Warning out vs Facebook 'Closed for Maintenance' chain mail

Facebook users may have to be more discerning before spreading a chain letter that the social network will be "closed for maintenance" at the end of February.

Security vendor Sophos noted the closure dates specified in the chain letter - Feb. 29 to 31 - are already a giveaway clue.

"And, of course, it's kinda true. You won't be able to log into Facebook on February 29th, February 30th or February 31st this year ... Umm.. that's because those days don't exist," Sophos' Graham Cluley said in a blog post.

Despite the telltale signs, he said some users have taken the email "at face value and shared it with their friends, unaware of the silliness."

Cluley also noted the messages appear to be particularly prevalent in French, though versions of the message have also been reported in English.

He cited an English version of the email saying Facebook will be closed for maintenance from February 29th to 31st.

The mail urged users to "Share this message with at least 15 of your friends for the best chance of alerting everyone."

Cluley said this was not the first time a hoax has spread claiming that Facebook will shut down - some years back, a bogus news story claimed Facebook was permanently closing on March 15.

"Hoaxes and jokes like these are nothing like as bad a problem as malware worming its way between users and stealing information, but they can still become a nuisance, clogging up communications, increasing the overall level of spam and perhaps leading people to make decisions for the wrong reasons," Cluley said.

Teenager signs no-Facebook agreement, to get $200

There have been plenty of stories in recent years about Facebook addiction, with users unable to drag themselves away from the social networking site for more than a few minutes without breaking into a cold sweat or something worse.

One user keen to kick the habit is Wellesley, Massachusetts resident Rachel Baier, who decided that a financial incentive was needed to make it happen. The enterprising 14-year-old high school student has struck a deal with her father that involves him handing over $200 if she manages to stay off the site for at least five months.

“It was her idea,” Paul told the Daily Dot. “She wants to earn money and also finds Facebook a distraction and a waste of time sometimes.” Rachel initially asked her father for $70 in exchange for a much shorter period of abstinence, but Paul came back with a $200/five-month offer. 

The pair have even gone as far as to draw up a contract (below), which Rachel’s father, Paul, posted on his blog.

Titled the Facebook Deactivation Agreement (hey, this might catch on), the contract stipulates that in return for Rachel not logging into her account, her dad will pay her $50 in April and the remaining $150 at the end of the six months in June.

Just to be sure Rachel doesn’t have a sneak peek at her Facebook page when her dad’s not around, the contract says that Paul will take full control of the account by creating a new password. The final line states in typical teen parlance how she intends to spend the cash: “I plan to use the money for the following purposes: stuff.”facebook contract

The results of a research project published last year showed that young people were more likely to become addicted to Facebook, and that women were more likely to be addicted than men.

Norway’s University of Bergen, where the research was conducted, came up with the the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale comprising six statements which help to identify the warning signs of Facebook addiction.

And it appears that Rachel Baier isn’t the only one keen to cut back on time spent on Facebook – research firm Pew said this week that a recent study of US users of the site shows that one in four plan to reduce the amount of time on Facebook this year.

Facebook adds news retrieval based on your assorted likes

A new feature in the works by Facebook for its mobile app could add more automated content to clog your news feed or give you a way to discover articles on some of your favorite topics.

The feature pushes items titled "Recent Articles about" into your Facebook news feed, providing a link to articles about the subjects of pages you "liked."
Depending on how this new articles-related-to algorithm functions, the new feature could seed your Facebook news feed with valuable information or just add noise to it. Its usefulness also might vary with how many pages you "like."
The feature could compete with popular feed aggregating apps like Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite, according to Josh Constine, writing for TechCrunch.
That seems a bit of a stretch, since some distinctive features of those aggregation apps—visual verve and customization—appear to be missing from the new Facebook feature.
In addition, to buy into articles-related-to, you have to trust Facebook to serve up links to content that you really want to read. That's not an easy task and not one likely to be accomplished by calling your attention to a piece just because you "like" a particular Facebook page and an article related to the subject of that page is getting a lot of attention from Facebook's minions.
It can also be problematic because Facebook wants to keep you in its orchard and not go cherry-picking elsewhere. An app like Flipboard doesn't care if you click on an object and read an article at its native location. Facebook does.
That problem, though, is fixable. As Constine points out, Rockmelt, which bills itself as a social browser, has found a way to deliver content from other websites in a pop-up window  so a visitor doesn't have to leave one website to read content on another.

If such a feature were built into articles-related-to, not only could Facebook keep article readers on-site, but it could monetize it. It could cut deals with publishers to collect a tithe for delivering readers to them, and it could sell advertising to be placed inside the pop-ups. That should make Facebook shareholders happy.
Facebook already has a feature similar to articles-related-to. It's called Trending Articles. It tells you what your friends are reading or watching—while the new articles-related-to polls the entire Facebook universe. Also, Trending Articles can be about any subject—not necessarily one you're interested in—while articles-related-to serves up recommendations based on something you've expressed an interest in. Many Trending Article links lead to sensational stories auto-shared among friends with Open Graph news reader apps, according to Constine.
What remains to be seen is where Facebook will next take articles-related-to. Is it a prelude to creating news-only feeds as it has done with Pages and Music pages? Just as you can now see a page of updates to pages you're connected to on Facebook, in the future will you may be able to create a page of news sources you're linked to?

Facebook quietly launches "Find Friends Nearby" feature

Facebook's launched a sneaky update to its mobile apps as well as its mobile site with a feature called "Find Friends Nearby". As the name suggests, the feature essentially finds your Facebook friends who are near you. Needless to say, the feature requires you to turn on location services on your mobile device. It seems the feature has been made available without an actual update to the Facebook app from the respective application stores. The feature was initially called Friendshake but the name was then changed to Find Friends Nearby for simplicity. According to TechCrunch, the URL through which the service can be accessed is http://adf.ly/Ij8nC which is essentially an abbreviation for "Find Friends Nearby". Early on in May, Facebook bought location service, Glancee, which obviously helped with the creation of Find Friends Nearby, either directly, or at least with sidestepping a patent suit. Glancee pretty much provided the same service i.e. ambient location services, showing you which friends are nearby. Facebook's Find Friends Nearby will now directly compete with Glancee's competitor, Highlight.

Facebook engineer, Ryan Patterson, who built Find Friends nearby commented that he built the feature with another engineer at a hackathon project. He said that the ideal use of the feature for him would be that if a user is out with a group of friends that they have just met and wants to stay in touch with the new friends, Find Friends Nearby, with its recommendation system, is almost a better search tool than Facebook's native search tool. The feature not only provides you with information on which of your friends is nearby but also which potential friends are nearby, that is, people you haven't added on the social network yet but you may have some sort of connection with. To access the feature within the Facebook application you have to click on the menu > apps > Find Friends > other tools > Find Friends Nearby. This is yet another step in Facebook wanting to take over the mobile space. They also launched Sponsored Stories for their mobile apps in a move to start monetizing from the applications. Of course, the Find Friends Nearby feature has already received outcry from users saying that it's a creepy feature. If you're worried about being 'found', you can always turn your location services off. What do you think? Creepy? Or fun? Let us know in the comments below.

FB is a mobile company, says Zuckerberg, as number of desktop users dwindle

Facebook's mobile Daily Active Users (DAU) have exceeded those on the desktop for the first time in its history, the company revealed at its Q4 earnings call yesterday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the surge in mobile users, saying, “There’s no argument, Facebook is a mobile company.” He also referenced a comScore report to prove that Facebook is the top app in the US, beating Google Maps, and accounts for 23 percent of total time spent on mobile apps in the the country.

In the past year, Facebook has focused on growing its network and leveraging mobile devices and platforms by regularly updating the Android app and completely rebuilding the iOS version. However, such a surge in mobile DAUs was rather unexpected.

The company stated in a press release that mobile revenue represented approximately 23 percent of advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2012, up from approximately 14 percent of advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2012. It should be noted that these numbers do not include Instagram, which was acquired by Zuckerberg’s company last year.

The social network reported Monthly Active Users (MAUs) were 1.06 billion as of December 31, 2012, an increase of 25 percent from last year’s figures. DAUs were 618 million for December 2012 and mobile MAUs grew 57 percent over 2011 to reach 680 million in December 2012.

Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook

The release was accompanied by a statement by Zuckerberg. It read, “In 2012, we connected over a billion people and became a mobile company. We enter 2013 with good momentum and will continue to invest to achieve our mission and become a stronger, more valuable company.”

At an event last September, Zuckerberg projected that a day will come when Facebook would make more revenue from mobile users. That’s not the case as of yet, but the shift is in full swing. At the time, he had said, “We’re going to execute this mission to make the world connected and build value over the long-term. The bigger question that will define how we’ve done is how we do with mobile.”

During the earnings call, Zuckerberg discussed the power of mobile: “It allows us to reach more people, there is more engagement from those people, and we’ll be able to make more money from those users. Mobile creates a more dynamic ecosystem.”

Facebook stock declined 7 percent in after-hours trading even though its revenue rose 40 percent to $1.59 billion in Q4 2012, compared to $1.13 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011. Revenue from advertising alone accounted for $1.33 billion and is a 84 percent chunk of total revenue. Payments and other fees for the fourth quarter were to the tune of $256 million.

Facebook buys location-based service, Glancee

Facebook's gone shopping again. While this time it's not with a $1 billion cheque, it's still a service that Facebook could use to make its mobile presence stronger. The service they acquired is called Glancee and it is an ambient location application. The app helps you discover people that are in your proximity and also friends and the things that you might have in common with them. Glancee used to use Facebook to find common friends and also Wikipedia to match users based on interest. Now, according to TechCrunch, Facebook has shut down Glancee's ambient location app and the three employees who work at Glancee have now joined Facebook. The technology that Glancee uses, of course, now belongs to Facebook. The social networking giant released a statement saying, "We are thrilled to confirm that Facebook has acquired Glancee. The acquisition closed today. We can’t wait for co-founders Andrea, Alberto and Gabriel to join the Facebook team to work on products that help people discover new places and share them with friends.”

Glancee put a message up on their homepage that mentions the acquisition. They said, "We started Glancee in 2010 with the goal of bringing together the best of your physical and digital worlds. We wanted to make it easy to discover the hidden connections around you, and to meet interesting people. Since then Glancee has connected thousands of people, empowering serendipity and pioneering social discovery. We are therefore very excited to announce that Facebook has acquired Glancee and that we have joined the team in Menlo Park to build great products for over 900 million Facebook users. We’ve had such a blast connecting people through Glancee, and we truly thank our users for being a part of the Glancee community."

Glancee had a competitor in its ambient location service, called Highlight and industry guesses state that Facebook couldn't buy Highlight, so they went for the next best thing. Highlight has 9,000 daily active users, while Glancee has 3,000 daily active users. In the meanwhile, Facebook has an IPO coming up on the 18th of May and they want to price their shares from $28 (approx 1,428) to $35 (approx 1,785) each. It will be interesting to see if Facebook will use Glancee's services or if they just want to prevent another startup from getting too big.

Facebook pulls 'Find Friends Nearby' feature

Facebook silently launched the ‘Find Friends Nearby’ feature recently which did exactly what its name suggests. With this new addition, the social giant wanted to take a step ahead with its mobile offerings as the feature was aimed at Facebook apps and its mobile site. As soon as news of the feature reached some users, it started facing criticism and was termed as a creepy and stalking app. The social network was quick to pull out the ‘Find Friends Nearby’ feature that uses GPS signal in phones to help find friends, before it got noticed by many others.

Find Friends Nearby pulled

Find Friends Nearby pulled

In the form of an update, ABC news reports that Facebook has an explanation why the feature was pulled out. Reportedly, in an official statement that they issued, Facebook claims that the feature was under test and it wasn’t a formal release. The report further claims that the feature was just something that the engineers were testing. "With all tests, some get released as full products, others don’t. Nothing more to say on this for now, but we’ll communicate to everyone when there is something to say,” reads the official statement.

Facebook had sneakily updated its mobile offerings with the "Find Friends Nearby" feature. It was initially called Friendshake, but the name was then changed to Find Friends Nearby for simplicity. The feature essentially finds your Facebook friends who are near you and requires the user to turn on location services on their mobile device. Ryan Patterson, who built Find Friends had earlier revealed that the ideal use of this feature for him would be that if a user is out with a group of friends whom they have just met and wants to stay in touch with the new friends, Find Friends Nearby, with its recommendation system, is almost a better search tool than Facebook's native search tool. The feature not only provides you with information on which of your friends is nearby, but also which potential friends are nearby, that is, people you haven't added on the social network yet but you may have some sort of connection with. This could have been the reason why people may have felt as if they were being stalked all the time. While some users thought it was a great way to connect with new accountancies, several others felt that it was a clear invasion of privacy.

Facebook had acquired a start-up, called Glancee, which is a mobile app to find friends with similar interests nearby. So, it was obvious that a feature on similar lines was on the way. Facebook is infamous with its methods regarding security related issues. So, the initial flak received by the mobile feature may have compelled it to pull out the feature to avoid further criticism and even legal issues.