion total valuation. Digital Sky will probably also buy $100-million worth of common stock so that Facebook can use the proceeds to pay employees who wish to cash out on their vested shares.
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said one of the primary reasons for the deal was Digital Sky's experience with social networks in various countries. The company's portfolio includes five Eastern European social networks, including Russia's Vkontakte and the company Forticom, which runs Odnoklassniki (Russia), Nasza-Klasa (Poland) and One.lv and One.lt in the Baltics.
 On a conference call with reporters, Digital Sky CEO Yuri Milner said that his social networks were market leaders in 13 different European countries. "What we see over there is that the companies that are farther along the monetization curve are able to monetize significantly better than Facebook at this point," he said.
But, he added, "we strongly believe that the same pattern would follow with Facebook."
Zuckerberg said he was interested in how DST's social networks use a variety of successful monetization strategies, including advertising, virtual gits and direct payments from users.
"The fact that there’s so many different models for these social networks across the world is a demonstration that these products are really creating a lot of value for users, and therefore there are ways to monetize them very effectively," Zuckerberg said. "I'm really looking forward to learning and getting more of an understanding about how these models are working in Europe and Asia."
Facebook doesn't make its advertising revenue numbers public, but research firm EMarketer estimates the company's overseas ad revenue will grow to $70 million in 2009, a 75% increase over 2008. EMarketer projects Facebook's 2009 domestic ad revenue at $230 million. Corrected, May 27th, 7:45 a.m.: Because of a typographical error, an earlier version of this post stated Facebook's valuation for this investment at $1 billion. The correct value is $10 billion.
-- David Sarno
 Annabel Linquist poses in a Swedish meadow. Credit: Daniel Karlsson For Annabel Linquist, launching a music career requires little more than a computer for recording, online social media for promotion and psychic powers for, uh, inspiration. Equipped with a secondhand acoustic guitar and a Mac computer, the Manhattan painter records made-to-order love songs for customers looking to score some romance points with a significant other.
Linquist is a self-professed non-musician, but her social networking savvy is earning her a quick buck through frank, charming, uncomplicated music.
Take, for example, the song "I Heart Sydney."
"Sydney, Sydney, you're so pretty," Linquist intones sweetly. "Red hair goes with pink / Sydney, girl, you're super bouncy / I heard you're a singer, too."
Or listen to the sour-sweet "I Heart Addy."
"Adelaide, Adelaide / Do you like lemonade? / Your aunt got you a serenade to tell you that she loves you / A serenade is when someone sings a song of love to you / because they think you're really great / And this song is for you."
The project started with a simple message to a friend that turned into something more.
"I was going to make a post on my friend's Facebook wall," she said, "and then I thought, I could just write her a song in five minutes."
When requests for custom songs began pouring in, Linquist charged $12 per song, and composed short love ballads under the alias Gretel Prinn. She posted each little ditty to the music-sharing service iLike -- a popular app for sharing music on Facebook.
She eventually received so many orders for the custom "I heart" tracks that she decided to raise the price -- from $12 to $50 and eventually ...
Read on »
 Twitter creator Jack Dorsey says the service needs to do a better job of hooking new users. Credit: carrotcreative via Flickr The mastermind behind Twitter isn't denying that his website has a problem keeping new users. The issue came up in an April report from Nielsen saying 60% of Twitter neophytes don't come back after the first month. Twitter is brainstorming ways to improve the service so newbies get hooked right away, said site chairman and creator Jack Dorsey over lunch in Washington, D.C., last week. The best way to do that is to connect users immediately with others they'll be interested in. Dorsey's co-founder Biz Stone told The Times in February that the Suggested Users list that's presented to brand-new users is a step toward accomplishing that goal. A similar list was around in 2006 when Twitter launched. The feature has skyrocketed the popularity of users who get that endorsement -- netting an average of 53,000 new followers in an account's first week since being featured, O'Reilly writes. But it's not the ideal solution for the user retention problem, Dorsey said. "Our sign-up process is still fairly weak," Dorsey said. "It's not the best way to suggest people to new users because they're . . . not relevant to everyone. We just choose a random 20" selections from a pool of picks by Twitter staff, he said. Grabbing new users from the get-go is one of the bigger challenges facing the company. "It's a hard problem to solve," Dorsey said. "And the company is . . .
Read on »
Is Facebook using the right tools for e-mail security? Original image Credit: jurek d via Flickr. In poker, you never touch anyone else's cards. Why? Because they're not your cards. Likewise, when you sit down at a restaurant and there's a tip on the table from the previous patron, you don't touch it. Simple reason: It's not your money.
I had a similar reaction this morning when Facebook reached its fingers into my inbox and deleted two messages without asking me. Granted, they were both phishing messages -- malicious spam, essentially -- from today's attack. For many unsuspecting people, the mere presence of these messages would constitute a security threat, so Facebook's eradicate-first-ask-questions-last approach is understandable. Nuke the virus before it causes more damage. But still, those messages had already been in my mailbox for hours. I had opened and examined them. They were my mail.
It's true that I had a professional interest in retaining copies of the messages, since I'd written about them earlier. And it's also true that most people probably wouldn't mind having toxic spam removed without their permission. Who would want to keep it?
Still, it's the principle. Facebook has made a policy of deleting e-mail it deems malicious, even after I've received, opened and read it. They get to decide when it's appropriate to do that, not me. And while it's clear that they're taking these actions to protect users, they're also protecting themselves, which means there's a subjective element to this. And as is well-known, people don't always agree with the decisions Facebook makes about content policing.
Hypothetical: What if I get suckered into a phishing scam and have my identity stolen? Do you think I'd want to have a copy of the original Facebook e-mail, including the text it contained and the time of receipt?
On the other side, this rather blunt nuclear option also catches some innocent fish. I sent several messages to myself that contained the phrase "151.im" in various contexts, including this one:
This message and all the others that mentioned "151.im" were rejected by Facebook's mail system:
Again, no reason to fault Facebook for trying to protect its users. But I'm not sure mentioning the name of the bad site should drop the red hammer of doom on my messages, especially if they're warnings. If the same principle were applied to Twitter, none of the hundreds of messages warning about the spread of the virus would've gotten out.
The detection and prevention of spam and scams should ideally happen before the mail gets to users, not after. But if Facebook gets hit by another worm, maybe they can add a warning band (like the one above) to iffy messages or even move them to a spam folder like Gmail or Hotmail might. That way, instead of the evidence disappearing without a trace, users could learn what malicious e-mail looks like -- the better to avoid getting burned next time.
-- David Sarno
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