Facebook Blogged

Thanks to Benjamin Dorr, Allan Chan, Brent Thorington and Richard Ponton for bringing Brijit for Facebook to life. They’ve done some pretty interesting and innovative things here.Now Brijit for Facebook lets your friends be your guide to the world’s best content, as it makes easy to share what we’re reading, listening, and watching. Find it on Brijit, and your friends can see it on Facebook. And if you want to write for fun or profit, Brijit will even pay us every time we publish one of your abstracts. It’s that simple. Users are just one click away from claiming any assignment they want to abstract. Facebook users now have easy access to the Brijit writer’s area, where we can earn $5 or more for every abstract they write that we publish. And of course, they can show off what they write for their friends with no further effort. For starters, Brijit for Facebook is one of the relatively few applications that are robustly integrated with a site outside of Facebook. Once you’ve opted in, your reading on Brijit leads seamlessly and directly to recommendations on Facebook. There are no additional steps. No share buttons to press. No comments to tack on. If you read it on Brijit, your friends can see it on Brijit for Facebook. And if they read it, you can see it.From SuperPoke to Scrabulous, the vast majority of Facebook applications, funs though they may be, are for wasting time. Brijit for Facebook is all about giving you your time back. We’re 100 percent committed to developing the best possible interface for dealing handling hundreds of sources and thousands of subjects.

Thus Brijit Facebook application’s 3 feature promotions are:
1.) Save Time: From NYT to The Daily Show to The Economist, Brijit provides you with the content you want to read.
2.) Share: Brijit makes it easy to share what you are reading, watching, and listening to.
3.) Get Paid: Write for fun and profit. Brijit pays $5 every time the company publicizes a writer’s abstract.

Through Digg, I came across this so called ‘Facebook Quest’, called “Who’s this Girl‘. Here’s a short summary:

“Please help us find this girl. We found her camera a week ago on a ski piste in Alpe D’Huez. We tried to locate her hotel, based on some pictures of this girl and her friends, and put a note on there, but didn’t got a reaction on it.

Therefore, we’ve posted some pictures of the camera on this Facebook group. Every person in the world is connected trough maximum 7 people, so with the aid of Facebook, we should be able to track her down. And of course, we’ll ship her camera back to wherever she may live. Based on her looks, whe guess she’s from Scandinavia somewhere?

Read the full story on http://www.asfaltkonijn.be/whos-this-girl/

So please forward this message/group to your friends (invite them to join the group), and if you know her, post it in the comments or get in touch by emailing to whosthisgirl.tips@gmail.com !”

Clearly, a lot of people think this is a hoax, but I don’t see why this can’t be real. The guys who posted this on Facebook do have a website, but it’s too small to do this as a viral for a big company. It’s also Dutch, so they don’t need a lot of international visitors. So I guess we can better help them by giving their Who’s this Girl? Facebook group a littlebit of attention. It would be really great (also for Facebook) if they really find the girl using the power of Facebook.

fblocalmail is a desktop Java (TM) application developed by ‘Scott Goldie’ that allows you to seamlessly access your Facebook (R) messages from your favorite email client.

With fblocalmail users can use their email client to:

• Retrieve Facebook messages
• Send Facebook messages
• Reply to Facebook messages
• Forward Facebook messages to normal email addresses
• Send and Cc a single message to Facebook friends and normal email addresses

fblocalmail works with the following popular email clients:

• Apple Mail
• Microsoft Outlook
• Mozilla Thunderbird

To learn more about the application contact scott@sjgoldie-consulting.com

Facebook has sought to assert its grip on the mobile internet by announcing a platform for operators that will make it easier for people to access the networking site on their phones. Mobile users will now be able to install a specific Facebook application on their phones which will let them receive newsfeeds, messages, status updates, ‘pokes’ and other features from the site. The social networking site, which now has 8.9 million users in the UK, has partnered with Vodafone to release the service, but it is expected that similar deals with other operators will be announced soon. Facebook already has a mobile website which people can access on their phones, but it often means going first to a web browser and typing in the address. The new offering from Vodafone will mean people can click directly on an icon in the phone menu, called a widget. Operators will also be able to integrate more effectively with Facebook’s site, meaning that users can get more regular updates - like with ‘push e-mail’ - rather than having to always to log in. Vodafone subscribers will be able to access the site as part of a £7.50 ‘mobile internet bundle’ which gives them 120Mb of data a month. Vodafone is the first operator to use the Facebook for Mobile Operators platform and has started services in the U.K. and Germany, said Jed Stremel, Facebook’s director of mobile division. Vodafone will soon expand the program to Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal. At the moment the mobile site does not have any advertising. The long-term hope for social networking sites is rich online advertising revenue. Facebook, which has an exclusive deal with Microsoft to place ads on the site, also did not say when it would put advertising on the mobile site.. The mobile platform also includes other specifications which are designed to stop abuse of Facebook such as spamming. For example when users send MMS with a photo to their profile, the user is sent back a confirmation message with a code or link. The confirmation than links the person’s phone with his Facebook account.

Facebook once again faces the very real possibility of being attacked by cyber criminals. The U.S. Computer. Emergency Readiness Team posted a bulletin on Monday warning users of critical vulnerabilities contained in control that provides the ability to upload photographs, used by the popular social networking sites.

Specifically, the ActiveX control allows users to upload images using the Internet Explorer Web browser. The feature contains multiple stack buffer overflow vulnerabilities in several properties, which include Action, ExtractExif, and ExtractIptc, and testing has thus far shown that versions up to and including 5.0.30 could be susceptible. The vulnerabilities directly affect users running IE on a Windows platform, which automatically comes equipped with the ActiveX control.

If exploited, the errors contained in the Image Uploader could potentially allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code and completely take over a user’s machine. Attackers could lure Facebook users running IE on their PCs with a Web page or HTML attachment infected with malicious code. A hacker could then turn the user’s computer into a boot or shut down the system completely in a denial of service attack, security experts say. In its review of the year,

MessageLabs noted that websites such as Facebook, Linked-In and Plaxo presented rich pickings for identity thieves looking to gather personal information.

As the same company warned in November, scammers are now researching their targets and attempting to lure them to infected websites that will download invasive code to their personal computers. MessageLabs tracked several attacks on senior executives, including one aimed at 1,000 individuals in the finance sector during November 2007.During the year, MessageLabs identified an average of 1,253 new web sites per day that harbored malware, equating to nearly half a million new malicious sites. It also found that social networking tools were the third most common trigger of its web security filtering rules.

As the MySpace Trojan indicates, malware attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. In Finjan’s annual report, chief technology officer Yuval Ben-Itzhak warned of “Trojan 2.0″ attacks that would exploit new web technologies such as social networks, blogs, RSS feeds and so-called “mash-ups”. Hackers are getting paid according to the number of users they infect, so their main motivation is to develop attacks that go undetected for as long as possible. This development has spawned new techniques to evade signature-based and database-reliant security methods, he explained. For example, Finjan recently identified and named a Trojan virus Random JS Toolkit that changes every time it is accessed from an infected website, making it extremely difficult to block. These Trojan 2.0 attacks represent a quantum leap for hackers in terms of technological sophistication, and pose a serious challenge to the IT community

Article Via

The ad, which began airing on network television Tuesday evening, features a close-up of the iPhone browsing the Facebook website while a narrator presents a voiceover.

“If you love Facebook so much that you check it every time that you’re at the computer, just think about how great it would be to check it every time you’re nowhere near your computer,” the narrator says. “Right on your phone.”

Meanwhile, a second spot dubbed “Cars,” touts the advantages of having the internet in your pocket when negotiating to purchase a new car and wanting to check out prices on Kelly Blue Book before striking a deal.

“Say you’re out shopping for a car, and the salesman says, ‘this is the best deal in town, guaranteed.’ Sounds good,” the narrator says. “But say you want a second opinion. That’s when having the entire internet on your phone sounds even better.”

The two new ads aired by Apple since the handset went on sale late last June. If you have yet to see the new iPhone Ads put out by Apple a few days ago, then take a look at them here. The first advertises the use of Facebook on the iPhone. It states: Two new advertising spots for Apple watchers to check out have been posted to Apple’s Web site, entitled “Facebook” and “Cars.” Both were designed to promote the iPhone as a Web surfing device. The “Facebook” ad reaches out to fans of the social networking service. “If you love Facebook so much that you check it every time you’re near the computer, just think about how great it would be to check it, well, every time you’re nowhere near the computer,” says the narrator.The “Cars” ad demonstrates the benefits of being able to surf the Web from the iPhone when shopping for an automobile. The user looks up the price of a car he’s interested in on the Kelley Blue Book Web site to make sure he’s getting a good deal.

We hope the creators of this application of FaceBook are ready. FaceBook has been known to experience down time in the past when third party applications or popular FaceBook features become suddenly popular. FaceBook has become as seemingly graphics and application heavy as MySpace lately, and I find the iPhone interface refreshing even on a regular browser as a break from all the visual noise. We may find us browsing the page in iPhone format more often just to give our eyes a break.

Its always good to track healthy competition and while we at Facebookblogged.com track round of news and developments at Facebookblogged.com. Here’s an update from Facebook’s Family Version.

Apparently, Kindo.com the super family social network has been funded by Skype’s founding engineers.

Kindo has won undisclosed seed funding from Estonia-based Ambient Sound Investments. In the seed round is Saul and Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group (TAG), and Stefan Glanzer, first investor in last.fm and executive chairman until the acquisition last year by CBS.

Like Mike Butcher says, Kindo has as much chance as any other site in this area, but being translated into so many languages from the word go creates a barrier to entry for a lot of competitors.

Via

CircleUp, Inc. is announcing the availability of powerful new messaging features on Facebook® Platform that significantly enhance the power and utility of Facebook groups, events and Friend List when added to any user’s profile on Facebook.

CircleUp is a free Internet messaging service that lets groups, clubs, teams and any other organization communicate and collaborate on Facebook Platform, by email and on the instant messaging networks for work or fun. Users ask questions or request information from groups and get back a single aggregated, visual result in exactly the format they want, instead of a blizzard of individual messages. The result can be used to make decisions and be shared immediately with the group.

With CircleUp added to their profile, group leaders and members can gather information, make plans or decisions and collaborate effectively via Facebook with simplicity, time savings and flexibility. The user makes requests or asks questions of their group, choosing an AnswerPattern™ to indicate the format they want the results presented in. CircleUp builds a user customized messaging application on the fly which is delivered to recipients via Facebook messaging, posting to the group wall or individual profiles, newsfeeds, notifications, the CircleUp Inbox and optional email messaging. Responses from all group members are organized, summarized and presented on a public or private results page inside the CircleUp application on Facebook Platform that can be accessed directly from links on the group page. The result can be shared with everyone and exported to XLS or PDF files, viewed and mashed-up with other applications using Microformats™, or continually updated in an RSS feed or daily HTML email Daily Roundup.

CircleUps can also be created and delivered to guests attending Facebook events to allow the host to get more than just RSVP information from a group. CircleUp allows event hosts to ask for volunteers, signups and commitments, agree on dates and times for meetings and events, gather group opinions, ratings and rankings on any topic, organize riders and drivers, get the T-Shirt sizes from everyone on the team, or build a group roster of participants and address information. A bride organizing a wedding event can use CircleUp to ask the wedding party whether they want chicken or fish at the rehearsal dinner or ask everyone who is traveling for their flight arrival and departure information. She then uses the results to order meals and organize ride shares from the airport.

“With CircleUp added to user’s profiles, Facebook groups and events become enormously more useful as a central point of communication for the facts, information and decisions that groups use to operate on a daily basis, saving admins and members tons of time and effort organizing information and decisions and sharing them back to the group,” said John Payne, CEO of CircleUp.

CircleUp is one of the first applications to take advantage of recently available features in the Facebook Platform api to access informal groups of friends via Facebook Friend List. A user can CircleUp their “co-workers” Friend List to see who will work shifts for them at the restaurant when they suddenly get a chance to go to Hawaii, or ask their “Cyclists” Friend List “who wants to go on a Century bike ride this weekend?” CircleUp makes communication better anywhere friends and groups are found. To check out the new Facebook application from CircleUp, go to http://apps.facebook.com/circleup/.

About CircleUp

CircleUp is a social messaging application that turbo charges messaging across many social and communications networks for information gathering, collaboration and decision making in online and real world groups and communities. It is publishing-enabled messaging that provides a fast, easy way to ask questions, make requests and gather information, photos, files, documents or decisions from any community who communicates via Facebook, email, sitemail, and IM — and get back a single, organized result that can be published and shared instead of a blizzard of emails and instant messages. The company is venture capital funded and based in Newport Beach, Calif. For more information on CircleUp, go to www.circleup.com .

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.