Facebook censorship has increased 19% in the past 6 months

According to Mashable:

Global surveillance requests for Facebook user data in the first half of 2014 increased 24% from the second half of 2013, according to the social network's transparency report revealed on Tuesday. A total of 34,946 requests were made between January and June, including messages, IP addresses and account information. Censorship also increased worldwide; compared to the June through December 2013, the amount of content censored on Facebook increased by 19%, according to the report.

Facebook is not the only service that has seen such a sharp increase in surveillance requests and censorship. In September, Google revealed that requests for user data had increased 15% compared to the previous six months, meaning a 150% increase over five years. 

In a blog post accompanying the company's third such report,

Facebook said that it doesn't accept every single request for user data or request to restrict content.

Facebook said that it doesn't accept every single request for user data or request to restrict content.   Read More

'Save' Facebook Content to Read Later

Collect everything from links and places to movies, TV, and music so you don't miss out on a new recipe or restaurant.

PCMag.Com - Can't get enough of those BuzzFeed quizzes or long-form news stories friends post to Facebook, but just don't have the time to dive into them during work? Now you can save them to the social network to read later.

Collect everything from links and places to movies, TV, and music so you don't miss out on a new recipe or restaurant to try out.

All saved items are kept secret, unless you choose to share them with online friends.

Reminiscent of third-party services like Pocket (formerly Read It Later), Instapaper, and Readability, Facebook's built-in tool makes it easy to save the latest news on Kim and Kanye without having to leave the site.   Read More

The Dark Side Of Facebook, Where People Lie, Steal, And Make Millions

 

Business Insider - On Feb. 10, Jason Fyk received a strange Facebook message.

“Bro.”

The message had been sent by someone who wasn’t his friend on the social network, someone using the alias “Anthony.*” It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread.

Minutes later, the traffic on his website, FunnierPics.net, nosedived. Google Analytics showed the number of active readers drop from 3,000 to zero instantly.

When Fyk, known online as Jason Michaels, clicked over to his company’s Facebook page, WTF Magazine, he found another message from Anthony.

“Site’s down :(.”

Fyk’s business was under attack, and not for the first time. He’d spent the past few years locked in ferocious virtual combat over his Facebook pages, battling a shadowy group of adversaries that he and his friends call Script Kiddies, on the assumption that they're young hackers who exploit low-level vulnerabilities on others' sites.

Facebook - Fyk said he received this Facebook wall post right as his site was crashing.

Anthony prefers the name the Community, and he readily admits — albeit communicating only under a pseudonym — that the group’s activities include hijacking valuable Facebook pages for fun and viral fame. (Meanwhile, Anthony and his cohorts refer to the WTF team as the Neckbeards.)

 

One of Fyk’s employees quickly determined that FunnierPics.net was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) reflection attack. When Fyk’s team contacted the host, GoDaddy, they learned an estimated 70,000 servers had gone dead, resulting in more than 1 million customers losing web service. Fyk’s IP address, GoDaddy confirmed, was the attackers’ target. The others were collateral damage.   Read More

Facebook Is About To Remove A Setting That Helps Control Who Sees Your Profile

Business Insider - Changes are coming to your Facebook page.

The social media giant is taking the last steps to remove an old search setting called “Who can look up your Timeline by name?" which controlled who could find you and see your status updates and photos.

The search setting was automatically removed last year for people who weren't using it.
If you are using it, you will get a notification in the coming days, letting you know it will be removed:

As a reminder of the importance of privacy on Facebook, the best way to control what people can see is to choose the audience that can view each of the individual things you share.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removes-search-timeline-2013-10#ixzz2hMpAuzaZ

Friend mining: Facebook preps for social search future

When it comes to social search, it's not just Facebook versus Google. It could also be Facebook versus Quora, Yelp and Foursquare.

 

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET)

 

 

CNET - No other company in the world holds as much personal data as Facebook, which puts it in an ideal position to cull data from your friends and friends-of-friends, and even those you don't know, to bring you answers to your deepest questions. Such as, "What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and Liked?"

Ok, maybe that's not your deepest questions, but it's the example that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used during an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF conference earlier this month when he was talking about the intersection of Facebook and search.

"Search engines are evolving" to "giving you a set of answers," Zuckerberg said. "Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of questions people have."

You could call Facebook's notion of search "friend mining," extracting specific answers to question by mining the immensely data-rich social graph. Zuckerberg was coy about when Facebook would launch a more capable search engine, but allowed, "At some point we will do it. We have a team working on search." His remarks certainly got the attention of Facebook watchers and Wall Street analysts, who have been speculating about how Facebook, with its nearly one billion users, could harness all that personal data and generate Google-like revenue from search.

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Why Google+ Can Still Beat Facebook

Even as Facebook goes public and nears 1 billion users, Google+ still has a chance to become a major contender if it simply plays to its own strengths. 

 

PCWorld - Now that Facebook has gone public and is nearing an astounding 1 billion members, it’s a good time to ask whether Facebook’s main rival, Google, can compete in the social networking game.

Google said in April that 170 million users had “upgraded to Google+,” but the company has been coy when it comes to specifying how many of those people actually use the social network on a regular basis. Some observers have suggested that it's mainly Google employees and hard-core Google loyalists who actively use the service today.

I still think Google+ can win out against Facebook in the end. But to do that, Google must learn how to play to its own strengths.

A lot rides on whether Google can pull that off. For ad targeting, Google can collect the data it needs from the subjects of people’s Web searches and the content of email, but that data isn’t nearly as personal and valuable as the stuff people willingly provide to Facebook every day. Social network data is far more individual and preference-oriented than other kinds of targeting data, and the long-term competitiveness of Google’s advertising business (96.5 percent of its revenue) may depend on Google's ability to get that data.

If anybody has a battle plan for Google+, it’s Larry Page. The Google cofounder and CEO has given some good reasons why Google+ will become a contender, but his reasons seem highly theoretical at this point.

‘Circles’ More Closely Resembles Real Life

Page says that the “Circles” structure in Google+ offers a great way to organize your friendships. He’s right: The Circles design is immediately intuitive; it’s easily understandable, and it works because it replicates the way we manage relationships in real life.    More

Sources: Google Is Close to Buying Meebo

Google is in talks to acquire Meebo, according to two sources close to the situation.
The price for the company would be about $100 million, according to one of the sources.

All Things D - Meebo's latest product promises to help users cut through information overload.

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg did not reply to requests for comment. A Google spokeswoman gave me the standard “We can’t comment on rumor or speculation” response.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Meebo has been around since 2005, when it was founded by Sternberg, Sandy Jen (who is CTO) and Elaine Wherry (now an advisor), who met at Stanford.           More

The Best and Worst Times to Share on Facebook, Twitter

Mashable - Want your link to get the most traction on Twitter? Post it on a Monday between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. ET.

Link shortening and tracking service bit.ly has released new data on the best and worst times to share links on popular social networks, from Facebook and Twitter to blogging site Tumblr.

The company revealed that posting links to Twitter between the hours of 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. ET will give you the highest click rank, especially on days earlier in the week.

Meanwhile, sending a tweet with a link after 8:00 p.m. should be avoided — as should posting links after 3:00 p.m. on Fridays.

The half-life of a link posted to Twitter is about 2.8 hours, according to bit.ly.

However, Facebook’s optimal posting times are slightly different than Twitter. Links sent between 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. get the most traction, with Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. being the best time to post on Facebook all week.      More

New Tweaks on: Facebook, Twitter, and Google

Mouse-hover behaviors on Twitter, status updates on Facebook Messenger, and a whole mess of tweaks over at Google Search.

Twitter added hover behavior to tweets.

(Credit: Twitter)

 

CNET - If you've noticed that things on your favorite big services feel a little different today, you're not imagining things. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have rolled out little changes to their main services.

Facebook added status details to its Mobile Messenger application. You can see if someone has read a message you've sent, if they're typing a reply, and what general region they are physically replying from (that one could be problematical). Apple iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger users are already accustomed to these features.

Twitter added a mouse-hover behavior to tweets on the Twitter.com site. Now when you hover over a tweet, interaction choices (Reply, Retweet, and Favorite) appear. They're not there otherwise, unless you click on the persistent "Expand" option that's on each tweet.         More

Court Finds Social Network Add-On Violated Spam, Hacking Laws

EFF - In a potentially troublesome decision, a federal district court has found that a start-up violated anti-spam and computer crime laws by creating and marketing a browser to let users view their social networking accounts in one place. The case demonstrates the difficulties facing those who seek to empower users to interact with closed services like Facebook in new and innovative ways.

In Facebook v. Power Ventures, Facebook sued a small company that created a tool for users to access and aggregate their personal information across social networking sites. In 2010, the court ruled that Power didn’t access Facebook “without permission” under California computer crime law when it violated Facebook’s terms of use, agreeing with arguments we raised in an amicus brief (pdf).

Unfortunately, the latest round of the case has taken a downward turn in ways that could have serious implications for other innovators and users.

First, the court gave a tremendous cudgel to Facebook against commercial users who displease it when it decided that Power violated the federal CAN-SPAM Act by sending “misleading” messages. These messages encouraged users to send Facebook “Event” invitations to their friends to promote Power’s service. As EFF pointed out in an amicus brief (pdf), though, the allegedly “misleading” elements of the message are supplied by Facebook itself—and can’t be changed by users. This means that any user who sends a commercial message on Facebook is technically in violation of the law, since it appears to come from Facebook. The CAN-SPAM Act, passed in 2003, simply doesn’t contemplate closed systems where the service provider controls many elements of a message.                  More

How Could Twitter Influence Science (And Why Scientists Are on Board)

Image via CrunchBase

Forbes - After some discussion here on Forbes about the validity of “influence” in social media, news that Twitter has a significant impact on scientific citations is something of a surprise. But could it be?

That debate has been ongoing in the science community through January. The possibility hit a wider public when Alexis Madrigal raised it in The Atlantic a couple of days ago.

“The bottom line is simple: articles that many people tweeted about were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than those who few people tweeted about. Its implications are even more interesting. It generally takes months and years for papers to be cited by other scientific publications. Thus, on the day an article comes out, it would seem to be difficult to tell whether it will have a real impact on a given field. However, because the majority of tweets about journal articles occur within the first two days of publication, we now have an early signal about which research is likely to be significant.

The relationship is not even marginal. 11x more likely is a huge influence. The research appeared in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and was conducted by its editor Gunther Eysenbach.

However the data had already been challenged before The Atlantic article, both by a rebuttal – and  by a suggestion that the research author had a vested interest in the results:

“What’s more, many of these counted tweets were not sent out by humans,” says Phil Davis at The Scholarly Kitchen after reviewing the data. “The Journal of Medical Internet Research sends out an automatic tweet when a paper first appears and then sends out monthly tweets to promote the journal’s most tweeted papers. Tweets promoting the journal’s most viewed, most purchased, and most cited articles (from Scopus and Google Scholar) are also sent out automatically, many of which are then retweeted by other tweet bots (and human bots) to the blogosphere.”

Davis also points out that the work was not peer reviewed and that the journal editor had registered a number of domains (twimpact.org, twimpactfactor.org and twimpactfactor.com) that suggested he could make commercial advantage of this research, though Eysenbach had fully disclosed this possibility.            More

Will Facebook's IPO Mark The Beginning Of The End?

Dave Whorton: The bubble will burst.

by Dave Whorton
Dave Whorton is the founder of Tugboat Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. 



Forbes - Remember when Netscape went public in 1995, kicking off a torrent of investment in new Internet companies that lasted for five years? Well, now we’re waiting for another Netscape-caliber IPO: the first public stock offering by Facebook, which is expected to come sometime next year. The deal will no doubt value the company at tens of billions of dollars, or more, and make many, many people into multi-millionaires, if not billionaires.

Except this IPO will spell the end of the party, not the beginning. I’m convinced that the frothiness we’re seeing right now in Silicon Valley cannot last. And it won’t last, I believe, past the point at which Facebook finally sells shares to the public.

Why? One would have to be blind, or have no friends in New York, London or Shanghai, to not realize that Silicon Valley is currently operating in a different reality. In Silicon Valley, office space is scarce, engineering graduates are commanding record salaries and homes are being purchased before the “For Sale” sign has even gone up. The number of startups formed in the last two years dwarfs the company formation pace of the late 1990s. And high-growth companies are receiving private financings at valuations – many over $1 billion – that could only have been achieved a decade ago by going public and beating Wall Street’s estimates over several years.,

But here’s the disconnect, which is obvious to everyone: We are in midst of the Great Recession, with 9% U.S. unemployment, European default risk, growth in China slowing and state governments on the brink of bankruptcy. Yet young technology companies with unproven management teams and business models are commanding nosebleed valuations. The most recent example is blogging startup Tumblr, which raised money valuing it, reportedly, at $800 million. This despite the fact that the company doesn’t have its business model figured out yet. Many of these investments are being justified by the anticipation of some highly lucrative, initial-public offerings for tech companies in the coming 12 months. If standouts like Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Twitter are going to go public for tens of billions of dollars, the argument goes, surely lesser tech stars can command a premium in their financings as well.

Some would argue that this investment frenzy is not irrational. The explosion of smartphones, social media and location-based services could fundamentally transform not only Silicon Valley industries but many others. I couldn’t agree more with Netscape founder Marc Andreessen’s “software will eat the world” argument, having invested under that premise since I was an associate at Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers in the late 1990s and helped KP back companies including Google, Autotrader, BlueNile, Drugstore.com and Good Technology. Those firms have transformed industries and created billions in value for investors along the way. But transforming industries takes time, and often the disrupter gets disrupted again by a new entrant – or the incumbent proves to be more deft at responding than it was in prior years. For every business that has become a long-term market leader like Amazon.com, there are a hundred companies of significant potential that simply don’t make it.           More

New Social Network Connects People Based on Gastrointestinal Bacteria. Yep.

PopSci - A German nonprofit, called MyMicrobes, is hoping you’ll want to get your gut bacteria’s genomes sequenced. It’s expensive, but you’ll get access to one of the most exclusive social networks around, where people worldwide can, um, talk about their gastrointestinal difficulties with like-minded people. Two grand seems cheap when we put it like that!

Actually, MyMicrobes does sound like an interesting project, even if we have a visceral reaction to any new social network or even the phrase social network or really anything relating to social networks that doesn’t star Justin Timberlake.          More