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vowe on Facebook

by Volker Weber

Since I need to write a story about social networks soon, I added myself to Facebook and sent out a couple of invitations. If you like to add me as a friend, go ahead. I am not going to be discriminatory. ;-)

Comments

Done. I was young and needed the friends...

Sounds interesting.
FB kicks ass, since they started to sell "*.jpg" for 1$ each. Stupid thing, but FB has enough stupid people who are buying this. Since they have this huge ammount of members...... every member has a birthday and another one might give him a nice little stupid jpg in his profile.......

But hey, why dont you build your own social network with Dolphin

I don't know very much about FB, so I clicked a bit around and found "find a friend".
I could not believe what happend:

If you have a Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, MSN or AOL email, you can enter your email login and password now to find friends in your address book who are on Facebook.

They realy ask me for my google login and password! I wonder how much passswords they got that way.

Wolfgang, LinkedIn do much the same thing. And yes, can you imagine what’s stored in these systems’ back-ends!

Woah.

You go into Google, change your password, tell Facebook the new password, import your contacts, go back into Google and change it back.

Now imagine, you would build a system like Facebook. Would you store the password, and why?

Now imagine, you would build a system like Facebook. Would you store the password, and why?

Volker, that's not the question for me. Even if they don't save the password it's a matter of "style". When ever I can, I tell people to keep there passwords secret and nerver trust a webpage saying "trust me, I am a good one".

OK.

Then how would you let people import their contacts from the Google address book?

@vowe: Make a deal with google to add a "search in facebook" button in the google mail app. This is the only way.

Adding my profile to facebook and let them make money with all the information I publish is one thing. I personaly would never do that, but it's up to every one to do it.
But letting facebook to read all my contact addresses may compromise all my contacts as well. If you do this I hope I'm not in your google addressbook.

Why do they use the mail address as login instead of some username I can define myself? When I search for a facebook entering a mail address, they are able to store (and use) this mail address even if there is no search result. You believe they are not doing this? They have to make some money. Facebook has an exclusive (advertising-) deal with Microsoft. Are they sending everything to Microsoft? They at last send SOME infomation about me to them. Who knows what.
They refejced a 750 million dollar deal with yahoo ... they must have a better way to do business.

Im am doing a bit of research on this aswell. Bebo is like FB for kids, but HUGE in Ireland (I mean it - email over here in the young is dying... Bebo messaging is the only way)

Paul, I believe Bebo is huge in the UK as well. Nobody in the MSM seems to have picked it up, but as far as I can tell there is quite a lot going on there. Still don't have an account there though.

Before you finish your article, you should try to get your FB-account deleted (deleted and not deactivated), Volker. Might be a nice sidenote :-)

Regards Mike

Wolfgang: I think you are reading a bit too much into this. Facebook is probably using the Google API to access data from your gmail account. The API call requires your e-mail address and password. So they ask you for it.

I'm not saying that Facebook isn't evil (I don't know). But I know that asking for your gmail password to import data from your gmail account is not an indicator for evil per se.

@Volker,

I don't know if this is relevant for your article or not, but Facebook hasn't magically solved the problem of sexual predators and underage children. When they went public and stopped requiring people to be students to have an account, they opened up this possibility. They do make an effort (people over 18 can't view the profiles of people under 18 unless they're "friends"), but they definitely haven't eliminated the problem.

link

Ah, and by the way. Make sure you create your own facebook plugin:http://developers.facebook.com/

Rob, of course they haven't. How would they. It's just a mirror of society.

Volker, yes, that's true. But society expects social sites like Facebook and MySpace to find a solution, and blames them when they don't. Society doesn't like to look in the mirror...

You want info on a bunch of social networking sites ping me tomorrow. I have a slew of stuff accumulated including examples.

I ve just stumbled upon vowes FB profile - whopping 118 contacts .... coool.

Ceci n'est pas un blog

vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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