How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free
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Some members discover itâs tough to erase all their information from the site.
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MySpace users are chronically unfaithful, according to Parks Associates' Web  2.0 & the New Net, a new report that focuses on the social  networking market. Nearly 40% percent of MySpace users keep profiles on  other social networking sites such as Friendster and Facebook.
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Facebook, the social-network site that has enjoyed explosive growth in new members over the past three months, said it plans to let users tell the rest of the world how to find them on the site.
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(200 sec.) Will Facebook's aggressive strategy make it look like MySpace?
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These aren't your teenager's social networking sites. Take a spin on MySpace and Friendster and most adults find amusement in the concept and technology, but relatively few practical reasons to keep coming back for more. They've been a boon to a mostly younger set of users looking to meet new friends, find a date, or just generally kill some time online.
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When the social discovery site turns members' most trivial actions into unfolding "News Feeds," users rebel, and the company races to quiet their anger. Both sides learn a hard lesson about the illusory nature of online privacy. Commentary by Bruce Schneier.
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Want a free peek at your credit file? Don't hold your breath.
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The PHPWomen have posted a reminder about the mailing list that they're going to "dust off" and start using again (and suggest you do too!).   There's just the one list currently (as hosted by omniti) but there's lots of subscribers. You can check out the signup page for more information on the list and get access to some of the archives of previous topics.
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Breaking up with Facebook is (less) hard to do It was a long time coming but the web's favourite has-been-in-the-making, Facebook, has finally agreed to let users who are bored with it wrest their personal information from its advertising salesmens' clutches.â¦
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It's kind of like Facebook's feed for people who don't do Facebook. http://friendfeed.com/davew  It seems pretty cool.
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Facebook wants to make the data its members enter into the social network&#39;s profiles portable, so that they can move that data to other online services if they want, the company&#39;s CEO said Wednesday.That Facebook doesn&#39;t let them do this today is &quot;a flaw in the system&quot; and something the company wants to fix, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.&quot;It&#39;s the users&#39; data. We want to [make it portable.] That&#39;s the goal,&quot; he said during a keynote speech in which he fielded questions from moderator and conference chair John Battelle and attendees.However, when pressed to provide a timetable for when Facebook might do this, Zuckerberg refrained from making a deadline commitment. &quot;I don&#39;t know,&quot; he said.The massive response from outside developers who have built, to date, about 6,000 applications for Facebook has been &quot;incredibly humbling,&quot; he said.Because&#160;Facebook chose to open up the platform&#160;at an early stage of its development, instead of refining the program internally for several years, the company is learning as it goes along, he said.That is partly the reason why the wording on the terms of service for developers may be read as giving too much power to Facebook over the third-party applications on its platform.However, Zuckerberg said Facebook isn&#39;t interested in &quot;yanking&quot; popular applications so that it can build them itself.While Facebook has to reserve the right to build whatever application it deems core to its social network, it doesn&#39;t plan to trample on its developers and steal their thunder.&quot;It wouldn&#39;t be good for us if we did that,&quot; he said.Opened to external developers in May, the platform is seen by many as containing well-designed tools and offering developers generous revenue opportunities, despite the terms of service language that Battelle highlighted and that has concerned developers who are investing time and money in creating Facebook applications.Still, Facebook has already had to step in and curb the behavior of some applications which, designed with self-promotion features intended to spur their adoption, annoyed users with unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays.Zuckerberg said it may take many years for the Facebook platform to reach a level of maturity, and in the meantime, the company will work hard to continually improve and refine it.He remained tight-lipped when asked about rumors that the company is in the latter stages of securing financing from a major Internet company, like Google or Microsoft.&quot;How&#39;s the financing going?&quot; Battelle asked him. &quot;Very well. We&#39;re almost all wrapped up,&quot; Zuckerberg answered, declining further comment.Facebook will likely more than double its staff of 300 to about 700 in the coming year, growth that Zuckerberg acknowledged is intense. Many of the new hires are referred by employees, he said.Asked if Facebook is contemplating hiring an experienced CEO to run the company, as fast-growing startups often do, Zuckerberg said that the focus is on &quot;developing a really good team,&quot; in part because there aren&#39;t many seasoned CEOs experienced in social networking.Zuckerberg also suggested that the company may be developing its own advertising platform, but declined to offer details, keeping mum when asked if the ad platform will syndicate ads outside of the Facebook site, thus becoming a potential competitor to networks from Google, Yahoo and others.Asked about the investigations from some U.S. attorneys general offices into Facebook&#39;s operations and policies regarding objectionable content and the presence of sexual predators among its members, Zuckerberg said the social network gives users very granular control over what data they share, how they share it and with whom.However, he acknowledged that he&#39;s not very familiar with how the company complies with civil and criminal investigation subpoenas.Founded in 2004, Facebook&#39;s popularity has been ballooning for the past year or so. Its user ranks have increased to 47 million active users today from 12 million in December. Over half of its active members return to the site daily.Web 2.0 Summit ends Friday.&#160;
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Once you ship a product you immediately start getting feedback, and if you're paying attention you can easily find the trends.  One of the big pieces of feedback about FlickrFan relates to branding. When you download the app and mount the disk image, where's FlickrFan? It isn't until after you figure out that you need to open the folder and click on the OPML app that you see FlickrFan. (I need to add a Readme file that makes this much more obvious.) I knew this would be confusing. I could have renamed everything FlickrFan, it wouldn't have taken much work, or testing, and the chance for breakage was nil, since it was a new product. I didn't do it for a simple reason, the engine that runs FlickrFan will run other apps, and I knew I would be shipping one such app within a matter of weeks. Once there's a second app running in the same engine, it may still be confusing. But there will be more after that.  Maybe there won't be millions of users, but my goal is to bootstrap a community of networked living rooms. For that I don't need more than a couple hundred households who want to play and I already have that.  I will soon tell you more about the new app, and if you're paying attention on my Twitter feed, you'll get a pretty clear idea of where this is going. It's all about communities, social features and big media. FlickrFan is about beautiful pictures on high def TV. The next one is about... Stay tuned!
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Sam blogs about his wiki spam problems  and implements a posting throttle.  With new spam-capable zombie PCs and with wikis that aren't updated very often this isn't a solution.  If I were to go back to my wiki after a month it would be covered with spam links.  One strong solution is emergent and distributed social whitelists (AKA my FOAFKey  proposal).  With a FOAFKey enabled wiki/weblog you could allow a whitelist of a few hundred thousand users to post to the wiki without any problems.  All they would need to enter is their email address for confirmation (or the SHA1 hash of their email).  For the rare times when the user isn't within the original whitelist we can just have the user uplo ...
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about changes at Facebook, his super-popular social-networking site. By Aria Pearson from Wired magazine.
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By ANICK JESDANUN, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS  NEW YORK  The operators of the online hangout Facebook wanted to help users save time by highlighting changes their friends make to their personal profile pages.
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Facebook is changing the social networking site to make the names and profiles of its members available to nonmembers and eventually accessible through search-engine listings.
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By Bob Dyer, The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio  Jan. 30--Regular users of MySpace may have noticed numerous changes during the last five days.