The Facebook Blog

Facebook may draw tech workers to NYC

2011-12-06T17:17:00.000-05:00

By Patrick Thibodeau

Computerworld - Facebook's decision to establish an engineering office in New York City may make it easier for other high-tech firms to recruit people who might be more likely to consider Silicon Valley over the Big Apple, according to some tech firms in the city.

Facebook late last week said it will open the engineering office early next year. It is now advertising for New York City-specific jobs.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company isn't saying how many employees the office will ultimately have. Facebook has around 2,000 employees, but has previously confirmed plans to expand by nearly 10,000 employees by 2017.

In October, Twitter opened a New York City office with 40 employees, including engineers and designers, and said it plans to continue hiring.

The Big Apple tech hiring market is competitive because of a growing number of start-ups, including firms such as Foursquare, the location-based service; Etsy, a marketplace; and Turntable, a music service.

Tarek Pertew, who co-founded Silicon Alley Labs, a startup that has organized job fairs for the tech sector, believes Facebook's move will increase the percentage of people working in New York City tech compared to other industries. That could help the tech sector get the same kind of attention now given to the city's large finance, media, and fashion industries.

Facebook will "help define NYC as a strong destination for many engineers," said Pertew.

Eduardo Frias, the senior vice president of engineering at Ideeli, a New York-based flash retailer, said Facebook's decision "just validates the viability of the East Coast as a destination for top tech talent."

Frias, whose firm is also hiring, believes his company will benefit from the attention Facebook brings.

According to New York City economic development officials, about 90,000 people are employed in high-tech in the city.

New York City also has an ambitious project to build an applied sciences campus on city-owned land. It's offering the land and up to $100 million in capital to a university, or group of universities, that submits the strongest proposal.

The universities that recently submitted request for proposals include: Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Cornell University and Stanford, all in conjunction with other schools.

The proposals ranged in size from a 400,000-square-foot development to projects with more than 2 million square feet. The city hopes to break ground by 2014, according to an economic development spokesperson.

Facebook lists 16 job openings for New York City on its site. The initial hurdle for applying is an on-line coding test.

Facebook tells India it won’t help censor the Web

2011-12-06T17:14:00.000-05:00

By Emil Protalinski

Summary: Indian Communications and IT minister Kapil Sibal wants technology companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Twitter to pre-screen user generated content. Facebook isn’t interested.

Indian Communications and IT minister Kapil Sibal yesterday announced a proposal to have technology companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Twitter pre-screen user generated content so that community sentiments are not hurt. Social media platforms are being asked to censor whatever politicians deem objectionable and too offensive for the Internet. Sibal called a news conference when the story broke, and following it, Facebook responded to say that it can’t help in the effort.

“We will remove any content that violates our terms, which are designed to keep material that is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity off the service,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. In other words, the social networking giant is not planning on changing its parameters to include all the content the Indian government has a problem with. Palo Alto will continue to remove content that breaks its own rules, but it will go no further.

The Indian government has presented a draft framework on what it doesn’t want on the Internet. Although India is democratic, the world’s largest democracy in fact, Sibal is asking companies to help him filter the Internet because the country has several religions and faiths. He argues what might seem humorous to someone can be really offensive to another and he wants to avoid further incidents of communities taking to the streets and vandalizing public property.

Sibal also says satirical representations of public figures are acceptable, but they should not disturb the communal harmony. He showed company executives derogatory images of the Prophet Mohammed as well as altered pictures of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi that appeared on their platforms. He argued these images would offend “any reasonable person.”

Sibal has been widely criticized for devising a policy and a framework to screen content that is being uploaded to social media websites. There has been a huge public outcry in response to his statements; the image above, which is spreading quickly on Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, is just an example.

Facebook Flaw Means Anyone Can See Private Photos

2011-12-06T17:11:00.003-05:00

By Fox News

A surprising security hole in Facebook allows almost anyone to see pictures marked as private, an online forum revealed late Monday.

Even pictures supposedly kept hidden from uninvited eyes by Facebook’s privacy controls aren’t safe, reported one user of a popular bodybuilding forum in a post entitled “I teach you how to view private Facebook photos.”

Facebook appears to have acted quickly to eliminate the end-run around privacy controls, after word of the exploit spread across the Internet. It wasn’t long before one online miscreant uploaded private pictures of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself -- evidence that the hack worked, he said.

A Facebook spokesman did not immediately return FoxNews.com requests for comment.

The issue stems from the site’s own reporting system, which Facebook has designed to give users power to police each other.

In this case, after a user reports another for “nudity and pornography” in their profile picture, Facebook presents them with the further option of “selecting additional photos to include with your report.”

If a user chooses to continue, Facebook provides them with an album of additional photos to discern. In FoxNews.com tests, this function consistently revealed private pictures, which the user can then resize and enlarge by adjusting bits of code.

Last week Facebook settled with the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly exposing details about users' lives without getting legally required consent. In some cases, the FTC charged, Facebook allowed potentially sensitive details to be passed along to advertisers and software developers prowling for customers.

To avoid further legal wrangling, Facebook agreed to submit to government audits of its privacy practices every other year for the next two decades. The company committed to getting explicit approval from its users -- a process known as "opting in" -- before changing their privacy controls.

How Facebook/YouTube can help you bag a job

2011-11-14T09:48:00.000-05:00

By Priya Kapoor

For almost three years, Hyderabad-based Srinivas Jale had been looking for a new job. He posted his resume on numerous job portals, with no luck However, in January this year, he was surprised when he received an offer through LinkedIn, a networking website.

"I had created a profile for connecting with my friends and ex-colleagues, but never knew that it could land me a job," says 32-year-old Jale, who now works as a sales and market ing manager with a car company.

Today, almost everyone who is connected to the Net, is present on at least one networking Website For workaholics, the most popu lar professional networking site is LinkedIn.

Realising the vast number of candidates that can be easily tapped on these portals, compa nies and head hunters have be gun to rely on them to find po tential employees. "Out of the vast pool of talent, only 20% is available on job portals.

The remaining 80% is still untapped. To reach out to them, networking Websites work as an effective tool," says Sunil Goel, chief ex ecutive officer , Global Hunt, an executive search company.

Here are some tips to help you leverage networking sites.

Join specific groups

All networking sites have groups formed by people with specific skills or in a particular industry You should join these as it will help to expand your network and tap these contacts when you need to start a job search. Also, recruiters often post vacancies on the pages of such groups. However, don' think that once you join a group you will be flooded with job offers instantly. It will take time to build a network as well as rapport with the members. After all, it is diffi cult to trust someone whom you have never met personally.

Keep an active profile

You should post a detailed profile as this is the first thing that a po tential employer will read about you. Highlight your professional capabilities and skills, but be brief about personal information. The headline or 'about me' informa tion should be succinct and in teresting. Use keywords which will help your profile to pop up when someone is trawling the site look ing for a candidate.

Be active on the site. Give so lutions to enquiries posted by peo ple and regularly post news about what's happening in your indus try. If you are looking for a job, fre quently post messages regarding your search as this will keep it fresh in the minds of people with in your network.

Recommendations

Your profile should carry positive feedback about your work. Re cruiters prefer it if the recom mendations are written by senior colleagues. "While requesting a colleague to write one for you, ask him to focus on the positive as pects and achievements in the past one to five years. Don't ask some one who has known you for less than this period as it will come across as a biased view," says Kris Lakshmikanth, CEO, The Head Hunters (India).

Online behaviour

You may have to change the pri vacy settings for your Website page so that recruiters can easily send or post a message.

While a social networking site can help you get a job, it could also land you in trouble if you are not careful about what you post. Don' start writing about a job change before informing your current em ployer as someone in your network may spill the beans at work.

Avoid mentioning faults of your current and past colleagues as this can sour relations within your network and harm future op portunities. Also, potential em ployers will be unwilling to hire you. Keep a check on what you post about your personal life. No racy photographs, snide com ments, risky jokes or strong po litical views should be aired.

LinkedIn

There are specific skill or industry groups on this professional networking Website, which can help increase your contacts. Ask colleagues to write recommendations that can work as references. Twitter Create a list of companies offering jobs under its feature 'List' . Also, start following companies that interest you, so if they post a vacancy, you find out about it instantly.

YouTube

Many firms have begun to post videos on YouTube about their internal activities and events, which can help you know more about the potential employer.

Facebook

Companies have pages on Facebook where they post about jobs. Add these, as well as college and school alumni groups. Features like 'status update' and 'notes' help inform your network about job search.

Mobile App Scrubs Your Facebook Past

2011-11-14T09:45:00.001-05:00

By Nick Clayton

Everybody has heard horror stories of the Facebook past of job applicants coming back to haunt them. In fact, a large proportion of final year students will now be trying to figure out how to expunge the unsuitable-for-work comments, photos and updates they have accumulated on their profiles and walls of friends. It is no easy task.

CNET reports on a very thorough app developed by a job-seeking programmer Michael Devine.

Devine’s Android app, called Exfoliate, allows you to delete batches of posts based on how long they’ve been up. For instance, you can have it remove posts that are older than three months and various time periods up to three years. You can clean just your wall, or also remove posts from friends’ walls. And the kind of content you can select for removal includes your posts, comments and likes…

“When you really think about it, it becomes clear that there’s actually no reason to leave anything (on Facebook) after a certain point in time because no one sees it or they rarely see it,” he said. “It just sits there waiting for someone to see it out of context and then it can cause you trouble.”

There are plans to refine the app so users can select which friends’ profiles Exfoliate will act upon and to prevent them leaking otherwise deleted comments to the world. Removal of comment based on keywords requires, he says, more computational power than is readily available on a smartphone.

As it is, CNET warns, the app is a “bandwidth hog” which takes several hours on a Wi-Fi network. Its actions are also permanent. Exfoliate costs the equivalent of $2.99 from the Android Market and an iPhone version is expected in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, The Guardian has some useful hints on how to use Facebook’s ever-changing privacy tools to reduce the chance of embarrassing comments and pictures being seen at work.

It suggests, for instance:

Hover your mouse over “lists” on the left hand of your main page, click on “more” and create groups; for example, clients, work, family and close friends. Messages for particular groups can be sent via the news feed by clicking on the drop-down menu next to “post”.

In addition:

You can also preview pictures and prevent them from appearing on your profile by going to privacy settings, “how tags work” and editing the settings. While you can’t stop friends adding pictures on their profile, you can take the tag off the photo so it doesn’t mention your name.

The soon-to-be-introduced Timeline feature is supposed to ease the process of deciding who will see your posts. However, Facebook does not have a great reputation for simplicity and transparency when it launches new features.

Social networking pioneer found dead at age of 22

2011-11-14T09:43:00.000-05:00

By Jessica Satherley

A young co-founder of social networking site Diaspora*, set up to challenge Facebook, has died at the age of 22.

New York University student Ilya Zhitomirskiy passed away suddenly on Saturday but the details of his death have not been issued.

Zhitomirskiy set up Diaspora* social network, a free personal web server, with three friends from NYU – Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer.

Friends and fans of Zhitomirskiy have written tributes on Twitter after hearing of his death, with one posting: ‘So sad! Social networking pioneer dies at 22.’

Another tweeted: ‘Death of a young entrepreneur is a great loss to the community.’

The four students announced their software programme in April 2010 and raised over $200,000 for the project through the online fundraising system Kickstarter.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) donated money to Diaspora*

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) donated money to Diaspora*

The system even inspired Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to donate money to the project.

In November 2010 the foursome released a consumer alpha version of the programme, while still making further developments.

Diaspora* is based around privacy concerns related to centralized social networks by allowing users to set up their own server to host content and then interact with others by sharing status updates, photographs and other data – much like Facebook.

But it differs from Facebook because the latter stores user data within its own network.

Co-founder Raphael Sofaer told the New York Times last year: ‘In our real lives, we talk to each other.

‘We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t that hard to do.

‘All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.’

While Zuckerberg praised the group, telling Wired last year: ‘I think it is cool people are trying to do it.

‘I see a little of myself in them. It’s just their approach that the world could be better and saying, ‘We should try to do it’.’

Facebook's Zuckerberg gets Harvard star treatment

2011-11-08T19:04:00.000-05:00

By Adam Tanner

CAMBRIDGE (Reuters) - Mark Zuckerberg returned to Harvard officially for the first time Monday, winning a warm welcome from the university where he created Facebook and embarked on a well-chronicled meteoric ascent.

It was clear Zuckerberg was no longer the dropout who left the iconic Ivy League institution, even if he still dresses in the classic campus uniform of T-shirt, jeans and sneakers.

If he weren't so famous, the billionaire and Silicon Valley entrepreneur portrayed as the flawed protagonist of the Oscar-nominated "The Social Network" could have passed for any one of the hundreds of computer science students who came to hear him speak.

"It didn't seem it was that different than talking to other Harvard students," said Kyle Solan, 19, a computer science major afterward. "He seemed very down to earth."

Just a few blocks from where he started the world's largest social network, Zuckerberg took part in a rare question-and-answer for students, who snapped up tickets to the event with the same frenzy reserved for favorite bands.

"We weren't originally planning this as a business or anything," Zuckerberg said sheepishly of the phenomenon that Facebook would become. "If I had a chance to do it again I would have gone to classes."

Zuckerberg's rock-star reception marked a sea change from when the entrepreneur famously landed himself in hot water for creating Facemash, a website that allowed users to rank their fellow students' attractiveness and an incident immortalized in the film.

Speaking at his usual machine gun clip, Zuckerberg appeared every bit as driven as the character Aaron Sorkin imagined for "The Social Network". But his bluntness and occasional humor in response to questions ultimately won the crowd over.

CODING THE CLASSICS

More comfortable with coding than the classics, Zuckerberg playfully acknowledged a lackluster academic career. Indeed, he said he once aspired to be a classics major, describing how he passed a course on ancient Rome while working on Facebook by building an Internet site for students to share notes.

"About halfway through the semester I stopped going to class," he said to laughter from the audience.

One day he sent around an email to other students saying: "Hey, I built a study tool for everyone. And everyone filled out all the answers of all the significance of each of the pieces of art work, and made it a lot easier to study and I passed!"

Zuckerberg's return was labeled his first official on-campus appearance since leaving in 2004, though he has been back informally. His creation Facebook has been a huge presence on campus since, to the consternation of its professors.

At least one Harvard professor, British historian Niall Ferguson, has warned students he will fail anyone he finds using the site during his class.

While Zuckerberg appeared for the most part at ease, he still lacked the polish of a seasoned executive at public appearances. Asked what books inspired him, he faltered and admitted he was "stumped" by the question. When another student asked what global problems worried him, he responded only by detailing different features on Facebook.

The Facebook founder conceded he had a lot to learn.

"You have to be willing to make a lot of mistakes," he said. "The story of Facebook, we made so many mistakes and continue to, every kind of mistake. I mean I knew nothing when I was getting started. I still know so little. I mean I am so young running a company of this scale."

In response to a question about Facebook's privacy policy -- an area of constant criticism for the company -- Zuckerberg said Facebook was better than many others which gathered data on unsuspecting users to target ads.

"People share so much information, put so much stuff into Facebook that how their data is treated is super important and we're constantly working on more stuff to make that more transparent," he said.

Zuckerberg also boldly predicted that the amount of content that people share on Facebook would double annually for years to come.

"If you project forward 10 years, each person will share about 1,000 times more things per day than they are now - 2 to the 10th is 1024," he said.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg says Google, Yahoo and Microsoft collect data ‘behind your back’

2011-11-08T19:02:00.000-05:00

By Todd Haselton

In a recent interview on the Charlie Rose show, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are secretly collecting user data. Zuckerberg also argued that Facebook is more transparent than the aforementioned companies. “It’s just that they’re collecting that about you behind your back,” he said. “You’re going around the web and they’re collecting this huge amount of information about you and you never knew that.” Zuckerberg did admit that Google allows users to see which information it is storing through its Google Dashboard website, but said “very few people” know that feature exists or bother to check it. Zuckerberg also said Facebook provides more features for users to manage what people can and cannot see, although it is arguable that Google+ makes it much easier to configure these options from the get-go. A clip of the interview can be found after the break.

Google+ Is Dead

2011-11-08T18:59:00.000-05:00

By Farhad Manjoo

Shortly after Google launched its new social network in June, many companies—including several online magazines, Slate among them—attempted to create “brand profiles” on the service. The rush was a testament to Google’s power to drive a flood of users to any new site it launches. Though Google+ was pretty rough around the edges, many observers called it a credible alternative to Facebook, so it made sense for companies to get in on the ground floor.

Yet Google seemed completely surprised by this turn of events. A product manager posted a message discouraging businesses from creating Google+ profiles, and the company began shutting down the profiles posted by renegade firms. This prompted many creative workarounds—TechCrunch jokingly created a page for a fellow named Techathew Cruncherin—but Google was unmoved. (Cruncherin’s profile was shut down.) The episode illustrated a persistent and likely fatal problem for Google’s effort to take on Facebook: There’s nothing to do on Google+, and every time someone figures out a possible use for it, Google turns out the lights.

Google did finally release brand pages this week—here’s Slate’s page—but at this point the effort might be moot. The search company says its network has attracted more than 40 million users in the months since it launched, which likely makes Google+ the fastest-growing social network of all time. But considering Google’s marketing muscle—it hasn’t been shy about directing Web searchers to Google+, and everyone who’s logged in to a Google account sees the Google+ toolbar at the top of every Google page—it would be a surprise if Google+ didn’t have so many users.
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The real test of Google’s social network is what people do after they join. As far as anyone can tell, they aren’t doing a whole lot. Traffic-analysis firms have consistently reported Google+’s traffic to be declining from its early peak. Even Google’s own executives seem to have gotten bored by the site. After several public posts in the summer, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin dropped off the site in the fall; they only started posting once more when bloggers began pointing out their absence. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman and former CEO, posted his first public message when Steve Jobs died. That was three months after the social network went live.

I was an early Google+ skeptic. Shortly after it launched, I likened its main feature—the ability to divide your friends into discrete groups, called Circles—to the process of creating a seating chart for your wedding. In theory, it was appealing to send “private” messages to certain groups, but in practice I thought most people would find it tedious to categorize their friendships. And apart from the Circles feature—which Facebook quickly co-opted—I didn’t think Google+ distinguished itself from its rivals in any compelling way. I still don’t.

And yet, I’ve been surprised by just how dreary the site has become. Although Google seems determined to keep adding new features, I suspect there’s little it can do to prevent Google+ from becoming a ghost town. Google might not know it yet, but from the outside, it’s clear that G+ has started to die—it will hang on for a year, maybe two, but at some point Google will have to put it out of its misery.

Why am I so sure that Google+ can’t be saved? Because there’s no way to correct Google’s central failure. Back when companies were clamoring to create brand pages on the network—or users were looking to create profiles with pseudonyms, another phenomenon that Google shut down—the company ought to have acceded to its users’ wishes and accommodated them. If Google wasn’t ready for brand pages in the summer, it shouldn’t have launched Google+ until it was. And this advice goes more generally—by failing to offer people a reason to keep coming back to the site every day, Google+ made a bad first impression. And in the social-networking business, a bad first impression spells death.

I know this sounds unfair: Facebook had years to add all the features it has now, so why should we demand that Google create a perfect substitute at launch time? But that’s just the thing—taking on a behemoth like Facebook is an unfair fight. Google seems to think about its social network in the same way it thinks of any other kind of software—as a “product” that it can design step-by-step, starting with a small number of innovative features and working up from there.

That launch-first, fix-it-later strategy has worked marvelously for Google in the past. Gmail didn’t match all of Microsoft Outlook’s features from the beginning—it didn’t even have a delete button—but the stuff it did have (lots of storage and fast search) was so compelling that people were willing to stick with it until it became the best email program in existence. In the same way, I switched to Chrome because it was faster than any other browser I’ve ever used—and I stuck with it even though it lacked add-ons or the ability to bookmark many tabs at once. (It has since added those features.)

But a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place. Like a bar or a club, a social network needs a critical mass of people to be successful—the more people it attracts, the more people it attracts. Google couldn’t have possibly built every one of Facebook’s features into its new service when it launched, but to make up for its deficits, it ought to have let users experiment more freely with the site. That freewheeling attitude is precisely how Twitter—the only other social network to successfully take on Facebook in the last few years—got so big. When Twitter users invented ways to reply to one another or echo other people’s tweets, the service didn’t stop them—it embraced and extended their creativity. This attitude marked Twitter as a place whose hosts appreciated its users, and that attitude—and all the fun people were having—pushed people to stick with the site despite its many flaws (Twitter’s frequent downtime, for example). Google+, by contrast, never managed to translate its initial surge into lasting enthusiasm. And for that reason, it’s surely doomed.

One in five willing to make Facebook friends with complete strangers

2011-11-03T16:40:00.001-04:00

By Peter Bright

Researchers from the University of British Columbia Vancouver infiltrated Facebook with a set of bot-controlled fake accounts, sent out a load of friend requests, got a load of responses, and then harvested 250GB of personal data. They managed this in spite of Facebook's defense measures such as CAPTCHAs if an account tries to add too many friends, and the "Facebook Immune System" (FIS), that detects suspicious, spider-like activity and blocks it.

In total, 102 bots were used. These sent friend requests to 5,053 random users with public accounts, 976 of which accepted them. The bots then sent a further 3,517 requests to friends of those users; 2,079 of these were accepted. Facebook Immune System blocked about 20 percent of accounts after users reported those accounts for spamming. The result was a network of 3,055 profiles, with a further 1,085,785 friends-of-friends in the extended network.

With these connections made, the researchers then tried to harvest information that could have monetary value: the extensive personal information contained in Facebook profiles. They then compared the amount of data accessible before infiltration (i.e. that made available to the public) and that after (i.e. that made available to friends or friends-of-friends). While some information was widely publicized—almost everyone who included their gender on their profile made it public—other details, such as postal and e-mail addresses, became much more accessible after friendship was granted: for people directly friended by the bots, availability of e-mail went from 2.4 percent (unfriended) to 71.8 percent (friended), and postal addresses from 0.9 percent to 19.0 percent.

Facebook disputes the value of the study, arguing that FIS actually blocked more accounts more quickly than the researchers claim, and that the bots were given more leeway than normal accounts because they were using a single university IP address. The fact that friends can access more personal data than strangers is in any case unsurprising: that's rather the point of being Facebook friends.

But what we did find weird was the number of people willing to add complete strangers as friends. The initial batch of friend requests had about a 20 percent success rate. These were unsolicited friend requests between people who couldn't possibly have relationships, and yet one in five people were willing to make the connection. If that complete stranger had a mutual friend in common, the success rate went up to about 60 percent.

Much is made of Facebook privacy and control. The site has been criticized for making it too hard to secure personal data, and be too liberal with its default policies. In response to these criticisms, it has made the privacy and security system easier to use and with more sensible defaults.

But these controls are irrelevant if people are willing to add random bots, and hence give away access to their "friends-only" private information. With its focus on data harvesting, the study didn't examine why people might add such accounts as friends, but plainly there are many Facebook users who are more interested in having the connection than whether they actually know someone. Facebook users are clearly taking the time to consider how widely their data is shared, and hiding information from non-friends. But when looking at whom the data is shared with, much of that same care and attention appears to be missing.

Judge orders alleged Facebook co-founder Ceglia to return to U.S. to hunt for evidence

2011-11-03T16:37:00.001-04:00

By Jolie O'Dell

Paul Ceglia, the man who last year claimed he owned 84 percent of Facebook, has been ordered to return to the U.S. to unearth the one piece of physical evidence that could settle the case.

Ceglia, who is currently staying in Ireland, was ordered by U. S. Magistrate Judge Leslie G. Foschio to return home to the States to search for one of six flash drives that Facebook says will settle the case in Facebook’s favor.

Ceglia said the drive was lost; however, given that billions of dollars and ownership of the world’s most significant social network are at stake, the court won’t simply take his word for it. He has until December 2, 2011, to find as many of the six flash drives sought by the court as he can.

So far, Facebook has gotten everything they’ve asked for in this case, as sources close to the matter tell us, on both privilege claims and discovery.

In July 2010, Ceglia had Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg served with papers. Ceglia said that he and Zuckerberg had entered into a contract nine months before Facebook launched. The contract allegedly stated that Zuckerberg would “develop and design a website” and that Ceglia would wind up “paying a $1,000 fee but getting a 50 percent stake in the product.”

At the time, Facebook dismissed the claims, and Ceglia had few supporters among the tech-blog-reading public.

But Ceglia persisted. In April 2011, he came back with an impressive law firm, DLA Piper, at his back and some new evidence.

Ceglia produced emails (which Facebook claims are forgeries) showing Zuckerberg attempting to swindle Ceglia out of his share of the company. The emails were allegedly written during the same time period Zuckerberg was stalling his work for the Winklevoss twins.

Given the fact that Facebook reached a $65 settlement with the Winklevoss twins, we can’t really predict whether the company is willing to bend on this claim, either.

What we do know is that according to court documents, Facebook asked the judge in the case to order Ceglia to “conduct a diligent search” for the missing flash drive in the United States. He will also have to give details about “the dates, times, locations and circumstances of his in-person, good-faith efforts” to find the missing drives.

Also in Facebook’s favor, the company will be permitted to issue subpoenas to various people involved in the case. Facebook will also be allowed to examine metadata from experts’ files.

Sorry, Mark. Facebook needed Silicon Valley

2011-11-03T16:31:00.003-04:00

By Om Malik

Could Facebook could have started in Timbuktu? Okay I am being a bit facetious, but in order to grow up it still would have needed to come to Silicon Valley, despite what what Mark Zuckerberg said this weekend. At the Y Combinator Startup School, the Facebook co-founder and CEO said that if he was starting Facebook now, he would stay in Boston. He is worried that folks in Silicon Valley think too short term and are transaction oriented.

“I knew nothing, so I had to be out here. Facebook would not have worked had I stayed in Boston. But I think that now, knowing more of what I know, I think I might have been able to pull it off. You don’t have to move out here to do this. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.”

t’s no surprise that his comments got a lot of attention. While I certainly agree that the malaise of short-term thinking is quite well spread in the San Francisco Bay Area and is making people myopic, I still disagree with Zuckerberg’s viewpoint. And to be clear, I am not saying Boston or New York or London or Berlin or Tel Aviv or Shanghai are not good for starting your companies. There is nothing I would like more to see than all those cities become even bigger centers of entrepreneurial creativity.

After living in San Francisco for eight years and with many deep and close relationships, I remain ambivalent. I still think of New York as my spiritual home, more so than my actual birthplace. However, when it comes to the technology industry, the San Francisco Bay Area is the place to work and “work it.”
People + Location

There are certain kind of startups – networking companies for example — that benefit from Boston’s locale. Or media companies from being in New York. But Silicon Valley, at least for the next couple of years, has an advantage — and it is not VC money, which people mistakenly identify as Silicon Valley’s edge, or nearness to Stanford. Instead it is a very high concentration of talent and people with varied skills to accelerate and grow startups, especially those on a break-neck trajectory like Facebook was in 2007.

Facebook benefited from being in Silicon Valley because of the intangibles. How many casual conversations with Steve Jobs would Zuckerberg have had if he was not in the Valley? Or how about access to some amazing team members who helped Facebook on the right track?

The fact is that if there are many downsides to Silicon Valley, there are also upsides to this area. And whatever the faults of the Bay Area might be, one cannot argue with the richness of the talent pool. The talent pool for technology is bigger and deeper, mostly because the area known as Silicon Valley has been in business longer and has been attracting more people by the day. It is no different than Hollywood attracting cinematic talent. The bigger the talent pool, the more likely a company is to find folks with highly specialized skills needed to grow a certain kind of company.

I started following Facebook a long time ago — I wrote about them when they were just getting started, when they were hardly a media darling. They got good solid people in quick succession and that in turn put the social network on the right track. The Valley is where Facebook found the likes of Matt Cohler, Owen Van Natta and Jonathan Heiliger — and these are just the more well-known members of the Facebook team. COO Sheryl Sandberg and CTO Bret Taylor are also from around here. Just look at the sheer number of Googlers that Facebook has poached over past few years — try doing that elsewhere!

However, given that Mark Zuckerberg is headed back to Boston and Harvard on what seems like a recruiting effort, that comment makes for a great soundbite, and probably an awesome recruitment tool as well. And on that I wish him the best of luck.

Google starts indexing Facebook comments, AJAX/JavaScript content

2011-11-01T20:12:00.000-04:00

By Emil Protalinski

Summary: Google has started indexing AJAX and JavaScript content. This includes, for example, the Facebook Comments Box many sites use to power their commenting system.

Google has started indexing Facebook comments posted on third-party websites. In other words, if you use the Facebook Comment Box to power the commenting system for your website’s content, as many news websites and blogs do, your readers’ content could be affecting your Google PageRank.

Users’ comments posted via services like Disqus, Intense Debate, or the Facebook Comments Box, normally aren’t picked up by search engines. That changed recently, however, as Google recently started indexing comments, meaning that content now shows up in Google searches.

The tidbit was first spotted by Digital Inspiration. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, confirmed the news on Twitter: “Googlebot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments.”

GoogleBot, the company’s search spider, has apparently learned to read comments that are dynamically loaded in AJAX or JavaScript. This also means Google is getting better at seeing content being loaded in your own custom AJAX and/or JavaScript code.

Although Facebook and Google may not be best friends, this is actually good news for the social networking giant. Those who have been avoiding using the Facebook Comments Box because of the SEO factor may reconsider their decision now.

Mark Zuckerberg to Recruit Harvard Students

2011-11-01T20:09:00.001-04:00

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The almost match: Facebook and Boston

2011-11-01T20:07:00.000-04:00

By Michael B. Farrell

If Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg had to do it over, he might have kept his online social network, which today has more than 800 million users, in Boston.

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Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, famously hatched the company while he was a Harvard University undergraduate but moved it to California’s Silicon Valley, where it grew into the multibillion-dollar enterprise it is today.

Asked Saturday at a Stanford University forum what he would do differently, Zuckerberg said he might stay local, a video of the event shows.

“If I were starting now,’’ he said, “I would do it very differently, but I knew nothing back then. Honestly, if I were starting now I would have just stayed in Boston.’’

Zuckerberg said Silicon Valley’s attention span lacks “long-term focus’’ and its culture often does not value commitment. “A lot of the companies that have been built outside of Silicon Valley . . . seem to be on a longer-term cadence than the ones in Silicon Valley.’’

The comments struck a chord in Boston. The fact that Cambridge saw the birth of one of the Web’s biggest innovations - and of a company that has been valued at $80 billion - but lost it to California has been a sore point.

“What I was pleased to see is that he’s acknowledging that Boston can hold its own,’’ said Michael Greeley, a general partner of Flybridge Capital Partners, a Boston venture capital firm.

Many investors have said Boston has a strong roster of companies but lacks brand-name consumer companies like Facebook, Google Inc., and Apple Inc. “If Facebook had stayed,’’ Greeley said, “we would have had a dozen other companies that would have been started by Facebook employees.’’

Zuckerberg said his point was that upstarts don’t need Silicon Valley to succeed. Still, California at the time was the right place. “I had to be [in Silicon Valley]. Facebook would not have worked had I stayed in Boston.’’

Got hacked? Facebook lets friends help unlock your account

2011-10-27T21:49:00.000-04:00

By Meghan Kelly

Can’t access your Facebook account, forgot your password or got hacked? Facebook announced today it is testing “Trusted Friends,” a new way to prove who you are when you’re locked out.

Facebook wants your friends to influence and be instrumental in every part of your social life, if not your real one. The company announced a number of new features to this end at its September developer conference F8. These include a new vocabulary to supplement the “like” button, options to listen to music with friends and discover news content through them. The security feature now lets your friends act as trusted liaisons when Facebook can’t contact you directly.

“It’s sort of similar to giving a house key to your friends when you go on vacation,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Pick the friends you most trust in case you need their help.”

Facebook Trusted FriendsFor example, if you suddenly don’t have access to your e-mail, and can’t remember your Facebook password, Facebook won’t be able to e-mail you a new password. Instead, the social network will contact three of your friends and require you enter an access code sent to each of them. The process will take longer than a simple e-mail password reset because you have to wait for the friends to send you access codes. If you’re locked out due to a hack, you might not want to wait the extra time to take your account back, but it is better than not getting access at all.

Facebook is also testing one-time passwords for third party applications. When you accept a third party application, you have to login to your account, but now Facebook will generate a one time password for you to use in your regular password’s stead. That way, if the app turns out to actually not be from credible sources, you didn’t just give them total access to your Facebook account.

According to its blog post, Facebook is rolling out these features in honor of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

Facebook builds 'green' datacentre in Sweden

2011-10-27T21:46:00.000-04:00

By The Guardian

Facebook is building a 'green' datacentre in Sweden, the social networking giant's first datacentre outside the US.

The company said on Thursday that it had picked the northern Swedish city of Lulea, just 100km south of the Arctic Circle, because of its access to renewable energy and the cold climate that is crucial for keeping the servers cool.

The centre will be the largest of its kind in Europe, and the northernmost of this magnitude on earth. It will handle all data processing from Europe, the Middle East and Africa and serve millions of the site's 800m users. It will cover 30,000 sq m – about the size of 11 football pitches – and be fully packed with data servers.

"It is our first data centre to draw its power primarily from renewables, and it features design evolutions like a 70% reduction in our reliance on backup generators," a Facebook spokesman said. The facility – the construction of which will begin immediately – is supposed to lighten Facebook's environmental footprint.

"This is a great step forward", said Casey Harrell, Greenpeace IT analyst. "With the IT sector – one of the fastest growing consumers of electricity in the world – Facebook's taking leadership on renewable energy could help determine whether we have a dirty 'cloud' or not."

Facebook said it had looked at more than 100 sites in Europe, including 40 in Sweden. Lulea, a small town of 74,000 inhabitants, has Europe's cheapest electricity prices because of its abundant hydroelectric power resources.

Tom Furlong, Facebook's director of site operations, said: "We concluded that Lulea offered the best package of resources, including a suitable climate for environmental cooling, clean power resources, available land, talented regional workforce and supportive business and corporate environment."

Each of Facebook's US datacentres is estimated to use the same amount of electricity as 30,000 US homes. Energy consumption of warehouses run by companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, is among the fastest growing sources of global electricity demand. In the US, which hosts approximately 40% of the world's datacentre servers, their electricity consumption increased by nearly 40% during the economic downturn of 2007-2010.

In April 2011, Greenpeace said in its How Dirty is Your Data? report that 53.2% of Facebook's electricity was generated by coal . An Unfriend Coal campaign on Facebook, launched by the green group 20 months ago, has gathered more than 700,000 supporters.

Greeenpeace also called on Facebook on Thursday to "state a public preference for siting its new datacentre infrastructure in locations where they can be significantly powered by clean renewable energy. This will send a important signal to IT companies and electricity providers that want to compete for future Facebook business."

Moron Alert - Belleville woman is charged after allegedly creating fake Facebook profile in ex-boyfriend's name

2011-10-26T10:37:00.003-04:00

By The Associated Press

PARSIPPANY — Lawyers for a Belleville woman say the state's identity theft law doesn't apply to allegations that she created a fake Facebook profile about her ex-boyfriend.

Forty-one-year-old Dana Thornton faces up to 18 months in prison if convicted.

Authorities allege the Belleville resident created a Facebook page as if it was written by her former boyfriend, Parsippany police Detective Michael Lasalandra, after they broke up.

The Daily Record of Parsippany reports Thornton's lawyer, Richard Roberts, claims while his client may have violated Facebook rules, there's no law in New Jersey against creating a profile of anyone online.

Morris County prosecutors say even though the ID theft law doesn't mention the Internet, Thornton's action harmed her ex-boyfriend's reputation.

Lasalandra declined comment.

A hearing is scheduled for Nov. 2.

Facebook Co-Founder Aims to Bring Venture Capital Model to Media

2011-10-26T10:36:00.001-04:00

By Sarah Frier

The Knight Foundation, a sponsor of journalism-innovation projects, named Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and digital experts from Harvard and MIT to its board, where they’ll take a venture-capital-like approach to media.

In the Miami-based group’s first-ever digital-related appointments, it also named Joichi Ito, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and John Palfrey, who runs Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and is also an adviser at venture firm Highland Capital Partners.

The new board members join people with backgrounds in newspapers including Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and currently editor-in-chief of ProPublica. Newspapers have lost money as advertisers and readers flock to the Internet and people communicate via social media and mobile devices.

“We need to be approaching these questions and these problems with an attitude more akin to venture capital, than with the attitude of a foundation,” Hughes said in an interview.

Hughes, who co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, led the online initiative in President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

$100 Million Investment

The Knight Foundation is shifting its strategy from charity to “social investing” as news and information delivery becomes digital, foundation president Alberto Ibarguen said in an interview. Since 2007, the foundation has invested more than $100 million in new technology for news and information, in more than 200 experiments, according to its website.

“Traditionally in the nonprofit sector, because an idea is founded on fate so much of the time, or founded on hope, the typical thing would be for someone to continue and continue until they ran out of money,” Ibarguen said. “An entrepreneur would find a creative way to make it work.”

Hughes also founded Jumo, which helped people connect with nonprofits, and merged it with another company. Ito was an early investor in Twitter Inc., Flickr and Technorati Inc. Their addition to the board could mean more experiments like ProPublica, a nonprofit that produces investigative journalism as newsrooms cut back, Hughes said.

“It’s about investment both in core activities that relate to media and information needs, as well as invented ones that cross the boundaries of what journalism is and what media is,” said Palfrey, the author of “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives.”

Events like the so-called Arab Spring, a wave of protests which the world followed on Twitter and YouTube, show traditional media professionals must be digitally savvy, Ito said. Programming and data analysis should be as integrated in journalism as photography or audio, he said, speaking in an interview.

“A lot of foundations look to the Knight Foundation to set an example for doing new things,” Ito said. “Bringing us guys on the board will hopefully send an interesting message.”

Facebook-Funded Sociable Labs Helps Retailers Be More Friendly

2011-10-26T10:33:00.000-04:00

By Tricia Duryee

Sociable Labs, which is helping retailers to integrate Facebook’s social graph into the shopping experience, has raised $7 million from investors.

The second round of funding was led by Battery Ventures. The company previously raised money from the fbFund, a $10 million seed fund and joint venture run by Facebook, Founders Fund and Accel Partners.

Nisan Gabbay, founder and CEO of Sociable Labs, said Sociable is exploring what social commerce means, and from what he’s determined so far, he doesn’t believe it means people shopping on Facebook.

Rather, he thinks the most value lies in connecting to friends on actual retail sites to share recommendations.

For instance, it would be helpful if people could see which of their friends are registered to run in a 5K when signing up for the race, or if anyone they know has stayed in a particular hotel in Miami before using a travel site to book a room.

Sociable’s beta customers include Active.com, Chegg.com, Backcountry.com, Rue La La, HauteLook and Sole Society.

“Facebook is focused around entertainment, but it’s not about discovery or an immersive experience,” Gabbay said. “I find that the right experience is to offer the feature set where they already shop online, and by adding social features and the graph into that experience.”

Currently, most social commerce experiences are tied to the “like” button.

You can like a product and have it show up in your news feed on Facebook. But that information is not useful to your friends until they are shopping for something similar, at which point it may not be easy to find.

“Not everything can happen on Facebook,” Gabbay said. “Your friends don’t want to see what you are buying until they are making a decision.”

Privacy protections will obviously be key with this sort of integration and long-term cataloging of consumer purchases. But after a quick look at how Sociable is integrated on Active.com, a Web site dedicated to sports events, it doesn’t feel invasive. It’s information that friends would normally share on Facebook, but which would instantly get lost in the stream of news.

The company’s software is coming out of beta today. Sociable Labs will charge its lowest-paying customer $50,000 a year for services and licenses. The company currently has 25 employees, and plans to use the funding to deploy the software more broadly and market it, now that it is out of beta.

Will Facebook profits double Amazon's this year?

2011-10-24T10:45:00.000-04:00

By Don Reisinger

Arrington, writing on his new blog, Uncrunched, cited a source who said that Facebook generated $1.6 billion in revenue during the first half of 2011 and an operating income of $800 million. Assuming that same profit margin carries through the year, Arrington says, Facebook could tally an operating income of $2 billion this year.

It gets better, Arrington says. During the first half of the year, Arrington points out that Amazon posted an operating income figure of $523 million, which Facebook easily overshadowed. And through the rest of the year, Arrington believes Facebook will generate more income than Amazon.

However, operating income is not necessarily the best measure to use when evaluating a company. After a firm tallies its operating income, it then needs to account for taxes, discontinued operations, and a host of other costs to arrive at a net income--the cash that the company eventually takes in.

In September, Reuters, citing its own sources, revealed Facebook's net income. Like Arrington's source, the news service said that Facebook generated $1.6 billion in revenue and net income of nearly $500 million during the first six months of 2011.

Amazon, on the other hand, was able to generate nearly $20 billion in the first half of 2011, and posted net income of $392 million. So, while Facebook is still leading Amazon, assuming Reuters' source is correct, the gap is not nearly as big as it would be if operating income was compared.

It's also worth noting that Amazon is running a seasonal business that typically sees fourth-quarter revenue jump considerably, due to holiday shopping. In the fourth quarter of 2010, for example, Amazon posted a profit of $416 million, which nearly doubled the $231 million in net income it posted in the third quarter of 2010. Depending on Amazon's profit in the fourth quarter, the e-commerce giant could trump Facebook at the very end of the year.

Regardless, just about any company would rather be in Facebook's position than Amazon's. Facebook has been able to best, or at least match, Amazon in profit by generating far less revenue, which means its profit margins are much higher. Even better, as Facebook's business continues to grow and the combination of advertising and its virtual currency Credits continues to gain popularity, the social network should only see its financial performance improve.

Research firm eMarketer certainly thinks so. Earlier this year, the company said that it expects Facebook to make $4.05 billion in advertising revenue this year and $5.74 billion next year. Even better for Facebook, it didn't include the revenue the social network is generating from Credits.

However, amid all this talk of revenue and profits, it's important to keep in mind that Facebook's data is guesswork at this point, since it's still a private company. As a public company, Amazon must divulge its financial information.

But it might not be long before Facebook goes public. In fact, the latest reports suggest the social network will hold its IPO late next year. If it does so, it should be a blockbuster event that will bring shareholders running. The only question is, what will Facebook be worth? That, of course, relies upon the number of shares Facebook will offer and its stock price. But if Amazon is to be our guide, it should be valued quite highly.

Currently, Amazon which might not be performing as well as Facebook on a financial level, is trading at $235.63, pushing its market capitalization--a measure of the value of a company--to $107 billion. Speculation abounds that Facebook could go public on a $100 billion valuation. However, given another year and with even stronger financial performance, the company might be worth even more when it finally goes public.

Steve Jobs: 'I admire Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg'

2011-10-24T10:42:00.001-04:00

By The Telegraph

Steve Jobs expressed admiration for the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for not selling out and dominating the social networking space, his official biographer has revealed. According to Walter Isaacson, the Apple chief spoke about the young technology entrepreneur with respect.

Jobs told his biographer: “We talk about social networks in the plural, but I don’t see anybody other than Facebook out there. Just Facebook, They are dominating this. I admire Mark Zuckerberg . . . for not selling out, for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot.”

These kind words were a stark contrast to the ones he reserved for the likes of Microsoft founder Bill Gates or for Google.

In the official biography, which is out today in the US, Jobs accused Gates of being “unimaginative”, saying: “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he's more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology."

He also vowed to destroy Android, Google’s rival mobile phone operation.

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” he told Isaacson.

“I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

However, in the outtakes of the CBS 60 Minute interview with Isaacson, the author revealed Jobs’s admiration for Zuckerberg.

When Jobs passed away, the Facebook founder and chief posted a message on his Facebook profile paying tribute to the late Apple founder.

He wrote: “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”

Many have drawn comparisons between the two entrepreneurs, both of whom dropped out of college and ended up founding huge technology companies in their 20s.

Facebook comes out swinging

2011-10-24T10:38:00.000-04:00

By Richard Chirgwin

Facebook has come out of its corner swinging in response to the accusation that its “shadow profiles”, among other aspects of its services, break Ireland’s privacy law.

The latest round in the world+dog-versus-Facebook began last week, when a group called Europe-v-Facebook picked up research by Austrian student Max Schrens as the basis of a complaint to Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner.

Schrens’s complaint covered the handling of Facebook user data, but also accused the company of creating “shadow profiles” of non-users. For example, he said, a non-user’s identity could be revealed to Facebook when a user uploads an address book to its servers.

Facebook’s Mia Garlick has told The Register that while Facebook does receive such information – since, for example, an e-mail address is provided by any user who sends a Facebook invite to a non-user – it does not use that data for profiling non-users.

“We keep the invitees’ e-mail address and name to let you know when they join the service,” she said. “This practice is common among almost all services that involve invitations … the assertion that Facebook is doing some sort of nefarious profiling is simply wrong.

“In addition, Facebook offers more control than other services, by enabling people to delete their e-mail address from Facebook, or opt-out of receiving invites.”

Regarding the accusation that user messages are retained by Facebook after the user has deleted them, Garlick says that Schrens has misunderstood the nature of messaging services.

Users can delete messages from their own inbox and sent folder, she said, and these truly are deleted. However, a message that a user sends also becomes part of the recipient’s inbox.

“People can’t delete a message they send from the recipient’s inbox, or a message you receive from the sender’s sent folder. This is the way every message service ever invented works,” she told El Reg. ®

Google+, Facebook Duel On Social Media Models

2011-10-20T16:42:00.000-04:00

By David F. Carr

Google+ integration with Google Apps coming soon, while Facebook sees social context added to more services.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Vic Gundotra, the senior VP of engineering for Google+, reported Wednesday on the progress of the service and promised to address some sore points like integration with Google Apps.

Meanwhile, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said Google's moves to integrate social features across its product line mirrors what Facebook is already doing, based on the philosophy that "every service is better when it's social."

The Google+ architects and Taylor appeared a few minutes apart in onstage interviews with John Battelle at Web 2.0 Summit, which is produced by Battelle's Federated Media and O'Reilly Media in partnership with UBM TechWeb.

Google+ now has more than 40 million users and "we're surprised--that's above our internal projections, even our wildest projections," Gundotra said. The speed at which the service took off left Google a little flat-footed, he acknowledged, when it came to addressing user expectations for Google Apps integration and brand profiles on the service.

Currently, you can sign up for Google+ using your personal Gmail login but not a Google Apps identity linked to the domain of a business or other organization. As a result, Google effectively snubbed some of its most loyal users, some of them paying customers.

"You have my personal apology for that," Gundotra said, in response to a Google Apps user in the audience. The integration with Google Apps wasn't given a high enough priority initially, but the solution is now "imminent, within days," he said. The delivery of brand pages is also "imminent, although not within days," he said in response to another audience question. He also said Google+ will deliver the ability to use pseudonyms and a richer set of APIs, but that it is taking its time to get those things right.

Brin took a personal interest in the development of Google+, although he said he was "not a terribly social person" and had never been engaged in using other social networks, other than as professional experimentation. He said he initially argued with the design of the Google Circles feature because "I thought it was too complicated, but now I love it, and I have dozens of circles."

Battelle asked about a remark by former Facebook president Sean Parker, in another Web 2.0 interview, that Google+ would have a hard time overcoming the network effect achieved by Facebook.

"The point Sean made is right, that the incumbent has a huge advantage," Gundotra said. "If you play the same game, that's a hard game to win. We're going to play a different game." His strategy will be to make Google+ a social layer on top of everything Google offers." What we've seen so far is just the "plus" part, but in the coming months the rest of Google will come to bear on the product, he said. Google also has a better opportunity than any other company to attract users to a new social network because so many are already users of other Google services.

Gundotra said one thing Google will not imitate is the new Facebook Open Graph frictionless sharing, where some news and music applications now automatically share links to the content you access through them.

"We think there is a reason why every thought in your head does not come out of your mouth," he said. "I don't want the world to know that I'm embarrassed I like that one Britney Spears song. I want the world to know that I like U2." Google will stick to a more deliberate model for sharing.

Taylor in contrast was relatively complementary about Google+--except to say that he thinks Facebook is already way ahead in delivering what Google is now attempting. "When I listened to Vic and Sergey talk about integration into a variety of Google properties, to me that sounds like a really good strategy," Taylor said.

What Facebook is offering now is a richer, more natural way of sharing information like what your friends are listening to. "It's not like we just tacked on a share button," he said. "We think more and more services will have a social context."

Also, although Facebook is often accused of violating user privacy, Taylor said he thinks very carefully about whether to allow users to export data that may include other user's private information, such as email addresses. Facebook users are very aware of privacy, and "the majority of people have changed their privacy settings," Taylor said. "The people who use Facebook a lot are very aware of the privacy settings. Our philosophy is not to bury them, but to put them in front of you as much as possible."

Watch more of the Web 2.0 conversations with Brin, Gundrota, and Taylor in the videos below:

Facebook partners with Labor Department to help job-seekers

2011-10-20T16:39:00.002-04:00

By LA Times

The Labor Department is hoping a popular new friend can help unemployed workers find jobs.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis on Thursday announced a partnership with Facebook designed to connect the jobless with companies that are hiring. The Social Jobs Partnership will aggregate a variety of existing, but often little-known, job-search services on a new Facebook page in hopes of drawing more attention to them.

"Landing on this page can help Americans land good jobs," Solis said at a Washington news conference with representatives from Facebook, the National Assn. of Colleges and Employers, the National Assn. of State Workforce Agencies and the DirectEmployers Assn.

The partnership, which Solis hopes to expand to Twitter, LinkedIn and other social-networking sites, will highlight job-placement resources to match those openings to some of the people who need work.

There are about 3 million job openings in the U.S., Solis said, and about 14 million unemployed people .

Among the services available to help match them up are 3,000 one-stop career centers nationwide, and online tools such as the Labor Department's My Skills My Future website, which allows people to see alternative careers for their skills and get information on educational opportunities and employers for those fields that are near them.

"Our data information and services are valuable only when people know about us," said Bonnie Elsey, president of the National Assn. of State Workforce Agencies, which represents public agencies that assist the unemployed, such as the California Employment Development Department. "Just think of the expanded audience we can reach with our partnership with Facebook. We can connect more job-seekers with jobs."

Facebook's new page will be a one-stop shop for those looking for work, said Marne Levine, the company's vice president for global public policy.

"Think of this as a free, online job fair that can be accessed seven days a week, day or night," she said. "Our labor market is changing, and so should the tools that are used to find these jobs."

A survey this summer by recruiting site Jobvite of 800 U.S.-based human resources and recruitment professionals found that 64% hired through social networks this year, up from 58% in 2010.

"The social Web is changing the way that employers search for talent," said Bill Warren, executive director of the DirectEmployers Assn., a nonprofit consortium of about 600 U.S. companies that focuses on recruitment and other human resources practices. "This initiative is going to make the recruiting process easier and more efficient for both employees and job-seekers."

In addition to creating the Facebook page, Levine said the company would launch public-service announcements on Facebook and the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, a list led by Nevada and California.