You know how sometimes you want to share links and status updates on Facebook, but don’t want to show it to all of your friends.  Facebook is adding the ability to make certain messages private through the use of the 5 tier networks.  Either you can share a link, photo, or status message with all of your friends, everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends, or a custom network.

Below is a screenshot of what the new feature looks like.  While status privacy is a nice feature, it seems like it is a minor add-on.  I don’t foresee myself manually selecting who I want to share stuff with and who I don’t.  However I am glad that they already had a similar privacy feature for photo albums.  There are certain photo albums I have that I don’t need some people seeing.

[via InsideFacebook]

David Fincher was a movie director for Fight Club, Se7en, and Panic Room.  Now he is being considered to direct a movie that revolves around the growth of Facebook and the life of Mark Zuckerberg.  The working title of the movie is called “The Social Network” and Columbia Pictures is in advanced talks with Fincher.

The movie will start with Zuckerberg’s creation of the social network while at Harvard University back in 2004 to the point where it has over 200 million users today.

Scott Rudin and Michael De Luca would be the producers. Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti may also be involved.  The author of the script is Aaron Sorkin.  Columbia hopes to begin production later this year.  Another rumor about the movie is that Michael Cera and Shia LaBeouf are being looked at to play the role of Mark Zuckerberg.

[via Variety/Mashable]

The White House recently hosted a “Stakeholder Meeting with Physicians” as part of a healthcare policy debate.  What made this debate different was that the debate was broadcasted on Facebook allowing the social network users to contribute to the discussion in a chat room format.

CNN did this with Facebook on Inauguration Day back in January as well.  The White House called this initiative citizen involvement.  ”An aide from the White House Office of Health Reform will also be keeping track of the chat and letting the participants in the meeting know what people are talking about,” stated The White House Blog.

The White House stated that there will be similar events like this broadcasted on Facebook in the future as well.  Giving users the ability to be heard empowers them.

[via Mashable]

Facebook is currently testing a real-time search engine for the news feeds of users.  The built in Facebook search engine isn’t that sophisticated and the Advanced Bing.com search engine is no different than just going directly to Microsoft’s website.  Facebook’s search engine could definitely use the ability to search through status messages, images, videos, and links that are connected to your profile and your friends.

Facebook is doing this as a challenge against Twitter’s search engine too.  Twitter’s search engine has the ability to search for keywords on all tweets that were sent out sorted by date.  You may remember how Facebook made an attempt to buy out Twitter last year.

“You will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. You will also be able to search for status updates, posted links and notes in Search from people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone. As always, you can control what content you’re sharing by editing your privacy settings here,” wrote Facebook engineer Kari Lee.

[via Mashable]

On Facebook, there are several groups revolving around Holocaust Denial.  Holocaust Denial is a conspiracy theory that the genocide of Jewish people during World War II did not occur or to the extent that history recognizes.  Holocaust Denial believers claim that the Holocaust was a hoax that was create as a Jewish conspiracy to advance their race at the expense of others.  Last week an individual that was a Holocaust Denial follower entered a Holocaust museum with a concealed weapon and shot the security guard, killing him.

This 88 year old man is James von Brunn and he was shot in the face when starting a shootout at the museum.  Two other security guards shot the man after he killed the first security guard.  Brunn is expected to survive.

Brian Cuban first noticed the Holocaust Denial groups on Facebook back in November 2008 and sent them a notice.  Facebook kept a firm position in allowing the groups to remain on their social network to facilitate open discussion based on free speech.

“It’s a difficult decision to make. We have a lot of internal debate and we bring in experts to talk about it,” Schnitt said. “Just being offensive or objectionable doesn’t get it taken off Facebook. We want it [the site] to be a place where people can discuss all kinds of ideas, including controversial ones,” stated Facebook representative Barry Schnitt in an interview with CNN.

After hearing about situations involving the shooting at the museum and several other incidents, I find myself thinking that Facebook is wrong for hosting a discussion that involves discrimination.

Facebook removed pictures of women breast-feeding if there was nipping showing within the last year because they said it was “indecent.”  Hosting a discussion that facilitates discrimination against Jewish people is also indecent.  Or what about the removal of the Ku Klux Klan groups on Facebook?  Why shut down the groups of one hate group, but not penalize others?

Going back to the removal of pictures with a nipple exploited, what about paintings?  There are several paintings that were created during the Renaissance period where the breasts of women were showing.  Is that considered “indecent.”  The way I see it, if I uploaded a picture of one of those artistic pieces it would be a lot more decent than a discussion a group is having about how Jewish people should be discriminated against.

Freedom of speech is one of the greatest laws our country has, but anytime it may contribute to acts of violence I strongly believe in censorship.  If Facebook is going to allow Holocaust Denial discussions to take place, they should be willing to monitor the groups closely around the clock and report the potential of any acts of violence that may take place as a result of discussions taking place on their social network.

Any time certain keywords like “kill” or “gun” in the groups, the FBI should be notified.  This way the FBI can determine whether the individuals making the threats do or do not have any intentions in carrying them out.

In an effort to make money from users, Facebook was considering on auctioning off vanity URLs to the highest bidder.  Originally Facebook was planning an ascending auction where the highest bidder would win the URL and user name.  The problem with the auction system is that Facebook would have to monitor millions of auctions in a short period of time.

Facebook was thinking about doing a Vickery auction.  An interested party submits a bid and the highest bidder only has to pay a penny more than the second highest bid.  This was too complicated to handle too.  Some of Facebook’s users tested out the auctions and gave a lot of hard pushback because MySpace and Twitter already offer vanity URLS for free.

[via BusinessInsider]

Above is the Facebook profile of Mike Lee of Orlando, Florida.  Lee is a fan of Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Michael Steele, and Senator Jim Bunning.  During the Facebook vanity URL rush, you would expect him to register the name “Facebook.com/Mike,” “Facebook.com/ MikeLee,” or something along those lines.  Surprisingly, he chose Facebook.com/ToddPalin instead.  Todd Palin is the husband of former VP candidate Sarah Palin.

Over 3 million user names were registered within several hours of the rush, but many of them are nowhere close to the actual names of people.  That is not surprising since many people do not use their real names on MySpace or on e-mail addresses. Facebook is now even starting to delete the user names of accounts that just seem off.  One account they recently deleted belonged to “Haywood.Jablome”

Some of the other entertaining usernames that were registered includes:
- RickRollNeverGonnaGiveYouUpNeverGonnaLetYouDown666
- Hades
- George Bush
- Limbaugh
- Wolfram

If you know of any other funny vanity name URLs, let us know in the comments.

For those of you that are in your mid-20’s like I am right now, you probably spent your high school afternoons watching MTV’s Total Request Live (TRL) TV show to find out what the hottest music is.  Starting this Monday, MTV will be starting a new show called “It’s On With Alexa Chung” that will replace TRL’s time slot.  The show will have Facebook and Twitter integrated.

Many TV shows already have Facebook and Twitter integrated already, but Chung’s show will be using the services as one of the main highlights.  The audience will be able to ask questions to the celebrity guests on the show using Facebook and Twitter.

Chung, a half Chinese and half British 25 year old model is from Britain and has hosted music and pop culture programs on Channel 4 in Britain.  ”It’s On With Alexa Chung” will be filmed in the same studio that was used in TRL.  TRL was cancelled last November.

The studio audience will add MTV producers as a friend on Facebook temporarily so that the show will have access to their status updates and pictures they take from their seats.

[via The New York Times]

On Friday night, there was a Facebook user name rush.  By yesterday morning there were about 3 million user names registered.  Within 15 minutes, over 500,000 user names were registered.  And within an hour, about 1 million were registered.

“Traffic was a quite a bit higher than usual,” stated Facebook spokesman Larry Yu in an e-mail. Facebook was “able to handle this quite smoothly” because of rigorous testing beforehand.  Twitter should learn a lesson from Facebook in this situation.

Facebook has over 200 million users.  Each user was given the opportunity to choose one unique name.  The reason why Facebook has given the option to register user names is so that search engines will be able to index the profiles of users seamlessly.

[via Bloomberg]

Social networking company Facebook has just poached another executive from Google.  Google’s Senior Director of Engineering Greg Badros will be stepping down to become the Facebook Director of Engineering.  While Badros was at Google, he was the head of the AdSense team.  He was there from the start of AdSense in 2004 up until the company started making billions in revenue.

Badros also led the Google Calendar, Google Reader, and GMail engineering teams for some time.  Around March 2009, Badros became head of the Application Platform group.  Badros will be directly reporting to Facebook VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer.  Badros has previously worked for Go2Net which InfoSpace acquired.  He was the Chief Technical Architect at both companies before joining Google.

This is the second AdSense executive that Facebook poached from Google this month.  Earlier this month, Facebook hired Google’s advertising operations head in Ann Arbor, Michigan Grady Burnett.

[via TechCrunch]

One of the biggest differences between Facebook and MySpace is vanity URLs.  Since MySpace started they have offered URLs to users that are in the format: http://myspace.com/yourusername.  Facebook’s user name assigns a number based on the order of which someone joins.  The format of Facebook’s URL is http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=[random number].

But starting tonight, Facebook users will have vanity URLs.  Some companies and people have already been rushing for a one-word vanity URL.  At 12:01AM Eastern Time tonight, users can grab a username of choice that will redirect to their profile.  I know I’ll be near a computer when this event takes place.

Facebook will be preventing registration of usernames that infringes trademark.  The social network recommends that you register a username that closely resembles your name.

This reminds me of when GMail first came out.  The service was invite only and people actually traded tangible goods over a forum.  In one case, I saw someone giving away a signed Kobe Bryant basketball just for a GMail invite.  I bet that person is kicking themselves right now.

[via Facebook Blog]

Richard Richtmyer is a news writer for a Philadelphia-based newspaper.  On the Facebook social network, Richtmyer simply stated an opinion about how he thought Associated Press executives should be punished for negatively affecting the McClatchy Company stock.

“It seems like the ones who orchestrated the whole mess should be losing their jobs or getting pushed into smaller quarters,” stated Richtmyer on Facebook in late May. “But they aren’t.”  One of his 51 Facebook friends ratted him out to a higher ranked employee and eventually Richtmyer was reprimanded.

Today McClatchy is a penny stock.  Two years ago the company spent $4.5 billion to buy another publication company called Knight Ridder.  After buying Knight Ridder, McClatchy started looking to sell off several Philadelphia papers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News.

The Associated Press union was not happy with Richtmyer being reprimanded and warned all other employees to be careful who they choose to add as friends on the social network.

“We have seen about six Facebook problems over the last two months, with employees — maybe managers you have as friends — reporting potential issues to management,” stated union guild chief Kevin Keane in a memo to other members. “You must be careful who you allow on as friends.”

The News Media Guild believes that the AP needs to fine tune their policy in how they handle these types of situations and they are also pushing for Richtmyer’s reprimand to be removed.

[via Wired]

The ability to create applications around platforms is what is driving social media today.  Developers are making a killing by developing applications for Facebook, the iPhone, Twitter, etc.  But what many people don’t realize is that AOL was one of the original platforms to develop applications around.  Sure there wasn’t a such thing as APIs back then, but a lot of developers today started by building software intended to modify AOL services.

I remember back in the late 1990’s, I knew at least 4-5 people that spent time on Visual Basic creating an application that enhanced AOL chat rooms.  That is around the same time when Warez groups on AOL started.  Each Warez group would team up on building different applications.  These applications would be similar in functionality but different in branding.  A lot of the functionality would have to do with requesting MP3s in chatrooms, punting users offline, and sending a lot of ASCII pictures in a chat room at once.  Those were the days.

Now look what we are stuck with today.  Some of today’s popular Facebook Applications revolve around taking quizzes, describing what music and movies you like, and what your zombie vs. werewolf score is.  Yawn.

However it is interesting to know that AOL was the inspiration behind Facebook’s application platform according to Mark Zuckerberg.

“I remember when I was a kid in high school, some of the first things that I built were add-ons to AOL. All of my friends were on AOL, and I built tools for IM or servers to run chat rooms, and I just had so much fun and that’s how I learned how to program. I just think it’s really interesting to see the new generation of college students that are growing up and building on top of this platform, and anything that we can do to encourage that is awesome,” stated Zuckerberg in an interview with InsideFacebook.

[via BizInsider]

Last month University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and Google co-founder Larry Page gave a commencement speech.  One of the reasons why Google has a major advertising operations office in Ann Arbor is because Page is deeply tied to the city.  His parents had actually met each at the University of Michigan according to Page’s speech.

Unfortunately for Google, the head of advertising operations at the Google Ann Arbor office Grady Burnett has stepped down to become the head of global online and inside sales at Facebook.  Facebook Inc. has about $716 million in total funding and is pushing towards $500 million in revenue this year.

Burnett has been leading the AdWords division in Ann Arbor since 2006 and he will be replaced by Mike Miller.

“As you might imagine, this was a hard decision for me and my family. We love Michigan and I thoroughly enjoyed my nearly four years working for Google,” stated Burnett in an e-mail to CrainsDetroit.com.

I’ve heard of several cases where an employer has fired people because of Facebook photos, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone getting fired for writing a funny status message on the social network.

A employee in Johannesburg was fired and two other were suspended for writing Facebook updates that their respective employers found were inappropriate.  The employee that was fired is a 23 year old admin clerk at a clothing factory located in Southern Durban.  He called his boss a “serial masturbator” and was reported by a co-worker.  Talk about a snitch, eh?

Another employee was suspended for “punting a competitor’s product” on the social network on her profile homepage.  Lastly, another 25 year old employee in Pretoria was suspended for discussing the laziness of her employer.  Supposedly writing negative remarks about work situations and environments can be considered online defamation and can lead to the loss of a job in certain areas of Africa.

Unfortunately the case of these three individuals, it cost them their jobs and reputations.  If you want to complain about your job, I suggest you write about it in your notebook diary that no one will ever read at home.  Don’t discuss it on the Internet.  And for those of you that enjoy eating lizards on an island, don’t post pics of it on Facebook either.

[via News24]