On the Internet, popularity often draws the attention of hackers. So it is not surprising that Facebook has become the target of a spate of attacks, just as the membership on the site has swelled to about 100 million active users worldwide.

In recent days, many Facebook users have seen a sharp increase in spam, some of it pretty racy. Over the weekend, several Facebook users contacted us saying that their accounts appeared to have been hijacked, and some said their accounts had been deactivated.

Facebook acknowledges that it has been under attack but suggested the problems are largely under control. “Over the past few days, we have received reports from users of spam and phishing attacks,” the company said in a statement. “We have also detected and contained a worm. We are investigating every report, removing false content, blocking bogus links and addressing the concerns of our users. These efforts have limited the affected users to a small percentage of those on Facebook.”

Some of the attacks were linked to Koobface, an Internet worm that began targeting Facebook and MySpace users in late July. Since then, Internet security firm Kaspersky Lab has identified about 27 variants of Koobface.

“It is very similar to a lot of the old worms,” said David Emm, a senior technology consultant at Kaspersky. Mr. Emm said Koobface, like many other viruses and worms, relies on what is known as “social engineering” techniques, which attempt to trick people into performing actions that will expose them unwittingly to a virus. The technique may prove particularly effective on social networks, he said. “If you receive messages from a friend on a social network, you are not expecting them to be a vehicle to carry a worm or Trojan horse,” Mr. Emm said.

In the wake of Koobface, that may change. In the meantime, Facebook recommends that concerned users check out the company’s new security page. It has also taken one spammer to court.

Source: N.Y. Times

Some people believe that Facebook Connect will transform the web from the still closed system to a massively social experience - it’s the “always logged-in internet.” On the other hand, the company bringing this web to us is Facebook, the same people who had to be told by their users why Beacon was a huge mistake. Do you trust Facebook to control the next iteration of the web?

Through the seamless Facebook Connect integration, sites can access your Facebook account details and friend graph and move that data back and forth between their site and Facebook. For example, people commenting on a blog using the Moveable Type platform will be able to login via Facebook Connect. Their comment will link to their Facebook profile and the commenting activity itself will make its way back into your activity feed. On Digg, another site adopting Facebook Connect, you can login with your Facebook ID and your digging activity is returned to Facebook, too.

Unlike with OpenID, Facebook Connect put the power of the social web into the hands of one company. One private company. Not only that, but a company that’s known for rolling out changes without so much as a warning to its users then having to react to the ensuing uproar.

Even the introduction of the Mini-Feed was protested upon launch. And Beacon - the advertisement system that sent data from external web sites back to Facebook, telling your friends about your purchases on 40+ partner sites - was literally a fiasco. It launched before there was a way to even opt-out.

In the past, user privacy on Facebook seemed always seemed to be an afterthought. Although their direction appears to be changing a bit now - recent updates to Facebook today make sure to cover how your privacy is going to be affected - it’s only because they’ve learned to cater to their users’ demands. It’s harder to believe that it’s because they genuinely care.

Facebook has always known that their value - that is, their monetary value - is selling off bits and pieces of your privacy to advertisers. The “real you” on Facebook is a holy grail for marketers. Now, with the power to spread that to sites across the entire web, Facebook will need to figure out how to cash in. In the process, they may again make another misstep. The problem is that this time it might not be something as innocuous as the video you rented at Blockbuster that finds its way back to your Facebook profile. As more of the corporate and business-oriented web adopts Friend Connect, the greater the chance for privacy intrusion.

A day after Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla took the game offline in the US and Canada, the team of Indian brothers has relaunched the game with a new name and board design: Wordscraper. Wordscraper uses the same UI as the old Scrabulous and is played essentially the same way Scrabble is played, but with different “bonus tiles” and board dimensions. Meanwhile, the official version of Facebook Scrabble, developed by EA under license from Hasbro, has experienced continued growth in the first day since Scrabble’s disappearance.

myYearbook, a social network for teenagers that launched in 2005, has raised $13 million in a Series B funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners, US Venture Partners, and First Round Capital. The new round brings the company’s total funding to $18.6 million.

myYearbook says it sees 10 million unique visitors monthly, and also makes the claim that it is the third largest social network in the US. (Not quite. It is only a fraction of the size of MySpace or Facebook, and Bebo and imeem also attract more monthly unique visitors. According to comScore, myYearbook had 4.5 million unique visitors in June, versus 5.2 million for Bebo and 6.4 million for imeem). When we last wrote about them, there was speculation that the site may have more high school users than Facebook. This is almost certainly no longer the case. Facebook has seen dramatic growth since that time, with 37.4 million uniques in June, with 10 percent of those between the ages of 12 and 17, says comScore. MyYearbook has a larger percentage of users in that age group (23.8 percent), but less than a third as many total.

Still, myYearbook continues to produce impressive stats if you look at Hitwise, with 384% in year-over-year growth.

The site intends to use the money to further expand its feature set and reach out to new members. As part of the deal, Norwest Venture Partners’ Sergio Monsalve will join the company’s board of directors.

Source:TechCrunch.com

The Calcutta-based brothers who developed the popular online game Scrabulous bowed to legal pressure Tuesday and barred North American users from playing the game on Facebook.

The software developers, Rajat and Jayant Aggarwalla, whose adaptation of the board game Scrabble attracts more than half a million players a day on Facebook, said they were forced to pull the game down from the popular social networking site after Facebook received legal notices from Hasbro.

“In deference to Facebook’s concerns and without prejudice to our legal rights, we have had to restrict our fans in U.S.A. and Canada from accessing the Scrabulous application on Facebook until further notice,” the brothers said in an e-mailed news release.

On July 24, Hasbro filed suit against the brothers in New York courts, alleging that their Scrabulous game was a “clear and blatant infringement” of their intellectual property. Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, while Mattel owns the rights everywhere else.

“This is an unfortunate event and not something that we are very pleased about, especially as Mattel has been pursuing the matter in Indian courts for the past few months,” the Agarwallas said. “We will sincerely hope to bring to our fans brighter news in the days to come.”

Both Hasbro and Mattel introduced Facebook versions of Scrabble to compete with Scrabulous this year, but neither gaming giant has attracted the users or praise of Scrabulous. The Agarwalla brothers put the game on Facebook in 2007, and it quickly became a hit, attracting millions of registered users.

As a heads up to developers, Facebook noted today that 5% of users have now migrated over to the redesigned version of the site. Some users are opting in, and other users are reporting being automatically migrated during the last several days. Facebook has said that everyone will be moved over with a “few weeks” of the Facebook redesign beta launch a week ago.

According to a comment made at Microsoft’s Analyst Day today, Microsoft and Facebook are preparing a search and advertising deal that would lead to the integration of Microsoft’s Live Search and search advertising into Facebook. Microsoft already provides ads on Facebook as part of a ’strategic alliance’ and Microsoft holds a $240 million equity stake in the company. No information about the financial specifics of the deal were mentioned so far and it is not clear if this deal would be exclusive.

Judging from the information available to us from the transcript of the call, Microsoft’s main reason for doing this deal is to get more people to know about Live Search. As part of that effort, Microsoft will also ink a distribution deal for its toolbar with HP.

Also, according to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft will be providing an API to Facebook which will allow them to create a “rich search experience for the Facebook users and that is something that they will launch in the fall working with us. And it will carry both our web results, as well as our page search advertising.”

This deal would mirror the one Google did with MySpace last year. In that deal, Google guaranteed MySpace $900 million in shared ad revenue for the next three years. However, it’s worth noting that the Google/MySpace deal has not been a huge success for Google. Users do not typically initiate a lot of searches from within social networks and monetizing advertising in social networks has turned out to be even hard.

Facebook unveiled a new layout, sporting fresh profile pages designed to help members better organize their social lives. But the redesign is drawing complaints from users who say the new site is difficult to navigate and criticism from application developers who worry that the changes will alienate their patrons.

Facebook’s changes come as it competes with rival MySpace to become the primary online social network. MySpace also reorganized the layout of its profiles this summer to help make information easier for members to find.

A central part of the redesign includes an expanded Wall, which is the section of a member’s profile page where friends can post comments and photos. The Wall now incorporates details about a user’s recent activities, previously found on a separate feature known as the news feed. Other applications, such as games and trivia quizzes, as well as personal details, are now on separate tabs in an effort to cut down on clutter.

But Jonathan Dach, 22, of the District, said the new design breaks up profile pages too much, making it more time-consuming to browse the site.

“Splitting up the information . . . forces users to continually click through links to new information,” he said. “Every time we do that, Facebook gets to reload the advertisements. To view someone’s profile in its entirety, I now have to view at least four times as many ads.”

Other users are reluctant to try out the redesigned profile pages, which are currently accessible on an opt-in basis as the redesign is gradually rolled out to all of Facebook’s 80 million users over the next few weeks.

“I don’t want it to change — that gives me a whole set of things to figure out on Facebook, which, as I get older, I have less time for,” said 22-year-old Yesenia Estrada of Gaithersburg.

One goal of Facebook’s new layout is to reduce the clutter from the applications users have downloaded to their profiles. While the colorful games and animated graphics used to dominate profile pages, the applications are now on a separate tab. Facebook said this will give users more control over where they place applications on their profiles.

Some small application developers fear that losing that valuable real estate on users’ profile pages will stunt their ability to attract new users.

Others say they need more time to revamp their applications to fit Facebook’s new design, which the company announced in May.

“It took me a year to write all these apps, and Facebook expects me to totally rewrite them in a month,” Chris Claydon, a developer in Britain, wrote on Facebook’s developer forum. “Why even attempt the impossible?”

Larger developers say the redesign will let members show off their favorite games and applications, which will help them gain more users. “For existing apps with a lot of users, you’re likely to fit into the new world,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, co-founder of Hungry Machine, which has developed programs that let users review books, movies and beer, for example. “If you’re launching a new one, it’s going to be a little harder to get visibility.”

Kevin Foreman, chief executive of Bevy, a fashion marketing company, in May launched an application aimed at women who like to swap fashion tips. He hopes the redesign will let users show off the application more prominently, rather than automatically being displayed at the bottom of a profile as it used to be.

“We may not see super-growth, but our loyal users will showcase the app because they want to, not because they were tricked into it with spammy techniques,” he said.

Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook, just announced that Facebook’s iPhone iPod app has reached 1 million users. Facebook is currently ranked as the 6th most popular free application on Apple’s App Store, and has been among the store’s top applications since the store’s launch on July 11. We’ve asked MySpace for their corresponding numbers. Off hand, John Faith, GM and VP of Mobile for MySpace was able to tell us that their mobile WAP site sees 1.7 million uniques a day. At Facebook’s f8 conference this week, the company announced that it would soon be open sourcing its iPhone application, so we can expect to see a number of copy cats in the near future.

Source: Techcrunch.com

In a move that many have been expecting for a long time, Hasbro, owner of the popular Scrabble game for the past 60 years, has filed a lawsuit against the developers of the popular Facebook application Scrabulous. Scrabulous, which sports over 500,000 daily active users, is one of the most popular applications on Facebook, and was an early favorite amongst many employees at Facebook itself. Now, it’s the subject of a suit in US District Court.