SpeedPlexer Blog

Facebook turned six years old last week, and celebrated having grown from a dorm room experiment to reaching the 400 million user mark. They also added a few new twists to their service. 

For one, they have made some changes to their navigation design, so everyone’s home pages look a little different. Facebook engineer Jing Chen broke it down into three main points on Facebook’s blog:

• Stay Updated from the Top Menu
• Discover Content from the Left Menu
• Interact with Games and Applications

And they offer a site tour for those who want some hand-holding. 

Another update they mention on their blog is faster, simpler photo uploads. 

But the L.A. Times tech blog told us about a few more changes up their sleeves.  One is that they’re taking over their display advertising, which was previously run by Microsoft.  Facebook’s partnership with Microsoft dates back to 2007 when the software giant invested $240 million in the social network, giving it a small ownership percentage in Facebook, but now they’re re-working their partnership to focus more on the ways in which they incorporate Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. 

The other big thing in the works, as reported by L.A. Times tech blog, is that “Facebook is deep into a project long rumored to be in the works: creating its own Web-based e-mail.”  We’ll have to wait and see if they can offer something new and somehow more user-friendly and fun, because if not, people are unlikely to move away from Yahoo and Google.

Still, that’s a lot to celebrate. Congrats Facebook, on your great use of internet speed!

The Associated Press have alerted us that a “Network flaw causes scary Web error”.

• In Georgia, Candace Sawyer, 26, used her Nokia smart phone to access Facebook.com.  Without being asked for her user name or password, she was in…and in an account that wasn’t hers.

• She asked her sister and their mother, to see whether they had the same problem on their phones.

• They both ended up in other strangers’ accounts.

“I thought it was the phone — `Maybe this phone is just weird and does magical, horrible things and I have to get rid of it,’” said Candace Sawyer. The women had recently upgraded to the same model of phone and all used the same carrier, AT&T.

But it wasn’t just them. 

• In Washington State, Stephen Simburg logged onto Facebook from his cell phone and ended up in a young woman’s page.

• He got her e-mail address from the site, logged off and wrote the woman a message, asking whether he had met her at some point and she had borrowed his phone to check her Facebook account.

• They figured out they hadn’t met, but were both using AT&T to access Facebook on their phones.
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The glitch — the result of a routing problem at the wireless carrier, AT&T — revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.
The problem adds a dimension to researchers’ warnings that there are many ways online information — from mundane data to dark secrets — can go awry.

It’s not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. But experts said such flaws could occur on e-mail services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone, and with internet speed.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Facebook users are saying that they are being blocked from sharing Seppukoo.com with friends. As mentioned in our previous post, Seppukoo.com offers ritual suicide for the virtual selves of Facebook users by deactivating their account, giving them a memorial page and informing all their Facebook friends. But it can all be restored with internet speed by logging in to Facebook again.

Simon Axten, spokesman for Facebook, said in an e-mail to the L.A. Times Tech Blog that Facebook has an automated system that blocks links for known spam, malware and phishing sites. So it must be nothing personal, right?

Well we think the idea is funny. It’s named for the ancient Japanese samurai act of “seppuku,” in which the samurai would voluntarily kill themselves rather than fall into the hands of their enemies.

“As the seppuku restores the samurai’s honour as a warrior, Seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body,” the site says.

Because it’s a spoof, the design and layout of Seppukoo.com is strikingly similar to Facebook – though Seppukoo is red and gray, and features paintings of sword-wielding samurai instead of profile photos.

The site was produced by an Italian “imaginary art group,” called Les Liens Invisibles (translated from French: The Invisible Links). When asked for an interview, Guy McMusker, art director of the group, replied in an e-mail that Les Liens Invisibles couldn’t do it on the phone. The group couldn’t speak, he said, “because of its invisible nature.”

But he insists that Seppukoo.com was not started to attack Facebook. In fact, Les Liens Invisibles has a Facebook page.

“We’re not Luddites,” McMusker said.

But once he discovered that any mention of the site has been blocked since Dec 10th, he wrote in an e-mail, “we’re studying a counter-strategy.”

Rights advocate groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are not fans of Facebook’s new privacy policies. Yahoo news reports that the controversy came a day after Facebook began requiring users to refine settings to specify who gets to be privy to each piece of content uploaded to the website.

The ACLU’s Northern California technology and civil liberties policy director, Nicole Ozer, said, “If users aren’t careful, the transition tool will transition them to less privacy.”

EFF lawyer Kevin Bankston said in a blog post, “The Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome development that will likely cause a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook’s users, whether intentionally or inadvertently.”

But Facebook director of global communications Barry Schnitt says,”It is not that big of a change…. The process is more transparent and transformative than they give us credit for. When they see how many people around the world have made choices about privacy this will be hailed as a giant step forward.”

For those who may be pushed too far by this, or other Facebook-related issues such as too many strangers wanting to be your friend, or even too many people you know wanting to be in contact, we have a drastic solution:  virtual identity suicide.

The L.A. Times Tech Blog told us about Seppukoo.com, which offers ritual suicide for Facebook users’ virtual profiles by deactivating your account. And if you are indeed willing to end it all, the site will give you a RIP memorial page and send the page to all your Facebook friends. But it can all be restored with internet speed.  Just log in and your account is reactivated!