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Yesterday, Facebook launched a new widget called the "Facebook Like Button," which, simply put, brings the Facebook like button to the entire Internet. Website owners can implement the new button on their site using a small bit of code. In fact, you don't even have to be a developer to make your own like button - there's a little wizard that generates the code for you. Then it's as easy as copy-and-paste to get the button onto your site. However, there's a small problem with this new, easy-to-use new tool: it's possible to trick users into liking anything - even pages they've never visited! Sponsor "Likes" - A New Tool for Spammers? As Arnab Nandi, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Michigan, recently discovered , it's simple to create a like button for a page you're not even on. Using the wizard provided by Facebook, you can create a button for any URL you want and embed it on your site. Why would anyone want to do this, you ask? While no self-respecting webmaster would want to deceive a visitor to their site, says Nandi, an "enterprising spammer" certainly would. By tricking site visitors into "liking" something by mistake, spammers could immediately place their links into that person's News Feed, a feed seen by all of that person's friends. And since an average Facebook user has 130 friends , even tricking a handful of people into doing this gives the spammer access to hundreds, potentially thousands, more people. Nandi already coined a word for this new hack: "News Feed Spam." And yes, it will exist. How the Button Works Creating your own evil like button is incredibly simple, as we've demonstrated below. Nandi uses the "safe for work" example of "liking" the Britney Spears site in the example on his blog , but we know that our readers don't want that affiliation in their News Feed for even an instant, so we created a much safer example for you to try by using our own Twitter account as the "like" target. (Really, we promise!). Although you can remove the "like" from your News Feed after clicking, when you "like" something on Facebook, the affiliation is now attached to the Open Graph API. That means that your "like" data is associated with your profile, even if you remove it from showing in your News Feed. In any event, all we did was fill in the necessary info into Facebook's wizard and we got code for the button below: (NYT readers, visit the original site for the demo). If you click that button, you'll see that you just "liked" ReadWriteWeb's Twitter account , not this post or this website. So the question now is this: did Facebook make the "like" button too simple? Should the button display more info about the target of the like so you know what you're getting into? Will this problem become so widespread that people begin to fear "liking" things across the net? What do you think? Image credit for original post: Zazzle Discuss

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How to Trick Users into Liking Facebook Pages They're Not On

Facebook today announced that application developers will be allowed to store user data for more than 24 hours, removing a major restriction that the company had imposed on its ecosystem for years. Competitors like Twitter and MySpace had no such restrictions and now Facebook is in the same boat. Founder Mark Zukerberg used to say that the rule against storing data was essential to protect users and their privacy. Where are those now? Privacy, Zuckerberg told me in a March 2008 interview, "is the vector around which Facebook operates." Two years later, not so much. In a December 2009 interview , Zuckerberg said that Facebook's new public-by-default privacy settings reflected how he would build the site if he were to do it again from scratch today. Compare below what Zuckerberg said in 2008 and what today's new Developer Terms of Service say about holding on to user data now. Sponsor I believe that the Facebook policy change on storing user data is a net win for the web: it will enable all kinds of new innovation. It was that kind of innovation that I was asking about two years ago when I got the following answer about privacy that just doesn't sound right anymore today. Zuckerberg on Data Portability, March 10th 2008 interview with ReadWriteWeb : "If you export your friends list, does their contact information come with that? What if they change their privacy settings later? Right now if you take an action that gets published to your friends' news feeds, but then if you change your privacy settings later to be more restrictive - then those events disappear from the news feeds. If that data is published off-site, then there's no longer any control over the data for users. " (emphasis added) And today, on the new Developers' Terms of Service : You must give users control over their data by posting a privacy policy that explains what data you collect, and how you will use, store, and/or transfer their data....You may cache data you receive from the Facebook API in order to improve your application's user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date ...You will delete all data you receive from us concerning a user if the user asks you to do so, and will provide a mechanism for users to make such a request. (emphasis added) One thing that remains the same? "You cannot use a user's friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use." Facebook doesn't want you taking your data out of the Facebook ecosystem, to other competing services, but it doesn't insist that 3rd parties under its shadow check in with you daily anymore, either. It's hard not to feel a little cynical about that. Discuss

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Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two Years

During today's F8 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of new products and features for Facebook, including a new collaboration with Microsoft. With Docs.com , Microsoft's FUSE labs just launched an online document editor and viewer that connects directly to Facebook and uses all of the new social features for third-party sites that Facebook announced today. Docs, for example, allows users to share documents with their Facebook friends, edit them collaboratively and discover documents that their friends have uploaded to their profiles. Sponsor Creating Documents in the Cloud and Sharing them With Your Facebook Friends With Docs, you can create new documents right in the web application or upload them from your desktop. Docs gives you the option to share documents privately or you can allow a select group of your Facebook friends to edit the document with you. A button next to every document allows you to add additional editors at any point. In our tests, the editor wasn't working properly yet (though the document viewer works just fine). We will take a closer look at Docs editing features once it is fully up and running. In addition to being able to create and view documents, Docs.com's Facebook integration will also allow your friends to discover these documents (if you choose to share them). You can also add a new tab to your profile page that shows all the documents you have shared with your friends. This also means that you can use Facebook to discuss these documents in public, just like you would discuss any other status update on the site. Attacking Google There can be little doubt that this is a direct attack against Google Docs . Even though Google Docs only offers relatively basic editing features, the service's collaboration tools allow it to stand out from Microsoft's products. Until now, collaborating on Microsoft Office documents was always a rather difficult task for Office users and generally involved using third-party software. It remains to be seen how many people in an office environment will really want to connect their documents to Facebook. For students and other Facebook users who aren't using this tool in a corporate environment and just want to share documents with each other, however, this looks like a great solution. Discuss

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Docs.com: Facebook and Microsoft Go After Google Docs

Facebook is hosting its annual f8 developer conference in San Francisco today. We expect quite a few announcements around new features and products today, including more information about the availability of a firehose of user data , geotagging, payments and the rumored off-site "like" button that publishers will soon be able to embed in their pages. Read on to find our live blog of Mark Zuckerberg's keynote. The keynote is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PST (GMT -7:00). Sponsor Watch it Live You can also find live video of the keynote here . We will refresh this page regularly during the keynote. Please reload this page to see these updates. 9:45: Audience is getting seated. 10:01: Looks like there is a little delay. Keynote is now scheduled to start at 10:10 a.m. PST. 10:07: Rumor : Facebook and Microsoft will announce a new application partnership. Image credit: Devin Reams . 10:11: Zuckerberg on stage. 10:12: "What we have to show you today will be one of the most transformative things for the Web we've ever done." Open Graph: Puts people at the center of the Web. "The Web can become a semantically meaningful set of connections." 10:14: Recap of Facebook stats: 400 million users on Facebook, 100 million people use Facebook Connect. "A lot of startups are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences." Policy updates: All permissions are now managed in one permissions dialog. Cache: Developers can now store information for longer than 24 hours. 10:18: Facebook credits: More than 100 developers working with Facebook already. 10:18: Back to Open Graph: "Facebook only maps out the part of the social graph that relates to people." Others, like Yelp and Pandora map out the social graph around other topics. 10:21: There is no way to bring these different graphs together yet. Right now, developers use the stream metaphor, but the services don't understand these connections. 10:22: By connecting these graphs, Facebook will be able to show you restaurants your friends like, music your friends like, etc. "By doing this, the Web will get a whole lot better." 10:23: New Graph API: Makes it simple to read connections on FB. Based on a new standard. New plugins for sites: Make your sites instantly social and personalized. 10:24: Example: See what your friends already liked on CNN. CNN won't know who you are or who your friends are. On CNN homepage: See all your friends' activity. 10:25: Bret Taylor (formerly of Friendfeed) on stage. 10:27: How do you get people to feel comfortable with importing their Facebook friends? Experience from Friendfeed: The only signup button that mattered was Facebook Connect, because that was the best way for people to find their friends. 10:28: New products: Social plugins: add social features with just one line of HTML. Universal like button: A like button for the Web that will instantly share your like back to FB. Based on an iframe. 10:31: Activity streams plugin: Transport the FB news feed to your site. 10:31: Recommendations plugin: Show users articles on your site that they are most likely to like. Highly personalized. Login plugin: See which of your friends already signed up for a given service. Social bar: The "kitchen sink" of Facebook's new plugins. One bar at the bottom of the site will show all of these features. 10:33: Talking about the news feed: Open Graph will make the stream more useful. Allows you to markup your pages to tell Facebook what kind of real-world object your page represents. You can say, for example, that a page is about a band and where this band is from. New section on your profile can now show which movies, songs, etc. you liked. 10:36: Launching with 30 partners today. You can also subscribe by topics. These likes and updates will point to sites outside of Facebook. "My identity is not just defined by Facebook but also by all of the things I do around the Web." 10:38: Graph API: Our attempt to re-architect the Facebook platform with simplicity and the Graph API in mind. 10:40: You can download all of the connections of a given user from the Graph API. 10:41: Search: You can search through all of the public updates on Facebook. Real-time will be built-in. Facebook will ping developers when a user posts an update. 10:42: Facebook will use oAuth 2.0. "It's so much more awesome than our current system. Available for the Graph API and all of Facebook's existing APIs. 10:44: Zuckerberg back on stage. Facebook expects to service a total of 1 billion like buttons today. 10:45: "The Web is at an important turning point today." Startups require their users to bring their real identity. "The default is now social." 10:46: What kind of products would be possible if Facebook partners already knew everything about their users? Microsoft Docs.com: Online version of Microsoft's office suite. Collaborate with friends on documents. All of the power of Microsoft Office - but with a built-in social experience. Second example: Pandora. See what bands your friends like on Pandora. 10:50: Zuckerberg finishes the keynote with an anecdote about his girlfriend. Discuss

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Live Blog: Mark Zuckerberg's F8 Keynote

Facebook's F8 developer conference starts today and, even if I had a plane ticket, I couldn't be there. The same went for Twitter's Chirp conference last week and the iPhone OS 4.0 release the week before that. It just wasn't in the stars and, more importantly, the budget - but that's what technology is for, right? On that point, we'd like to look at a few ways you can keep up with the news coming out of today's F8 conference and other events you might not be able to attend in person but want to watch, in real-time, nonetheless. And for your convenience, we've embedded streaming video of the F8 Keynote after the jump. Sponsor First, for more less secretive events like today's F8 conference, there's the fully authorized, sponsored live-streaming video . And often a search on sites like UStream and Justin.tv get a number of somewhat shaky but nonetheless informative smartphone videos of the events. Often, these sites are the place to go for streaming video of less open events, like most any of Apple's clamped-down product releases. Then there's the old faithful hashtag, the identifier that shows you tweets that are (supposedly) related to the same topic, though sometimes fall short on that point. And lets not forget any number of live blogs. But beyond all of these standard tools, we were reminded of an aggregator of all these different ways of remotely monitoring a real-time event that's been around for a bit more than a year now and is just as useful as ever - Almost.at . Almost.at is a sweet looking tool written in Cappuccino by David Cann for the express purpose of "Following People at Real-World Events in Real-Time". The service can be used on the web or in a standalone browser for Mac OSX 10.5+ and gathers all the content it can about a specific event from a number of services: Twitter , Flickr , YouTube , TwitPic , TinyURL and Bit.ly . Streaming in real-time, Almost.at shows a number of different events in the left-most column, pulls in related tweets in the next, pictures and videos after that, and then related articles and external links in the final column. Even better, the web app offers a minute by minute timeline at the bottom of the screen, showing when the conversation was most active and allowing you to browse everything by the timeline. So, while we'll certainly be keeping an eye on our own cultivated lists of who's who on Twitter, Almost.at will likely be the main browser tab we keep open alongside the live-streaming broadcast that we've embedded at the end of this post. But before you get to watching today's F8 conference, you may want to catch up on what we're expecting, so here are a few links to that end: Om Malik's F8 Preview explains "How Facebook Plans to Take Over The Web". Marshall Kirkpatrick anticipates that a Facebook Firehose May Be Released at Developer Conference F8 . Inside Facebook's Eric Eldon also gives a round-up of all the rumors leading up to the F8 conference that helps put everything in context. Marshall Kirkpatrick also expects that Facebook May Launch Recommendation Service For Other Websites . Discuss

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How to Keep Tabs on Facebook's F8 from Afar