After what can only be termed a kerfuffle last week over changes to its Terms of Service, Facebook has decided to take some pretty drastic steps to address the issue of content ownership on the social networking site: they’re soliciting input from their users.
Giving Up Facebook For Lent?
Well, I guess it all comes down to whatever floats your spiritual boat. In this case the spiritual boat is floating straight out of Facebook—they’ll be back in a month (some of them sooner, probably). Welcome to Lent 2.0, if I may be so crass.
What would Mark Zuckerberg do? If I were him, I’d sit back and marvel, not just that my college days thingamabob has amassed 175 million social networking faithful, but also that a portion of them love Facebook so much they honor it with ritual sacrifice.
Facebook Opens Corporate Blog To Comments
Yesterday, Facebook held a press conference call, put out a press release, and published a blog post as it gave users a voice in the recasting of the site’s terms of use. Today, although there hasn’t been quite as much noise, the social network found another way to demonstrate that it’s interested in people’s opinions.
Spam King Back in News Thanks to Facebook
Remember Sanford Wallace? A little less than a year ago, MySpace won a lawsuit against him after filing it about a year earlier based on a phishing scheme carried out six months before that. He created profiles, groups, and forums on MySpace to lead users to his sites.
Facebook, YouTube, Digg & SynthaSite Leaders to Make World Better
The World Economic Forum announced selections for its Young Global Leaders. This group consists of business, government, academia, media, non-profit organizations and arts leaders from different regions around the world. Among the selections were a number of Silicon Valley leaders including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Chad Hurley of YouTube, and Kevin Rose of Digg (not to mention non-techies like Tiger Woods and Jessica Biel).
Facebook Press Conference: Live With Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook looks set to adopt a fresh approach to site governance, and we’ll be bringing you live coverage. The setup, as explained in an email to Murdok: Mark Zuckerberg "will announce the new steps Facebook is taking to improve user understanding and ownership of the Facebook terms of service and, more generally, the policies of the Facebook service."
2:00 – Classical hold music.
Intel Gets Behind Facebook Developer Garages
Take it from a car guy: the people who are willing to spend time with you in a garage are some of the finest individuals you’ll ever know. And so it seems Facebook has a new BFF, as Intel will sponsor some Facebook Developer Garages this year.
Facebook Needs To Follow And Not Lead On Privacy Policies
I took last week off, and it was a big week for Facebook watchers. Facebook decided to change its terms of service, putting its millions of users on notice that Facebook owns their data and isn’t planning any opt-out mechanism. Now, to many observers, including Chris Brogan and me, it’s not news that free Web services own the data posted to them, but this Facebook announcement caused a firestorm, and Facebook backed off before the week was out. Watching this play out caused me to realize why Facebook is dumber than Google.
Facebook Hit With Malicious App, Searchers Duped
As far as malware tricks go, this one is pretty diabolical. Over the weekend, Facebook users started receiving messages saying friends had tried to view their profile but were unable to do so. The message prompts the user to install a third party app, oddly titled “Error Check System.”
The actual text of the message reads: “[Name] has faced some errors when checking your profile View The Errors Message.”
A Wild Week For Facebook, And Its Users
Facebook has had quite a week. If it is true that there is no such thing as bad publicity then this week has been a windfall for the social networking giant. I have even read some conspiracy theorists who believe that the whole terms of service ‘incident’ was intended. I’m not sure I can go there but to be honest it does make some sense.