Facebook elected not to go dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, unlike Google, which blocked out its logo, and Wikipedia, which actually went grey.

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Soon, Missouri teachers won’t be able to send nor accept student friend requests on Facebook – or any other social network.
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German officials are demanding that Facebook-organized parties should become a thing of the past due to some events that spiraled way out of  control.
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A 20-year-old Philadelphia woman posted an open offer on Facebook to kill her child’s father to the tune of $1,000. A young Darby, Pennsylvania man responded to the woman by agreeing to carry out the hit.
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Major tobacco companies would fire up Facebook pages if New Zealand stubs out cigarette advertising.
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Two attorneys in North Carolina are fighting the 2008 state law barring registered sex offenders from using social networking sites like Facebook.
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If you’ve got an idea for a social media application and a case of wanderlust, this news is for you: 21 different states in the U.S. will have incentive programs for developers in place within the couple of years. Read the rest of this entry »

Well-meaning vigilantes circulated postings on Facebook misidentifying a serial killer in Philadelphia.

Local police became aware of the misinformation after the community rallied around the wrong individual’s house last night, calling him the “Kensington strangler.”

The misidentified man fled his home during last night’s confrontation, and asked the local police for help, ABC News said.

Now let’s stop right here and apologize to this individual. We’re not posting his identifying information here, but sourcing requires us to link to an article that includes his name. That’s not as bad as sharing his photo and address on Facebook, but still, multiple wrongs don’t make a right.

So we hope that the correct information has by now reached all 8,000 members of the Facebook group dedicated to catching the strangler. The incorrect photo got pulled from the group after Philadelphia police said the man wasn’t a suspect in the case.

The local police also held a press conference this morning clarifying his innocence. This came after a DNA test confirmed that he isn’t a suspect. He actually volunteered for it after fearing for his safety.

We applaud what Philadelphia Police Lieutenant Ray Evers said to ABC:

Everybody has to be very leery of photos of a wanted person on Facebook. Because of social networking and how big this fan page is growing … if somebody shared it with their friends, the multiplier effect … it’s pretty damning…. You can put any photo out on Facebook. The only one that should be giving out a photo is the police.

What does this case tell us about the state of affairs on Facebook? Should the social network create rules about how crime can be policed using the site?

Facebook is claiming that it is a criminal offense to use an add-on aggregation service that lets users access information from multiple social networking accounts. Power Ventures, creator of the social network aggregator Power.com is being sued by Facebook, who claims that their terms of service bans users from accessing their information through automatic means. Power.com’s motto is “all your friends in one place,” and the service allows users to log in to their accounts at sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Orkut and Hi5 simultaneously so that friends, profiles, messages, postings and content from many locations can be seen all at once.
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