Facebook has gotten another face-lift.
The popular social-networking site has tweaked its home page yet again. This time around, the redesign puts more of Facebook’s core features and settings right on the home page. The goal is to spare users from having to jump from one page to another to access their favorite features.
Facebook has fixed a hole that allowed strangers to see your friends list by accessing the site using a mobile device, the company said on Thursday.
“There was an inconsistency between the Web and mobile versions of the site for the friend list visibility option,” Facebook spokesman Simon Axten said in an e-mail.
A small but notable development at Facebook means that if you’re replying to a comment posted on your profile, you can now do so through regular e-mail.
A post on the Facebook blog explains it: “These notifications–for comments on such content as status updates, photos, videos and Wall posts–allow you to stay informed about your Facebook friends’ activities without being logged in when you’re on the go, on your phone or at work. Today, we’re launching the ability for you to participate in these conversations by replying directly to these e-mail notifications.”
Some people celebrated the coming of 2010 with crystal glasses of fizzy yellow liquid. Others used the opportunity to stare into their crystal glasses and see what we have and will become.
Perhaps the most pulsating and sad suggestion is that we no longer have any privacy. You burp in Bellingham and someone quickly hears about it in Sydney. You decide you dislike your wife, so you tweet about it, tell your Facebook friends and then get around to telling her. If you can remember to do that.
Social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can expect more attention from cybercriminals in 2010, according to a new report (PDF) released Tuesday by McAfee Labs. Also at risk are users of Adobe Systems products including Acrobat Reader and Flash. Read more…
If you were a social-networking site other than Facebook or Twitter, you were probably struggling to stay above water in 2009. But if you were one of the many services built on top of Facebook’s or Twitter’s platforms, this may well have been a very good year.
Some formerly big names in social networking were attempting to revamp, rebrand, or recover.
You and just about everyone else, it seems, are spending more and more time on Facebook and Twitter, updating statuses and checking friends’ tweets. That’s all well and good, of course, but the amount of personal information that all of you share in real time, and the level of trust implicit with the social networking sites, do pose particular security and privacy problems.
Facebook isn’t just for kids anymore, but it looks like Disney’s still an admirer: The entertainment conglomerate has nominated Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of the massive social network, to its board of directors.
A Foursquare check-in posted to Facebook through Facebook Connect.
Privacy on Facebook has been front and center this month as the company has rolled out the controversial revamp of its user privacy settings. One thing that’s thankfully stayed intact has been the ability to restrict the third-party applications on your profile to specific “lists” of friends–so that you can, for example, block your Mafia Wars activity from everyone who’s not on your “People Who Know About My Mafia Wars Addiction” list.
Looks like Facebook will be throwing another big “F8″ developer conference in the spring, after taking 2009 off. According to a sparse post on the company’s developer blog, the event will be held April 21 and 22 in San Francisco. No more details are currently available.
“F8 has always been about empowering a community of developers to hack, to build and to delight users,” the post reads. Read more…
