ReadWriteWeb

While end users are eager to try out Google Buzz for themselves, many of the Web's largest social properties have expressed a certain amount of fear, uncdertainty and doubt about the search giant's move into the social space.

A Facebook rep said that the company is interested to see how Google's latest product will make the Web more social and more open, but the Facebook team has their concerns about whether Buzz's friendship model is really all that functional. After a little bit of messing around with the new product today, we can understand their point of view.

Are you using your real name on your social network profiles? According to the European Union's Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), that's a big mistake. A new report, published to coincide with Europe's Safer Internet Day, details the dangers of using social networks and lays out 17 "golden rules" for keeping safe on social networks. The report's authors are especially worried about the proliferation of mobile social networks and, among other things, recommend that users turn off all location-based services whenever they are not absolutely needed.

Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

As more and more of our friends and favorite organizations start publishing updates online, being able to organize them well is becoming even more important. Niche-popular desktop social media stream-reader Tweetdeck issued a software update this morning and the most striking change is in its handling of user groups. It's beautiful. The new Tweetdeck is faster, more flexible and easier to navigate.

Groups, we have argued, are the secret weapon of the social Web. Here are five ways that the new Tweetdeck gets groups right, and that Facebook, the world's dominant social-media-stream reader by a long-shot, could learn from what Tweetdeck is doing. That would drastically improve Facebook's own user experience.

As we've seen from some of the previews of the new layout, search is becoming more of a focal point for Facebook, and today's announcement seems to back that up. Microsoft and Facebook announced this morning an expanded partnership, making Bing the default search engine for Facebook's more than 400 million users worldwide.

The two companies also came to a "mutual decision" to allow Facebook to take over sole responsibility for advertisements on the social network, a move that we see as part of Facebook's continual progression toward becoming an ad provider.

It's Facebook's 6th birthday today and it's been a very big year. On February 4th, 2004 then 20-year old Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com from his Harvard dorm-room.

At this time last year Facebook reported having more than 140 million users. We were awed then that the social network was doubling its membership every 12 months. Since then the numbers have more than doubled and the site may have already passed 400 million users. The world is on Facebook, but just 6 weeks ago the company changed what that meant with a fundamental shift in its privacy policy. Check out these 7 articles below for a big picture of the good and the bad about the incredible phenomenon that is Facebook.

The consumption of news -- that formerly-respected category of information outside of humorous cat and music videos that impacts hundreds of millions of peoples' lives -- could be substantially improved by new methods of subscription offered online. Unfortunately, that's not happening. Numbers from web traffic analysts Hitwise released tonight indicate that almost nothing has changed in 10 years when it comes to popular consumption of news online. The big portals and search engines, delivering their version of news, remain in control. That's bad for independent thinking and human free will.

If you were hoping that a new world of web technology would empower free-thinking people to subscribe to diverse sources of information and analysis about the world's news, then Facebook, albeit a little awkward as a news-reading platform today, may be your best hope.

Online advertising can, at times, be downright villainous. We've all fallen victim to the misleading "X" that opened up more windows instead of closing the one, or lured by ads that seemed to know all our personal information. But today, Facebook released a new set of terms for ad and offer networks that looks to help prevent dishonest advertising.

David Swain, a spokesperson for Facebook, said that the new terms are meant to create more accountability and faster enforcement when things run afoul.

Earlier this week, we pinged PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf about the implications of HipHop, the new PHP runtime that Facebook just open-sourced.

Using ReadWriteWeb as an example, he goes into great detail about how speeding up PHP isn't simply a matter of finding a single magic bullet. Lerdorf contends that true optimization comes down to attacking the mundane inefficiencies that sneak into sites of all sizes - even suggesting free tools for PHP devs to use - before a solution such as HipHop is considered.

We've just discovered an awesome new feature that Facebook is using to experiment with friend request confirmation pages.

When you confirm a new friend, you'll be presented with four people that friend is connected to - four suggestions for people who might be mutual acquaintances based on your social graph. It's more useful and more accurate than the current friend/fan suggestion feature, and we actually like it a lot. Check out the screenshots, or try it for yourself the next time someone friend requests you.

So, Facebook went and secretly rewrote PHP's runtime to be a lean, mean, C++ translated, g++ compiled piece of resource-friendly hotness.

If that sentence confused you, then you're not the target audience for this post. We want to know what our developer friends think of HipHop, the latest open-source code project to emerge from the deep, dark dungeons of Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters (ok, the HQ's actually quite pretty, but we like a good turn of phrase). Read these expert opinions (and by "expert," we mean Rasmus Lerdorf), and let us know in the comments what you think of the new PHP runtime.

Last night, we reported that Facebook was planning to release a JIT compiler for PHP, a huge step toward making the PHP runtime - and PHP-based sites and apps - faster by taking the interpreted lagnuage (a.k.a., more human-readable code) a few steps closer to the bare-metal ones and zeros machines actually read.

We've been updated this morning that the PHP runtime has in fact been rewritten, with an extra step: The PHP is translated to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This project, called HipHop, has been in development under great secrecy at Facebook for the past couple years and has just this morning been open sourced.

The rumors have been flying over what's going on over at Facebook headquarters. The word has been that a PHP team was brought in and made to sign non-disclosure agreements before discussing a PHP project that has been in development for the past two years. Alex Handy, senior editor of the Software Development Times Blog, predicted last Saturday that Facebook "has rewritten the PHP runtime from scratch," and several sources have confirmed for us tonight that Facebook has indeed been making some changes to the basic PHP runtime environment.

According to our sources, Facebook has been working on a PHP compiler that will
increase speed by around 80% and offer a just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that will offer a number of advantages. The project is very similar to Google's Unladen Swallow project, which rebuilt the Python compiler, boosting the speed fivefold and opening the door for multi-language integration.

Want to track a hot story being covered by multiple news outlets? Today Google News added the ability to pin hot stories to a special "starred" page where you can go back and find the latest updates at any time. It's a simple but elegant feature that makes the service a lot more interactive and useful.

Stories on the front page can be starred as well as story clusters that appear in search results. The resulting page of starred stories becomes a fully customized news tracker. There are plenty of other features that could be added, but this is a great start.

From TV to Tivo and Hulu, from the mall to Amazon and eCommerce and from newspaper carriers and delivery trucks to online syndication and subscription - distribution of goods, services and information has changed a lot thanks to the internet. Subscription to syndicated publications hasn't changed nearly as much yet as it could in the future, though.

Services like MyYahoo and iGoogle saw some traction and many readers here may have a Google Reader account, but dedicated RSS (really simple syndication) feed reading services have never lived up to their potential to become a mainstream phenomenon. These days many people say they just wait until links get shared on Twitter and they never use a feed reader at all. Late last week Facebook threw its hat in the ring and called on users to use its service as a news feed reader. There are a number of reasons why Facebook could be the strongest online subscription option yet.

Update: Hard numbers have now confirmed that Facebook is already the biggest news reader on the web. In our next post on the subject, we discuss the implications of Facebook's relatively small market share on the future of free thinking.

Are you goofing off on Facebook at work? As it turns out, this sort of "time theft" may be no longer be your company's top concern when it comes to social networking in the workplace. According to a new study from security firm Sophos, the real problem with social networks - and most of all Facebook - is the security risk they pose to organizations.

After Facebook's recent privacy settings "adjustment," the social network is now reporting that 35% users who had never before engaged with their privacy settings took the initiative to do so instead of accepting the updated suggestions put before them by the social network. To Facebook, this number is a very, very good thing. Although nowhere near a majority of users, this engagement rate is much higher than industry averages. Plus, as Facebook's director of public policy Tim Sparapani points out, "35% of 350 million users is an extraordinary number."

But should Facebook really be proud here? What about the other 65% of users who blindly accepted the defaults?

Today is the 3rd annual international Data Privacy Day and a whole bunch of companies are listed on the organization's website as participants. Google, Microsoft, even Walmart. Facebook is not listed as a participant and has stirred up a lot of controversy with changes to its privacy policy lately.

Why are these corporations singing out loud about protecting our personal privacy? According to the website, "Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information." More than dignity, this is about building trust with consumers so that these companies can do things with our personal data. Some of those are things we might like, a lot. Aggregate data analysis and personal recommendation could be the foundation of the next step of the internet. Unfortunately, Facebook's recent privacy policy changes put that future at risk by burning the trust of hundreds of millions of mainstream users.

"This status is being tracked. The owners of Facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for Haiti every time this is cut and paste as a status." Sound familiar? This recent status message hoax has been making its way around the popular social network, duping members into posting the status as their own in the hopes that, by doing so, they've somehow contributed to the Haitian earthquake disaster relief fund without having to actually open their own pocketbook to do so. While that would be nice if it was true, this hoax is just one of many found on Facebook today.

The Westboro Baptist Church, home of the best known anti-gay protest organization in the US, led by Pastor Fred Phelps, has a new target for its public outcry. This Thursday afternoon the organization will be picketing outside the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter.

NBC Bay Area reporter Jackson West unearthed the schedule for the group's trip to the Bay Area and writes that after a day of protesting outside Jewish organizations, the congregation will travel to Twitter's brand new office.