facebook

A team of researchers from the University of Georgia has come to a conclusion that will undoubtedly turn the tech world on its side (ha): if you use Facebook to promote your lovely self, it shows through. Narcissists, or those psychologically defined as "excessively egotistical," will inflate their profiles on the social network with more photos, massive friends lists, and packed activity feeds.

As we used to say on the playground in third grade, duh.

"We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," study leader … Read more

For years, Amy Jo Kim has been a well-known and respected member of the video game design community, as well as the author of perhaps the best book ever written on building online community.

But for the most part, through years of working on other peoples' projects--Ultima Online, The Sims, the virtual world There.com, Rock Band, and many others, as well as consulting for countless companies--Kim has played a supporting role.

That's all set to change. Kim, along with her husband and consulting partner, Scott Kim, are in the midst of what might be their most ambitious project ever: Building their own game company from the ground up.

Their start-up, known as ShuffleBrain, plans to announce the public beta of its first effort, a Facebook game called PhotoGrab, in a matter of weeks. On the one hand, PhotoGrab is a puzzle game, tasking players with matching small snippets of photographs with the full pictures they're taken from--and doing so against a clock that's quickly counting down. The more accurate the placement and the more snippets you can match, the higher the score.

But PhotoGrab is also a social platform that is built around the idea of encouraging photographers to upload groups of their own pictures and make their own games from them.

So, for example, after playing for a little while with a few of the games already in the system, I uploaded five pictures I took last summer while visiting the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Ky., on my CNET Road Trip 2008 project, and then spent a few minutes selecting small circular pieces of the photos for players of my game to identify. … Read more

The good news for Facebook, according to new statistics from Hitwise, is that its traffic is up 50 percent in the U.S. since last August. The not-so-good news for Zuckerberg & pals? The same numbers say that News Corp.'s MySpace still owns a whopping 67.5 percent of the social-networking market in the U.S.

Hitwise gathered its data from an analysis of traffic to 56 different social-networking sites, and concluded that Facebook has gone from a market share of under 14 percent to slightly over 20 percent in the past year. MySpace, meanwhile, has seen a 10 … Read more

I bet you think this podcast is about you. Don't you? Don't you!? On today's show, we learn how easy it is to spot a narcissist on Facebook (stay away!), terrible ideas that will criminalize professional eBay sellers and kill eBay even faster than it's killing itself, and how video games might be the only thing that can survive a recession.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Bill would give retailers power to halt online auctions http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080924-bill-would-give-retailers-power-to-halt-online-auctions.html

Users fail to spot fake pop-ups http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7633402.stm … Read more

The New York Times has started rolling out TimesPeople, a sharing-and-recommending tool that the publication first announced earlier this year. It's essentially an extension of the free user accounts that are already required to read the Times' Web site: You can now build up a friends list, recommend stories to people you know, and see what they've been recommending or commenting on.

In other words, it's a social news feed for Times readers. You can also sync it up with your Facebook account to push your feed--stories you've commented on or recommended--to your profile on the … Read more

Our No. 404 fanboy Dee Wren takes time out of his busy filming schedule to bring some positivity to our Monday morning. After revealing some news about the upcoming Google Android release tomorrow, we talk about the weekend box office, touch on Facebook porn, and make an overall attempt to shade ourselves from Jeff's rays of hate (unsuccessfully). Happy Monday!

To make up for all the lives we've ruined with The 404, we invite our buddy Dee Wren into the studio to pimp his philanthropic project, From Us With Love. It's a nonprofit organization that supplies aid to children in South Africa and Dee is helping to shoot a documentary on their efforts to send a group of them to Australia for the Homeless World Cup. We'd love for you to contribute as much time, money, and resources as you can to their foundation. The best part of this endeavor is that For Us With Love is already corporate-sponsored, so the full 100 percent of your contribution will go directly into the project, no filters. It's a very noble cause, please check out the Web site and do what you can to help!

Update (1:18 p.m.): This story has been modified to include comment from Facebook.

For some of the legions of Facebook users eager to get on the site to see what their friends have been up to, play Scrabble or look at photos, Monday morning has not been the best of times.

That's because some users of the popular social-networking site--though not all--have found themselves locked out due to some sort of Facebook-initiated downtime.

"Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance," a message received by some users when they tried to log in said. &… Read more

A new hole in Facebook allows members to see the fan pages of people on the networking site who they aren't friends with, an outside researcher revealed on Friday.

In verifying the hole, CNET News--signing onto the site as someone who is not a designated "friend" of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg--was still able to see that he is a fan of Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, Green Day, Nirvana, Central Park, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Apple Students.

All a would-be spy has to do is go to anyone's profile page, click on the "Info&… Read more

Today, for kicks, I tried to draw a map of all the places I write content, all the places it is displayed, and all the intermediate services that re-post my content in places other than where I originally write it. It's a spaghetti of interlinked services, and it's becoming unmanageable. I think it's just dumb luck that I haven't created an infinite loop of republishing so far. Adding one more service could push things over the edge.

Although my profession is creating content and publishing it, my problem is hardly unique. I post a few times … Read more