Facebook Groups Hijacking by “Control Your Info” Organization

“Control Your Info” organization makes itself administrator of groups that have been abandoned and warns the site’s members.

An organization that calls itself “Control Your Info” reportedly took control of hundreds of Facebook groups by making themselves the administrator, according to PCWorld.com and CNet.com. Each group that they became administrators of had previously been abandoned by the administrator and the organization managed to edit hundreds of group images and descriptions upon gaining access.

PCWorld.com is reporting that “Control Your Info” specifically targeted groups with a business, entertainment or sports theme. The organization went on to insert a warning message to members of the groups that they became administrators of that reads, "This means we control a certain part of the information about you in Facebook. If we wanted, we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage you severely."

Facebook representatives tried to calm the nerves of those who were concerned about the widespread group hijacking by releasing a statement that reads, "There has been no hijacking and there is no confidential information at risk. The groups in question have been abandoned, which means any member can make themselves an administrator. Group administrators have no access to private user information and members can leave a group at any time.”

Although the message from “Control Your Info” worried many Facebook users who were affected by their actions, representatives from the organization are insisting that they meant no harm or long-term inconvenience and that their ultimate goal is to shed light on the vulnerabilities of social media that have the potential to affect the safety of user privacy.

Facebook experiences 194% of YoY market share growth - Hitwise

Famous online marketing intelligence Hitwise says - Top social networking site Facebook is proving it's no fad as its market share continues to grow at a pace and time spent on the site rises, according to the data available till last week.
At the last commercial year Facebook has grown 194% to capture almost 60% of the market share of US. Back in September 2008 Facebook captured a relatively miniscule 19.9% of the overall U.S. market, way behind rival MySpace and other social networking sites. Nowadays, Facebook's share is almost double that of MySpace.

Twitter also witnessed enormous growth, reported Hitwise, rising 1170% YoY, although the micro-blogging platform only represents 1.84% of the U.S. market.

However, MySpace users spend more time on the site than any other social networking venue averaging 25 minutes and 56 seconds each month. In comparison, Tagged users hang around for 25 minutes 17 seconds and Facebook users 23 minutes.

Man 'asked daughter for sex on Facebook'

A father has been arrested for allegedly approaching his daughter for sex over Facebook.

John Forehand referred to himself as "Bad Daddy" as he made explicit suggestions to his biological daughter on the social networking site, investigators claim.

He allegedly told the child, who has not been identified and from whom he lives apart, that "not many other fathers and daughters are this brave, so not many of them are so lucky to experience all these pleasures."

Forehand. from Lititz in Pennsylvania, was held in a police sting after the girl told her mother about his Facebook messages.

He was tricked into coming to what he believed would be a meeting with his daughter, where he was detained in possession of a camera, tripod and box of condoms.

Tom Corbett, the Pennsylvania attorney general, called on all parents to be vigilant about their children's online activities.

"Predators know that colder weather and shorter days mean that kids are spending more time inside, in front of their computers, and that many may be home alone – either before or after school," he said.

"As we have seen in a number of cases this year, including two of these most recent arrests, predators are reaching out to real families in Pennsylvania – and tips from those families are resulting in arrests."

Forehand faces several charges relating to his alleged approaches to his daughter. He was one of five men held in the sting last week.

Facebook shows when you're happy

Facebook is even more omniscient than you thought: it can now chart the world's collective hopes and dreams and highs and lows--sort of, at least.

The company's data team on Monday launched a trippy new application called the "Gross National Happiness Index." Taking a similar format to its "Lexicon" trend-tracking product, the "GNH" currently displays a graph of data tabulated over the course of the past few years to track the "happiness" of Facebook users based on words picked up in their status messages.

The GNH is currently restricted to United States-based Facebook users--keep in mind, they now represent less than a fourth of the site's 300 million-strong memberships--who have set English as their default language. That will likely change at some undetermined date.

"Earlier this year, data scientists at Facebook started a project to measure the overall mood of people from the United States on Facebook, based on the sentiment expressed in status updates," explained a company blog post by Facebook's Adam Kramer--who is also a Ph.D. student in psychology:

Examples of positive or happy words include "happy," "yay," and "awesome," while negative, or unhappy words, include "sad," "doubt," and "tragic." We also did a brief survey of some Facebook users, which showed that people who use more positive words, relative to the number of negative words, reported higher satisfaction with their lives.

Holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Valentine's Day tend to generate spikes in happiness, as do days of historical significance like the election of President Barack Obama. There are notably "sad" days, too, Kramer pointed out, like the double whammy on January 22, 2008, when the Asian stock market took a dive and young actor Heath Ledger was found dead.

In January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg chatted with blogger Robert Scoble at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and expressed interest in using the staggering amounts of data on the social network to generate a sort of "sentiment engine."

"He said that already, his teams are able to sense when nasty news, like stock prices are headed down, is under way," Scoble wrote at the time. "He also told me that the sentiment engine notices a lot of 'going out' kinds of messages on Friday afternoon and then notices a lot of 'hungover' messages on Saturday morning. He's not sure where that research will lead."

Sound creepy? Facebook doesn't think so. "To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research," according to Kramer's post. "Instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed."

Vivox's Facebook Application for Voice Chat

A voice chat application launched on Monday in open beta enables Facebook users to place and receive calls within the social network.

Vivox, which also provides voice services for online virtual words and accommodates more than 15 million users worldwide, is offering the app.

In order to use it, Facebook users first need to add Vivox Voice to their applications list and download a Vivox plug-in. From there, a Vivox channel and phone number are created to accept calls. Users can then place calls to (or receive calls from) Facebook friends also using the app. And because each Vivox channel has a call-in number, non-Facebook users can also participate in the conversation.

In order to invite friends to talk, an invitation is sent via Facebook chat. The recipient can click on the included link and start chatting with the other person.

I had the opportunity to use the app this morning. Overall, I was impressed by it. The installation took just a few minutes, and connecting with others was quick and easy.

The only issue I had with Vivox's Facebook app was its audio quality. At times, the transmission was clear. At other times, I could barely hear my wife, who was on the other end of the call. Luckily, those moments were few and far between.

If you try it out, let us know what you think of the free app in the comments below.

Facebook now has more than 300 million users

Facebook with more than 300 million users, making it the world’s most popular social networking site.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, announced the news in a blog post, and confirmed that the company was now cash-flow positive, generating revenue independently of third-party investment and funding.

“We’re also succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I’m pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong, independent service for the long term.”

Facebook has enjoyed a rapid period of growth in the last two months, going from 250 million users in July to 300 million in September. The social networking site is still steadily adding users in major markets, such as Britain and the United States, and is also making inroads in to other territories. The recent launch of Facebook Lite, a stripped-down basic version of the site for users with slow internet connections, hopes to boost membership numbers in areas such as India and South America.

Facebook, which launched five years ago, has attracted more than $700 million of investment during that time. In 2007, Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 per cent stake, valuing the social networking site at around $15 billion.

Zuckerberg pledged to continue investing in new systems and technologies to make Facebook perform faster and grow efficiently, and serve users in “increasingly deep and innovative ways”.

“We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the web,” he wrote. “The site we all use every day is built by a relatively small group of the smartest engineers and entrepreneurs.

“In fact, the ratio of Facebook users to Facebook engineers makes it so that every engineer here is responsible for more than one million users. It’s hard to have an impact like that anywhere else.”

Industry analysts believe the milestone could mark a new push by Facebook to dominate the social-networking space, and rival sites, such as the microblogging service Twitter, could be caught up in its wake.

“If Facebook continues to open up its platform and adopt Twitter’s best features, it could spell trouble for the Twitterverse,” Ben Parr, associate editor at social media blog Mashable, told the BBC. “The world’s largest social network is on the warpath.”

Facebook in challenge to Google

Speculation that Facebook is on its way to becoming a full-fledged search engine is, well, odd. Merely buying four former top Google engineers when acquiring FriendFeed does not a new search engine make. And it's a bad idea, besides.

What's more, Facebook has too much work to do on its core social networking platform to also build a next-generation search engine. Better to cut a deal with Bing, I think, if a general-purpose search engine is what Facebook wants.

The new search features on Facebook, allowing you to see in real-time what at least some users are posting on their FB pages, don't much interest me, but succeeds in making the service all the more Twitter-like. That seems to have been an important goal at Facebook and I hope they now will move on.

Purchasing FriendFeed, which seemed to be going nowhere, seems like an enlightened act of charity. The four previously mentioned former Google stars that founded the company get a graceful exit from FriendFeed and an excuse when the service eventually shuts down.

Facebook might benefit from some of Friendfeed's functionality, which was essentially as an aggregator of a user's various social network feeds. I have a FriendFeed account but never used it because I had better things to do than approve the same friends a second time and interact with another service.

Adding FriendFeed to Facebook would solve that problem and make the service easier to use, sitting as it would on many people's primary social network. It demonstrates that just because a company has created something more akin to a product feature than a full-fledged product doesn't means it won't eventually find a good home.

The real value of the new FB search tool will blossom only once the service's 250 million users start using the service's new privacy features to make their status updates viewable and searchable by everyone.

Most people, consider Facebook's ability to limit the reach of their postings to be more of a benefit than a hassle. That works against the value of a systemwide Facebook search capability.

Circling back, the only value of adding a Google-like total Internet search to Facebook would be its ability to generate revenue in amounts that have eluded FB thus far. But, as I said, this can be done quite effectively though a search partnership that avoids FB having to create an entirely new technology platform.