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Posts Tagged ‘User Profiles’

Friendster Strikes Deal With Yahoo Southeast Asia

More news from the social network Friendster. The site, which was acquired in December by Malaysian payments company MOL Global, has struck a deal with Yahoo Southeast Asia. The purpose of the deal is to integrate product features and cross-promote across both Friendster and Yahoo. Both Friendster and Yahoo stand to gain from the partnership as Friendster has a significant Asian audience and Yahoo also has a steady following in the regional area for certain web services.

Friendster, which was sold for just under $30 million, has over 90 million registered users and 90 percent of its daily traffic coming from Southeast Asia today. The partnership will involve a a new social application built by Friendster that will be prominently displayed on Yahoo Southeast Asia properties and a cross-promotion of Yahoo products on Friendster.

Yahoo Search will also feature results from Friendster user profiles and fan profiles, similar to the deals struck with Twitter and Facebook by the search giants. Friendster users will also be able to link their Friendster account to their Yahoo! account to share their Friendster network activity updates and inbox via their Yahoo accounts. So, users can check their Friendster account and send updates directly from their Yahoo homepage. Users will also be able to publish their Friendster network activity to Yahoo Messenger and other Yahoo applications.

The cross promotion between Friendster and Yahoo has already been implemented but the search results and activity update integration will be rolled out over the next few months.

Friendster, which was founded in 2001, has raised over $45 million in venture capital to date, and is sitting on some potentially lucrative IP. Friendster is no longer hot in the U.S. and still has members in the Asia/Pacific region. The social network, which just rolled out a much-needed redesign, appointed Richard Kimber as its new CEO, who used to head Sales and Operations in South East Asia for Google.

The partnership makes sense; and Friendster should be doing everything it can to try to own the user base in Southeast Asia, considering that the social network is performing poorly in other parts of the world.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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How Facebook’s New Privacy Changes Will Affect You

In a late night post on Facebook’s company blog, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a round of upcoming changes that will affect all users of the social network. Specifically, the changes focus on new privacy controls for information sharing. For those who have been following Facebook closely, the announcement doesn’t deliver any new information, it only confirms some previously discussed plans. However, for Facebook’s user base, now 350 million strong, the updates represent a major overhaul as to how privacy is handled on the site.

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Change #1: No More Regional Networks

Over the years, Facebook has grown from a tightly closed social network designed for connecting college students to an entirely open network which anyone and everyone can join. At first, Facebook’s privacy model revolved around “networks” – communities for your school, your region, or your company. “This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students,” Zuckerberg writes, “since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.” Over time, the company added more networks, including some for entire countries. But now, thanks to Facebook’s ever-growing popularity, these “regional” networks have grown so large that some have millions of members.

The problem with networks of this size when it comes to privacy is that people who had opted in to sharing content with their network (via the setting share with my “networks and friends”) were inadvertently be sharing personal updates with far more people than they intended to. To address this issue, Facebook demoted cities and regions from being considered networks although the information still exists in user profiles, listed under “Current City” and/or “Current Region.”

This update isn’t exactly news – the company revealed their plans to remove regional networks back in July of this year. Zuckerberg’s mentioning of this update seems to be more of a confirmation that indeed, this process is underway, than any sort of major announcement about a new direction for Facebook.

Change #2: Control Who Sees Each Piece of Individual Content You Add or Upload

A second privacy update involves Facebook’s plans to allow its users more control over individual pieces of content uploaded or added to the social network. This control will be implemented on a per-post basis through a mechanism dubbed the “Publisher Privacy Control.” Simply put, this change adds a new feature to the publisher box on Facebook – aka the status update box. From here, Facebook users post their status, upload photos and videos, and share links. At the moment, when you click the “Share” button, who sees that content is governed by settings tucked away under a cavalcade of menus (Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Profile -> Status and Links.)

With the the upcoming Publisher Control functionality, already in beta testing, a new button featuring an image of lock will appear beneath the status update box. Click on this button and you’ll be able to choose precisely who is allowed to see that update or other piece of content (”everyone,” “friends,” “friends of friends,” etc.)

Change #3: A Simplified Privacy Page

Facebook’s granular privacy controls have always been sort of a blessing and curse for the social network. Although savvy users could drill down into each individual setting and adjust it to their needs, the majority of the site’s users don’t even know where these settings are, much less how to change them or to what. The problem, as noted above, is that many of the privacy settings are buried in a series of complex menus. Even if you can find the Privacy Page, the drop-down boxes and their lists of choices stump average users who aren’t sure what a setting like “my networks and friends” really means.

To make privacy simpler, Facebook’s controls will be changed to permit sharing with three groups: “only friends,” “friends of friends,” or “everyone.” In addition, the Privacy Page itself will be simplified to combine some settings which currently overlap. This, too, was announced in July.

Although neither post details specifically what settings will be combined, a quick glance at the Privacy Page allows for some speculation. Perhaps the “basic info” and “personal info” boxes will become one? There really isn’t that much distinction between the two, despite what their names imply. For example, “basic” information includes what many consider “personal” information such as birthday, hometown, and religious views. Meanwhile, the so-called “personal” information setting controls more innocuous content like favorite books and movie. The “Photos Tagged of You” and the “Videos Tagged of You” settings also seem like worthy contenders for combination. It seems that you’re either okay with people seeing content you’ve been tagged in by others or you’re not. Whether that’s a photo or video doesn’t really matter to most. However, these are just guesses, mind you – until the update goes live, there’s no way to tell what will and will not be changed.

How the Transition Will Occur

Although not mentioned by name in Zuckerberg’s blog post, the July post mentioned a new “Transition Tool” that would be rolled out to users to aid them in configuring the new settings. This is likely what Zuckerberg was referring to when he noted that “we’ll suggest settings for you…” With the Transition Tool, users are prompted to pick from different privacy level options like “open,” “recommended,” or “limited.” According to the recent post, the recommended settings will be based on your current level of privacy but you’ll be able to read through the other options to make changes if you so desire.

Beginning with a small group of users, Facebook has been testing six different versions of this tool to determine what works best. Based on feedback from the group, the testing tool will be refined to a final version before all the changes are made available to the entire network. However, since the recent post made no mention of a timeline for these changes, the implication is that these new updates are not going live just yet. Instead, the post was merely setting the stage for what’s to come.

Why Facebook Cares About Privacy

It’s good to see Facebook taking the issue of privacy seriously. Although it’s easy to blame the user for over-sharing and then having to deal with harsh consequences like job loss or even, remarkably, the loss of health-care benefits by sharing some items too publicly, at the end of the day, affected users will not blame themselves, they will blame Facebook. And those reading these “social network horror stories” in the media could ultimately become too afraid to post to the site, leading to a less active user base, or worse – users deleting their accounts.

Privacy issues are bad news for Facebook, just as they were bad news for MySpace back when they were king. For years, there were so many news stories about sexual predators on MySpace that eventually the public perception of MySpace was that the network wasn’t very safe. Instead of going that route and allowing the media stories about Facebook blunders to control the network’s public image, these privacy changes are designed to preempt the missteps and mistakes the not-so-savvy user base may make by making Facebook privacy simpler and more refined while also more representative of the large network Facebook has become.

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Things Have Changed: Facebook to Open Public Messages to Search

Facebook began as a place for college connections, secluded from the prying eyes of the outside world, but today that era is officially over. Major Facebook investor Microsoft announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit that it has closed deals to bring status messages from both Twitter and Facebook into the search results of Bing.com. Twitter search is live now, Facebook is forthcoming.

Facebook is opening up to a search engine – that’s very big news. Only content from accounts marked public will be indexed by Bing, but it’s a sea change none the less. Facebook has an explicit, acknowledged agenda to make more people comfortable sharing more information publicly – once they do, that information will be searchable on Bing. This ‘aint your big sister’s Facebook anymore.

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Facebook opened on-site search across user profiles and messages late this summer. The company has been careful to only expose information from people who have opted-out of their own default privacy settings and we don’t expect this Bing deal to be any different. While some people like Facebook because of the privacy settings, a growing number of users like it for the promotional and networking advantages that can be maximized with a public profile.

You don’t want to be public with your Facebooking? Facebook will respect that, but the company does hope you’ll change your mind.

Facebook status messages used to be entirely closed to outside search engines – and now they will not be. Even these public search results won’t be full participants in the open web, though. It’s very unlikely that Bing will be allowed to cache the Facebook messages it serves up. Facebook prohibits other software from keeping user data in cache because the company says users must be allowed to change privacy settings and have those reflected everywhere around the web that Facebook data could be found. That’s an unusual arrangement for a search engine. It breaks one of the fundamental laws of the internet – that what you publish publicly once is public forever.

Will the company make a similar deal with Google? Probably not. Twitter may have gone both ways, but Facebook’s long term ambitions to challenge Google and the Microsoft backing could mean that the world’s leading search engine will never be allowed to index the world’s leading social network.

Say hello to the new Facebook, now a partial player in one public part of the rest of the web.

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cctext: Too Simple or a Smart Fit for The Small Business Market?

The wiki market space has transformed over the past few years with a number of the existing players adding social features to keep them competitive and more fully dimensional for users.

But we are starting to wonder how many wiki providers can play in the more established spaces of the market. Perhaps the best potential for emerging vendors is in the small business market, which is increasingly open to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments.

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cctext is a new wiki environment. It joins a number of more robust collaborative products that integrate wikis and social web technologies into their products. Perhaps there is an opening. Many of the first entrants to the market have moved up the ladder, due to their deeper product offering.

For instance, Socialtext started as a wiki provider and now offers social networking; social messaging; weblogs; dashboards and distributed spreadsheets. MindTouch calls itself an open-source collaboration engine for the enterprise and the web. PBWorks operates far deeper in the collaboration space as well. They recently introduced Social Collaboration Update, which in their words “includes social networking-style user profiles, Twitter-style microblogging, and the ability to create wiki pages (with file attachments) just by emailing a single email address.”

This trend is an example of how social applications are segmenting. As developers learn to add more pieces of information into their wiki products, they look more like content management systems than what we have traditionally called a wiki.

cctext, for its part, is a straight forward wiki that is counting on its speed and UI to give it a jump in the market.

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They may be on to something. Customers do complain about speed. A recent tweet about PBWorks expressed this pretty clearly:

cctext claims its speed comes from its cloud infrastructure. They use Amazon Web Services. We tested cctext and it does appear to be pretty fast when writing, editing and saving information. cctext allows for media uploads that play in the wiki. We uploaded a video. It worked fine but we could not view it. We used a test account so it may have been unviewable for that reason. Overall, cctext is a pretty clean experience. They have a pretty thorough list of features.

All in all, cctext is a wiki that truly is a wiki. It’s a basic tool for small business. Cost is $12 per month. First ten users are frree. cctext integrates with Google Apps. Pricing is the same for the Google Apps version.

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