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Social shopping site StyleFeeder nets $2 million in funding

StyleFeeder, a social shopping site that aims to do for the retail sector what StumbleUpon did for browsing or Last.fm did for music, has announced that it's pulled in $2 million in Series A venture funding from Highland Capital Partners and Schooner Capital.

The start-up, based in Cambridge, Mass., plans to use the $2 million to hire more employees.

StyleFeeder, which has operated until this point on seed funding, operates a "recommendation engine" for fashionistas based on which products users rate and then purchase through affiliates. Much like other recommendation sites, StyleFeeder then suggests related products … Read more

43% of Facebook messages are spam - the rest is almost worse

I just read this research paper from HP Labs, in which the report notes that 43% of all Facebook messages are spam. This was a bit surprising to me since until today I had never received a spam message through Facebook. I have been waiting for a "feisti_vixen" most of my life - who knew it would take Facebook to bring us together?

She seems so lonely. Maybe she should get some new "friends" on Facebook. After all, even though I've yet to receive much mail from the likes of feisti_vixen, I get all sorts of worthless noise through Facebook. It's impossible to log in without being hounded by all sorts of glittering, vapid communication:… Read more

Developing story: MySpace security breaches

What's more worrisome than a public MySpace page? A page that the user only thinks is private. I was just alerted to several stories by Kevin Poulsen of Wired News that publicize recent security breaches on MySpace.

Poulsen reported on January 17 about a MySpace Bug that leaks "private" teen photos to voyeurs. He wrote, "A backdoor in MySpace's architecture allows anyone who's interested to see the photographs of some users with private profiles--including those under 16--despite assurances from MySpace that those pictures can only be seen by people on a user's friends list. Info about the backdoor has been circulating on message boards for months."

These message boards include self-described groups of "pedos" who hacked into underage-girls' private MySpace profiles. According to Poulsen, one poster reported successfully pilfering photos from a randomly chosen 14-year-old girl, "It worked and I was shown her pictures. Now lets see some naked sluts."

On January 18, Poulsen updated the story to say that the next day, MySpace quietly fixed that back-door bug, without publicly acknowledging the problem, even though users' profiles had been vulnerable for months. … Read more

Facebook moves into international translation efforts

As has been long expected, Facebook has begun to work on making its service available in multiple languages as it expands internationally--and it's doing so by utilizing the power of its millions of users by enlisting them to volunteer a few minutes. The site has spent the past few weeks asking international users to participate in the process by installing a "Translation" application that lets them translate words on Facebook from English to their native languages. It only applies, of course, to Facebook-generated text; anything entered by users, like interests or favorite movies, remain as-is.

The Translation … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 645: We love you, Matt Mullenweg!

EPISODE 645

Exclusive: The next Facebook privacy scandal

Facebook is no stranger to the complaints of privacy activists. First, it was the site's News Feed feature back in 2006. Most recently, the company's Beacon service drew widespread criticism. This blog post will outline yet another major privacy issue, in which Facebook recklessly exposes user data.

Facebook launched its widely popular application developer program back in May 2007. As of press time, there were more than 14,000 applications. Some, including most of the popular apps, are made by companies, while a few of the popular apps, and a significant number of the long tail of the less popular applications are made by individual developers.

But a new study suggests there may be a bigger problem with the applications. Many are given access to far more personal data than they need to in order to run, including data on users who never even signed up for the application. Not only does Facebook enable this, but it does little to warn users that it is even happening, and of the risk that a rogue application developer can pose.

Privacy problems for the user

In order to install an application, a Facebook user must first agree to "allow this application to...know who I am and access my information." Users not willing to permit the application access to all kinds of data from their profile cannot install it onto their Facebook page.

What kind of information does Facebook give the application developer access to? Practically everything. According to the Application Terms of Service,

Facebook is like IKEA is like...open source?

Slate is positioning Facebook's reliance on user-generated content as a bit like IKEA:

Ikea keeps its costs and prices low by enlisting its customers--their time, their cars, their ambitions as interior designers, and their inflated ideas of their carpentry skills.

Management experts Rafael Ramirez and Richard Normann pointed this out in the Harvard Business Review back in 1993. Ikea, they argued, was a success because it enabled "value co-production."

The article's author goes on to credit Microsoft with creating a value co-production platform but completely overlooks the open-source software industry. Is open source like IKEA? Well, … Read more

If you delete a social-networking profile, does it still exist?

Maybe they were pulled voluntarily due to embarrassing content, or involuntarily due to inappropriate material--either way, sometimes social-networking profiles get deleted. And a recent controversy in the U.K. has left some Web users wondering exactly what happens to them.

Here's how it started. A few Facebook members pointed out that the site keeps profile data intact after users delete their accounts so that they can be subsequently "un-deleted" if the addictiveness factor of Facebook proves to be too much. But what if they don't come back? We all know by now that Social Ads, the … Read more

The secret of Facebook's success: Obnoxious, useless applications

The New York Times has an insightful (and funny) article on the secret of Facebook's success. Facebook's increasingly open platform lets in a wide range of applications. However, if you've spent more than a few seconds on Facebook, you know that all that glitters is not gold. It's not even copper:

So far, though, the applications fall mainly into two categories: the silly and the annoying (and sometimes, both). Users can throw virtual sheep at each other or take part in zombie attacks on their friends. Recently, many users received a message entreating them to "… Read more