“No, Your Social Networking ‘Friend’ Isn’t Really in Trouble Overseas” — That’s the title of a press release put out yesterday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The release was a warning to users of social networking sites, encouraging them to be sceptical of suspicious requests, even if they look like they are coming from friends. In a recent popular scam, fraudsters have been infiltrating accounts, announcing they are in trouble overseas, and asking their friends for money. Continue reading "Scammers and spammers target social sites"

When I talked with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in July, he said that much of his company’s future would play out not on Facebook.com, but on the myriad other sites across the web that use Facebook Connect.

Sure, Facebook’s user base was growing fast (it had topped 200m when we spoke, and recently eclipsed 300m), but Mr Zuckerberg said the real potential was in allowing users to log in to other sites, such as CNET and Citysearch, with their Facebook identity.

“That’s a lot of the future,” he said at the time. “A really interoperable graph of people’s identity that they can bring with them to other places.”

Today Facebook unveiled two new features for Facebook Connect that should help bring Mr Zuckerberg’s vision to fruition. Continue reading "Facebook makes it easier to Connect"

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, like so many private company bosses, is notoriously coy when it comes to numbers. He only periodically provides updates on the all-important number of active users (250m was the last official tally). And don’t bother trying to get Mr Zuckerberg to estimate revenues (unofficial estimates are $500m for the year). But in a rare moment of candour, Mr Zuckerberg provided Bloomberg with two interesting figures.

He said that Facebook plans to expand its headcount by as much as 50 per cent this year. The recession has resulted in a surplus of talented engineers, and Facebook plans to scoop up some of these workers while they are on the market. Though the engineers at FriendFeed were gainfully employed, Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed two weeks ago clearly fits into Mr Zuckerberg’s bulking-up strategy. Continue reading "Facebook’s growth spurt"

A mechanism to connect with your friends as you travel around the Web, a place to store and manage your network of relationships, and now… a platform for social apps.

Piece by piece, Google is building many of the core functions that define social networking. They do not all reside in one place, but as it finds more ways to link these things, the utility should increase exponentially. Continue reading "The Google social network proceeds apace"

If Silicon Valley technology companies go through something like the stages of life, then Facebook is in its adolescence — growing quickly, and struggling to find its identity.

That it is rapidly bulking up is no longer in question. The latest figures from comScore show Facebook to be the fourth-largest site in the world, with a 340m unique visitors, trailing only the sites of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Facebook has added 208m visitors in the past year, a 157 per cent growth rate that has allowed it to surpass MySpace, Amazon and Wikipedia. Continue reading "Facebook’s adolescence"

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Facebook prides itself for being a deeply interconnected network where links, content and ideas can go viral. That’s part of its appeal, and its pitch to advertisers.

But Facebook has found itself the victim of its own success. A user revolt is underway, as a huge number of users are updating their status to warn of a rumoured invasion of privacy by the site.

The message being endlessly reposted reads, “Facebook has agreed to allow third-party advertisers to use your photos without your permission”, and includes instructions on how to change this setting, along with instructions to “Repost to let your friends know!”

The message is indeed true. Continue reading "Privacy rumours rage on Facebook"

PayPal said in March that it planned to double revenues in two years, growing from $2.4bn to $5bn by 2011. It was an audacious goal, but today PayPal gave some indication of how it hopes to achieve as much.

With the official introduction of its platform on Thursday, PayPal invited third-party developers to tap into the PayPal experience and weave it into their own applications and websites. Called Adaptive Payments, the platform should expand PayPal’s reach, bringing it to iPhone, Facebook and Twitter applications, and perhaps into the physical retail world. Continue reading "PayPal gets a platform"

Marc Andreessen is on a roll. Earlier this month he raised a $300m venture capital fund with his business partner, Ben Horowitz. Now Ning, the social networking startup he co-founded, has raised $15m from Lightspeed Venture Partners at a whopping $750m valuation, according to All Things Digital.

Valuing Ning at $750m seems more than generous, considering the company has never said it is profitable. Even before the economic crisis, these would have been favourable terms. Slide, which makes applications for social networks, last January raised money at a $550 valuation, while LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, got a $1bn valuation last June.

But it seems investors are still willing to give some Web 2.0 companies the benefit of the doubt, trusting that a large enough audience will inevitably lead to profits. Founded in 2007, Ning lets its 29m users create their own social networks. Its aim is to fill the niche spaces where conventional social networks fall short. And its handsome valuation is a sign that investors, at least, believe it those will be lucrative spaces.

Neither Ning, nor its new valuation, however, hold a candle to Facebook, with 250m users and a recent valuation of $6.5bn.