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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

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.

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.

jeff pulver recently decided to publicly declare his lack of understanding of the differences between the various different online networking sites. unable to recognize that facebook is a social networking site and linkedin is a business networking site, pulver decided to jump ship and focus all his professional and social networking on facebook.

he formally announced,

after spending the past few months using Facebook, I no longer see the value of LinkedIn.

as if this wasn’t stupid enough, coming from a ‘tech-guru’, he followed up the initial post with another one in which he argues that linkedin is flawed, and then admits that these flaws are his fault, but he is still going to blame the site for the problems.

On LinkedIn, what I ended up with was a network of people, many of whom I didn’t know. I suppose it was my fault but I rarely refused someone who asked to connect with me.

moreover, he displays his facebook-newbie badge proudly when he says,

over time, not only was I inundated with “connect me” requests from strangers [on linkedin], but I also was regularly spammed with reminders to follow up on such requests.

he clearly hasn’t spent enough time on facebook. try it out for a few days buddy, and then you’ll know what networking spam really looks like.

a few things are clear from jeff’s posts:

1. he hasn’t been using facebook long enough to make an informed comparison and a conclusive decision between the two networks.
2. he doesn’t understand the need to and the importance of differentiating between social networking and professional (business) networking.
3. he is unaware of the differences in the demographics of the two sites
4. he needs to get in touch with mario sundar, community evangelist at linkedin, so he can school pulver in how to use linkedin more effectively, and teach him why linkedin is better at what it does (and possibly why it is ultimately more useful to use both networking site simultaneously).

i don’t usually have many bad things to say about the people at download squad, but that’s because they usually don’t act like morons. for example, one of the writers on the site, gordon finlayson, finally got out from under the rock he’s been hiding under for the past decade to realize that there are people that steal content from blogs, paste it to their own, throw some ads around it and try to make money from it.

have a look at this beautifully composed exhibition of idiocy:

But while linking and references may be the lifeblood of blogging, there’s a submerged undercurrent of blogs and Web sites looking to get something for nothing, sailing the high seas of the Blogosphere with a view to plundering hard working Blogs for what they can in order to build up page views and Google page rankings.

yeah i had to read it 5 times to make sense of it too. let me make it easy for you:

note to gordon: when you are linking to sites scraping your content, at least use the nofollow tag. c’mon man!

venture beat is reporting today that facebook has removed ‘audio’, a music sharing application, from its platform because the application violates music copyrights as well as facebook’s own developer terms of service. for the uninitiated,

Audio allowed users to upload audio files in the mp3 format, share them with each other and listen to them within Facebook.

while the move is significant for facebook and social networking sites in general (as discussed in the venture beat article), it’s not nearly as significant as it should be for pownce. in case you didn’t see nytimes get down on its knees earlier this week, here’s the kicker:

What struck me most was the site’s potential to be powerfully disruptive. Most file-sharing occurs on public sites, which can be monitored by media companies; if the users violate copyrights, the sites or the users themselves can be threatened into compliance or litigated out of existence (as happened with the original Napster). File-sharing on Pownce would be difficult to police.

the remark, of course, is entirely idiotic. it’s incredibly easy to monitor file-sharing on pownce (as easy as adding all the users as friends and monitoring their activity). if kevin is smart, he will learn from mark and curb this file-sharing activity on pownce now (which is obviously being used to share copyrighted music), rather than face litigation in the future. the problem though, is that without the file-sharing features, pownce becomes just another microblogging tool.