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the blogosphere is talking about facebook’s source code being leaked and though most people (including myself) can’t make sense of the leaked code, it does beg an important question: what does this mean for the safety and privacy of our personal information on facebook?

here’s a comment left by brandee barker of facebook on techcrunch,

Hi Nic-

I wanted to clarify a few things in your story. Some of Facebook’s source code was exposed to a small number of users due to a bug on a single server that was misconfigured and then fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further.

Thanks to you and the TC readers for helping us out on this one.

Brandee Barker
Facebook

while this might be true, it certainly seems like an attempt by facebook to minimize the negative press from the incident. and in spite of how isolated and innocuous the issue may be, the question still remains about the potential for worse breaches in the future and what facebook is doing (and steps the site’s millions of users should take) to prevent sensitive data from being compromised.

the reason why i started using facebook some 4 years ago was because of its exclusivity and privacy settings (when compared to myspace, etc.). i have to admit that now that facebook doesn’t really distinguish itself in that regard anymore, and with the rise clutter on the site (due to the facebook open platform and the applications built on it), i find myself visiting the site less and less.

after yesterday’s rumors (started by unknown people and spread by arrington & co.), netscape has published an official response. here’s the gist of it:

Yesterday afternoon, a TechCrunch blogger insisted that he had just heard Netscape’s death rattle. According to Michael Arrington, AOL was on the verge of killing off this very site. But despite the rumors, we’re very much alive and kicking.

furthermore, the post says:

Here at Netscape, we prefer to dwell on the good news. With millions of unique visitors per month, the site is the focus of a growing, enthusiastic community. We have major design initiatives on the schedule for the next year, and will continue to respond to feedback from our large, energetic, sometimes rambunctious membership. We’re still here. Should that change, our community will be the first to know.

disclaimer: i’m a netscape scout

it appears that now that techcrunch has become the de facto source for inside information about web 2.0 companies, products, and services, michael arrington’s site is now expanding into the realm of rumormongering to better compete with the silicon valley gossip rag - valleywag.

the recent post, titled ‘AOL May Kill Their Netscape Digg Clone‘ is full of speculation (based on misinformation) that is presented as fact.

AOL is considering killing off the “Digg Clone” social news site that they launched a little over a year ago at Netscape.com, and redirecting traffic to the Netscape portal instead. One source says it’s a done deal. Another says no final decisions have been made. But the Netscape editorial team is rumored to be completely freaked out, and they are starting to talk to outsiders.

i have been a part of the ‘netscape editorial team’ for a year now and am in constant touch with a majority of the other members of team netscape and haven’t heard a peep of this ‘completely freaked out’ and talking to outsiders business that arrington is talking about.

Just launched this week, there is a new AOL.com site available for the Netscape Community. Over the past year, there has been a lot of feedback regarding some of the features of the previous Netscape.com site that have gone away, and this site hopes to bring some of that functionality back. Check it out!

any objective look at the official information would conclude that rather than shutting netscape doing and redirecting traffic to the new aol subdomain (as the article on techcrunch interprets things) this is more of an effort to please the two different kinds of communities netscape has engendered, the social users and the portal users. after all, the other site is being referred to as ‘a new companion experience’.

here are a few choice quotes:

Tom Drapeau (Director of Netscape)

Umm…. who are all of these sources? I run the Netscape.com social news site now, and I wrote the text that you quoted in your article. The cobrand launch this week was simply an effort to give a place to go for those who desire a Netscape portal experience instead of a social news experience.

The Netscape.com social news team is alive and well, despite your “rumors”, and have extensive plans for 2007 and 2008 which are already in progress. We may exist in a different AOL division than the AOL.com team, but that doesn’t make this a turf war. I am speaking to the editorial team right now, and as they knew this portal was launching weeks in advance… they aren’t “completely freaked out”. Where are you getting these sources/rumors?

If you are curious to know about Netscape.com, e-mail me at tom at newnetscape dot com.

Tom

Marcien Jenckes (SVP AOL Messaging, Community & Voice)

I want to echo Tom’s post. Community has been a core element of both AOL and Netscape since their inception and will continue to be. As the text on the site explains, we wanted to give a more traditional portal alternative to the Netscape users who requested it. You can rest assured that social news will continue to be an important part of what we do.

the team at netscape has been incredibly open to talking to anyone about anything related to the site. it’s sad how infrequently writers take advantage of this openness to conduct research before they speculate.

if the latest measures from comscore are to be believed, the facebook-myspace gap is becoming smaller by the month. while myspace (user base) is still around four times the size of facebook, the younger social network’s growth (unique visits) is over three times that of myspace and if the sites continue to grow at the same rates, their market penetration will be even within the year.

vital stats according to comscore (press release):

MySpace
Total Unique Visitors (June 06): 66,401
Total Unique Visitors (June 07): 114,147
Year-over-year growth: 72%

Facebook
Total Unique Visitors (June 06): 14,083
Total Unique Visitors (June 07): 52,167
Year-over-year growth: 270%

for argument’s sake, let’s assume that there are only two social networks in the market and that there are a total of 166,314 unique users, (114,147 for myspace and 52,167 for facebook, based on comscore statistics). myspace owns 68.63% of the market while facebook owns the other 31.37% of the market. next, assuming growth stays at the same levels, we can estimate that a year from now, myspace will have 196,333 unique visits (50.43%) and facebook will have 193,018 unique visits (49.57%), meaning they will both own about half the social networking market.

there are, however, a few caveats. it is clear that facebook has recently been enjoying explosive growth and as a result has been gaining on myspace. however, it is important to not get carried away by these statistics and be open to the possibility that this growth is a short-term result of facebook’s recently announced open platform and won’t necessarily be sustained over the long-term. additionally, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility of myspace announcing a similarly open platform to counter facebook’s sudden popularity. lastly, it is important to note that i have used only comscore statistics and other measurement methods may not show similar results.

here’s a look at a time magazine special feature covering what they consider to be the 5 worst websites of 2007, and what i think will replace them.

eHarmony (eharmony.com)
Why they hate it: “Our main beef with this online dating site is its power to cause utter despair. The site also discriminates against gays.”
Alternatives: im in like with you

Evite (evite.com)
Why they hate it: “The site, in short, is crying out for an overhaul. The ads are intrusive and navigation’s a drag.”
Alternatives: Upcoming.org

Meez (meez.com)
Why they hate it: “Just plain annoying. The company insists the app is neither spyware nor adware, but it can still slow your computer down.”
Alternatives: plain old e-mail

MySpace (myspace.com)
Why they hate it: “It seems the community has become infested with marketers and other opportunists who create false profiles and essentially spam other users, all under the guise of ‘making friends’.”
Alternatives: Facebook

Second Life (secondlife.com)
Why they hate it: “notoriously slow to load… difficult to navigate… creating and personalizing [the] animated representation of yourself is tedious. Movements feel clunky and there can be a terrible lag… learning curve is simply too steep.”
Alternatives: Real life

i recently wrote a post pretty much flaming jeff pulver for his stance on the facebook versus linkedin debate. this wasn’t the best way to get my points across and i shouldn’t have made it personal. it was more out of my frustration with the tech community in general and their stance on the debate and i think pulver’s post was just the tipping point for me.

apologies to gordon finlayson and josh bernoff too. in any case, we’re all human, and i can be grumpy too, y’know.

the internet can be a dangerous place for kids using publicly accesible sites without any parental monitoring. kids can be exposed to strangers, sexual offenders, etc. for example, according to a report from 2 weeks ago, MySpace found and deleted the profiles of 29,000 sex offenders on the site, a number that was 4 times the previous total.

however, now, the idiots at the national school boards association have released a report saying that fears prompted by statistics such as those listed above are overblown. the more accurate statistics according to them are as follows (these statistics are as reported by the nsba’s pool of interviewees):

1. 20% of kids have seen inappropriate pictures on social networking sites in the last 3 months.
2. 18% of kids have seen inappropriate language on social networking sites.
3. 7% of the kids were asked for information about their personal identity on a social network.
4. 7% of the kids experienced cyber-bullying.
5. 4% of the kids have had conversations on social networking sites that made them uncomfortable.
6. 3% of the kids were repeatedly asked by unwelcome strangers to communicate with them online.
7. 2% of the kids were asked by strangers met online to meet them in person.
8. 0.08% of the kids met someone in person from an online encounter without their parents’ permission.

In spite of these figures the nsba (national stupidity bureau of america?) believes that kids should be encouraged to use these sites and learn from their own mistakes.

The report concludes with a handful of recommendations, the most controversial of which is likely to be a suggestion that schools reexamine social networking policies. “Safety policies remain important, as does teaching students about online safety and responsible online expression,” the study’s authors note. “But students may learn these lessons better while they’re actually using social networking tools.”

if you’re having a hard time believing this slant from the nsba, it shouldn’t be too surprising considering that the study was in fact sponsored by news corp., parent of myspace (one of the largest sources of offences like those mentioned above). and as far as+ the 0.08% figure is concerned, if you just look at myspace and their 180 million users (of which approximately 10% are in the 12-17 year-old range), that puts 14,400 kids in danger! i wouldn’t want that on my conscience.

note to nsba: only 16% of all rapes are ever reported. are those fears overblown too?

check out the pdf study and more from the great folks at ars technica.

about two weeks ago, in a post titled ‘How to Compete with Google Search‘, i explored how privacy was one of google’s weaknesses and and how other search engines were using offerings of better privacy options to compete with the industry leader.

now, further research by the center for democracy and technology confirms this and expands on my initial analysis by concluding that the recent makeovers in the privacy policies of the major search engines are in fact a result of competition between the big five.

That the search engines are now competing to provide the best privacy protections is great news for users, who will hopefully see a continuing expansion of choices and controls offered to them for managing the information they share over the Internet.

the report compares the changes in the privacy policies of the major search engines as detailed in their announcements and illustrates the results in a chart showing what information is retained, how long it is retained for, and what the user can do to have the information removed. furthermore, the report outlines recommendations for increased user control and safeguarding privacy in the long-run.

the 5-page pdf report is a short and interesting read.

i’m happy to announce that today (just minutes ago) i was inducted into the digg.com 700 club. the group has a total of 5+ members, out of which 2 are active (including me). i want to thank all the content producers whose stories i have submitted (for creating the great content) and all the digg users (who have been reading and digging my submissions).

80% of the work is done by the content producers, 10% by me, and the rest by the digg community, so this is an achievement for all of us.

check out my profile, and the complete rankings.

after a 14-month chase to uncover the secret identity of the ‘fake steve’, headed largely and unsuccessfully by valleywag, brad stone of the nytimes was the reason why the blogosphere cried. i echo the sentiments of the author behind the blog,

Now you’ve ruined the mystery of Fake Steve, robbing thousands of people around the world of their sense of childlike wonder. Hope you feel good about yourself, you mangina.

here’s a look at what the rest of the blogosphere had to say:

The New York Times have spoiled the fun… Half of the fun related to the blog has been not knowing who the author was. - TechCrunch

Hope these media scrooges are satisfied spoiling the fun for the rest of us. - michael parekh on i.t.

This is just a big bummer. Not knowing who Fake Steve Jobs was part of the appeal of his blog. - zdnet, between the lines

Wow, how anticlimactic… They may have found you but they can’t kill the idea of FSJ, disappointing though it may be that the mystery’s been solved. - engadget

I’m sort of sorry that the suspense is over… - pc world

while you’re at it why don’t you ‘manginas’ go ahead and out the secret identities of santa claus, the easter bunny, and jesus christ?

also - who ‘fake steve’ is not: andy ihnatko, leander kahney, and harry shearer.