Facebook posts

“Do no evil.” That was the now famous philosophy that Google portrayed to the world, claiming that a business doesn’t need to be evil to be effective and make money. It sounds great, really. But we are left wondering what Facebook’s motto would look like: “What they don’t know won’t hurt them”? We regularly accept the fact that businesses have one goal: make money. If they are not making money, then they can’t survive. That’s a given. So we typically expect to be bombarded with advertising (granted, Facebook’s advertising is horrible in more ways than one), affiliate offers, promotional material,…

Facebook is one of those things you hate yourself for using, but you keep using it and hating yourself because, well, it’s easy and fun and everyone else is using it. But what if there was an alternative? What if there was a Facebook clone that was open source, privacy aware and personally controlled by you? What if, and I can’t imagine the sweet words are leaving my lips, what if there were no Farmville, Mafia Wars or Zooville? Diaspora is a Kickstarter project that aims to do all of the above, and people are voting with their wallets – the project was asking for $10,000 funding and the current total is…

With it’s hot shot iPhone developer Joe Hewitt gone, Facebook has gone some time without an update for iPhone, and there is still no native iPad client. Indie developer Sobees has changed all that. Their Facebook for iPad client is actually a breath of fresh air, with a new interface that breaks down your Facebook information into a palatable, newspaper-style look and feel. Facebook is generally not too happy about applications taking all your information, or as they see it, once you’ve uploaded it to Facebook, their information and displaying it outside their web application, so we’ll see how…

Seems everybody’s just about had it up to here with Facebook, and it looks like this is the case with developers as much as it is with users. Zynga, the developer of Farmville, has warned its employees to brace themselves for a possible imminent break from the social networking giant. That’s kind of cool. Sounds like a spaceship about to break away from an asteroid, or something. Anyway, tensions between the two companies have been rising, and, due to Facebook’s apparent bullying of Zynga to sign a contract which would bind Farmville almost exclusively to Facebook, Zynga threatening to leave,…

As an early adopter of Facebook, I’ve been able to see the ups and downs of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation. Fortunately, through all of it, I’ve learned quite a few things along the way. Some of these insights are more disturbing than others, while others just make no sense whatsoever. So let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way first: 1. Everyone Loves Farms (and Gangsters) The words “farm” and “gangster” could never appear in the same sentence, until now. For some amazing reason, people like to build farms and waste people — who’d of thought that? Furthermore, who would have thought that so many…

Facebook and privacy go together like Hilary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Yesterday it was revealed that yet another security breach at Facebook exposed user data to public view. A bug in the feature that allows users to see how their profile appears to others exposed chat data and pending friend requests. Facebook responded quickly to patch the hole, but it’s once again clear that Facebook is the least secure of the social networking sites. In late 2009 they were attacked for security practices at one point that involved all staff accessing the main user database used a single password. Now Marc…

My entire life revolves around the internet. Between writing for Techi, interfacing with design clients, talking to friends, and gaming, there is almost not a moment of my life that doesn’t take place online. I have GOT to get me one of these. The Reconnect concept by Lars Rosengren is a genius little device. A diagnosed or suspected internet addict (read: you) can strap it onto his or her wrist, and the device helps monitor your social networking activities while periodically reminding you of your real-life priorities, and offering helpful suggestions. On the one hand, it’s sad that we as a people…

Yesterday Facebook updated it’s events feature to be a little more user-friendly. You can now add events directly from the Events box on your home page. In a rare move NOT connected to Facebook trying to monetize every single user interaction, this new events feature may actually prove useful for those Spring and Summer gatherings you want all your Facebook buddies to know about. You can read more about the change on the Facebook blog, but rest assured, it’s a solid feature update that will make you want to use Facebook more. Unfortunately….

I’ve always been a fan of the internet’s perpetual refusal to be governed by an ‘official’ body. The internet today, as I mentioned last week, largely resembles the American Wild West: player pianos, a keen interest in poker, bandits, and a whole lotta rules routinely broken by the people, whenever it suits them. But be that as it may, the internet grows more orderly by the day, and impressively, it does it on its own, by the power of its users. Remember your first GeoCities page? Could you remember mine, while you’re at it? I think I was Sunset Strip. Anyway, user-generated content has…

We all know Google staff get to spend 10 percent of their time working on their own projects, and we know Google to be a search, mobile and ads sales business with a plethora of hobbies, but now it looks like the giant firm wants to bring in even more engineers, making a deal to buy Israeli Web gadgets provider LabPixies. Israeli financial news website TheMarker said Google paid $25 million for LabPixies, a developer of virtual gadgets ranging from calendars, news feeds and to-do lists to entertainment and games . The company was one of the first to begin development of personalized Web gadgets (aka:…