Last month I received an email from a reader who informed me that he had received the standard SpeedDate acquisition letter which is sent out every time they acquire an existing application. It’s a strategy that the company has been using for a long time and so far it has been relatively successful. One of the most recent applications was the My Starbucks application which had close to 18,000 monthly active users that were huge fans of Starbucks.
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CNN’s partnership with Facebook worked really well for President Obama’s inauguration, so the two are back at it for the coverage of President Obama’s State of the Union coverage and President Obama’s Address to Congress. In the same way live coverage was supplemented with Facebook users’ streaming status updates during the inauguration, so too will Facebook users have the combined and social experience for the State of the Union. RSVP here.
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A Facebook application that lets you discover and track bands has seen some rapid growth in the past 24 hours and we think we know why. Apparently the application, called pickRset, is sending out notifications to its users’ Facebook friends with an invite to join a “fan page.”

This seems harmless enough, yet clicking on the invite automatically redirects to the “Allow Access” page for the pickRset application, without providing any other details about the app, and certainly not redirecting to a Facebook fan page. According to a tip we received from optionshiftk, clicking the “Allow” button on the app’s “Allow Access” page will in turn send out fan page invites to all their friends as well.
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Back in December I wrote that Facebook Connect had surpassed 100,000 users according to our statistics at the time. Our latest numbers suggest that Facebook Connect now has close to 1 million users. Currently we only have a sampling of applications that have Facebook Connect installed. According to Facebook, over 6,000 developers have leveraged Facebook Connect.

We are currently tracking some of the largest applications and will be adding more over the coming days via our Facebook Connect directory. With the launch of Facebook’s new commenting widget, there are most definitely thousands of new people implementing Facebook Connect and currently we don’t have an effective way of tracking those applications.
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This is a guest post by Rob Banagale. Rob Banagale is co-founder of Neutrinos, LLC, a digital media company specializing in iPhone application design and consulting based in Boston, MA. Rob advises clients on how they can extend their marketing reach to iPhone users, including the iPhone application publishing process. He has authored a Facebook application and remains interested in the design of social media platforms.

One of the most important parts of a person’s Facebook presence is their profile photo. This is displayed in the top left corner of a page. The photo can be a newly uploaded image or it may be drawn from any of your online albums.

Typically, a profile photo shows someone’s face, and appears in front of the light blue-grey line that connects from the left side of the profile to the left-most tab. View an example of a typical profile page with a normal photo.
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Over the weekend, the two leading March Madness applications saw a large jump in their active users as Facebook users prepare for the upcoming NCAA Touranment. Watercooler’s 2009 Bracket Challenge saw a large jump in their active user base to over 111,000 users. The CBSSports.com tournament application saw a jump of over 22,000 users.

We’ll most likely see numerous other bracket applications released over the coming week but these two applications have already launched and have seen an uptick in active users. Last time around some developers complained when CBSSports.com received premium promotional placement over the news feed for a few days. While that promotion has not yet begun, we’re guessing that we’ll see something similar again.
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This is a guest post by Joseph Bonneau. Joseph Bonneau is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory whose research interests include privacy and security in social networks. He originally reported these vulnerabilities on his group’s research blog, Light Blue Touchpaper.

Facebook has a spotty track record enforcing the privacy of photos posted by users and designated as private. Up until last February, Facebook’s photo security relied on users not being able to craft custom PHP queries, instead of checking login cookies with every photo request. It was only a manner of time before this was hacked in a fairly spectacular way in February 2008, exposing a few personal photos of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The “temporary flaw” was fixed, only to be hacked again in March, and again in May. The Associated Press picked up the story, Paris Hilton’s name got involved, and Facebook was forced to re-work their photo security and prevent these PHP-style hacks.
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This morning I’ve received at least 10 emails from people about misleading notifications that they received from friends suggesting that their friends “faced some errors” while viewing a user’s profile. The notifications are highly misleading and as expected highly viral. Within hours, hundreds if not thousands of users had registered for the “Error Check System” application to see what was wrong with their profile.
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Last night Facebook announced a new Live Feed implementation which connects E! Online, Variety, Bollywood sites Zoom and Saavn for the Oscars, and numerous other sites. The new implementation is similar to previous implementations that we saw with CNN, TNT, and Israeli news station Nana10. There’s one core difference with this implementation, which is that the same feed is accessible across multiple sites.
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A new bill is being proposed in Texas in order to push state and federal efforts for child protective services online. According to ABC News, Texas’ Attorney General Greg Abbott, U.S. Senator John Cornyn, and U.S. Representative Lamar Smith have announced the SAFETY Act of 2009. The bill would enable further cooperation between the state and online destination sites for creating a safer environment for children on the web.

As the law currently stands, convicted sex offenders have to provide certain information about themselves, including their name and physical address. This information is made public, in a database that’s accessible by anyone. The proposed SAFETY Act of 2009 would up the ante, requiring convicted sex offenders t provide their email addresses, mobile telephone numbers, social networking aliases and other electronic information to the state’s Department of Public Safety. Unlike the information they already have to give to the state, the electronic information would no be available to the public. The data would be utilized by the state and online social networks like MySpace and Facebook to help screen new and existing users for cross-reference.
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