Your Facebook profile on a dating site or any other sites

Facebook Privacy & Data Issue

When your one time rival is seeking to work with you, you can be sure you have not just triumphed over your competition but by a very large margin. When MySpace started using Facebook login API to login users to MySpace, it was only a symbolic throwing in of the tower by MySpace. Though Facebook is the run away winner of the social networking battle, a lot of critics are not impressed with Facebook privacy nor how easy Facebook has made obtaining and using your personal data entrusted to them.
A group of social networking users are so disgruntled with Facebook privacy that they are starting a social networking site called diaspora to rival Facebook purely because of what they see as Facebook privacy laxes. Another group of people with axe to grind with Facebook has just setup a fake dating website with 250,000 profiles of Facebook user profiles pulled from Facebook without any problems or vetting, they call the site Face to Facebook . They have a completely different reason for creating their project, its now to highlight privacy issue like diaspora is doing, its more an experimental art project where they just use Facebook user profile as the source of the faces they need for their project. In total, they extracted 1 million Facebook user profiles and narrow the pictures that meed their needs down to 250,000.

The reason whey the creator of Face to Facebook (they also created a second site called Lovely Faces)created the site is not really clear. Trying to figure this out from reading a page on their site called theory could almost give you a nose bleed, excerpt from the page follows:

Facebook is an eternal, illusory party, under surveillance and recorded for all time. Its structure invites you to first replicate and then enhance your real social structures, replicating your experiences on your own personal “screen space”.

In this unending party, you meet and join old and new friends, acquaintances and relatives. As with most parties everything is private, or restricted to the invited guests, but has the potential to become public, if accidental shared. Here the guests’ activity and interests are also recorded through their posts in different formats and media (pictures, movies, trips, preferences, comments). It’s an induced immaterial labour with instant gratification. Guests produce content by indirectly answering the question “who am I?” and they get new friends and feedback in the process.

Whilst its almost impossible to make sense of Face to Facebook or the motive behind it, one thing that is clear is the fact that if you are one of the 500 Million people who are said to have a Facebook account, anyone, anywhere could pull you Facebook profle and do what they want with it, you can even find yourself on a dating site looking for a partner even though you are not looking for one.

You can comment on this article by using the commen facility on this page or you can discuss it with other webmasters are UK webmaster forum.

Social Networks Eclipse Search Engines in Popularity

Social Networks Eclipse Search in Popularity

For many years, search engines has been the most popular websites online. Most Internet users start their online journey with a search engine thereby making search the most popular Internet destination, until the middle of 2010 that is. For the first time, Internet traffic to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter exceeded traffic to search engines.

Earlier this week, Twitter mark the occasion of its users sending the 20 billionth tweet. The much talked about 20 billionth tweet was characteristic of what some of the critics of social networking site called pointless gibberish. Gibberish or 20th billionth tweet if you prefer to see that way which was sent at 1544 GMT last Saturday by GGGGGGo_Lets_Go, a Tokyo graphic designer for an advertising agency. GGGGGGo_Lets_Go was inundated with congratulatory messages from around the world.

While twitter is the rising start of social networking, Facebook is the indisputable king at the moment, it attracts 55% of the social networking traffic in UK, making it three times the size of its nearest social networking rival; YouTube. Twitter is the 3rd most popular social networking force in UK. Given how fast Twitter is rising, it will not be a big surprise if it catches up with or even exceeded YouTube in the not too distant future. It took Twitter four years to reach 10 billion tweets, but five months after that, the number of tweet sent increase by 100%.

The combination of popularity of and phenomenal growth in in social networking has seen traffic to social networking site exceed search engine in May 2010 according to Experian Hitwise. A list of top 10 most popular websites in UK according to Alexa can be found below.

Top 10 UK Sites

1. Google UK
2. Facebook
3. Google Dot Com
4. YouTube
5. Yahoo
6. BBC Online
7. Windows Live
8. eBay UK
9. Wikipedia
10. Twitter

Google Buzz to take on Facebook and other social networking sites?

Launch of Google Buzz announced

Google announce the launch of its social networking application called Google Buzz today. Buzz has all the familiar features users of Facebook, twitter and other social networking sites are familiar with such as the ability to post private or public status updates called twitts by Twitter and in the case of Google Buzz, you guess right “buzz”. You can share content from other sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Picassa.

Google Buzz integrates with Gmail, not quite clear whether a Gmail account is a prerequisite for signing up to Buzz, but the integration with Gmail automatically gives Buzz a 170 million user base, which is the current number of Gmail users worldwide at present.

So far, Buzz does not seem to have any killer features strong enough to make the 400 million or so Facebook users abandon Faceebook for Buzz but it is early days, lets see how Buzz develops. This is the second social networking platform Google has launched in the last six years. In 2004, it released Orkut which is quite popular in countries such as Brazil and India, never caught on in Western Europe and other places where Facebook is the the most popular social networking site.

Google has developed a number of services to rival popular services in the past including Google Video which was launched when YouTube became very popular, Google Video as not able to compete with YouTube, Google eventually bought YouTube and merged Google Video users into it.

You can discouss Google buzz a UK webmaster forum

Facebook Vanity URLs or is it SEO Friendly Web Address

Facebook calls it vanity URL, I call it search engine friendly (or is it user friendly?) web address. This is referring to the news that Facebook is making it possible for their users to choose a user name that is five characters or more long to be their Facebook user name/url for example  Facebook.com/odurinde instead of the automatically generate url of this authors Facebook page, which was quite long and contain  lot of parameters. The new Facebook vanity url is much easier to remember both for visitors and when giving it out on the phone or via email

The vanity url kicked in on on Friday or to put it into Facebook exact words on the blog where it was announced “Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you’ll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer” . Keen facebook users were said to have sat by their computer to wait for the appointed time so that they can grab their new SEO friendly style facebook web address.

Though Facebook does not allow the transfer of one Facebook accounts from one user to another (without permission from Facebook) it is well know that Facebook account changes hands for money and sometime for love regularly. This new vanity url is set to fuel a Facebook version of domain squatting with desirable Facebook vanity url acquired by squatters who will then sell it on for money at a later date.  Its like a domain land rush but confined to Facebook and its users.

If you want to switch and existing Facebook account to the new search engine friendly version, all you need to do if follow the prompt on your Facebook account once logged in and grab the name you want provided its still available. Existing account does not seem able to choose a name unrelated to the words in your current Facebook profile,  you may have to register a completely new account with the keywords you desire to acquire a particular word you are after.