JetLib News

theodp writes “Ever since she was a toddler, freelance writer Lily Burana has been a Stay Up Late kind of girl. When her kindergarten teacher asked students ‘What time do you go to bed?,’ young Lily felt compelled to lie rather than rat out her own mother by saying, ‘Oh, between midnight and 1 a.m.’ She still suffers from insomnia, but has discovered that Facebook is the Promised Land for the awake and alone. She finds comfort in the company of others who, like her, live counter to the conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world.”

Source: Insomniacs, the Phantoms of the Internet

An anonymous reader notes a long piece up at BusinessInsider.com accusing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of hacking into the email accounts of rivals and journalists. The CEO of the world’s most successful social networking website was accused of at least two breaches of privacy. In a two-year investigation detailing the founding of Facebook, Nicholas Carlson, a senior editor at Silicon Alley Insider, uncovered what he claimed was evidence of the hackings in 2004. “New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints [in a court case ongong since 2007] against Mark Zuckerberg are valid. It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in 2004, Mark used private login data taken from Facebook’s servers to break into Facebook members’ private email accounts and read their emails — at best, a gross misuse of private information. Lastly, it suggests that Mark hacked into the competing company’s systems and changed some user information with the aim of making the site less useful. … Over the past two years, we have interviewed more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of this story — including people involved in the founding year of the company. We have also reviewed what we believe to be some relevant IMs and emails from the period. Much of this information has never before been made public. None of it has been confirmed or authenticated by Mark or the company.” The single-page view doesn’t have its own URL; click on “View as one page” near the bottom.

Source: Facebook Founder Accused of Hacking Into Rivals’ Email

A study of American and German college students suggests that people portray their personalities accurately on Facebook, rather than inflating themselves.

Source: No Lie! Your Facebook Profile Is the Real You

daedae writes “It seems Facebook has been granted a patent for the news feed, as a method of monitoring activities, storing them in a database, and displaying an appropriate set of activities to an appropriate set of users. ‘That sounds pretty broad, and the social-networking world was all atwitter at the possible ramifications. Writing for ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick proclaimed, “This could be very big. … MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo, Twitter (?), the sharing part of Google Reader, and even Google Buzz — do all of these sites have technology at the center of their social experiences that falls under this new patent of Facebook’s?” The patent may not be that broad. Nick O’Neill at the All Facebook blog wrote that the patent doesn’t appear to cover status updates as used by Twitter. “It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. … Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user’s friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial,” O’Neill wrote.’”

Source: Facebook Patents the News Feed

Facebook’s new patent on publishing streams of user activities has many worried for online innovation. But it could be worse.

Source: Facebook Patents Social Network Feeds, Raising Innovation Worries

A Wisconsin teenager is sentenced to 15 years in prison for a Facebook sex-extortion scheme.

Source: Wisconsin Teen Gets 15 Years for Facebook Sex-Extortion Scam

A Florida federal judge is siding with a student’s First Amendment right to criticize her teachers online, in this case on Facebook. Dozens of similar cases are cropping up across the country, with no clear legal precedent or rationale behind conflicting rulings.

Source: Student’s Facebook Tirade Against Teacher Is Protected Speech

supersloshy writes “Facebook Chat has so far only been meant to be used in a web browser, and instant messaging applications have had a hard time implementing it’s undocumented protocol. Today, Facebook is making this job much easier by enabling support for XMPP to access its chat service. AOL’s AIM and the Empathy Instant Messenger are also including pre-set Facebook options, due to already supporting XMPP.”

Here are instructions for setting up XMPP Facebook chat with popular instant messaging clients, including Pidgin and Adium.

Source: Facebook Now Supports Jabber/XMPP

Facebook is denying “all wrongdoing” as it settles a class action lawsuit brought by its users whose video rental and other information Facebook published without permission. The $9.5 million deal gives $3 million to lawyers but virtually nothing to the 3.6 million class members. It also paves the way for the creation of a new privacy group in which Facebook is a board member.

Source: Facebook Denies ‘All Wrongdoing’ in ‘Beacon’ Data Breach

Hugh Pickens writes “Google is set to make a fresh attempt to gain a foothold in the booming social networking business, seeking to counter the growing threat that Facebook poses to some of its core services. USA Today reports that the search giant is upgrading Gmail to add social-media tools similar to those found on Facebook, including photo and video sharing within the Gmail application, along with a new tool for status updates. According to reports, Google is planning to give Gmail users a way to aggregate the updates of their various contacts on the service, creating a stream of notifications that would echo the similar real-time streams from Facebook and Twitter. Google’s decision to exploit the heavily-used Gmail service as the basis for its latest assault on the social networking business partly reflects the failure of Google’s previous stand-alone efforts to enter the social networking sector. Its Orkut networking service, though launched before Facebook, has failed to gain a mass following in most parts of the world, despite success in Brazil, and its acquisition of Twitter rival Jaiku ended in failure after it scrapped development of the service.”

Source: Google To Challenge Facebook Again