Facebook

Starting this weekend, Saturday June 13th at 12:01 am EDT Facebook users will be able to choose a username for your profile. What this allows is your identity to be easily seen in your Facebook URL which up to now is just a number, as example:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1234567890

The new look will be similar to how Twitter does it:

http://www.facebook.com/your.username.here

There are several reasons for Facebook adding this new feature, with the main one being to allow for easy identification of a profiles URL. This will also make it easier for search engines like Google to identify and index web pages.

This is a first-come, first-serve basis so if you have a name in mind, I would reserve it early Saturday. Full detail instructions are available here and will also be present on your homepage starting this Saturday. Privacy isn't a concern since your new username will have the same privacy settings as your profile name.

For more information, read the Facebook blog post.

We just talked about live video chat and how it has not gained much ground on social networks a few stories ago. The website, All Facebook, broke the news that video chatting may indeed be coming to Facebook soon. Through surveying the JavaScript files Facebook uses for their website, a user of All Facebook found a number of notification messages which deal with video calling. With text instant messaging already in place on Facebook, it is the next logical step for them to offer a video feature. Plus, video would also then make their suite of communication tools complete.

According to an update in the article it looks like Facebook is indeed testing a video chat feature but have no cuurent plans to launch it for the general public.

For the full story, check out All Facebook.

On Thursday, an unknown number of the over 200 million Facebook users, gave up their passwords to hackers in an email phishing scheme. Hackers initially cracked passwords of a number of Facebook accounts and then, using these accounts, sent emails to the account holders Facebook friends telling them to visit the website. The link in the email actually sent them to another website which was made to look like Facebook. When the friends logged in, they unwittingly gave up their real Facebook username and password. It is thought that the attack was designed to spread SPAM and steal identities. The affected Facebook accounts have now been closed. Apparently Facebook faced a similar attack 2 weeks ago.

Last year a similar attack type of phishing attack happened to Facebook and MySpace users. The difference that time was a virus called Koobface, which users unwittingly downloaded, was used to generate a fake email.

Last month Match.com members faced a similar phishing expedition by hackers when they were sent emails that looked like they came from Match (see Story). The email asked them to log into a fake website to view pictures and a video which required a special video player. This video player was actually a virus.

For the full story, read Reuters.

Facebook announced late last month their new Open Stream API to developers. What this means is, Facebook user information now can be shared with other websites and software. Don't worry, users will still have full control on who can see and use their information. Apparently permissions will work similar to how the current Facebook Application system works.

This is good news for dating sites. It means we will probably see in the coming months or year the ability to transfer over information from Facebook when we create a profile on a dating site. Not all dating sites will do this initially but I bet one or two of the popular ones will test it. Dating profile quality is important for a successful dating site and it does suffer when people join multiple dating services. Who wants to type in the same information over and over? When this happens, less information typically is included in the newer profiles by the single as they grow bored entering the same information again. I am sure online daters would much rather store their profile information and update it in one spot. Facebook has enough members (over 200 million global users) to make them a prime candidate to offer this type of service.

For more on this story, read the Facebook Developers Blog and check out the Online Dating Insider for further insight into how Open Stream may help the dating industry.

There have been a few articles lately regarding who owns all the user profile information and communications that people do on social networks and online dating sites. It really came to the forefront in the news when Facebook updated their Terms of Use a few weeks ago that readdressed the ownership issue. Basically Facebook wanted almost complete control of all user generated content.

irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sub-license) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), ...

Many Facebook users complained about these new terms and with all the media attention it was getting, Facebook has rewritten their Terms Of Use and has posted a draft copy. They are even allowing users to comment and vote on the new proposed Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities For Users. This is a surprising move that should make many Facebook users happy.

In the online dating world, dating sites have Terms of Service that can vary wildly. Some are similar to Facebook's old terms and some to the new terms of use. The one thing with dating sites you may wonder about is how long do they keep all this information for and what they do with it. With most of the popular dating sites they have strict privacy policies about who may see what information. As far as with how long the information is kept, it is all over the map. Dating sites like eHarmony doesn't delete your information from their database. With eHarmony's 200 plus questionnaire, this is a good thing as if you ever need to return to the site, your information will still be available to you when you reactivate your account. The flip side of this for example, is Plenty Of Fish. If your account is inactive for 6 months to a year then your account will be deleted. Not a big deal if you are a returning user as it only takes less than 5 minutes to fill out any required information for the profile.

For more information on the Facebook new terms of use, read PC World. To better understand the life of your online dating profile on many of the popular dating sites, read ComputerWorld.

In the beginning of the year we took a look at a new Facebook application called the Little Black Book from Match.com. We were not overly impressed but, felt it did hold some promise. Being maybe a few weeks old at the time, the Little Black Book had 67 daily active users with about 600 total installed users. Our main complaints involved around the clunky user interface and browser compatibility problems.

A month later, David from the Online Dating Insider took a look at the application as well. At this time there was 240 daily active users. While not impressive numbers for a Facebook application, it was an improvement from when I had looked at it. In his review, David had a wish list of improvements and found the browser issues were still present.

Flash forward 11 months and the Little Black Book has disappeared from Facebooks application list. The last appearance I can find of it is a Google Cache page which was capture September 29, 2008. At this time there was only 100 monthly active users with a 1.6 out of 5 star rating. The reviews of the application were not pretty.

Did Match.com take down the application to redevelop and fix its problems or is it gone for good? I think it is in Match.com's best interest to forget about Facebook applications. A search for the term "Dating" on Facebook revealed that the most popular application has over 12 thousand active monthly users. Not a lot when you consider the 1.3 million paid users Match.com website had this past quarter. Match.com employees time would be better spent on other projects.