Social Networks

Worlds biggest social networking website Facebook has recently launched its newly design homepage in time with the company’s sixth year anniversary on Thursday. Company officials said that the new design would give better emphasis on the various games, applications, and searches in the homepage interface.

Facebook has moved several links and items that can be found in the homepage in a bid to streamline the navigation process of users by highlighting games and applications in the interface.

The social networking website has started rolling out the new design late Thursday and has continued on Friday. According to Facebook officials, the new designs were being implemented in stages to avoid complications among users.

Facebook, which has traced its humble beginnings as a simple college students’ online hub, has continuously innovate itself to cope up with the sudden increase in demand. To date, the company has around 400 million active users worldwide.

Many users, like in the past, have protested the new changes in the Facebook homepage. But the company argued that innovations being implemented by the company will serve its users better, citing months of rigorous testing to selected users.

The company also said that it is the users who have requested for the changes in the interface design.

Based on the new design features, Facebook managed to put together links that are somewhat connected to each other. Links of messages, friend requests, and comments are grouped together while other similar featured links like games and apps were also labeled together.

Also, the new search box is bigger that the previous one, making searches easier, better, and faster. Microsoft Corp, the company behind the search link, said that the new design will have smarter search decision basing on the keyword inputs of the users.

The online dashboard for the homepage, on the other hand, will contain all the favorite games and applications of the users, such as Farmville and Mafia Wars.

A new report released by a top computer security firm on Monday showed an alarming increase in the number of hacker and spam attacks in social networking websites, threatening to hamper operations online.

Based on the study, Sophos said that there has been a significant increase in the online attacks particularly in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The social networking “investigation” also showed that these websites were considered as the main source of money for hackers since users generally share sensitive information that could be used against them.

“More and more online users are spending some time on these social networks. They are also unwittingly sharing sensitive and valuable information about their personal lives, which the hackers sniffed out to cash in later,” Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley said in a statement.

At the same time, Cluley reminded hundreds of millions of social networking users to do more with regard to protecting themselves from such attacks. He said that users should be more careful in disseminating information to avoid falling prey to organized identity theft, scams, and other malware attacks.

Meanwhile, social networking websites announced several security upgrades in their webpages to avoid future complications resulting from cyberattacks. Just recently, Facebook said that it will be signing an agreement with McAfree online security firm in providing better security defense fort their servers.

“With the largest number of social networking users, Facebook is also the first place you can find bad apples,” the security expert said.

“Facebook is able to elude such massive cyberattacks because of its dedicated team of security experts, who work hard to counter potential hazards to the website and its 350 million users,” he added.

As part of the cleanup process, Facebook identified all users that have been subjected to the previous attacks. McAfee will then have to clean the users’ entire system before they could be allowed to return online.

Major mobile operators in Europe are now beefing up their operations following analysts’ reports that social networking usage in the region will mostly likely increase to over 112 million this year.

Based on the report of Pyramid Research, the telecommunications arm of Light Reading Communications Network; mobile social networking usages in the region will boom significantly this year by over 112 million users and could possibly reach over 450 million by 2014.

In 2009, mobile social networking increased to more than 52 million users.

The 18-page report also tackles the three major potential drivers in the growth of mobile social networking. This includes the quality of user experience in the use Smartphone and 3G networks in Europe, operators’ initiative to increase network access, and online networking companies’ promotion of the platform for mobile use.

Stela Bokun, an analyst at Pyramid Research, said that the technical issues mentioned in the report will play paramount roles in many of the mobile markets in the region.

“3G network penetrations in vital European markets, including the development of advance handsets, will be the key factors the boom of social networking in the region,” Bokun pointed out.
She also said that mobile phone operators and social networking websites will have to strengthen its collaboration and bring new ideas for mobile users to make the growth projection possible.

“Both mobile network providers and social networking sites will have to bring its collaboration to a new level to cope up with the increasing demand in mobile networking usage. With this, they can increase revenue opportunities not only with their respective industries but also other business across the region,” the analyst said.

She added that the move will need a more proactive approach, citing the immediate need for more advance technologies in mobile phones and websites.

“One of the best examples in the usage of mobile phones for social networking is Facebook. In 2008, there are only five million users, which then increased to more than 85 million in December 2009,” Bokun pointed.

After losing its social networking reign to Twitter and Facebook, MySpace.com said on Monday that it is now looking for more relevance of social media to music and films as it bares plans of retooling itself to be one of the biggest one-stop for online entertainment.

“We want to become relevant. There’s no other way to achieve that goal, especially with more than 100 million users a month, if you don’t have anything to offer that is relevant,” MySpace chief executive officer Owen Van Natta said in an interview.

Van Natta also told members of the media at a music conference in Cannes that the move will make MySpace as one of the top one-stop shop for music and movies, adding that they “should see increased gains.”

Van Natta has taken over MySpace.com, owned by News Corp., in April. He has then made several reshuffling with most of the management team.

As the former chief operating officer of Facebook, he has already made several cuts in the operation of the MySpace by clearing contents such as horoscopes, weather updates, job listings, and has made music and entertainment hub its priority.

After the implementation, MySpace.com has seen a seven percent growth in the number of unique visitors in November and December. It was the first time that the online company posted gain for over two years.

To date, Facebook remains the top online social networking website in the world with more than 350 million users while Twitter has more than 58 million unique monthly users.

If MySpace was to retake its glory, the company should introduce more features that is not being tapped by its opponents. Earlier, MySpace Music website has hit the online world and has enticed millions of online users back to the website.

MySpace is now making several deals possible for the website to be able to offer more music and video downloads.

“We’re not trying to be the No. 1 video site or the No. 1 audio site. We want to develop that next generation, and we’re highly social about film and music,” Van Natta said.

Hollywood superstar Bruce Willis said on Friday that he has not intention to follow the footsteps of his ex-wife Demi Moore by signing up on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, saying that online technology is “very disturbing.”

Willis confessed that he is not a big fan of online social networking and remains skeptical over the entire world’s dependence on Internet technology, particularly online communications.

“I find it really disturbing. The lies and the fact that people wanted to use social networking media to communicate information, which has made spreading of news faster than ever,” Willis said during an interview with a Germany-based website.

“I’m really not a big fan of the social networking in electronic form. If the electricity dies, we would have to go home right now,” the actor added.

Moore, together with her current husband Ashton Kutcher, is a huge fan of online communications through the micro-blogging website Twitter. The couple regularly sends “tweets” to update thousands of followers about their daily activities.

But Willis said that the frightening power of social networking has now reached the alarming state, citing the death of pop icon Michael Jackson in June 2009.

“People already knew about his death in seconds or at least for a moment. Ten years ago, it was impossible to do that. The amount of information is getting more compact and quicker, which makes it more frightening,” said Willis, who is a star of several Sci-Fi movies including the latest Die Hard installment.

Die Hard 4.0: Live Free or Die Hard was one of the movies that Willis starred. The movie tackled about the dangers of being too dependent to the online communications.

In the movie, hackers attacked the United States Internet infrastructure that leaves the country vulnerable. The massive cyberattack threatened to shut down the entire operations of the country, which has depended most of the electronic communications under one roof.

A group of security researchers and social networking experts warned about the imminent hacker attacks on social networking websites, saying that more sophisticated malicious software will hound operations this year.

According to experts, the boom in the number of social network users will also trigger the rise in number of attacks to websites like Facebook, Twitter, and other related online sites.

It will be recalled that 2009 saw it share of attacks where majority of the targets were individual homepages. But experts said that it relatively small in nature compared to what hackers are preparing for this year.

“These cyber-criminals and their toolkits are evolving in an outstanding pace. The rapid changes in technologies also make attacks more sophisticated, which leave online users blind to risks that they face,” McAfee Labs researchers said in a statement.

The online security firm also said that “hot spots” and “buzzes” in social networking websites are continuously being monitored by malware authors, making active users more susceptible to attacks.

With Google beefing up its security to shield its search engine homepage from attacks, hackers are expected to shift its sight to more vulnerable targets like Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking websites.

However, the experts warned that it is not only social networking websites that are vulnerable from such malwares, saying that third-party tools and other URL-shortening services, used to communicate with the homepages, would also suffer similar problems.

“These third-party services are easier to attack. They are more susceptible to be overtaken by malwares since cyber-criminals can easily mask the URL the users usually click,” the security firm added.

Instead on logging-in on websites that they prefer, users are actually being redirected by hackers to websites containing malwares. Users are also giving away personal information such as username and passwords when they click in on these bogus websites.

For several hours Monday morning, Chinese online users were able to access banned websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube after the “Great Firewall” of China suffered temporarily outage.

Cautious but excited Chinese users were surprised when they suddenly found themselves browsing the webpage of the social networking websites that has been banned by their government as part of the strict Internet control called the “Great Firewall.”

News of the outage spread like wildfire with estimated number of  users in China reaching more than 200 million were able to check out websites that has long been scrutinize by the Chinese government.

One of the bloggers who broke the news to other people was identified as EfanZh. He said that he was surprised to see that the websites were open and has no restrictions like several months before.

“It’s finally unblocked, reasons unknown. I hope nothing gets blocked anymore. I can’t take it any longer,” EfanZh wrote in his blog posts.

However, several hours after his first glimpse of Facebook and Twitter, the Great Firewall has been reconstructed restricting anew the websites.

“By the time I woke up, strict restrictions had returned. Error messages once again flashed across computer screens for sites blocked by the nation’s censorship filter. It seemed just like a dream,” EfanZh wrote after several hours.

Meanwhile, Michael Anti, a social critic and an advocate for the anti-Great Firewall, expressed disappointment anew to China’s grip to its people. Anti was among the thousand of users who “tweeted” the development.

Based on reports, the outage in the Great Firewall was because of some maintenance works being administered by the government and its Internet provider, China Unicom.

Several reports also suggested that the downfall in the restriction was brought by heavy snowstorms in Northern China, which has blanketed the entire region with more than three feet of snow.

BeautifulPeople.com, the popular dating and social networking website, has kicked out some 5, 000 members after gaining some weight over the holiday season.

In a website where ugliness is the “original sin,” some 5, 000 members were expelled after being tagged as “festive fatties” by other members as shown to their photos posted in the said social networking site.

Among those who were evicted from the site were 533 Canadians who “overeat” themselves.

The high-profile mass eviction, according to the “beautiful” members, was necessary in order for them to keep the integrity and standards of the website, saying that overeating has been the norms for these members and should be dealt with accordingly.

The public stunt was even published through news releases by members claiming that they are supreme when it comes to appearance.

“Vigilant beautiful members, who take pride in the standards demanded by the site, called for action,” BeautifulPeople.com managing director Greg Hodge said in the statement.

“Canadians’ entire culture has made them one of the worst offenders of the rules of the website. Over eating, drinking, and sitting like a potato on the couch during the holiday season has made them festive fatties,” Hodge added.

Meanwhile, site founder Robert Hintze defended the action by the BeautifulPeople member, saying that allowing those “fatties” to continue membership is a direct threat to the business model of the said website.

He also said that excuses, like extreme cold weather, are simply unacceptable to let themselves wear baggy clothes and not dressing out appropirately.

But despite having huge volume of ejected member, Canadians only ranked third after the US and UK, which has 1, 250 and 832 members ejected, respectively.

Hintze said that evicted members can opt to join the website once they are beautiful again.

“These will teach them that people need to pay more attention to physical fitness,” the founder said.

Social networking hub MySpace has officially opened the submission period for the Application Developer Challenge, which encourages users to develop and use new applications in the website.

According to MySpace, it will give away $50, 000 worth of prizes for developing new and innovative application, which will be run in the website’s programming interface.

The deadline for submission will be on February 24.

Winners in each of the five categories will take home more than $10, 000. The categories include: Best New MySpace Application, Most Innovative (Use of real-time streaming), Best Open Search API, Best Photo Upload API, and Best Mobile API.

Qualified applicants should be a legal US, UK, Canadian (expect Quebec), and Australian resident. They should also be at least 18 years old to be eligible to join the contests.

Likewise, MySpace said that participants can join the contest as individual or a group with a maximum of three members.

Also, the social networking website said that the panel of judges will include MySpace COO Mike Jones, Google Engineering Director David Glazer, and other distinguished personalities in the social networking arena.

The evaluation for each entry will fall into four criteria including originality, entertainment factor, technical achievement, and innovation.

Winners will be announced at the Game Developers’ Conference, which will be held in San Francisco, California in March.

To start up ideas for the developers, MySpace said that it will be hosting a free event called the MySpace devJam this coming January 14 in its San Francisco office.

In a statement, MySpace said that the idea for the contest stemmed from its decision a month ago to open the social networking websites’ public activity stream data to outside developers through a new set of APIs.

With more than 110 million active members worldwide, MySpace hopes to better its standing in the online world with the contest.

A 32-year-old Indonesian mom has been cleared by a local court on Tuesday over a defamation case filed by Omni International Hospital after she had sent an email to her friends where she complained about the wrong diagnosis of the doctors.

A panel of judges has dismissed the complaints of the hospital against Prita Mulyasari, a bank employee, after months of trial that has outraged the people of Indonesia.

In their ruling, the judges said that the email sent by Mulyasari does not contain any kind of defamation, pointing that it only constitutes criticism by the defendant to protect her friends and the public from being mistreated by any doctor or hospital.

Based on the court documents, Mulyasari had sent the email to some 20 of her close friends, narrating the misdiagnosis committed by the doctors at the said hospital. The doctors claimed that she had a dengue fever, when in fact, she had mumps.

Upon learning about the circulation of the said email, the hospital immediately filed charges against the defendant. The hospital said that the “defamatory” email message has been circulated on social networking site Facebook.

However, the defendant said that she had no knowledge about the circulation.

Mulyasari was arrested on May 13 while she was still breastfeeding her youngest child. She had spent more than three weeks in jail while awaiting trial.

Her detention caused massive public outcry, with support groups in various social networking sites such as Facebook growing to more than 100, 000 members.

This forced authorities to release her from custody and brought her before the court, which eventually dismissed all the charges against her.