Britney Spears kicks off celebrity merchandizing on Facebook

Britney Spears' virtual icons, now on sale at Facebook. Credit: www.britneyspears.com.

The first celebrity gifts on Facebook are now on sale, and who is at the forefront of this e-commerce revolution? Britney, of course.

The pop star Britney Spears, who is described on her blog as an "international icon," has loaned her likeness or related images to a series of virtual gifts that Facebook users can send to one another.

A couple of them show her singing, a couple others show her on-stage outfits and one perhaps hints at a political message by showing a rainbow-colored balloon labeled "Britney Pride" (Spears has spoken out in support of gay marriage).

According to the Britney blog, all of the gift symbols were designed by Susan Kare. Back in the 1980s, Kare designed some of the original Macintosh computer icons, including the famous one with the smiling computer face.

Except for one of the Britney gifts that is free, the others cost $2, apiece, to obtain and send. All are limited editions, although you probably don't have to rush over to the site right away. The "Happy Birthday" symbol with Britney's signature is available to the first 500,000 buyers.

-- David Colker

Facebook to acquire FriendFeed, a threaded message service

Facebook announced today that it was acquiring FriendFeed, the 12-person Mountain View, Calif., company that runs a messaging network of the same name and has stayed viable in a crowded social-media landscape.

FriendFeed is a messaging platform that allows friends to easily create long threads  -- or discussions on a particular topic.  The threads can include various kinds of media, including Web links, videos and images -- the better to facilitate a discussion without the need to jump around to disparate websites.

Facebook has more than 250 million active users worldwide.  FriendFeed, by comparison, has a limited audience, many of whom are early adopters and electronic-media types. According to Compete.com, Facebook has more than 100 times the number of unique visitors that Friendfeed had in June -- but  FriendFeed's audience also increased by 75% over the last year.

Under the deal, FriendFeed's founders will become part of Facebook's senior product and engineering team, and all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook.

The statement included the following comment from one of FriendFeed's founders:

“As we spent time with Mark [Zuckerberg] and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

The sale price was not disclosed in the press release.

-- David Sarno

Cyber attack is meant to bury blogger; instead, it makes him a star

This scene from the former Georgian city of Sukhumi is used as a logo by the attacked blogger Cyxymu. Credit: Cyxymu Livejournal.

The massive cyber attack last week that security experts said was aimed at silencing a single blogger in the country of Georgia instead made him a global celebrity.

Cyxymu, as he is known on his mostly anti-Russia blog, has been the subject of news reports worldwide ever since he was identified as the target of the attack that took down Twitter for several hours and crippled other popular online services.

"I am not happy that [my] blogs were attacked," said the blogger, speaking on his cellphone from outside the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. "But it is good that I get famous.

"I think Obama knows about me, because he likes Internet news."

The blogger, who declined to give his last name but said his first name is Giorgy, said he has gotten  messages from people in numerous countries who have read his postings on Facebook. (His main blog on the LiveJournal service is still down.)

It was not the first time his blogs were a target. Giorgy said an attack last year shut down his blog from October to May. Afterward, he got messages that if he continued with his blogging, there would be more attacks to "stop you second and third time," he said.

The attack that began Thursday at about 6 a.m. PDT was so huge -- with a hacker-controlled botnet of computers overloading his sites with various kinds of requests -- that it took down Twitter in its wake.

Beth Jones of the Sophos online security company thinks that the disruption of Twitter was accidental "collateral damage" from the attack. But Open Society Institute fellow Evgeny Morozov, writing in a Foreign Policy magazine blog, said he believed the damage to Twitter was an intentional demonstration, a flexing of the "attackers' cyber-muscles by revealing the kind of leverage that Cyxymu's detractors have on the Internet's most popular sites."

Giorgy said the attack will not stop him from continuing his writings, and he has adapted before by changing addresses, making his online soap box a moving target. One of his strategies for the future is to raise funds for a more stable home for his views.

"I want to create a new Internet blog," he said, to be housed on "a server in America."

-- David Colker

Cyber attack that brought down Twitter was aimed at dissident blogger

The cyber attack that brought down Twitter for several hours Thursday was aimed at a single blogger located in the country of Georgia.

The blogger was identified as a dissident who uses the name of Cyxymu, according to a source close to Facebook, which was also targeted in the attack.

The attack began about 5 a.m. PDT, with hackers trying to discredit Cyxymu by making him appear to be a spammer, according to analysts at the Sophos online security firm. The initial attack also tried to get a huge number of users to click on the blogger's Twitter, Facebook and other sites in an attempt to bring them down.

About an hour later, with the blogger sites still operational, the hackers mounted a direct massive attack on the sites. There was such a huge amount of "collateral damage" from the attack, said Beth Jones of Sophos, that Twitter crashed and Facebook's operation was compromised.

In an interview with the Guardian newspaper in London, the blogger -- who declined to give his real name -- identified himself as a 34-year-old economics lecturer. He said he believes the attack was an attempt to silence his criticism of Russia's conduct toward Georgia.

"Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers," he told the newspaper, "but I'm certain the order came from the Russian government."

-- David Colker

How to opt out of being Facebook's corporate shill with privacy ad settings

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: One face we'd prefer not to be in our ads. Credit: Peter Foley / EPA

Social-media websites are trying to evolve advertising as quickly as they have online communication. Social news sites Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon all are experimenting with user-ranked ads.

Facebook is taking a different approach by sticking your mugshot directly into your friends' sponsored posts.

Your digital endorsement is only supposed to kick in with your "relevant social actions." But a mix-up last week had third-party Facebook apps randomly serving ads with users' faces.

Buried in the social network's privacy settings is the ability to opt out of being a corporate shill.

If you don't want to lend your identity to Facebook's ad program, log onto the website, go to News Feed and Wall ad tab in privacy settings and set "appearance in Facebook ads" to "no one."

There. Doesn't it feel good not to involuntarily endorse things?

-- Mark Milian

Follow my random thoughts on technology, the Internet and Web start-ups on Twitter @mmilian.

Friendster founder on the rise and fall of America's first big social network

Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams at the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose in 2007. Courtesy of Abrams

Facebook, with more than 250 million active users, and Twitter, the fastest-growing social network, might be all the rage right now.

But they have to give props to Friendster, the social network that paved the way and contributed many of the key concepts behind online connections.

Before the founders of a little-known social network called ConnectU cried foul about Facebook stealing its ideas, MySpace was replicating then-top network Friendster, according to Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams.

"I don't think there's anyone who has had their stuff copied more than me," Abrams said over lunch in San Francisco recently.

In a previous post on our interview with Abrams, he credits himself with the creation of the friend request system, a vital piece of the online social networking puzzle. But he soon learned that being first doesn't necessarily mean you'll come out on top.

Work on Friendster began in 2002. The site launched in March 2003 and by autumn, it had more than 2 million users requesting and accepting friendships and filling out personal profiles. The company was experiencing extraordinarily fast growth and was having trouble keeping up, Abrams said.

To fund the ballooning beast, Abrams sought funding from venture capitalists and secured enough to keep the ship afloat -- for a while.

Within a few months of a successful fundraiser, Abrams was ousted as chief executive. He didn't say whether the heave-ho had anything to do with the $30-million buyout offer he turned down from Google. But over the next two years, Friendster had four different people at its helm and a host of problems inside and out.

"I actually stuck around through 2004 and 2005, trying to help Friendster," Abrams said.

The problems were beyond his control. Coping with the torrent of growth in 2004, Friendster replaced the shaky computer systems that had been running the site with "worse technology," Abrams said.

Meanwhile, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, founders of MySpace, had built a competing product that ...

Friendster founder on social networking: I invented this stuff [UPDATED]

Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams poses in front of the logo for his start-up company, Socializr, at a Lunch 2.0 event in 2007. Credit: Terry Chay

Updated to include a response from Jonathan Abrams. Click "read more" to read his response.

The millions of high school and college kids on Facebook probably have never heard of Jonathan Abrams or his once-popular website, Friendster.

But within a year after its launch in March 2003, Friendster had defined social networking as we know it today. It spurred millions of Americans to fill out their online profiles with loads of personal information and connect with friends online.

The concept inspired hundreds of websites, including some of the world's most trafficked properties -- MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

As more sites, such as Google Reader and Hulu, add features to make their products more social, Abrams rolls his eyes.

He takes pride in his claim to inventing the idea of requesting and accepting friendships online. But because he's been around it longer than anyone, he's also getting sick of all the friend requests.

"I'm a little burned out, to be honest. I get maybe five friend requests on Facebook per day," Abrams said over lunch in San Francisco recently. "I invented this stuff, and now I'm paying for it."

What Abrams had envisioned was a portal to connect with a tight-knit group of friends. Now, he says, he accepts digital friendships from people he meets through work and from vague acquaintances out of guilt. He finally just ...

Facebook simplifies its privacy policies [Updated]

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

Facebook hires former Genentech exec Ebersman as its new CFO

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

Michael Jackson-related traffic doubled Twitter's update frequency, tripled Facebook's [UPDATED]

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