Facebook

One of Twitter’s strongest features is the @reply, where you can direct a message to someone else on Twitter by typing @ and then their username. Facebook, which is trying to emulate some of Twitter’s best features, doesn’t have anything similar in the News Feed. In short, it’s not easy to have a public conversation.

Very soon, that will no longer be the case. Facebook just introduced the ability to tag your friends in status updates. What makes this really interesting though is how you tag people: Using the @ symbol. Facebook has just turned on their own version of Twitter’s @Mentions feature that will be rolled out over the next few weeks.

Here is Facebook engineer Tom Occhino’s explanation of the new feature:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

Friends you tag in your status updates will receive a notification and a Wall post linking them to your post. They also will have the option to remove tags of themselves from your posts. We hope that tagging your status updates and others posts from the Publisher will enable you to share in a more meaningful and engaging way, and connect with even more people. We’re rolling this feature out over the course of the next few weeks, so you may not see the new feature just yet.

Summary: The @ symbol now works just like Twitter, and not just for users, but for groups and fan pages as well.

Facebook has just stepped deep into Twitter’s territory. How long until you can see your @reply history? We’re betting not very long at all.

via BREAKING: Facebook Introduces @Mentions in Status Updates.

In July, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) embraced the stream in a new beta (for both Windows and Mac) and started moving beyond simple IMs. You can now see your Facebook and Twitter feeds, along with AIM buddy updates and feeds from other services.

The problem was that the Twitter and Facebook feeds were only one way. You could read them, but you couldn’t send updates from AIM to the other services. A few weeks ago that changed, and AIM status updates can now appear as updates in Facebook and Twitter as well. There also appears to be a way to comment, or respond, inline to other people’s messages, although I am having trouble getting that feature to work for some reason.

Going both ways turns AIM into a full-fledged Twitter/Facebook client. It is a big deal for AIM because now it can be used as both a private and public IM client. While stream readers such as TweetDeck and Seesmic already have two-way messaging capabilities with Twitter and Facebook, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are still stuck in Read-Only Land.

The AIM Beta doesn’t have the Twitter integration working perfectly yet. Some updates and comments seem to never get through, while others do just fine. On the Facebook side, it is working much smoother. But AIM is making the right moves in an attempt to become an all-in-one instant communications hub. AOL’s new communications chief, Brad Garlinghouse, should keep pushing in this direction.

via AIM Now Goes Both Ways (With Twitter And Facebook) .

Hayley Jones changed her Facebook status to single shortly before her death

A man killed his girlfriend after becoming suspicious of her activity on Facebook, a court has heard.

Hayley Jones changed her Facebook status to single shortly before her death

Brian Lewis, 31, denies strangling his partner Hayley Jones to death at the home they shared with their four children in Phillipstown, New Tredegar, south Wales.

The youngsters found their mother’s lifeless body in the living room after Lewis fled the scene during the early hours of March 12, Cardiff Crown Court was told.

Jurors heard that cracks began to appear in the couple’s relationship when Lewis lost his job and Ms Jones, 26, found work as a care assistant.

Prosecutor Mark Evans QC said: “Hayley had at the same time started to expand her social horizons.

(continue reading…)

Open Source

Tristan Louis gives weight to new term that I like a lot: fauxpen. Faux in French means “false” or “fake”. So fauxpen means fake open. There has always been a lot of that going around, but since the world of tech inevitably contains more of everything, there’s more fauxpen stuff than ever. In his post Tristan issues a fresh warning about some of what he calls “a venus flytrap of technology”. His definitions:

• Fauxpenness: Calling a system or platform open while it is, when more closely scrutinized, under the tight control of its provider.

• Fauxpen system (or fauxpen platform): a system or platform that claims to be open but, upon closer examination, isn’t. (continue reading…)

Facebook’s Reach Worldwide

Everyone knows that Facebook has become absolutely massive, but it’s easy to lose sight of just how big a number like 250 million is. Buzzpoint, a social media marketing firm based out of Los Angeles, has put together an impressive visualization that shows off just how large Facebook has grown. The company has estimated the current and past Facebook usage statistics using available data and plotted a number of graphs tracking its progress over the last three years.

Among the more interesting stats: as of July 15 2009, Facebook had 250 million active users, which would make it the fourth most popular country in the world. Facebook’s top two traffic contributors are the US (by a large margin) and the UK, but in third is Turkey, which didn’t even have a localized version until last year (though English is fairly common there).

via A Look At Facebook’s Reach Worldwide.

The rise of social gaming is happening more quietly than one might think given the statistics. Today we’re hearing about another potential milestone: Facebook (facebook) application FarmVille claims to be the fastest growing social game in history, reaching an impressive 11 million daily users in a little over two months.

To put than in perspective, World of Warcraft is the largest massively multiplayer game that dominates MMO marketshare with at last report 11.5 million active subscribers. Its publisher Blizzard hasn’t revealed any new population statistics since the end of last year, but assures the press that its figures are still growing. It took WoW four years to reach that many subscribers after its launch in late 2004.

Compare that to FarmVille, which only launched June 19 of this year. If its daily active stats are accurate, that would mean FarmVille is close to rivaling industry-leading World of Warcraft’s player numbers in only a little more than two months. Perhaps it has already eclipsed the elephant in the social gaming room if you look at its monthly stats, which boast 30 million active users.

via 11 Million Facebook Users Flock to Virtual Farming Daily.

A recent simplification of Facebook’s user privacy controls wasn’t enough for some policymakers.

On Thursday, in conjunction with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, Facebook announced a new set of modifications to its user privacy controls as well as its developer API, and the targets of these changes are the thousands of third-party applications built on Facebook’s developer platform. That means there may be major implications for developers–some of whom rely almost exclusively on Facebook activity as a revenue source.

The Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s office released a set of recommendations for Facebook last month, specifically highlighting concerns that third-party applications could access a significant amount of users’ personal data. “It’s clear that privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates,” commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a release at the time. (continue reading…)

Many people have asked us to make Facebook and Twitter work better together for those times when they want to share their content as widely as possible. We agree. Over the next few days, we will be releasing a feature that allows administrators of Facebook Pages to publish their Facebook updates to their Twitter accounts automatically. This will only link Facebook Pages to Twitter, not your individual profile.

Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who’ve created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible. Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls for help to both their Facebook fans and their Twitter followers, all at the same time.

via Publishing to Twitter from Facebook Pages | Facebook.

via Boy Genius Reports

Ready for round 2, ladies and gents? A tipster just dropped a new handful of iTunes 9 screenshots in our inbox and while their authenticity cannot be confirmed, they’re certainly worth mentioning. Earlier this month we scooped a whole bunch of info surrounding the imminent release of iTunes 9 and this new round of screenshots, allegedly of an early iTunes 9 beta, may help support some of the info we exclusively detailed. The first notable feature depicted in the new shots is the Facebook integration…

Read the whole article via Boy Genius Report

careerbuilder.com

We all know that employers are getting savvy to social networking sites and the information we share online. But what you may not know is that a recently conducted survey shows that nearly 1 in 2 companies are doing their online due diligence for prospective job candidates.

This according to research firm Harris Interactive, who was commissioned by CareerBuilder.com and surveyed 2,667 HR professionals, finding that 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.

According to the study, “thirty-five percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire the candidate.” The big lessons you can learn are quite obvious, but bear repeating. Provocative photos and info are a bad idea (53% of employers won’t hire you), shared content with booze and drugs is also highly dangerous (44% dismissed candidates for this reason), and bad-mouthing former employers is very risky behavior (35% reported this a the main reason they didn’t hire a candidate).

We also think it interesting that emoticons, those friendly smiley faces you see everywhere, are actually big no-nos in direct communication. 14% of surveyed employers disregard candidates for that single lapse in judgment alone.

Though this may seem as a big downer for those of us who are oversharers, the reality is that there’s still opportunity to use your social presence to land that job. The survey also found that, “eighteen percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them to hire the candidate.”