Unhandled Perception

Media reported that the secret project, named as Project Titan, will offer @facebook.com email addresses for users. The reports also added that the Project Titan can be regarded as ‘Gmail Killer.’

The special November event of Facebook is expected to held at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The event will surface Project Titan, which will change Facebook’s entire messaging system.

Link: http://news.oneindia.in

Yesterday Facebook rolled out a new feature called Places that lets you and your friends check in to locations, Foursquare-style. If you’d prefer to keep your location private, or at least stop your friends from posting it, here’s how.

If you’re not convinced that posting your location can be a bad thing, check out PleaseRobMe for some evidence. Of course, if you’re careful, check-ins aren’t inherently a bad thing. Whether or not you want to disable them is entirely up to you, but Facebook—yet again—has made the assumption that you want to take part in all of their privacy-eroding new features. If you don’t, or want a little more control over who can divulge your location, you can make this change pretty quickly through your privacy settings.

Facebook Places, one more thing that everyone should disable.  Why on earth do you want to share with the world where you are, and the fact you’re not at home.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/5616395/…

Facebook officially unveiled its new Open Graph API and tools a few weeks ago, making it possible for developers and end users to easily hook their own sites into Facebook’s broader ecosystem.

Link: http://mashable.com/2010/…

Looks cool.

At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that. – Facebook serves 570 billion page views per month.

Link: http://royal.pingdom.com/…

What we often don’t realize when signing up for all these accounts, though, is how difficult it can be to permanently delete our accounts when we’ve had enough. Some require complicated, multi-step processes that can stretch over the course of days (or weeks). Others take less time, but still require multiple steps by the user.

Below we’ll take a look at the account deletion processes of popular websites and services, and how easy or difficult they make it. Then we’ll discuss why sites make things so complicated, and some things to consider when designing your own deletion policies.

Link: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/…

I couldn’t believe when I saw that 7-eleven was getting involved in a Facebook Application (Mafia Wars) promotion.  Get the 7-eleven product and redeem some code at Mafia Wars on Facebook.

A new website is attempting to get ‘the masses’ rallied to quit Facebook.  QuitFacebookDay.com already has 24865 (at the time of this post)  members pledging to quit.  Wow.  That’s like .005% of Facebook’s user base.  That’ll tell em.

I have no intention of quitting.  Are you going to quit?  Leave a comment on your thoughts about Facebook.

Link: http://www.quitfacebookday.com/

You should see the new Privacy settings in Facebook.  The new settings should in your account by now.

Link: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php

The above is from my first scan with the tool.  Found an issue and provided a direct link to the setting so I could close the potential security hole.

Just follow the instructions provided.  It’s very simple even if you’re not familiar with a bookmarklet.

All-in-all a pretty useful little tool.

Did it find any issues with your Facebook account?

Link: http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/

Microsoft OneApp is a new software application that enables feature phones—commonly found in emerging markets—to access mobile apps like Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, and other popular apps and games. Now, people around the world who own feature phones will be able to do more and enjoy a better mobile experience with their existing phones. Microsoft OneApp will be offered initially through partners in emerging markets worldwide.

The have an interactive demo that allows you to play, and see, OneApp in action.  Not sure if it was a SilverLight incompatibility or what but the interactive demo would not work for me.  Not too worried as I recently purchased an iPhone, which by the way is excellent.

Anyone with hands on experience with OneApp leave a comment.  Let me know what you think.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/oneapp/

If you visit certain sites while logged in to Facebook, an app for those sites will be quietly added to your Facebook profile. You don’t have to have a Facebook window open, you don’t need to signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings.

These apps appear to be related to Facebook’s sharing tools. The sites currently leaving this trail all have Facebook Connect integration, and the list includes heavyweights such as the Gawker network of blogs, the Washington Post, TechCrunch, CNET, New York Magazine, and formspring.me.

Link:  http://www.pcworld.com/article/…