Facebook enrages privacy groups

SOCIAL networking phenomena Facebook is under fire from privacy groups over an advertising scheme that publishes the online purchasing habits of its users without their permission.

And a group of privacy advocates are so hot under the collar about it that they are using the networking capabilities of Facebook to organise opposition to the policy.

The group MoveOn.Org has established a Facebook group aimed at generating petition signatories against the policy. Just days old, it now has nearly 9,000 members.

The group highlights the example of Matt, from New York, who found out what his girlfriend was planning to give him for Christmas.

“Why? Because a new Facebook feature automatically shares books, movies, or gifts you buy online with everyone you know on Facebook,” the group says. “Without your consent, it pops up in your News Feed – a huge invasion of privacy.”

The group encourages companies to “get word-of-mouth promotion” for their business to “millions” of users.

The concerns are related to a free tool called Beacon, that businesses are can embed in their sites. When a Facebook user purchases something from that site, it is published on their news feed.

The aim of Beacon is to promote sales through the electronic word-of-mouth provided by social networking. If someone sees their friends making a purchase, they may be encouraged to make the purchase themselves.

Beacon is an opt-out system. When a purchase is made, a small opt-out icon appears at the top of the screen that reportedly disappears after about 20 seconds.

The privacy groups complain that not only is the icon easily missed, but that the scheme should be opt-IN, not opt-out.

Though Facebook built a reputation for strong privacy in its early days, that reputation has taken a battering more recently. When the news-feed was introduced in 2005, users were outraged until the company changed its policies and allowed the feed to be turned off.

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Google draws in MySpace into fold

GOOGLE has joined forces with News Corporation unit MySpace to launch OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for building applications for social networking sites.

The OpenSocial initiative effectively makes Google a clearinghouse for social networking applications.

Google, along with MySpace and others in the social networking space, hope the intitiative will put the brakes on the phenomenal growth of competitor Facebook, which opened its service to third-party developers five months ago.

In following the Facebook lead, MySpace says the announcement underscores the company’s “commitment to supporting standards that foster innovation.”

“Our partnership with Google allows developers to gain massive distribution without unnecessary specialized development for every platform,” MySpace chief executive and co-founder Chris DeWolfe said.

“This is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network,” he said.

Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

The companies hope the platform will attract third-party developers to their sites.

“As the most trafficked website in the country and the most popular social network in the world, MySpace is one of the leading forces in the global social Web,” said Google chairman and chief executive Eric Schmidt.

“We’re thrilled to grow our strategic relationship with MySpace by joining forces on this important initiative.”

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Asia-Pacific Internet survey released

US-BASED internet metrix firm comScore has released the first comprehensive review of Net usage in the Asia-Pacific region, making some surprising – and not-so-surprising – discoveries.

The comScore World Metrix numbers reveal that the Asia-Pacific makes up fully one-third of all internet users. But with internet penetration rates varying from 65 per cent (South Korea) to three per cent (India), there remains enormous growth potential.

The region is characterised by the vast differences between its many country markets.

While South Korea boasts the highest rate of internet usage (from home or work locations among users aged 15 or older), Australia is second with 62 per cent penetration, New Zealand third (60 per cent) and Hong Kong fourth (59 per cent).

There is still a lot of room for growth. The average person in the Asia-Pacific region visited the internet on 13.8 days in the month and spent 20.2 hours viewing 2,171 pages. This compares to the global averages of 17.1 usage days per month, 25.2 hours per month, and 2,519 pages per month, indicating that the Asia-Pacific region’s PC-based Internet usage is somewhat lower than the rest of the world.

Yahoo sites are the most popular in the region, though in Australia Yahoo sites are ranked third behind Microsoft and Google.

Meanwhile, comScore has also found that MySpace is starting to lose ground to FaceBook in the US as the most popular social networking service among teenagers.

Though MySpace is still the leader over FaceBook overall, comScore says in the US visitors to MySpace under the age of 18 dropped 30 per cent in the past year while FaceBook visitors surged 250 per cent.

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Bebo announces A/NZ management

FAST growing social network Bebo has appointed former Yahoo7 group sales manager Francisco Cordero as general manager for its new operation in Australia and New Zealand.

Mr Cordero is Bebo’s first Australia-based appointment, a position he took up in Sydney this week. He is responsible for further establishing Bebo’s local presence and for cementing partnerships with clients and advertising agencies.

An experienced group business manager, Mr Cordero has a strong affinity for technology, cross-media advertising and emerging channels like mobile. He has more than seven years experience in sales and business development roles across Europe and Australia

“The appointment to the company of an executive of the calibre of Francisco Cordero reflects our ongoing commitment to the Australian and New Zealand markets,” Bebo’s international sales chief Mark Charkin said.

Prior to his last position at Yahoo7 – the Australia-New Zealand joint-venture of Yahoo! and the Seven Network – Mr Cordero worked at ninemsn, having moved from Lycos UK in Europe.

“We are experiencing a true internet revolution and with it a dramatic change in the media landscape – Bebo is an important part of this evolution and brands are going to significantly benefit from its huge reach” Mr Cordero said.

“Bebo offers a truly unique opportunity to work on one of the most engaged websites in Australia & New Zealand and I look forward to help develop its business from the grass-roots level up.”

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Facebook opens a new social page

SOCIAL networking comer Facebook has opened its platform to other application developers with the aim of making the service a kind of operating system for the new Web 2.0 world.

Facebook’s 23-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg said the company has set in place programs to encourage third-party developers to build applications that tightly integrate with the platform.

“Until now, social networks have been closed platforms.Today, we’re going to end that,” Mr Zuckerberg told an audience of more than 750 developers and partners.

“With this evolution of Facebook Platform, any developer worldwide can build full social applications on top of the social graph, inside of Facebook.”

The keynote opened the Facebook f8 event, named to reflect the developer hackathon that ends 8 hours after the address during which new applications will be created for Facebook.

This week, Facebook Platform launched with more than 65 developer partners and 85 applications and with the introduction of an example application called Video.

E-commerce giant Amazon.com is the highest profile of the third-party firms committed to using Facebook Platform to deliver applications. Amazon will next week launch an application that lets Facebook members publish book reviews on their profile page.

Mr Zuckerberg detailed how any developer can build an application that is as integrated into the site’s information flow and connections of relationships as Facebook’s own applications.

Facebook users decide which applications to add and can control their order and appearance within their profiles, all with the familiar Facebook design. Users can always remove applications, including those built by Facebook, and will have their privacy controls maintained across applications.

Facebook introduced a new markup language, Facebook Markup, which along with its previously released APIs allows developers to build applications fully integrated into the site.

Facebook Markup includes features, such as dynamic information tags, conditional privacy tags, image caching and Flash. Developers can build anything they want in full, unlimited application pages on Facebook, called the “canvas pages,” and applications also can have a box in users’ profiles and navigation.

The Facebook site is now the sixth most trafficked internet destination in the US, and is second only to News Corporation’s MySpace as the world’s largest social networking site.

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Myth busted! Male online dominance a nonsense

THE myth that the internet is a male dominated arena where women fear to tread has been debunked, with new US research showing more women than men on the internet, and that women do more while they are online.

Market research firm eMarketer estimates there are currently about 97.2 million female internet users, making up 51.7 per cent of the online population. About 90.9 million men are active online in the US – 48.3 per cent of the internet population.

By 2011, the eMarketer projects 109.7 million US females will be active online, amounting to a steading 51.9 per cent of the total.

The company says internet usage by females has probably surpassed that of males for some time, and points to other research that have also concluded there are more women online than men (Edison Media Research, comScore Media Metrix.

The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School Centre for the Digital Future reported in 2006 that for first time in the six years the school had measured internet usage, females had surpassed males.

It found 78.4 per cent of females aged 12 or above go online, compared to 76.7 per cent of males – while female usage since 2000 had jumped 12.4 per cent, compared to just 3.2 per cent for blokes.

eMarketer warned that researchers that only measure the adult population were still finding that a greater percentage of men go online than women. But the overwhelming trend among younger girls, having grown up with the internet, is to feel as at home online as the young males.

eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson thinks that current trends will shape future internet demographics and usage.

“For girls who have grown up with technology there is no significant gender gap in internet usage, and the rise of activities that are particularly appealing to young females, such as social networking, will result in even greater usage,” Ms Williamson said.

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Mozilla Labs looks to add social networking

OPEN source driver Mozilla Labs has started a project that seeks to add social networking functions to the Firefox browser.

Mozilla said the new project, called The Coop, aimed to build a browser that let people more easily share web content and web links among friends and colleagues.

The Mozilla Labs web site says the only surprising thing about the burgeoning market for Web 2.0 style social networking sites has been that little of the functionality is built into the browser.

“The result is that when people think of tools for social interaction, email and instant messenger are at the top of their list, not web browsers,” the Mozilla Labs website says.

The Coop is a Firefox addon in development that will let users keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share new and interesting content with one or more of those friends. It will integrate with popular web services, using their existing data feeds as a transport mechanism.

“Enter The Coop, a Mozilla Labs project to experiment with adding social tools to the web browser. We want to create a fun and easy way to share links with your friends, and to browse the set of links that friends have shared with you,” it said.

“We also want to make it easy to ‘subscribe’ to a friend in order to make it easy to keep track of the pictures, movies, blog posts and status information that they might be posting on a variety of services.”

An early working prototype of The Coop is available for download through Mozilla Labs.

Mozilla believes that people sharing news and files was the killer application at the birth of the web and remains the killer application today – and that while different services had been introduced to allow that sharing to occur more easily, it make sense to build the functions into the browser.

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