Over the past two weeks I have been seeing a spike in the number of users emailing me to see how they can get their Facebook account re-enabled. Why are they emailing me you ask? Well, they’ve emailed Facebook, haven’t received a response and are now trying to figure out how to get their account back. While I’m sure that the frequency of these e-mails will increase as the site grows in size, over the past couple weeks I’ve seen a large increase in the volume of such emails.
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I’m proud to say that we’ve finally implemented Facebook Connect. It has been weeks in the making and without the help of Josh Elman and Adam Hupp over at Facebook this wouldn’t have been done this week! For now all that I’ve implemented is an easy way to comment on posts but in the coming weeks I’m going to be rolling out a large number of new features that build directly on top of Adam’s plugin.
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If you’ve used StumbleUpon, then you know about their iFrame navigation toolbar that lets you rate sites that other people have stumbled without creating a StumbleUpon account. The tool is extremely useful for finding interesting sites and it also lets you comment on a site with friends. Facebook has embraced the iFrame functionality of StumbleUpon for shared items from your friends.
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Yesterday Facebook updated their demographic data and announced that the site now has over 140 million active users. We’ve been tracking the site’s growth over the past year and a half and we decided to let our readers get their hands on our data to see what interesting things they come up with. We have been tracking basic data from Facebook over the past few months and now I’ve developed a Facebook demographic statistics tool to let all of our readers track information including country, gender, and age groups.

I’ve already been able to uncover some interesting data and the other people that I’ve shared this tool with have found some really interesting data. In terms of the data accuracy, we are currently using Facebook’s publicly provided information from their ad service. I’m also implementing some data smoothing models and given Facebook’s delay in updating their data we are off by a small fraction.
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For those of you that use Facebook application on a regular basis, Facebook has made a small adjustment to the way that the application menu works now. Rather than just viewing bookmarked application, you can also now view the recently used applications as Ray He explains on the developer blog. This change will provide more exposure for many of those application that users forget to bookmark.

When a user logs back into the site and can’t find the application they were looking for since they didn’t realize the bookmark feature or simply forgot to do so, now they can navigate directly there. It’s clear that Facebook is going through extensive user testing to determine where links and buttons should be place and making changes based on users’ experiences.
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Today Facebook will anounced the launch of their plugin directory. Included in the launch of their plugin directory is the release of a number of Wordpress plugins that you can implement on your site. I have yet to test out the Wordpress plugins but I’m sure they are good. I’ve already run into a number of issues related to wp-cache and wp-super-cache.
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The latest recruit to the Facebook camp is Daniel Levy, who has been named the company’s new director of risk management, reports VentureBeat. Holding senior positions at Paypal in his previous roles, Levy will have a focus on finance with his new job for managing risk at Facebook.

This is important for protecting the advertising revenue that Facebook receives from its ever-growing network. Given the modifications we’ve seen in recent weeks alone, the protection of Facebook’s advertising stream is vital right now. From new advertising methods and increased placement, there is a great deal of risk to be managed when it comes to Facebook and its ad network alone.
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Facebook has been fighting spam on all fronts. Whether it’s hackers and spammers trying to find loopholes in the site’s security, phish user data, or use other malicious techniques, or developers trying to cheat the platform, spam is a big problem. Just last week I posted about the Snowball Wars application which has since been banned. Today I stumbled across an application invite which asked me to install an application. The only problem was that thee of the links say ignore and one says confirm.
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Over the past couple years, Facebook has been the subject of many privacy flaws and hackers are continuously generating new methods for phishing user passwords. Today XSSED posted about a new set of cross site scripting vulnerabilities. Now that the vulnerabilities have been posted, Facebook will most likely resolve the issues within hours but it’s clear that Facebook has become one of the primary targets for hackers online. According to Dimitris Pagkalos of XSSED, it’s not even safe to accept friend invitations from people you don’t know. “The reason is that a Facebook profile contains enough personal information which can be studied by fraudsters in order to create special phishing attacks or malware targeted to individual users or businesses.”
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This has been the year of Scrabulous. In January of this year, Facebook received a letter from the Hasbro and Mattel lawyers asking them to shut down the Scrabulous application. Since then, there has been numerous updates including Scrabulous being forced to ultimately change their application name from “Scrabulous” to Wordscraper. Today, Reuters is reporting that Hasbro has officially withdrawn their lawsuit against RJ Softwares, the company behind Wordscraper and the original Scrabulous.
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• Power.com And Facebook Are Friends Again (Almost)
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• Facebook and The Myth Of Contextual Advertising - ReadWriteWeb
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• Tech Crunch
• The Webpreneur
• Mashable
• Del.icio.us
• Facebook
• Google