By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
February 24, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - New numbers from the folks at Twitter show that people are tweeting furiously.

Three years ago, the microblogging company was handling 5,000 tweets a day, according to Kevin Weil, the analytics lead at Twitter . Today, though, that number has gone up — a lot.

Weil noted in a blog post on the Twitter site today that 50 million tweets are posted on the site every day. That’s an average of 600 tweets per second. Weil noted that Twitter strips out the spam tweets before calculating the daily totals.

Twitter use has been steadily climbing.

In 2008, the site was managing 300,000 tweets per day. By early 2009, it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew by 1,400% and reached 35 million per day by the end of the year.

Weil, however, doesn’t say how many users account for the current 50 million tweets-per-day. Are the top 10% of users, for instance, accounting for 80% of all tweets? That’s not clear.

Just last month, a study from RJMetrics Inc. showed that the number of Twitter users has climbed to 75 million.

The study also showed that a lot of Twitter accounts are inactive, and the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in a given month hit an all-time low in December. According to RJMetrics, only 17% of all Twitter accounts tweeted in December. That’s down from more than 70% in early 2007, when Twitter was a fledgling company with far fewer users.

Twitter, according to the report, has between 10 million and 15 million active tweeters.

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By David Taber
CIO.com

FRAMINGHAM (02/18/2010) - At the core of customer relationship management is “who am I talking with?” In a simple SFA or CRM system, it’s obvious: you called them, or they called you. But in enterprise CRM, it’s tricky to identify exactly whom the interaction is with, and every new data source seems to make it harder. The problem occurs at two levels: contact information blur from multiple databases, and avatar confusion from multiple entry points into your company’s web and social networking sites. This week, we’ll cover the top layer of the problem.

Multiple Contact Lists

Nearly every employee in your company has an address list in their e-mail client. On analyzing a large number of those address books, you’ll find a high degree of overlap. Of course, the data entries in each address book will have minor variations, setting the stage for a massive duplication problem if you ever tried to consolidate all that contact information. Fortunately, in most companies there is little reason to try this for most employees’ contacts. The relationships just aren’t relevant enough to the overall business.

But in professional services firms and investment banking/private equity/venture capital, the contacts of nearly every employee can be a valuable asset. It is very tempting to move towards a centralized list of contacts, making all of them visible in the CRM system. But the chaos of data in the individual address books makes that very hard. Here are approaches we’ve seen work, with the pros and cons:

• Using a shared address book for corporate contacts, supplementing the private address books for each user. This approach is simple, can be set up to automatically synchronize the shared address book with your CRM, and doesn’t involve a lot of cost. But it does require a change of user behavior: users have to remember to keep the contacts in the corporate address book updated, and to put new business contacts into the shared address book rather than their own private one. Further, the effort of deciding which people should be in the shared list, and deduping that shared list once created, is a visible and painful startup cost that stops many organizations from using this strategy. Finally, this won’t really work if you’re a Mac shop.

• Using the CRM system in place of the e-mail shared address book. This is simple to understand and execute, but it requires an even bigger change to user behavior. People like to live in their e-mail client, and this approach means telling users to log in to their CRM system to get the contact info they need all day long. This strategy can work in sales, marketing, and customer service, but for most professional services organizations or senior management, this e-mail-plus-CRM approach is the kiss of death.

• Using plug-ins to synchronize your e-mail client address books directly with your CRM system. There are a variety of plug-ins from CRM vendors, dedicated contact management systems, and third party products that try to seamlessly represent CRM contacts as a natural extension of the user’s individual address book. While each of these products has potential plusses, the user experience with them ranges from the acceptable to the horrendous. I won’t mention any names in print, but feel free to contact me if you need the real story. The bottom line over the long term is that none of these products is really satisfactory without implementing careful policy, extensive testing, or expensive integration. Sometimes, all three. And if you’re a Mac shop, there’s almost nothing on the market to support this strategy.

• Using Microsoft Dynamics. You have to admit it, these guys own more than 80% of the e-mail clients, 65% of the e-mail servers, and control of the desktop. Not surprisingly, they’ve done a bang-up job of integrating with Outlook and avoiding the bug-bombs that seem to come with each of their patches. That said, users generally don’t rate Dynamics very high, the system can be overly complex, and they are in no way a leader in SaaS CRM. So Dynamics isn’t on the short list for a lot of companies — particularly if they’re professional services firms where SaaS matters and Macs abound.

• Using people to offset the weaknesses in technology. Believe it or not, this one can work the best because it makes no tough demands for behavioral change. In this approach, an admin or intern is designated as the keeper of the corporate contact file, and they make all updates — typically to the CRM system. Busy executives like this because it means they don’t sit around typing updates. Periodically (probably daily), the admin/intern runs a push program to update the corporate addresses that everyone uses (typically a read-only shared address book). Because all the data is updated in one place, there’s much less risk of duplicates or data corruption. Ironically, this can be one of the most flexible and least cost approaches, particularly if you have the admin/intern in a low-cost labor market.

Even with the best of these solutions, there are still wrinkles. Thanks to Google Mail, BlackBerries, and differing user work-styles, there will be multiple address books that are at best partially synchronized. The bottom line for this layer of the CRM identity crisis: policy and business process need to be refined if you are ever to get this problem under control. So don’t invest deeply in a technical solution until you’ve got the people and policy issues nailed.

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By Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)
February 10, 2010

MIAMI - Google has given Gmail a social-networking component with its introduction of Buzz, a service built inside of the webmail product that lets users post and share content in similar ways as they do in sites like Facebook and Twitter.

How successful Google will be in convincing Gmail users to shift their social-networking tasks over to Buzz remains to be seen. Google believes Buzz offers enough improvements over existing social networks.

Specifically, Buzz has been designed to help users deal with the often massive amount of information they receive through their social-networking sites.

“Increasingly, it’s becoming harder and harder to make sense and find the signal in the noise,” said Bradley Horowitz, a Google vice president of product management, at a press conference on Tuesday.

The problem is only going to get worse, as people continue to find value in and embrace social media, he said. “We all feel this bombardment, this fatigue of having to go manually through and try to make sense of the torrent of information that’s washing over us,” he said. “This has become a large-scale problem, the kind we’re good at [solving at] Google.”

However, as Google officials acknowledged, Buzz right now has no links into Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking site with more than 400 million members. This means that Buzz, at least for the moment, exists in parallel with Facebook, without the two of them intersecting, thus offering no help for users of that site, a major gap in Buzz’s coverage.

As for Twitter, users can’t post to Twitter from Buzz right now, but they can direct their Twitter posts to Buzz, as well as other content they post on public sites, like the Flickr and Picasa photo sharing sites from Yahoo and Google, respectively.

Google opted to build Buzz into Gmail because Gmail contacts lists are an underlying, existing social graph for users, officials said.

“Today, with Google Buzz, we’re introducing a new way to share and communicate inside of Gmail. Buzz is like an entirely new world inside of Gmail,” said Todd Jackson, Google Buzz product manager.

Jackson highlighted a number of areas in which Google believes Buzz improves upon existing social-networking sites. For example, Buzz builds a list of friends automatically, based on the Gmail contacts a person interacts most with. In addition, Buzz lets users include thumbnails when sharing Web links, making them more graphic and attractive. Buzz also lets users attach various degrees of access to posts, from completely public to limited to hand-picked friends.

Leveraging its Gmail core, Buzz makes every post a Gmail conversation that gets updated in real time as friends add comments to it. Buzz also recommends posts from people who aren’t necessarily on one’s list of friends, based on certain “signals” that the content might be of interest. Likewise, it also buries posts from friends that it determines are unlikely to appeal to the user.

“This is Google being Google, doing what they always do: collect everybody’s information, organize it, become an intermediary and serve up ads around it. This plays to their classic strategy,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an Altimeter Group analyst, in an interview.

Buzz will be rolled out over the coming days to all Gmail users. Later on, a version of Buzz will surface in Google Apps, the collaboration and communication suite for workplaces.

Buzz will also be available on mobile devices in various places, including the Google.com mobile home page; at buzz.google.com>, a Web-based application for the iPhone and Android devices; and as a new layer on Google Maps for Mobile.

Google is playing catch-up in the social-networking field. Its Orkut social-networking site is popular in specific countries but doesn’t come close to matching the worldwide popularity of Facebook.

“Google has a history of being late to the game when it comes to social, and they often are hit and miss,” Owyang said.

With Buzz, Google is trying to leverage the connections people have made on its webmail service, a move similar to ones from other providers of Internet communications services, such as Yahoo and AOL, with their respective IM and webmail products.

Owyang sees Buzz going deeper into social connections than the Yahoo and AOL attempts. He predicts the Google product will enjoy a certain degree of success but fall short of being a blockbuster.

“I’m optimistic there will be moderate Buzz adoption. I wouldn’t say this will be the complete next social network,” he said.

Augie Ray, a Forrester Research analyst, said in an e-mailed statement that he expects people to give Buzz a test drive but doubts there will be a massive migration to it from Twitter and Facebook.

“While bringing relevance filtering to the noisy social media world could prove a significant advantage, this doesn’t — yet — seem to be enough to pull people away from the networks they’ve already created elsewhere,” Ray wrote.

“Buzz could end up supplementing rather than replacing users’ other social networks for now,” Ray added.

Competitively, Buzz is aimed squarely at Facebook, Owyang said. “This is a direct blow against Facebook. This is absolutely competitive,” he said.

Facebook has become a serious Google competitor in areas beyond the core social-networking features. For example, in Facebook, people share photos, watch videos, read news articles, search the Web, play games, exchange private messages, text chat and listen to music. Along the way, Facebook has become the fourth-most-popular site in the U.S., where it accounts for 7 percent of people’s time spent online, according to comScore.

Google’s Horowitz said Buzz is in its early stages and that Google has many opportunities to extend and improve it in the coming months.

For example, it would make sense to integrate Buzz with Google Wave, the application that meshes e-mail, IM and document sharing, he said.

Google wants to aggressively provide APIs (application programming interfaces) in Buzz to help external developers build new applications for it and integrate Buzz with existing sites and software, said Vic Gundotra, a Google engineering vice president.

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By Jared Newman
PC World (US)
February 08, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Forget the redesigned homepage and the inevitable controversy it will create, Facebook’s next feature might actually be something its users will adore.
TechCrunch reports that Facebook is overhauling its message service and turning it into full-blown e-mail. Remember when everyone scrambled to get a vanity Facebook URL last June? Your Facebook e-mail address could be vanityURL@facebook.com. The so-called “Project Titan,” launch date unknown, would also include POP/IMAP support for checking mail outside of Facebook.

That’s a good start, but here are five other features I’d like to see in Facebook e-mail:

Multiple Inboxes

Here’s where Facebook e-mail could really flourish: The site already lets you divide friends into distinct lists, such as friends, family and work. An e-mail service could sort incoming messages accordingly, letting you check separate inboxes even when everything’s going to the same address.

Convenient Access

Checking e-mail is often the first thing I do when switching on my computer or fiddling with my phone. Give me a convenient URL for direct Web access, such as facebookmail.com, so I don’t have to hit my Facebook landing page first. Also, a mobile app that loads right into Facebook mail would be helpful.

Optional Threading

As a Gmail user, I’m now addicted to the way it combines all e-mail messages on a single topic into one conversation thread. Facebook already does the same thing with its message service, making me confident that the feature would carry over into e-mail. But those who despise threading should have the option to turn it off.

Pull in Facebook Info

A Facebook e-mail service should make it simple to pull Facebook information directly into messages. Someone wrote something ridiculous on my wall? Give me a button that lets me easily find and link to it. Same goes with photos and albums, which should appear as thumbnail previews in messages.

Manage Everything From E-Mail

If Facebook becomes my e-mail service, it should make administrative tasks easier. Approving friends, sending event RSVPs, and responding to wall posts should all be possible directly from e-mail, without ever visiting a separate Web page.

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By Tom S. Noda
Published in the CWP December 2009 - January 2010 issue

As the population of netizens balloon, so will the number of cybercrimes. It is a challenge major security vendors vow to battle with products and strategies engineered to protect businesses and individuals alike.

In this yearend special feature of Computerworld Philippines, four security vendors—Trend Micro, Sophos, NetPlay, Inc., and Symantec—say in separate interviews, that emerging technologies such as Web 2.0, cloud computing, virtualization, and social networking have led them to intensify their efforts on curbing cybercrime.

“As more companies conduct their businesses online, and more information, transactions and communications are posted online, threats and problems increases, like loss of data due to hardware failure and theft, stealing of confidential information, bogus online transactions, account phishing and spamming, among others will continue to rise exponentially,” says Scott Gonzalo, managing director of Netplay, Inc., the Philippine distributor of Microworld Technologies Inc.’s eScan and Elitecore Technologies Ltd’s Cyberoam.

Similarly, Rob Forsyth, managing director of Sophos in Asia-Pacific, describes 2009 as the social media year for businesses globally, since more enterprises have begun to tap social networking and Web 2.0 to reach out to customers and to transform their brand and marketing strategies.

“The Internet will continue to transform the way people work and play, and its pervasiveness will continue to blur the lines between consumer and enterprise technology with the growing sophistication of an average user,” remarks Forsyth, adding that as enterprises discover new ways of integrating the social media platform in the business, employees are expected to continue initiating and implementing their own social media practices within the enterprise, which may prove unsettling to both network security and worker productivity, if a social media usage policy is not in place or adequately enforced among employees.

“Organizations will be increasingly concerned about malicious attacks originating from social networking sites, and the risks associated with users revealing sensitive and confidential corporate information online,” Forsyth says. “Other than social computing, another major enterprise technology trend is cloud computing which will gain greater prominence in 2010.”

According to Gartner, revenues from cloud computing will reach US$14 million annually by the end of 2013. Typical cloud computing services provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, with the software and data stored on the servers.

“The growing adoption of cloud computing will drive the sharing of corporate data in never-before-seen ways and result in both the immediate exchange of information and increased vulnerabilities for enterprises,” says Forsyth. Because of this, he says more powerful encryption policies and security technologies will be needed to safeguard data wherever it is stored.

Eric Hoh, vice president of Symantec, Asia South Region, tells Computerworld Philippines that attackers will continue to shift away from mass distribution of a small number of threats to micro distribution of millions of distinct threats.

He says that many of the new strains of malware consist of thousands of distinct threats that come from known, unique families through a variety of methods such as file sharing, email and removable media. “These new and emerging threats have given rise to the need for new, complementary detection methods such as heuristics, behavior blocking and reputation-based security models.”

ONLINE PROTECTION

To address online threats, NetPlay has unleashed security software from Microworld and Elitecore that are designed to support businesses that have online presence, and they are: the eScan Antivirus software, Cyberoam Endpoint Data Protection suite and Cyberoam UTM, respectively.

Gonzalo says Cyberoam UTM is a gateway security appliance that monitors incoming and outgoing traffic for threats like hacking, spamming, viruses and provides web content filtering.

He claims it to be the first UTM that is identity based wherein the appliance provides the name and the IP address of its user who has breached security regulations unlike other appliance that only provides an IP address.

Gonzalo adds that eScan antivirus is another endpoint security software that provides proactive virus monitoring of its host PC. Gonzalo reveals they will also be rolling out a Cyberoam UTM software and EPDP for the small and medium-enterprise (SME) markets as well as new versions of eScan antivirus software.

The products complement each other, he says, describing Cyberoam UTM as a gateway security solution while eScan Antivirus and Cyberoams EPDP as endpoint solutions.

INTEGRATED SOLUTIONS

Following its integration with data security solutions firm Utimaco Safeware, Sophos introduced in 2009 a portfolio of security software that includes data encryption, computer security, web security, email security, and network access control that users can manage, deploy and use.

In October 2009, Sophos fully integrated data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities into Sophos Endpoint Security and Data Protection 9, which enables businesses to have visibility and control over sensitive data without the need to deploy any additional agents or incur any additional licensing costs.

Forsyth notes that with the rise of cybercrime, breaches, accidental or intentional data leakage, and multi-faceted security threats, business critical information must be fully protected at all times.

He stresses that complexity of securing data stems from the growing popularity of virtualization and cloud computing among organizations and data centers looking to streamline the use of resources.

Accordingly, data centers must comply with enterprise service-level agreements and operating procedures before corporations entrust moving mission-critical applications under their control. To help address these concerns, Sophos has collaborated with Intel to help protect security-critical applications and contribute to compliance for regulations such as financial payments, government agencies and healthcare organizations through integrating Sophos SafeGuard Crypto-Server for cryptography with Intel SOA Expressway for XML security into a single integrated solution to help customers meet industry-specific security regulations and policies.

Forsyth says malware threats and the security landscape have evolved dramatically over the last five years, which bring about a paradigm shift in customer requirements as well.

Today, having anti-malware tools and firewalls in place is no longer enough to protect the dissolving network perimeter. He says the lack of data protection can hurt the bottom line, adding that the Sophos Endpoint Security and Data Protection 9 addresses such concerns by integrating endpoint security with comprehensive data protection to safeguard against data loss.

IT, PEOPLE, PROCESSES

Over at Symantec, the security approach for 2010 is three-pronged: technology, people, and processes.

“We understand that technology isn’t the only answer to enable businesses to secure and manage their information,” Hoh says, adding Symantec will continue to bring together an ecosystem of products, services, and partners that will help businesses secure and manage their information-based security models.

“Symantec’s new reputationbased security technology leverages the anonymous software usage patterns of Symantec’s extensive volunteer user community to automatically identify entirely new spyware, viruses and worms,” he says, noting with the increasing threats, businesses will also opt for multilayer and comprehensive protection, such as those provided by all-in-one security suites.

Hoh claims that the Symantec Protection Suites, made available earlier this year, is an all-in-one suite that protects critical business assets from complex malware and spam threats, and rapidly recovers data or computer systems.

And as businesses consider DLP in the coming year, Symantec recommends that they look beyond technology and consider strengthening policies and processes.

Effective DLP, Hoh says, establishes reputable processes and procedures that reduce the risk of data exposure throughout an enterprise. He says a comprehensive, long-term, sustainable DLP is based on: “Threat coverage, business process integration, and risk reduction measurement.”

TECH OF TOMORROW

At Trend Micro, the game plan is to develop the “technology of tomorrow,” as the level of threats in the world has vastly outrun existing technologies. “Everybody right now is unable to face the threats of tomorrow that’s why we have to go to the technology of tomorrow,” says David Perry, global director of security education.

“We just released our smart protection network over the course of last year, but we got a whole lot more product releases all through next year, starting right away, and some before Christmas this year,” he says.

Perry says Trend Micro is seeing an advancement of many web-based threats that cannot be pursued with traditional methods. “We have invented whole new ways of detecting web-based threats and blocking people from going to them.

This should protect them from Facebook, MySpace, on Twitter, and all of the different places that they’re going on the web,” he says.

Although he declined to name some of the future Trend Micro products, Perry says the company has new products in the SME space, particularly those involved with cloud computing. “We foresee security problems in the cloud so we’re looking at protecting the cloud and placing protection in it.”

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By John Mark V. Tuazon

In the dog-eat-dog world of the competitive enterprise, keeping up to pace with the latest developments in technology becomes vital for survival, especially after a crucial time of economic crisis. For the coming year, experts therefore agree: agility and mobility becomes the core battleground of competition for companies to stay afloat. In the workplace of 2010 as predicted by top network vendors interviewed exclusively by Computerworld Philippines, executives have relevant information at their fingertips, employees utilize the power of the Web in collaborating for their work, and everyone will be connected to their home base whenever and wherever they may be. “There is an increasing movement towards the ‘Connected Life’,” quips Stephen Misa, country manager for Cisco Systems Philippines. Misa sees personal technologies such as smartphones and social networking infiltrating the corporate sphere, simultaneously as the workplace begins to move out of the conventional office building.

A Networking Facelift

Due to the increasing demand for content—especially video, which Misa describes as “the killer application” that will drive the next generation of productivity and innovation—corporate and service provider networks would have to be upgraded. The potentials of Web 2.0, specifically social networking, will ring in more demand for bandwidth, especially as consumers—who are also employees—continue to drive the popularity of such tools. “Companies need to re-evaluate the tools they offer their employees, and service providers need to re-engineer their networks,” Misa notes.

Social networking, however, will remain a marginal portion of the company’s network bandwidth, as bandwidth-hungry video redefines bandwidth requirements and Internet traffic for most firms. “Our Telepresence offering once again grew in excess of 100% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2009, proving that customers truly understand the productivity and value that video delivers both internally and with their own customers and partners.”

With this incessant hunger for richer content delivered through the office, Misa says providers must graduate from merely providing basic voice or data services, and move to become “experience providers” delivering an integrated set of data, voice, video, and mobile services to retain customers.

The Everywhere, Every Time, Everyone Office

However, pushing content to the office—a stable and stationary placeholder of content—is just half the battle for network administrators and providers. As more and more devices offer portability and mobility not only to consumers but to professional users as well, the four walls of the office become irrelevant.

“Corporate users want all information at their fingertips, and to stay connected with the office and clients while still being able to do business in the field,” posits Desmond Toh, marketing director, D-Link.

As corporate users continue to access the Web even outside their offices, Toh says the demand for Internet connectivity on-the-go will ramp up by next year. “Broadband and the network have [actually] become the fourth utility after water, gas, and electricity,” asserts Cisco’s Misa.

More importantly, as new innovations break barriers in terms of access, productivity is heightened due to the liberalizing capabilities of collaboration. “Tools are being developed to enable workers to communicate and collaborate seamlessly with one another, with their partners and with their customers,” Misa explains. Bart Burstein, vice president for product management and business development of Ruckus Wireless, would like to call this innovation as “distributed computing.” “Businesses are becoming more mobile, enabling corporate users, for example, to edit a speech or a press statement on the go, in real time, and in collaboration with other workers,” he shares. For such enablers, Burstein says connectivity requirements are heightened. “High-quality and reliable broadband access is therefore needed to do distributed computing,” he adds.

3G as Enterprise Enabler

3G technology, currently touted as the messiah that will integrate both mobile computing and high-speed access through wireless broadband capabilities, will become increasingly important in the coming years, and may even trigger the growth of more mobile users.
“In terms of access, 3G is increasingly being used by businesses,” claims Mantosh Malhotra, Philippine country manager, Qualcomm, a 3G technology innovator for device manufacturers. “With 3G, information can be fed real-time to the server.”

According to Malhotra, 3G enables companies to drive up its productivity output and ensure that downtime is kept to a minimum. These innovative products, D-Link’s Toh said, will allow users to enjoy broadband experience with full mobility. But aside from the access side, Malhotra notes how more and more targeted devices utilizing 3G technology are slowly becoming mainstream. “With the robust 3G ecosystem, manufacturers are increasingly becoming secure that their investments in 3G are protected, thereby ramping up the production of 3G devices, and driving down its costs, making it more affordable,” he explains.

Ruckus Wireless’ Burstein, on the other hand, sees a similar trend in devices, as more and more gadgets move towards “miniaturization.” “The trend for miniaturization of devices will mean more work will be done on smartphones and netbooks, as these devices become more affordable,” he says, adding that due to this, the percentage of smartphone usage in the enterprise will escalate.

Virtualization to Continue as a Trend

On the other half of the network spectrum, vendors see virtualization going through most of 2010, with a slight entrance of cloud computing as it slowly captures more industries. “Most technologies will be based on Internet delivery and infrastructure,” details Jojo Colina, head of product management and development group, ePLDT. Colina said cloud computing will play the largest part of organizations’ network bandwidth, as utility computing infrastructure sitting on top of their virtualization strategies become commonplace. “Companies who don’t have the infrastructure to deploy applications can look to providers in provisioning the needed software,” he adds.

With an increasing demand for faster access, richer content and a more mobile environment, Cisco’s Misa concludes that virtualization has finally become the hot topic for CIOs. “They are increasingly being challenged to manage more and more computing assets while keeping a cap on complexity and costs,” he explains.

“Virtualization, therefore, will mean better management of IT resources, enabling companies to become more agile and respond more quickly to macro-economic and customer shifts.”

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
January 27, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive, according to a study released today.

While the rate of new user growth peaked last July at about 7.8 million a month, that number has dropped to about 6.2 million new users a month now, according to a study from RJMetrics Inc., which develops online metric analysis software. The past six months, the study also noted, have shown a steady falloff in the number of new accounts.

“When you look at new account registrations, no one can deny that Twitter is still growing like a rocket ship. That’s good,” wrote Robert J. Moore, CEO and founder of RJMetrics. “However, upon closer inspection, the rate of new user signups has dropped meaningfully from its peak and many new users never do anything with their accounts. That’s bad. Furthermore, the percentage of accounts sending out tweets has steadily declined over the past six months. That’s worse.”

Actually, the study shows that a lot of Twitter accounts aren’t active, and the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in all of last December hit an all-time low.

According to the findings, only 17% of all Twitter accounts Twittered last month. That’s down from more than 70% in early 2007 when Twitter was a fledgling company with far, far fewer users.

However, Moore pointed out that because of Twitter’s “rapid user growth”, even with only 17% tweeting last month, that still adds up to more Twitterers than ever before.

Twitter, according to the report, has between 10 million and 15 million active Twitterers.

Today’s study echoes a report released last week. HubSpot, a Web analytics company, noted in its own report that the number of users joining Twitter started to drop off dramatically last fall. While Twitter grew rapidly over the past couple of years, HubSpot said in its latest “State of the Twittersphere” report that the company’s growth rate dropped to 3.5% in October, compared to 13% just seven months earlier.

This slowing growth rate stands in stark contrast to the micro-blogging site’s staggering growth numbers just a year ago.

ComScore, Inc., a Web analytics company, reported that the number of people using Twitter in February 2009 had jumped a dramatic 700% compared to the same month in 2008.

Twitter also saw a 131% increase in U.S. visitors between February and March of last year, according to another report from comScore. Twitter had 9.3 million visitors in March of 2009 - a whopping five million more than it had the month before.

According to today’s RJMetrics report, people who have joined Twitter aren’t creating much of a presence there. The average Twitter user has 27 followers, which is down from 42 followers in August, according to the new study. About 25% of users - up from 20% last August - have no followers at all. Upwards of 40% of users only have between one and five followers.

“A third of Twitter’s user base has joined up in the past four months, and we know that users acquire more followers the longer they are on the system,” wrote Moore in the report. However, he added that it’s “impossible” to tell at this point if so many users have few followers because they’re new to the site or if they’re simply not engaged.

And a lack of engagement is showing up.

The study noted that about 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times, up five percentage points from just five months ago.

Moore pointed out in the report that if new Twitter users stick with the micro-blogging service through just the first week they have a much higher rate of engagement with the site over time.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
January 8, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Will 2010 be the year Facebook and Twitter take over the business world? The social networks are growing in popularity by the day, both for personal and business use, yet many IT and business executives remain wary of the risks posed by the online services and skeptical about potential benefits.

A number of Web-savvy CIOs are using Twitter to spread their views, engage with colleagues and discuss technology, yet a survey shows that more than half of CIOs in the United States do not allow employees to log onto social networking sites “for any reason” while they’re at work. Another survey conducted in the United Kingdom found that nearly three-quarters of the top brands had no official presence on Twitter, despite the service’s potential for reaching customers. (See related story, 12 CIOs who Tweet.)

Business users are logging onto public social networking sites far more often than social networks sponsored by their employers, but attempts to block such activity simply will not work, says IDC analyst Caroline Dangson, who researches enterprise collaboration and social technologies.

As workforces become more distributed, and even office workers spend time working at home, people will use personal devices for business use and it will be difficult for IT to make blanket proclamations banning tools as widely used as Facebook and Twitter.

“This concept of trying to control or block [social media usage], it is not going to work,” Dangson says. “There’s going to be a divide, with some companies that shun public social networks and are fearful of using them, and some who embrace it and take the risk.”

An IDC survey of 4,710 U.S. workers in October found that 34% use consumer social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn for business purposes, and 9% use microblogging sites like Twitter for business purposes.

Yet many of their employers are trying to stop them from doing so.

A Robert Half Technology survey of 1,400 CIOs from U.S. companies with at least 100 employees found that 54% completely prohibit use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work. Nineteen percent allow social networking sites for business purposes only, while another 16% allow “limited personal use.” Just 10% permit use of social networking sites “for any type of personal use.”

Some brands have begun using Facebook and Twitter to reach consumers, both to promote themselves and communicate about company failures. Rackspace, for example, has used Twitter extensively to communicate with users after several power outages knocked customer services offline.

But large companies are also avoiding social networking sites in droves. New Media Age, a United Kingdom publication, analyzed the top 500 U.K. brands and found that 74% have no presence at all on Twitter, and just 10% use the site daily.

Dangson believes Facebook is a good setting for businesses to reach consumers, but that there is a greater business opportunity in Twitter, particularly in business-to-business markets, because “everything is public and open.”

Twitter “is a fantastic direct marketing tool,” she says. “People have opted in to follow you and follow your messages.”

Others tout the potential of LinkedIn, another major social network that is business-oriented, and often used to build business relationships and find new jobs.

Users of Facebook and Twitter likely care only about the sites’ usefulness, but many financial analysts have wondered how these social networks can create a compelling business model. Out of all of them, LinkedIn may have the greatest financial future, and potential to be acquired by a larger company, says Robert Armstrong, a financial analyst and senior columnist at Dow Jones Investment Banker.

Major Web properties like Google and eBay have been successful because their business model is based upon transactions, he notes. Facebook and Twitter seem to lack that advantage, but LinkedIn is centered around a pretty major type of transaction – the hiring of a new employee.

Even if you’re not seeking a new job, LinkedIn may be the best place for IT folks looking to exchange information with colleagues. An IDC survey of 204 IT decision-makers found that LinkedIn is the best social network for finding information to support IT purchases. Twitter was ranked second, followed by Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

Clearly, use of social networks will continue to increase in 2010. Company executives need to accept this reality – they don’t have to take a hands-off, anything-goes approach, but they do need policies governing employee use and a strategy for corporate use, analysts say.

In the next year, CIOs will get more involved, and “we’ll see companies writing policies and guidelines,” partly to protect workers, Dangson says. Businesses will also increase use of Facebook and Twitter for CRM, she predicts, saying CRM is “the most compelling business case for public social media sites where customers frequently voice their opinions on matters of everyday life, including the brands in which they interact.”

Forrester analyst Augie Ray, who studies social marketing, says companies like Best Buy and Comcast are have done a good job interacting with customers on social sites. This is necessary in part because consumers’ attention has been distracted from traditional forms of advertising.

“They’re embracing it because they have to,” Ray says. “Brands that do get it, understand that they can engage with and have a two-way dialogue with consumers.”

Companies need a strategy that takes into account who their audience is and how they prefer to be reached, Ray says. Social media efforts can’t be half-baked. Starting a company Facebook page, putting a lot of effort into it up-front and then never updating it again is not effective marketing.

Businesses should also have a plan for how to use social media in times of crisis, because Facebook and Twitter are often the most direct ways of reaching customers. The moment a public relations crisis happens is not the time you want to be asking the question “how will we respond?” Ray says.

Companies looking to improve brand image via social marketing also need to be wary of the legitimate privacy concerns their customers may have. Marketers need to be transparent about what data they collect and how they are using it, Ray says.

“As individuals become more concerned about information they’re giving up and how they’re using it, that’s going to have a big impact on companies,” he says. “There’s certainly some concern in the marketplace and government entities about use of marketing data. … Marketers just want to be fully transparent, which they haven’t always been.”

Privacy and security concerns also have businesses wondering how they can use social networking to improve collaboration among internal employees, without exposing themselves to risk. Companies are wary of employees releasing sensitive information like layoffs and acquisitions.

“The risk that comes with social media is how viral it is,” Dangson says. “It’s the risk of scale that can work both ways.”

That’s why many businesses will opt to create their own internal social networks, which can be controlled and open only to employees, and perhaps to business partners.

In 2010, you’re likely to hear the phrase “Facebook for the enterprise.” Salesforce.com recently announced “Chatter,” a social-networking application that is designed for internal business use but can also incorporate content from public social networking sites by taking advantage of the Facebook and Twitter APIs. Therefore, employees can receive in the same feed a mix of private content from their bosses and fellow employees, and public content from Facebook and Twitter that is related to their jobs.

Bruce Francis, vice president of corporate strategy for Salesforce, says he doesn’t know anyone without a Facebook account. Eventually, he thinks employees will develop extensive corporate profiles as well, and relationships between the public and corporate profiles will develop.

“The question we are asking everyone is ‘why is it you know more about strangers on Facebook than you do about your colleagues and employees?’” Francis says. “You know who has gone to the movies, but you don’t necessarily know about when one of your key sales reps has just visited a major account.”

Even though many CIOs seem wary of social networking in the workplace, Francis is confident that IT executives will ultimately embrace the trend.

“I think that every CIO is looking at what’s been going on with the rise of social networks like Twitter and Facebook,” Francis says. “Companies are wondering, ‘how can I capture that energy, that relevance, that better way of managing all the information that’s important to me, how can I capture that for my company?’”

Just as in Facebook, Chatter allows people and applications to send users news in real time, but the security model will allow IT to determine what types of information employees can see. Salesforce believes this granular privacy control will help assuage concerns businesses have about the security of public social networking sites.

There are also private alternatives to Twitter, such as a service called Yammer, which lets companies create streams available only to their own employees. New privacy controls for Facebook, which have been criticized by many users for making too much information public, may ultimately make it easier for people to present different information to business colleagues and personal contacts.

“What companies are really asking for is a better way to collaborate,” Francis says.

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By Robert McMillan
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
December 18, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Ten privacy and consumer groups, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), filed a complaint Thursday with the U.S.Federal Trade Commission, saying that Facebook’s newly revamped privacy settings are deceptive and unfair.

Facebook unveiled the new privacy settings last week, saying that they were giving users more granular control over their settings, but critics immediately jumped on the fact that Facebook’s new default settings push information that may previously have been semi-private onto the Internet and they now give users no way to block their friends’ Facebook applications from accessing personal data.

“Facebook is engaging in unfair and deceptive acts and practices,” that are “likely to cause substantial injury to consumers,” says the complaint, which was posted to EPIC’s Web site Thursday.

In an e-mailed response to the complaint, a Facebook spokesman said the company was “disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them.” Facebook discussed these changes with regulators, including the FTC prior to going live with them.

Since the changes went live on Dec. 9, Facebook has made some adjustments. The company now gives users a way to prevent their list of friends from being publicly available.

Among those who signed the complaint are the American Library Association, the Center for Digital Democracy, the Consumer Federation of America, and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

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By Sumner Lemon
IDG News Service (Singapore Bureau)
December 11, 2009

SINGAPORE - Social networking site Friendster accepted a buyout offer from Malaysia’s MOL Global, which hopes to generate revenue from the site using micropayments.

One of the first social networking sites, Friendster was among the most popular Internet sites before it was eclipsed by new entrants, including Facebook and MySpace. While Friendster eventually lost traction among users in most major markets, the company remained popular in Southeast Asia.

Friendster says 90 percent of its traffic comes from Asia. In August, the site had 20 million active users from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.

MOL and Friendster, which is privately held, did not disclose financial terms of the acquisition deal.

The buyout extends a partnership between the two companies, announced in October. Under the terms of that deal, MOL will provide a payment platform for Friendster’s e-commerce services, Friendster Wallet and Friendster Gift Shop, where users can buy virtual gifts for friends.

Friendster Wallet allows users to make purchases at the online Gift Shop using virtual currency. Users buy the virtual currency, called Friendster Coins, using top-up cards sold at physical shops, such as convenience stores.

“The new combined entity will now build upon that initial set of products to deliver a content distribution network and e-commerce platform,” the companies said in a statement.

In addition, MOL plans to use the other business interests of its main shareholder to attract more users to Friendster. Those businesses include franchises in Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia for Starbucks, 7-Eleven, Borders, Krispy Kreme, Wendy’s, and Papa John’s Pizza, the statement said.

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By Robert McMillan
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
December 9, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - What do phishing, instant messaging malware, DDoS attacks and 419 scams have in common? According to Cisco Systems, they’re all has-been cybercrimes that were supplanted by slicker, more menacing forms of cybercrime over the past year.

In its 2009 Annual Security Report, due to be released Tuesday, Cisco says that the smart cyber-criminals are moving on.

“Social media and the data-theft Trojans are the things that are really in their ascent,” said Patrick Peterson, a Cisco researcher. “You can see them replacing a lot of the old-school things.”

Peterson is talking about attacks such as the Koobface worm, which spreads via Facebook and Twitter. Koobface asks victims to look at a fake YouTube video, which ultimately leads to a malicious download. Cisco estimates that Koobface has now infected more than 3 million computers, and security vendors such as Symantec expect social network attacks to be a major problem in 2010.

Another sneaky attack: the Zeus password-stealing Trojan. According to Cisco, Zeus variants infected almost 4 million computers in 2009. Eastern European gangs use Zeus to hack into bank accounts. They then use their networks of money mules to wire stolen funds out of the U.S. They have been linked to about $100 million in bank losses, some of which have been recovered, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said last month.

With that kind of success, older types of attacks such as instant messaging worms and phishing are now on the decline, Peterson said.

Traditional phishing is becoming harder as consumers become wary of suspicious banking sites and the banks themselves are now adept at getting these sites taken off the Internet.

Those factors make password stealing Trojans like Zeus even more popular, Peterson said. “They’re focusing on other ways to basically accomplish the same thing.”

One scourge that’s not slowing down, however, is spam. Cisco expects spam volume to rise between 30 and 40 percent next year, even though countries such as the U.S. have knocked some spammers offline. In fact, U.S. spam dropped 20 percent in 2009, and the U.S. lost its traditional position as the world’s number-one source of spam. More spam now comes from Brazil, Cisco says.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
December 2, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Enterprise data needs will grow a staggering 650% over the next five years, and that’s just one of numerous challenges IT leaders have to start preparing for today, analysts said as the annual Gartner Data Center Conference kicked off in Las Vegas Tuesday morning.

Rising use of social networks, rising energy costs and a need to understand new technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing are among the top issues IT leaders face in the evolving data center, Gartner analyst David Cappuccio said in an opening keynote address.

The 650% enterprise data growth over the next five years poses a major challenge, in part because 80% of the new data will be unstructured, Cappuccio said. IT executives have to make sure data can be audited and meet regulatory and compliance objectives, while attempting to ensure that growing storage needs don’t break the bank. Technologies such as thin provisioning, deduplication and automated storage tiering can help reduce costs.

“If you’re not doing thin provisioning in storage today, you need to start,” Cappuccio said. “It’s an easy, logical way to reduce storage consumption.”

Deduplication is another technology IT officials have to examine. Many IT shops are seeing storage reductions of 50% to 60% with dedupe, which eliminates duplicate copies of stored objects and files, he said. Another money-saving technology is automated tiering, which makes sure data is stored on appropriately priced boxes. As much as 80% of data on high-speed drives is almost never used and should be moved to less expensive storage tiers, he said.

Cappuccio listed 10 key issues for IT managers to examine: virtualization; the data deluge; energy and green IT; complex resource tracking; consumerization of IT and social software; unified communications; mobile and wireless; system density; mashups and portals; and cloud computing.

Social networks are coming into the enterprise whether CIOs want them to or not, Cappuccio said. Twitter use grew an amazing 1,382% in 2008 and the majority of new users were between the ages of 39 and 51, he said.

“It is a growing phenomenon which we can’t shut down,” he said. Employees and customers are using wikis, blogs, Facebook and Twitter and “it’s affecting you now whether you know it or not.” Businesses need to examine Web-based social software platforms because they are transforming interactions with both customers and employees, he said.

IT managers are also being forced to look more at energy use, as many organizations are moving the energy bill from the facilities department to the IT department. “What’s happening now is CFOs are asking embarrassing questions [about power use],” Cappuccio said.

The energy cost of two racks of servers, at full density, can exceed $105,000 a year, he said. And servers are only growing denser, with new blades that incorporate servers, storage, switches, memory and I/O capabilities. At today’s prices, the money spent on supplying energy to an x86 server will exceed the cost of that server within three years, he said.

IT managers are accustomed to being asked to “do more with less,” but that need is taking on new levels of meaning as IT is forced to curtail energy use, Cappuccio said. The energy bill has not traditionally been a part of the IT budget but CIOs can expect it to be incorporated into their spending plans soon, he said.

Energy costs are the main reason businesses are pursuing server virtualization. Despite what hypervisor vendors might have you believe, virtualization typically doesn’t reduce complexity or management costs but the energy savings from packing multiple virtual machines onto a single box are very real, Cappuccio said.

Gartner analysts noted that there is declining level of trust in the IT market on the heels of the recession, but the research firm expects global IT spending to rise a modest 2.3% in 2010. “There’s no denying that it’s been a tough year,” Gartner analyst Joe Baylock said. Enterprises are extending the life of old equipment to save money, but this is also subjecting users to higher failure rates caused by aging hardware.

Future spending growth might be driven by cloud computing, but Gartner analysts are predicting that most cloud spending will initially focus on building private cloud networks rather than outsourcing services to external cloud providers.

“We think private cloud services are going to be 70% to 80% of the investments over the next few years,” Cappuccio said.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
November 27, 2009

The undeniable popularity of social networking is making a huge impact on the call center, transforming the way businesses deal with their customers, industry experts and analysts said during a recent contact center summit held Wednesday.

The sheer number of social networking users around the globe, according to analysts, is slowly getting to a magnitude that companies cannot simply ignore.

“Social networking is not just centered in the United States,” said Shivanu Shukla, industry manager, ICT practice for Asia Pacific, Frost & Sullivan.  “Indonesia ranks 7^th among the top Facebook users globally, with the Philippines coming at 17^th with 2.7 million users and still growing.”

Shukla, speaking at the Customer Contact Philippines Summit 2009 organized by analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, said social media has therefore progressed from being a mere fad into a tool which helps firms listen to customer experiences and make a significant business impact.

“Social media helps you be proactive with customer care,” Shukla notes.  “Having that ability is critical.  People are spending more than 25 minutes on Facebook pages-and that’s a lot of time.  If you put a dollar value to that, it’s a significant dollar loss; but you can make that into an opportunity, if you can reach out to them.”

Every day, Shukla points out, customers are talking about products and services over the Internet.  “We need to listen to that conversation.  When people are talking about your products and services to their friends, how can we take that info, and do something about it for the good of the company?” he said.

A dynamic world
This change in the rules of the game has given rise to a dynamic contact center, which enables customers to have more ways of communicating with the enterprise.

“The coming of the millennials-the younger generation born or have been raised at the turn of the millennium-will signal a change in the way customers deal with various companies, changing the face of customer care as firms know it,” posed Kevin Panozza, CEO, Engagement Matters, and erstwhile chief of Australia’s SalesForce.

These changes, according to Panozza, are very difficult for most companies to adopt.  The recession, however, provides the best opportunity for firms to transform their businesses.  “The new marketplace is very different,” he said.  “Yesterday, companies competed with each other.  Today, they are competing just for the opportunity to speak and to be heard.”

Panozza said the enterprise space is lagging in terms of utilizing new technologies to further their businesses.  “The enterprise is not keeping up with the world.  There are many things the enterprise won’t allow customers to do, because they would like to sit in a cube.  Right now, there are a lot of channels available to people which the companies can utilize,” he suggested.

The Internet for the customers, Panozza illustrated, is like going to a shop with no one to assist them in making their choices.  “You’re on your own, there’s no one to help you,” he admitted.  This setup, he said, allows companies to be proactive in their approach to business dealing.

Integrated contact center
But the addition of social media to the plethora of channels available for contact centers poses a challenge to its managers.  “Social media means knowledge and systems are now distributed,” explained Rob Delnoj, business communication management head, SAP.  “It becomes important that when a customer calls, agents already have access to vast information and expertise needed to serve the customer.”

Most CRM (customer relationship management) issues can be traced to processes involving human communication, Delnoj clarified.  “These challenges can be seen in a non-optimal call center.  If you have one system in place, it becomes easier to manage,” he added.

It becomes increasingly important, therefore, to blend communications with the business process, because brick and mortar call centers are becoming a thing of the past, Delnoj concluded.

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By MIS Asia staff
MIS Asia
November 20, 2009

SINGAPORE - Mobile devices are the preferred tools by social network site (SNS) users over PCs in at least four Asian countries, according to a recent IDC survey report.

The report titled Examining Usage, Perceptions, and Monetization: The Coming of Age for Social Network Sites in Asia/Pacific said more than 50 per cent of respondents in China, India, South Korea and Thailand access social networks such as Facebook weekly via mobile phones.

In China and Thailand, 62 per cent and 65 per cent of the respective respondents use mobile phones to get news alerts and notifications, receive and reply to messages, upload photos, or update personal status and profiles on popular SNS.

On the other hand, 19 per cent and 25 per cent of the respondents in Australia and Singapore, respectively, registered the lowest percentage of users who access mobile versions of SNS on a weekly basis.

“The prevalence of owning a cellular phone over a PC in China, India and Thailand has directly boosted the popularity of mobile SNS access,” said Debbie Swee, market analyst, IDC Asia/Pacific Emerging Technologies Research.

The number of mobile users in South Korea is also large but the growth has been attributed to another factor.

“The [South Korean] market is technologically advanced and has already seen mass adoption of mobile Internet as compared with all other countries surveyed in the study,” Swee explained.

Despite a similar technological status of the Australian and Singaporean markets, “the overwhelming importance of the PC over mobile has created strong inertia against adopting regular mobile access of SNSes,” the IDC analyst added.

Lower telco rates

According to the IDC report, there are indications that mobile operators’ pricing strategies are preventing non-users from going to mobile social networking.

“For mobile operators in China, India and Thailand, IDC believes a low flat-rate Internet access fee would complement and increase mobile SNS adoption,” Swee said.

Most users who have never accessed SNS through mobile phones said they are prevented from doing so because of the costly data tariffs in the form of mobile Internet, SMS or MMS access.

However, they also expressed intention of trying out mobile versions of SNS if telcos offer more affordable data rates. To a lesser extent, the availability of user-friendly mobile applications is also perceived as a notable area of improvement.

For other countries, increasing the number of users of mobile SNS might just be a matter of marketing approach.

“In Australia, South Korea and Singapore where data tariffs are already relatively low, operators need to correct users’ misconceptions of pricey data plans through advertising and other marketing efforts,” Swee said.

She stressed that failing to do so could mean that mobile Internet applications and services, not just mobile SNSs, will take longer to take off.

Undertaken by the IDC’s Asia/Pacific End-User Research and Statistics Group (ERS), the survey involved 1,400 social network site users, aged between 15-35 years old, from December 2008 to January 2009. It is part of a series of studies that evaluate the impact of Web 2.0 on Internet users in Australia, India, China, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

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By Eric Lai
Computerworld (US)
November 11, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - An anonymous group calling itself “Control Your Info” has taken over hundreds of Facebook groups to highlight what it claims is a major security weakness on the social networking site.

Facebook downplayed the incident and said no hacking or confidential information was involved.

As of this morning, more than 200 Facebook groups were hijacked and renamed “Control Your Info” . Pasted on each group’s Wall was a message announcing that it had been “hijacked” and reminding members to be careful about controlling personal information on social networking sites.

“This means we control a certain part of the information about you on Facebook. If we wanted we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage your image,” the message said.

“For example we could rename your group and call it something very inappropriate and nasty, like “I support pedophile’s rights,” the message said while going on to assure group members that the group wouldn’t do that. The message also promised to restore each hijacked group’s name by the “end of next week” and promised not to “mess anything up.”

A separate Web site set up by Control Your Info claimed that the group’s action did not constitute hacking, but was a demonstration of how a legitimately available feature on Facebook can be used to easily hijack Facebook groups.

According to Control Your Info, when the administrator of a Facebook group leaves, anyone can register as a new administrator for that group. To take control of a Facebook group, a user only has to do a quick search on Google to identify public groups with no administrators.

Once someone signs up as a group administrator, that person then can do “anything” with the group, including changing its name, sending e-mails to members and editing information on it.

“This is just one example that really shows the vulnerabilities of social media. If you chose to express yourself on the internet, make sure the expressions are your own,” the group urged.

In an e-mailed statement, a Facebook spokesman downplayed the incident and said there had been no hacking and no confidential information was at risk.

“The groups in question have been abandoned by their previous owners, which means any group member has the option to make themselves an administrator in order to continue communication to the group,” the spokesman said.

The spokesman further stated that Facebook group administrators have no access to confidential information. Administrators can edit a group name, moderate discussions or send a message to members only in the case of small groups, the spokesman said. “The names of large groups cannot be changed, nor can anyone message all members,” he said. In cases where Facebook finds that a group name has been changed inappropriately, it will disable those groups, which is what it plans on doing in this case, he said.

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
October 28, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - The experimental Google Social Search service , which went live today, adds opinions from friends and others to information a search engine provides on products and services like a new restaurant or smartphone.

The new service, created in Google Labs , adds a long-missing piece to the search pie, Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products told Computerworld last week following its unveiling at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

“We came up with a way to have social networks influence your search results,” Mayer said. “If you’re signed into Social Search, you get content from your friends.

“There’s a huge amount of data on social networks,” she added. “Think about social networking and it’s really about people as sensors. Is the power out over there? How is the snow there? Are the speakers good at this conference? If I can search this massive amount of data, a user can find out what it’s like over there right now. That’s very exciting.”

Google announced Social Search last week at the same time it disclosed that it had inked a real-time search deal with Twitter . Mayer noted that the two announcements are related in that users will eventually see Twitter posts , or tweets, in Google search results.

For today, however, all search focus is on the addition of Google Social Search to Google Labs.

Google Social Search is designed to let searches return traditional results along with updates and tweets that their friends and other people they follow on various social networks have posted. For instance, a user might want to buy a specific car. They can search for information and reviews of the car on a regular search engine and then use Social Search to find pertinent posts from their friends and colleagues.

Dan Olds, principal analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said the experimental new service has the potential to make social networking more useful.

“With it, you can mine your own circle of contacts for information, whether it’s for recommendations on a handyman or a pointer to a company that’s hiring,” said Olds. “It will also encourage people to expand their networks, since more friends and a wider range of friends mean more useful information.”

Olds noted that Google Social search is a good example of networks becoming more valuable as they get larger.

“Let’s say that I’m looking for a new LCD TV,” he added. “I’m researching models on the Web and happen to see some results pop up in my Social Search. Out of all of my contacts, it’s pretty likely that a friend or acquaintance has bought a TV in the last year or so, and they’re chock full of useful advice. The bigger my network is, the more potentially useful information it contains.”

How will Google know who your friends are?

Mayer explained that users will be able to fill out a Google Profile , which would be used to link to friends on Facebook , LinkedIn, MySpace and other social networks. If they use Gmail, Google will have access to their contacts.

“You opt in to using Social Search and then we look at who your friends are and what content they might be publishing,” she said, adding that Google is aware of people’s privacy concerns. “We tell you which data source we used in order to find that friend. We’re doing our best to be transparent about how we found the relationships. And people have the choice of whether they want the feature or not.”

Google did not disclose how many people have so far signed up to try out Social Search.

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By Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)
October 22, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft has reached collaboration agreements with Twitter and Facebook to get their members’ public status updates and messages indexed and presented in useful ways on the Bing search engine.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Online Audience Business, made the announcement on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

The partnership with Twitter has it working with Microsoft to optimize how Bing crawls and indexes “tweets.” Microsoft in turn will apply search algorithms to the Twitter messages, so that Bing users will not only be able to see a real-time feed of “tweets” but also rank them by how relevant they are to their query, Mehdi said.

“This is a big deal we’ve been working on for a long time,” Mehdi said.

To rank “tweets” by relevance, a feature Microsoft calls “Best Match,” Bing will take into consideration a number of factors, such as who are the authors of the messages based on a “social relevance” score Bing will assign to them, Mehdi said.

Bing will also evaluate the message’s quality, noticing, for example, if it contains a link to an online article or Web page. It will also take into consideration how popular the message is by calculating how many times it has been “re-tweeted” by others.

In addition to providing links to Twitter messages, Bing will extract the URLs of the pages that the messages are making reference to, so that users can go directly to that source of the information.

When providing links to “tweets” that contain a shortened URL, Bing will put in parenthesis the main Web domain of the link, so that users know, before clicking, whether it’s a reputable site and thus avoid landing in a malicious phishing or malware-laden site.

Bing will also display a tag cloud of the most popular Twitter topics, so that users can click on and dive deeper into them.

The Twitter deal is nonexclusive, and hours later rival Google announced its own agreement with Twitter.

“The ‘tweets’ will be integrated universal-search style, ranked alongside the other [different types of] results, and you’ll be able to click on those results and go to a page that shows only ‘tweets’ and real-time updates,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, in an interview after her appearance on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit to announce the news. Users will also be able to restrict results to Twitter posts from the get-go using the engine’s filtering controls.

Google has so far been crawling Twitter posts on its own, but the subset of content available in this manner has been very small, she said. With this Twitter partnership, Google gets access to what Twitter calls its “firehose” API (application programming interface), which was recently released, she said.

“So we can do this really comprehensive coverage and indexing of ‘tweets’ integrated into Google search,” Mayer said.

Like Microsoft, Google has identified what Mayer calls “relevance signals” in Twitter posts, such as the links they contain and the people authoring them. The latter remains constant, so a Twitter author’s level of competency in a given topic can be analyzed and evaluated, she said.

However, Google is looking at social-networking content in a broader scale beyond Twitter. When asked if Google is interested in striking a deal like this with Facebook, Mayer said, “We’re interested in comprehensiveness, which is a fundamental element of search. We need to have all the answers in order to find the answers for people.”

Along those lines, she said that Google is working on a new search feature to let users view content in their Google search results that their friends have shared with them on social networks.

“We can use social networks and analyze them to improve search quality. When you’re signed in and have a Google Profile established, we’ll look at the different social networks you associate with, understand who your friends and connections are, and surface content written by them on your results pages,” Mayer said.

The Twitter search-result integration and the new social-networking results feature will be implemented “very soon,” Mayer said, declining to be more specific. Google’s announcement of the Twitter agreement states it will be ready “in the coming months.”

Still, it seems Bing is for now ahead of Google with an optimized search experience for Twitter that is already live.

Although Google remains by far the most popular search engine, Microsoft is making a big push to improve its position in this market, starting with Bing’s launch in May and the broad search deal with Yahoo, which is awaiting regulatory approval.

In addition to its core microblogging and social-networking features, Twitter has emerged as a repository of real-time testimonies on whatever is on people’s minds, such as news stories of global importance, celebrity gossip and hot-button issues. As such, being able to capture, analyze and make sense of Twitter’s stream of posts is seen as an important new area in the world of search engines.

“We’re super happy with the Twitter partnership,” said Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, who was also on stage being interviewed by conference moderator Tim O’Reilly. Lu declined to disclose financial details of the deal. He also said he wasn’t sure on its duration.

Neither Mehdi nor Lu said much about the Facebook arrangement, other than to indicate that it will be similar in nature to Twitter’s but that it will be implemented at a later date.

It will be interesting to see what shape the Facebook agreement takes, considering that Facebook allows individual members to make only basic profile information available via search engine results. Facebook has indicated it may let members make their profiles open to anyone on the Web, including their status updates, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a much more open service and most of its users make public their “tweets,” messages that can’t be longer than 140 characters.

Facebook expects its deal with Bing to become active early next year, a Facebook spokeswoman said via e-mail. Before Bing can make Facebook status updates searchable, Facebook has to first roll out to all users its new Publisher Privacy Control system, which is now being tested with a small group of users, the spokeswoman said.

“As you may recall, the new Publisher Privacy Control enables users to define who can see the content they publish on a per-post basis. For example, they may want to make some posts available to everyone, while restricting others to their friends and family,” she said.

Microsoft and Facebook have an existing partnership through which Microsoft provides Web search and search ads to Facebook.

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By Ellen Messmer
Network World (US)
October 15, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - A number of Facebook applications, including one called CityFireDepartment, has been hacked and tries to attack site visitors’ computers via unpatched Adobe software vulnerabilities, a researcher says.

Hacked Facebook accounts are not unusual but “this is the first time I’ve seen Facebook applications hacked,” says Roger Thompson, chief research officer at AVG, who said the firm traced back several hacked Facebook applications to a Russian site which appears to be taking advantage of the compromised Facebook applications to launch attacks against victims’ computers based on unpatched Adobe software vulnerabilities.

In addition to CityFireDepartment, which AVG is cautioning Facebook users not to visit until “it’s cleaned up,” Thompson says. Other compromised Facebook applications also include MyGirlySpace, Ferraritone, Mashpro, Mynameis, Pass-it-on, Fillinthe and Aquariumlife, he says.

The attack “uses an Adobe exploit, and if you’re not patched, it’s installing the exploit, initially rogue antispyware but probably also a Trojan,” Thompson says. AVG has informed Facebook directly about AVG’s findings but he noted it’s not simple to identify who maintains each of the Facebook applications.

Thompson has chronicled AVG’s findings in a blog item. The attack site, which appears to be in Russia, may also be associated with several other Web-based attacks, he adds.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
October 6, 2009

For a brief six hours one September weekend, time stood still for residents of Metro Manila as an advent of torrential rain from typhoon Ondoy (International codename: Ketsana) ravaged the entire Philippine capital, inundating houses and people with muddy waters and virtually erasing towns and cities off the map.

The irony of the situation was that nobody saw it coming. One would think that the Philippines, ever the stopover of tropical cyclones due to its geographical position, would be no stranger to such a naturally-occurring calamity.

Yet reports as of writing point out that at least 240 people have been found dead, 38 are still missing and an approximate 200,000 families have been displaced by the storm that recorded 455 millimeters of rain—a measure 182% higher than Katrina’s 250 millimeters in the United States and the first recorded of such magnitude in 42 years.

The country’s weather bureau—which reports and analysts say fell short in predicting the devastating impact of the storm—also pointed out that the gush of water on the 26th of September surpassed the monthly average of rainfall expected in the nation’s capital. “The system is overwhelmed, local government units are overwhelmed,” admits Anthony Golez, deputy presidential spokesperson, at a National Disaster Coordinating Council press conference the day after.

Where the government faltered in its efforts, concerned groups and individuals more than made up for in the inherent spirit of bayanihan the Philippines has always been known for. Aside from good-natured people who decided to help victims over at ground zero, various individuals likewise took to the Web and used the available tools at their disposal.

The power to retweet
Columnist and TV host Manolo L. Quezon III was one of the active Web users who coordinated the influx of aid and volunteers by posting regular updates on different evacuation and relief centers via Twitter. “Broadly speaking, my involvement included calling attention to relief efforts, directing people to contribute to directories for numbers and places to donate, relaying public concerns and requests for clarification to the authorities, and help with the coordination of actual relief operations,” he explained.

In the absence of up-to-date and reliable information posted by the government, citizens turned to their Twitter walls for up-to-the minute reports regarding the relief efforts of different organizations. Popular Twitter users such as Quezon, local celebrity Jim Paredes, Broadcast Journalist Howie Severino, Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro and RockED originator Gang Badoy were one of the most re-tweeted personalities throughout the week of extending relief efforts to calamity victims. Re-tweeting allowed short messages to be dispersed to an exponential number of people given Twitter’s networked structure.

Toni, a sales agent, for example, was one of the volunteers who went to the Sagip Isko relief effort in UP Diliman. “I volunteered [in UP] because I read on Twitter that they were re-opening operations today,” she says. “I was supposed to go to Balay Expo [in Cubao] because I volunteered there before, but they were close today, and UP Diliman was the closest center I could find.”

Brian Ong, the communications head of the UP Sagip Isko relief center and councilor of the UP University Student Council, said online social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have been very instrumental in disseminating information about the status of their efforts. “We often post updates through Twitter, Facebook, Multiply and Plurk, especially about the things we need here in the center and whenever we need more volunteers,” he explains, adding that whenever they would post quick updates, people would immediately respond with the goods or manpower they need.

Quezon echoes the same effect of social networks in one of his tweets, saying that his mother, who was volunteering for Red Cross in Pasig, told him that “there were a lot of volunteers who came and told them they heard about the relief efforts through Facebook.”

Facebook ‘flood’
Typhoon Ondoy caused flooding in many areas in the metro but the flood eventually reached the walls of popular social networking site Facebook as well, albeit in a different form. For several days after the typhoon, citizens used their walls to update their friends and colleagues with information relating to the recent calamity.

Facebook proved to be a vital tool in raising awareness that some users appealed to their friends to withhold irrelevant updates—such as network games, unrelated photos or irrelevant comments—to clear up people’s news feeds and make way for updates relating only to the typhoon. The result were Facebook news feeds peppered with pure updates from concerned citizens, able and willing to help in any way they could.

Directing efforts
The deluge of information proved to be a herculean feat to organize, especially for would-be volunteers who wanted to know which areas they can offer their help. Serge Gregorio, a local Web developer, was one of the first to notice this, which led him to action. “[During the typhoon], I couldn’t reach my brother and my dad. Frustrated that I couldn’t do anything to help my folks, I set up a Google Maps page for Ondoy Manila in the evening,” Gregorio narrates. “My primary source of data—mostly pleas for help—were Twitter, Facebook, the GMA News web site, and TV.”

Gregorio set up the Google Maps page unaware of its potential purpose in the rescue efforts. “I guess at that time, it was more of a ‘prayer’—rather than a rational decision—that rescue teams would notice the map site and use it,” he shares.

Little did he know that his small effort would prove to be a crucial instrument in trying to consolidate the dearth of information available online. “We were able to establish formal cooperative ties with GMA and ABS-CBN, who embedded the map we made in their respective news sites,” Gregorio says. “With the two giant networks behind our back, I was now more confident the map would be noticed and used to help save lives.”

By Sunday morning, Gregorio’s page gained more mileage when he was introduced to Dana Calit, an officer who works for Google. “She helped mobilize the company in making the Ondoy site more visible by putting the link to it below the keywoard search box at the Google Philippines home page,” he says. Other Google software engineers and willing Filipinos, he notes, also pitched in by improving the capabilities and interface of the map facility. By then, Gregorio’s small effort has become a central hub of information regarding the latest developments with the relief efforts.

Cashflow
Information proved to be a crucial resource in the recent time of crisis, but the power of the Internet was not limited to merely processing and disseminating useful information to concerned individuals. As the damage the typhoon wrought became more and more apparent throughout the days, people started looking for avenues where they can help in whatever way they can.

Mike Villar, a local Internet Marketer, was one of the first people to come to the victims’ aid using the Internet. “When you see people’s houses half-submerged—houses of people you know—it just hits you: ‘This is really happening!’ And instinctively, you jump up and do what you can to help,” he succinctly narrates in an online interview with local technology blog Technogra.ph.

“Being a professional Internet marketer with considerable clout in the local Internet community,” he continues, “I figured creating a website to collect financial aid is the best I can do.” Because of Villar’s efforts, PhilippineAid.com came into fruition, which drew widespread attention for allowing Internet users with Paypal accounts to donate to the cause through a widget called ChipIn.

In a short span of 48 hours, Villar’s efforts paid off—literally. He was able to raise over P300,000 to be turned over to the Philippine National Red Cross. The best part about his initiative? “It didn’t cost me a thing [to set the website up]. Zero pesos and zero cents.”
The same milestone was achieved by local consumer group TXTPower, who mobilized its members to ask for donations to be donated to PNRC. “We really felt we had to do something and provide people here and abroad an opportunity to concretely help via online and mobile donations,” explains Anthony Ian Cruz, convenor, TXTPower.

Cruz says they utilized their website (TXTPower.org), Facebook, Twitter, Plurk and their blogs to get their message across. “TXTPower’s fundraising campaign was included since day one in many lists [passed around the Web] on how people could help Ondoy victims,” he says.

At the end of their fundraising drive, TXTPower was able to turn over around P1.2 million worth of donations to PNRC, with more cash donations waiting to be remitted through Paypal.   “I think TXTPower’s quick, timely and correct decision to air an appeal for donations did it for the campaign,” Cruz surmises. “We also filled a gaping void: the Red Cross didn’t have a secure and safe way of getting online donations—and our campaign provided that.”

Later on in the relief drive, however, PNRC was able to secure a Paypal account, to which TXTPower and PhilippineAid.com directed all their efforts in. But early on in the campaign, PNRC enabled Filipinos to donate money by sending their airtime credits to access numbers provided by major networks. “Red Cross donation through SMS: text REDAMOUNT to 2899 (Globe) or 4483 (Smart),” a Twitter message being passed around reads.

Hard-earned lessons
The recent calamitous events proved to be a hard-earned lesson in disaster response and preparedness. However, more than anything, it highlighted the important role the Internet plays not only in simple day-to-day communications, but in the larger context of society as well. Without the efforts of netizens to dispose of and disseminate precious information about the calamity, people would still be stuck perched upon their roofs, waiting for capable individuals for much-needed rescue or nourishment.

Businesses and organizations still skeptical about the short- and long-term potentials of Web 2.0—social networking in particular—to their firms should therefore take a quick look at the recent collaboration efforts during the recent typhoon, and how effectively it has served the victims of calamity.

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By John Fontana
Network World (US)
September 30, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Microsoft users say their global workforce and the arrival of Gen Y employees are making strong demands that IT can no longer ignore for new collaboration and social networking tools.

“If you don’t pull those solutions into the enterprise and embrace them they are going to happen anyway,” said Diane Bryant, global CIO at Intel. Bryant was part of a customer panel at a Microsoft event in San Francisco Tuesday to promote Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010.

“It is the way to attract and retain the next generation of workers who are very comfortable in that mode of collaboration and communication,” she said.

Intel is taking a strong stance in embracing social networking with an environment that integrates with its deployment of Microsoft’s Office suite. Bryant said the way to deal with social networking tools is to be proactive.

“We have had our meetings with HR and legal to get over the hurdles,” she said.

Eric Craig, manager of IT for Continental Airlines, said social networking is also sweeping his organization. “It has exploded in a way we have not anticipated,” he said.

The social networking tide started with some 1,000 reservation agents working from home. “The unanticipated benefit of some of those social networking tools was the ability to communicate real-time chat to all these at-home workers. Once that program became popular, there were other business units that said they wanted to work at home, too, and work at odd hours and have families and all those other things that people like.”

Ford is also being driven in the direction of social networking adoption.

The theme emerging is that connectivity and collaboration will be a mainstay,” said Nick Smither, CIO of Ford Motor Co.

“Right now, business needs it,” Smither said. “We do business in 100 markets globally and increasingly we are more dependent on people around the world to contribute to our success long term …that is a business driver.”

Smither said Ford also is seeing a push from users who crave the flexibility they get from access to an always-on connection.

“Today’s Generation Y coming out of school and entering the workforce, have an expectation around connectivity all the time, always on, whether at home, traveling or in the office,” Smither said. “There is a focus on more sophisticated tools in the collaboration space to enable the flexibility to work anywhere.”

He did not go into detail around specific applications that Ford is making available to its users, but he did say Microsoft SharePoint Server is at the heart of virtual communities that provide collaboration tools for developers, designers and sales.

The company is building out its collaborative tool set as part of its One Ford global strategy that includes Exchange 2010 on the technology side. The company already processes 1.35 billion e-mails a year for its 201,000 employees.

During the event, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer acknowledged that social networking is largely a consumer phenomenon, but said companies are quickly seeing the potential.

“It is not whether [adoption of social networking tools] will happen in corporations, it’s when will it happen,” Ballmer said.

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By Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)
September 16, 2009

MIAMI - With consumers venting opinions about vendors left and right on blogs, social networks, discussion forums and news sites, Jive Software has developed a tool to help companies monitor and analyze relevant online chatter.

Jive Market Engagement, announced on Tuesday, is designed to automate the tracking of specific topics and keywords on sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, so that companies don’t have to set up myriad alerts and manually scan notifications and mentions.

For example, the product can monitor mentions of the name of a company and of its competitors in various social media sites and then aggregate and synthesize the findings in a central dashboard, where users can also drill down to details of specific “conversations.”

“Companies know their brands are being talked about in the social Web, so they set up alerts to monitor terms and names. They get a ton of references which they have to manually read to understand the intent and whether the arrow is pointing up or down,” said Ben Kiker, Jive’s chief marketing officer.

“That’s a very time-consuming model that you can’t scale, and it doesn’t work. With Jive Market Engagement, you can do that in a more automated fashion,” he added.

The product also provides collaboration capabilities so that workgroups can discuss and analyze the findings, generate reports and decide what actions to take.

Jive Market Engagement, which will be generally available in October, can be used as a stand-alone product, although it also works in an integrated fashion with the vendor’s Jive SBS (Social Business Software) enterprise collaboration suite.

The product, which uses monitoring technology from Radian6, is priced at US$25,000 and sold as an annual subscription.

That price includes the monitoring of a certain number of topics, the ability to share and collaborate on the findings with up to 50 end users, as well as consulting from Jive to configure the software.

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Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)
September 16, 2009

MIAMI - Facebook has passed the 300 million-member mark worldwide, as well as turned free cash-flow positive ahead of schedule, the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced Tuesday.

While having 300 million members is “a large number,” it’s just a start on the social-networking company’s goal of connecting “everyone,” Zuckerberg said in the company’s official blog.

As the user base continues to grow, the company faces “fun and important challenges” related to making the Facebook site perform faster and more efficiently, he said, perhaps alluding to Facebook Lite, the new stripped-down version of the site that is built for speed and has been well-received.

The company, which is privately held and doesn’t offer a lot of financial details about its business, had expected to be free cash-flow positive next year, but achieved that goal in this year’s second quarter instead, he said.

This means that Facebook now generates enough cash from business operations to cover the cash it spends on capital expenditures, a source familiar with the matter said. It doesn’t include cash generated from things like private investments that aren’t directly related to the company’s business performance, this person explained.

“This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term,” Zuckerberg said.

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
September 9, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Twitter Inc. co-founder Biz Stone told reporters in Mexico City this week that the companmy expects to add revenue-generating features to the microblogging site in the fourth quarter, according to a report today on Bloomberg.com.

After a year or more of speculation by bloggers and financial pundits on ways that Titter could generate revenue , Stone on Tuesday said the company is building an “analytics dashboard” designed to help businesses keep track of what is being tweeted about them.

The dashboard is expected to be ready by the end of the year.

Though Twitter has garnered massive attention from its use by well-known tech bigwigs, companies like JetBlue, and personalities like Oprah Winfrey and the women of The View television show, the company has yet to generate measurable revenue.

Just last spring, Stone told Computerworld that since the company has plenty of venture capital funds available, there’s no rush to create a business plan focused on generating profits.

“It’s not tough for us because we have a lot of money in the bank and patient investors [and a] patient board,” Stone said during the April interview. He said at the time that Twitter wants to focus first on expanding its network, increasing its user base and adding new features to the site. “We want to focus on this before profit. If we focus on profit, then we take people away from focusing on features.”

According to Bloomberg, Stone said businesses may be willing to pay for the dashboard features, which would first be offered on a limited basis. He also said that no pricing decisions for the dahsboard have been made, according to the report.

Online pundits and bloggers have been closely eyeballing the company and criticizing the lack of a Twitter business plan . Some have doled out dire warnings about the future of the microblogging site unless it comes up with a viable revenue generating strategy soon.

The company has been adding other features recently as well.

A few weeks ago, Stone announced that the company is working on enabling Twitterers to follow tweets based on location. Twitterers, for instance, could keep track of what’s being tweeted in their own town or the location-based tweets could help them track what’s happening in an area hit by a tornado or military attack.

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By Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)
August 28, 2009

MIAMI - Facebook will enhance its social-networking site’s privacy features over the next 12 months as a result of a set of recommendations from the Canadian government.

Facebook will increase the information it provides to its users about its privacy features, as well as make technical changes to tighten privacy controls, the company said Thursday.

The changes come as a direct result of a review of Facebook’s privacy policies and controls conducted by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Facebook cooperated with the Canadian agency’s study, which lasted more than a year.

Specifically, Facebook will update its privacy policy so that it more clearly explains its privacy practices. Facebook will also reach out to users, prompting them to review their privacy settings.

For the tens of thousands of third-party applications built for the Facebook platform, Facebook will begin to require that they comply with a new set of permissions, specifying the types of information they want to access. “Express consent” from end users will also be required before their data and their friends’ data is made available to external applications.

The new privacy requirements for third-party applications will take about a year to implement because they involve changes to the Facebook platform’s API (application programming interface) and to the applications themselves. It will be interesting to see how Facebook developers react to the news that they will have to re-tool their applications to comply with these stricter privacy controls.

In July, Facebook announced plans to simplify its privacy features, saying that they have become too numerous and complicated for end users to understand and apply.

Under pressure from Twitter, Facebook is also in the process of adding less restrictive privacy settings for end users who want to make their profiles, or at least portions of it, more public and thus more widely available to others on and off Facebook.

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By Elizabeth Montalbano
IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
August 27, 2009

NEW YORK - Companies can begin to target people over the age of 34 with media campaigns that leverage social networks as that age group has become the largest segment using Facebook, Twitter and other social media, a new study from Forrester Research claims.

While people in their teens and 20s were the first to adopt social networks for everyday use, they aren’t just for the younger crowd anymore, according to the report, “The Broad Reach of Social Networks,” by Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran. The report is based on a May 2009 survey of 4,455 people between the ages of 18 and 88 in the U.S.

“Much of the growth in social networks today comes from people older than 34,” he wrote. Compared with last year, adults over the age of 34 increased their participation in social networks by more than 60 percent. “Now more than half of adults ages 35 to 44 are in social networks,” Corcoran wrote.

People in their 40s and 50s still lag behind this age group in participation, but they, too, are beginning to use social networks more than in the past, the study found. And even adults 55 and older are starting to share and connect more online, Corcoran wrote.

“Seventy percent of online adults ages 55 and older tell us they tap social tools at least once a month; 26% use social networks and 12% create social content,” he wrote. “As a result, social applications geared toward older adults will now reach a healthy chunk of their audience.”

Corcoran categorizes people who use social networks as “creators,” or people who write blogs and upload audio and video or post stories on social networks; “critics,” those who take part in online discussions; “collectors,” or people who organize online content by using RSS feeds and sites like “Digg” to rate content; “joiners,” or people who actually subscribe to social networks; and “spectators,” those who view user-generated content online.

People in the 35-54 age group are increasingly joiners and creators, while adults over 55 are more likely to be spectators.

However, with so many more adults participating in social networks, it makes sense for companies to create media and advertising campaigns targeted to them in addition to the ones that target younger people, Corcoran wrote.

Only 18% of survey respondents don’t currently use social networks, compared to 25% in 2008 and 44% in 2007.

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By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)
August 27, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - A vulnerability in the popular microblogging Twitter service remains unfixed and can be used by criminals to hijack accounts or redirect users to malicious Web sites, a developer claimed today.

James Slater, a software developer who blogs on the site of David Taylor, a U.K.-based search optimization specialist, said that Twitter has not successfully plugged a hole he disclosed yesterday.

The cross-site scripting bug in Twitter allows hackers to insert malicious JavaScript into tweets simply by adding code to a field of an API (application programming interface) used by third-party Twitter application developers.

Developers use the API to direct Twitter users to their Web sites by embedding links in tweets created with their software. The link appears in the text at the bottom of each tweet, such as “37 minutes ago from Tweetie,” where Tweetie is the third-party application.

Shortly after Slater revealed the vulnerability Tuesday, John Adams, of Twitter’s operations staff, said the service had quashed the bug. However, today, Slater said the vulnerability had not been fixed.

“Simply by seeing one of these [malformed] tweets, code can be run inside your browser impersonating you and doing anything that your browser can do,” Slater said as he ticked off several possibilities , ranging from redirecting users to pornographic sites, sending a message to all of a user’s followers or transmitting log-in details for Twitter as well as other Web sites or services.
“If I tweet something, all of my followers will see it instantly,” Slater added. “[So] do you trust everyone you’re following?”

Slater said that Twitter’s bug fix only prevented hackers from putting spaces in the address box that builds the link to the third-party application. “Other than that, everything else is fair game,” Slater said. He also provided a demonstration using a dummy Twitter account, which Twitter has since suspended , as it did with the account he used Tuesday to illustrate the original exploit.
One user commenting on Slater’s post of today said it appeared that Twitter had completely patched the problem. “Looks like it’s been fixed, recent tweets containing code characters get converted to their HTML code equivalent,” said Scott Bowler, who said he works at a U.K.-based Web site design and consulting company.

Twitter did not reply to e-mail asking if it had, in fact, fixed the flaw.

Slater recommended that, pending Twitter patching the vulnerability, users ditch any followers they don’t personally know or trust. “Who’s to say they’re not already stealing your details? If you don’t see their tweets they can’t harm you,” he said. Slater also urged people to use a trusted third-party application to view tweets, rather than relying on the Twitter Web site.

Twitter has had its share of problems this month. Three weeks ago, a determined distributed denial-of-service attack took the service offline for several hours, and crippled third-party applications for several days after that.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
August 25, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - For anyone who complains that Twitter posts are too short to be meaningful, we present you with Twitter’s exact opposite: Woofer.

While Twitter limits users to 140 characters per tweet, Woofer requires each post to have a minimum of 1,400 characters.

Similar to Twitter, Woofer counts down the amount of characters you have inputted with a big number at the top right of the screen. But you’re not allowed to post anything until you hit 1,400.

Woofer calls itself an homage to Twitter, but to avoid any legal problems makes sure to include statements such as “We are not affiliated in any way whatsoever with Twitter.”

Woofer’s user interface is near identical to Twitter, however. The service also urges users to tweet about Woofer and for a while Woofer was “borrowing” profile pictures from Twitter users.

Last week, I tried to post a gigantic “woof,” by taking the text of a short article about Shaquille O’Neal and using the copy and paste function to get up to about 1.6 million characters.

Here’s where it gets a little weird. Woofer asks you to type in your Twitter username. So I typed in my real one (JBrodkin) and my 1.6 million character woof appeared, along with my real profile picture from Twitter.

I immediately wondered: how and why did Woofer post my Twitter picture? I didn’t type in any password. But I was signed into Twitter, so perhaps that’s why it was able to grab my picture, I reasoned.

To test that theory, I submitted another woof but this time I typed in the username of a different Twitter user, one whom I have never met in person. That person’s Twitter profile picture showed up next to the woof, effectively allowing me to impersonate this individual.

Woofer appears to be fixing this problem, though. As of Monday morning, most new posts are now accompanied by a picture of a little blue dog, rather than a real Twitter profile image.

Woofer does require at least some originality. At one point, I tried to woof by typing the letter “d” a bunch of times and then hitting copy and paste over and over again. My attempt failed and I received this message:
“No Woof. Really?! 1400 characters and you can only use d? You can do better than that…”

Woofer obviously isn’t meant to challenge Twitter in the microblogging, or “macroblogging” space, to use Woofer’s term. The parody Web site is run by Join the Company, a small company in Washington, D.C., which says it specializes in launching “entertaining websites that change the way people use the Internet.”

For the most part, it appears “copy and paste” is the preferred method of Woofer users to reach 1,400 words. Some of the first woofs reached the minimum by reciting the opening paragraphs of the Catcher in the Rye, the Gettysburg Address and the Old Testament.

As of Monday, 1,623 users had posted 1,934 woofs –for a whopping total of 38,683,934 characters. If you’re wondering, that’s about 20,000 characters per woof.

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By Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)
August 21, 2009

MIAMI - Twitter is jumping on the geolocation bandwagon, with plans to let users geocode their posts and make the information accessible both on the main Twitter site and through external applications.

Initially, Twitter will release to its external developers a preview of a new geolocation API (application programming interface), which will let developers attach geographic metadata to “tweets,” the company announced Thursday in a blog post.

“Developers will have access to this new geolocation feature early which means it will most likely be available on your app of choice before it’s available on Twitter’s web site. Later, we’ll add it to our mobile web site and Twitter.com as well,” wrote Twitter cofounder Biz Stone.

Until now, location information has been available to external developers, but via a “rudimentary” API that uses the location information Twitter users add to their profile. “Since anything can be written in this field, it’s interesting but not very dependable,” Stone wrote.

When the new geolocation functionality is implemented, end-users in all cases will have to opt in to append latitude and longitude coordinates to their posts.

“If people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information,” Stone wrote. “For example, with accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city — whether you follow them or not. It’s easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake.”

The geolocation functionality will allow developers to deliver “more meaningful and localized experiences” to their applications’ users, wrote Ryan Sarver, a member of the Twitter application platform support team, in a discussion forum for Twitter developers.

“We are also really excited about a unique facet of this release in that it will be API-only initially. This means that Twitter.com won’t surface the functionality and we look forward to seeing the new and interesting experiences that will grow out of the ecosystem,” Sarver wrote on Thursday.

Developers can expect to soon see a “Geolocation Best Practices” guide from Twitter that will address key geolocation API topics like security and privacy.

“The guide will create a framework from which we can address the challenges that come about when dealing with something as sensitive as someone’s location while hopefully allowing everyone enough creative freedom to create their own experiences around it. It is important to note that the feature is going to be strictly opt-in. It will be disabled until a user chooses to switch it on,” Sarver wrote.

There is no specific date set yet for the official release of the geolocation API.

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By Meridith Levinson
CIO (US)
August 18, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Forget job fairs and spamming potential employers with your résumé. If you’re looking for a new job, networking should be your primary job search strategy, according to the results of a recent survey conducted by Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

The outplacement firm asked HR executives to rate on a scale of one to five which of nine job search methods were most effective:

1. networking

2. using social networking sites

3. targeting management recruiting firms

4. using online job boards

5. applying to jobs via an employer’s website

6. cold-calling employers

7. sending unsolicited résumés to employers

8. responding to newspaper classified ads and

9. attending job fairs

Networking came out on top, with a 3.98 rating and nearly half of hiring managers (48%) ranking it a five (with five being the best).

Hiring managers named online social networking as the second most effective job search tool. They gave websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter a 3.3 score, with 47% of survey respondents rating it four or five.

Targeting management recruiting firms and using internet job boards tied for third place. Both methods earned average ratings of three from hiring managers. Applying directly to a position posted on an employer’s website ranked fourth, with just under a three rating.

The poll results also showed that hiring managers don’t think much of cold-calling. They rated it 2.2 on the five-point scale, which placed it squarely in fifth place.

Responding to newspaper classified ads and sending unsolicited résumés to employers didn’t fare much better, both of which received a 1.7 rating. (You can find out if your résumé is generating hiring managers’ interest in Job Search Tips: How to Find Out if Hiring Managers Are Checking You Out.)

Job fairs were deemed the least effective method, garnering a rating of 1.6 on the five-point scale.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas CEO John Challenger stated in a press release that attending a job fair “hardly qualifies as networking” even though job seekers have the chance to meet with company representatives because those company representatives are rarely decision makers. They’re simply there to collect applications, he said. What’s more, he added, many of the employers that do attend job fairs are there to find low-level workers.

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By Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service (London Bureau)
August 17, 2009

LONDON - Web sites such as Twitter are becoming increasingly favored by hackers as places to plant malicious software in order to infect computers, according to a new study covering Web application security vulnerabilities.

Social-networking sites were the most commonly targeted vertical market according to a study of hacking episodes in the first half of the year. The study is part of the latest Web Hacking Incidents Database (WHID) report, released on Monday. In 2008, government and law enforcement sites were the most hit vertical.

Social networks are “a target-rich environment if you count the number of users there,” said Ryan Barnett, director of application security research for Breach Security, one of the report’s sponsors, which also includes the Web Application Security Consortium.

Twitter has been attacked by several worms, and other social-networking platforms such as MySpace and Facebook have also been used to distribute malware. That’s often done when an infected computer begins posting links on social-networking sites to other Web sites rigged with malicious software. Users click on the links since they trust their friends who posted the links, not knowing their friend has been hacked.

The WHID sample set is small, encompassing 44 hacking incidents. The report only looks at attacks that are publicly reported and those with which have a measurable impact on an organization. The WHID’s data set is “statistically insignificant” compared to the actually number of hacking incidents, but shows overall attacker trends, Barnett said.

Other data showed how Web sites were attacked. The most common attack was SQL injection, where hackers try to input code into Web-based forms or URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in order to get back-end systems such as databases to execute it. If the input is not properly validated — and malicious code ignored — it can result in a data breach.

Other methods used include cross-site scripting attacks, where malicious code gets push to on a client machine, and cross-site request forgery, in which a malicious command is executed while the victim is logged into a Web site.

The WHID found that defacing Web sites is still the most common motivation for hackers. However, the WHID includes the planting of malware on a Web site as defacement, which also points to a financial motivation. Hacked computers can be used to send spam, conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks and for stealing data.

“Ultimately they [the hackers] want to make money,” Barnett said.

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