Category: Tech

The king of office software launches Office 2010 to businesses today, May 12th. It is a major departure from what we have seen before in it’s visual design and user interface, but may still seem familiar to those already used to previous versions. There are many new features hiding under the hood, including a free online component that will let you store your documents in the cloud and access them from anywhere.

Microsoft dominates as the Office Suite of choice for individuals and especially businesses. This continues despite services like Google Docs, Zoho, and others offering cheaper web-based solutions. The push into the web is more than likely a response to these services. It’s important that Office users have the same flexibility to change computers or work at different locations as the competitors may offer. In addition, the popularity of netbooks, iPads and other less powerful devices focused on web browsing means that a web-based solution is imperative to retain existing users and remain an option for new customers. Moving into the cloud and keeping the web based services free may put MS a step ahead given their already dominant position.

Social connector is another new feature aimed to keep Office on the cutting edge. It allows you to integrate your social web life directly into your Office experience. This lets you integrate information about your contacts from the social web so that you know their current contact information in addition to what their current status and activities might be.

It looks like Microsoft has definitely been paying attention to current trends and has no plans to be left behind. For existing users, the new version should be a welcome update. For future users, they will be able to choose a solid brand without sacrificing the ability to work in the cloud. Office 2010 launches May 12th at an event in New York and should be available for businesses immediately. Individuals will have to wait until June for the official retail launch.

If you’re impatient, you can still download the beta and get a feel for what is to come. You can also try Office Live to see what the cloud offering is like.

It seems like the hits keep on coming for Facebook and your privacy. This latest security exploit involves Facebook’s new Instant Personalization features. This is the method that Facebook has rolled out that allows 3rd party sites the ability to access your personal information from Facebook in order to provide you with a customized view of the site. Yelp, along with Docs.com and Pandora was one of the few sites first allowed access. In what illustrates the most basic fear as to why you don’t want random 3rd parties accessing your data, a Cross Site Scripting took advantage of Yelp to gain access to your Facebook info.

According to TechCrunch, this is how the exploit worked:

The script in my example would capture the browser cookies set for Yelp.com, extract a key required to make Open Graph API requests to the Facebook API, and send that key to my site. My site would then make a request for your name, email, etc. and store it in a database.

To put it in more basic terms, you visit a site with the evil code on it and it uses Yelp to get at all of your Facebook information. You don’t have to actually visit Yelp, do anything on Yelp, or even know what Yelp is. Yelp has been given full access to your Facebook account to enable Instant Personalization. Without even knowing what has happened or that it even happened, someone just got all of your goods.

Luckily, this exploit was discovered by Web security consultant George Deglin and he wasn’t really after your data. He immediately reported it and Facebook shutdown Instant Personalization. They then worked with Yelp to get the problem fixed. The key points to take away here are that, by opening up to third parties, Facebook is pretty much putting you at risk. Who will discover the next major security hole with Instant Personalization or the Facebook Graph API? Up until now, these exploits have gone public pretty quick and Facebook has had time to recover, but what happens when the bad guys find the hack first?

Silentale is a service just launching their public beta that wants to help you keep track of all your contacts and interactions with those contacts. They are apparently calling themselves he “Dropbox for communications,” collecting and storing your contacts’ information and messages in the cloud for you.

360° view of the people you know – their contact details & your conversation history across emails, social & business networks.

Your personal CRM available anytime, anywhere.

Contacts

Silentale connects with all of your social networking and communications accounts, including email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Apps, and more. It pulls in all the information available about your contacts. This isn’t just limited to your followers, friends, or address book. It looks at those locations as well as who you have actually been talking to. This is similar to how Gmail handles your contacts, storing them all, but allowing you to separate and refine. It also combines your contacts across your social networks, creating one entry with all the relevant data.

Messages

Silentale attempts to create a complete history of all of your messages. This includes things like emails, tweets, and Facebook messages. It will even include attachments. This gives you one interface to access all of your messages. View them in full, link to the particular message on the external service, open attachments, links, and open up contact details.

Search

This is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. What good would all this data be without a robust search engine behind it? Silentale makes it easy to search for specific contacts and locate conversations you’ve had with those contacts. Locate meeting information, directions, documents, and other data without having to remember where it was originally posted. You can even do more involved searches using the advanced search operators.

Silentale is being compared to other services like Gist and Socialwok, but is really not as involved as those. Gist collects your contacts’ information, but is more focused on learning information about those contacts and their activities, not simply what you have discussed with them. Socialwok is about project management and collaboration. They do share the general use of trying to keep track of what’s going on in your social media world, though. It will be interesting to see how they ineract in the future.

Silentale offers a free account that limits you to 6-months of history and 5 services, but is offering free premium accounts until May 31st.

One of the primary reasons that Hootsuite is such a good Twitter client for the individual is that, from the start, the goal was to create an interface for managing all your social networking accounts. Not only was it created to manage your brand, but was built for groups to manage a brand. Up until recently, you only had the option of adding other managers for your accounts, but there was no hierarchy. Everyone had access to the social networking accounts, but here was really no way to coordinate.

That changed with the creation of Owners and Teams. Now, it’s simple to add an account and invite team members to help manage it. It gives you the power to organize efforts without sacrificing the security of your social media accounts. It also helps your brand to be more agile and react in a timely manner. You can modify team member roles at any time and team members can even integrate their personal accounts into the same interface to keep things simple.

There was still a missing piece here. While it was easier to coordinate, there was still no real way to delegate work or track what others on the team were doing. You could easily end up duplicating efforts or having messages fall through the cracks. This could be highly detrimental for your image.

With a few new feature additions, Hootsuite has filled in the gaps and taken your social media management to the next level. Most important is the Message Assignment feature. Use this to assign specific updates and messages to specific team members, including an optional note to give them a heads-up. This allows you to divide work among your team in an efficient and simple manner. For instance, customer complaints, technical support, blog posts, and kudos could all be handled by specific individuals. As the manager, you can see what your team is doing and ensure quality. Team members can also forward messages to each other in the case that another team member could better handle the situation.

To increase efficiency, reduce redundancy, and keep everyone on the same page, Hootsuite has shared columns and drafts. This means the whole team sees the same set of columns and messages. The shared drafts allow you to store pre-written responses to make sure there is a level of consistency in your communications. You can quickly see what messages have been taken care of, what is outstanding, and which have been transferred using the Assignment Tracking feature. Finally, use the Forward Updates by Email function to share messages outside of Hootsuite. This makes it easy to show off your hard work to upper management or handle special issues.

Hootsuite helps you monitor what’s going on in your niche and respond quickly where necessary. The team management features can help organizations of any size maintain a consistent brand image and maintain favorable sentiments. All this in a simple and easy to use interface.

How are you managing your brand?

Twitter has confirmed a bug that makes it possible to force any user to follow you. The bug was first discovered by the Turkish blog and then put to the test by Webrazzi. They created a dummy account and were able to get some high profile geek follows like @ev, @finkd, @readwriteweb, @mashable and @techcrunch.

Before you go trying this out, Techcrunch reports that Twitter is working on fixing the bug. One of their “solutions” involves resetting your follower count to zero if you attempt to exploit the bug. If you just have to see it in action, create a dummy account as Webrazzi did. Now, let’s say you want some high profile people following you:

1. Load up Twitter’s web interface at Twitter.com. The bug doesn’t work through any 3rd party clients which is probably some limitation or feature of the API. On the same note, you may be able to get this to work via SMS, but that requires more setup time.
2. Simply send a tweet of the form “accept @username” and @username will be forced to follow your account.

It seems like Twitter and Facebook, both giants in their areas, are slowly exposing more chinks in their armor. This is not unusual as the most popular are the ones people are always gunning for. The issue here is that Both are still on the way up. They are trying to move the crowd and can’t afford to slip up right now. Facebook just corrected a bug that allowed anyone to view your pending friend requests and chat history. Now, users were able to manipulate their follower counts and force high-profile people to follow them on Twitter.

These types of mishaps won’t go unnoticed and, as I’ve said before, these bugs seem so simple that one has to wonder how they have possibly been overlooked. Twitter’s follower numbers are already pretty much worthless, but they are still a metric that many brands look at to measure ROI.

Google Buzz took a lot of heat regarding privacy when it first launched. It seems to me that the issues popping up as of late regarding the likes of Facebook and Twitter are much more disturbing. While Google’s actions can be argued as a difference of opinion or strategy, Facebook and Twitter just appear to be getting sloppy.

US President Barack Obama addressed a class of graduating students at Hampton University in Virginia recently. During his speech, he warned of the dangers that our technology-driven society puts us in as a nation. While many may complain about information overload, Obama points at more pressing underlying issues. According to AFP:

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,” Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.

Obama seems to be concerned about the fact that technology provides us with access to a wealth of information, but a lack of education and knowledge puts us in a dangerous situation of not being able to tell fact from fiction. He mentioned Thomas Jefferson and talked about the founding father’s belief that the fate of democracy lie with the education of the masses.

“What Jefferson recognized… that in the long run, their improbable experiment — called America — wouldn’t work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy to those who didn’t have the best interests of all the people at heart.

“It could only work if each of us stayed informed and engaged, if we held our government accountable, if we fulfilled the obligations of citizenship.”

As Hampton University is a historically black college, Obama also touched on the disparity between the educational achievements of African Americans and other groups worldwide. He pointed to recently deceased Dorothy Height, who did not give up on her dream of a college education even as a black woman in 1929, as an inspiration in seeking education.

Our technology seems to be a double-edged sword. These tools can be used to edify and enrich your mind, but are just as useful in creating apathetic and uninformed zombies. These people either do nothing in the interest of our country, or become soldiers marching for people who don’t have the country’s interests at heart. Our access to information is very powerful, but only useful when one has the education to make sense of it all.

Do you agree with Obama here? Is our always-on access to information of all kinds dangerous to our society?

Image courtesy Hampton University on Flickr

The nature of projects like Twitter’s @Anywhere and Facebook’s Graph API open up a lot of opportunities for the web. This is not only for developers, but for average web users as well. The key lies in the fact that these technologies rely on simple languages like HTML and Javascript. No advanced development skills are necessary to do some very interesting things.

In a previous post, we covered the basics of setting up @Anywhere on your website. Here, we will take things a step further and describe how to create a members only or VIP section. This will be a page or section of a page on your site that is only visible to certain people. These are Twitter users who have authorized your site to connect to their Twitter account via OAuth. This connection could later be used as part of a marketing funnel or leveraged using more advanced techniques.

This is all possible using a little bit of Javascript. In my implementation, I stuck the code into the sidebar on one of my WordPress blogs. This method is the easiest and most useful because it will attract more eyeballs. Also, putting Javascript inside a post or on a page is actually more difficult than it sounds. Here is the example code:

<span id="authContent"></span> <script type="text/javascript">
twttr.anywhere(function (T) { $j = jQuery.noConflict(); var currentUser, screenName; if (T.isConnected()) { currentUser = T.currentUser; screenName = currentUser.data('screen_name'); $j('#authContent').append("Hello, " screenName); } else { T("#authContent").followButton('BlackWeb20'); };
});
</script>

First, we create a <span> element with an id of “authContent” (you could pick any name you like) which will be a place-holder for our content. What follows is an @anywhere block that does a couple of things:

Digging Deeper

I kept this example dead simple so that it would be easy to grasp the basic concept, but this is definitely just the tip of the iceberg. All you’ve got here is a way to get people following you that might actually be interested in your brand or site, but you can take things much further. Here are a couple of examples that I’ll leave as exercises for the reader:

Google Buys BumpTop

Bumptop is a freeform desktop application that break out of the usual ways you might expect an operating system to behave. Rather than your standard windows and icons setup, you have something that behaves a lot more similar to a desktop in real life. The difference here is that you get advanced tools that make interacting with and organizing your stuff much easier. Its unclear at this point exactly why Google bought Bumptop. Maybe we will see some fancy new functionality on an upcoming Android release. As far as the Bumptop software in it’s current form, you have to download it by the end of today, May 7th, or you may not have another chance to play with it.

via TNW

Apple Has Sold Over 1 Million iPads

Just 28 days after it’s introduction on April 3rd, Apple has already sold 1 million iPads. This is as of May 3rd. I’m still not sure all the hype surrounding the iPad was worth it, but the things are selling like hotcakes and are causing ripples in the tech community as companies scramble to make sure their products are supported.

via Apple.com

Ning Will Stay Free for Educators

Millions of users were outraged when Ning recently announced that it would no longer be free. You can’t really be mad at them as they are actually making the majority of their revenue and even generating most of their traffic from the users that actually pay. Shortly after the announcement, while many searched for alternatives, a petition went up pushing for Ning to keep the service free for educators and their students. 1100 people signed it and it looks like Ning was listening. For everyone else, premium plans are as low as $2.95/month or $20/year, so all is not totally lost.

via NYT

Google Redesigns for the Spring

This isn’t something that happens very often. Google has made slight changes to their search results page, adding a sidebar that gives you quick access to features that help refine your searches. Not a major change for you average site, but Google keeps things so sparse that this is close to a complete redesign.

Today’s metamorphosis responds to the increasing richness of the web and the increasing power of search — revealing search tools on the left and updating the visual look and feel throughout.

details at the Google Blog

FCC Makes Moves on Net Neutrality

After losing a case against Comcast regarding it’s practices towards net neutrality, the FCC has not given up. They still plan to push a new agenda regarding regulations for broadband companies. The question is what that agenda will be and how it will affect consumers and ISP’s. The FCC didn’t fail with Comcast because nobody wants regulations, they just picked the wrong way to go about it. This is why they’ve come up with a new way.

details at Engadget

Facebook will soon launch location-enabled status updates. I think we’ve all known this was coming, but will it really matter? Facebook has the largest and most popular social network, but I don’t think that automatically means they will overtake services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Weren’t people saying Yelp was going to kill Foursquare when they enabled checkins?

As early as this month, the social-networking site will give users the ability to post their location within a status update. McDonald’s, through digital agency Tribal DDB, Chicago, is building an app with Facebook would allow users to check in at one of its restaurants and have a featured product appear in the post, such as an Angus Quarter Pounder, say executives close to the deal.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t really been itching to be able to attach ads to my location check-ins. This is social media, so the focus should be on Me, not some message being pushed by the establishment I’m at. If they want to get a piece of the location action, I’m gonna need them to get their own account. On the other hand, if I’m getting compensated with free stuff or cash, maybe me and Micky D’s could work something out.

Facebook says they don’t usually monetize any new feature immediately, so the check-in ads may not be showing up any time soon, if at all. It will also be interesting to see how, exactly, Facebook chooses to implement check-ins. Google and Twitter are both probably tracking your location and including it with your updates right now, but you wouldn’t know by the methods they’re using. It’s more of a passive system and, well, there are no badges (don’t act like you don’t like badges).

Privacy is also an issue here. There are people that I have friended on Facebook that I may not want to share my physical location with. That’s not what I joined Facebook for. This could end up being yet another change that current Facebook users do not want or won’t understand.

Are you ready to share your location using Facebook?

Twitter’s Anywhere platform allows you to turn any website into a Twitter application. All basic functionality that you would find in a Twitter client is supported. It appeals to your average user who just wants a fancy follow button, to more advanced business and technical users. This will be a quick walk-through on how, exactly, you can get started with @Anywhere with minimal technical knowledge.

Set Up a Twitter Application

This isn’t as hard as it sounds. Visit the Twitter @Anywhere Dev site and click the Start Using It Now button. This will take you to the application setup screen. Don’t get tied up in the details here. You know your site’s name and URL. That is all you need. Be sure to choose Read & Write access for your new application.

Once you’ve created your application, copy the API key to your clip board. You will need it for the next step.

Paste The Relevant Code

You knew this was coming. The first code snippet goes in the header of your page, before the </head> tag (this is usually the case for most external Javascript you use). It should look something like this:

<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/anywhere.js?id=YOUR_API_KEY&v=1" type="text/javascript"></script>

Just be sure to replace the YOUR_API_KEY part with your actual API key from the first step.

Activating @Anywhere Features

This part can get a little technical, but is still just a cut and paste job if you keep things simple. You activate specific @Anywhere features calling the corresponding methods within your Javascript code. The features currently available are:

• Auto-linkification of Twitter usernames – automatically link @usernames to their Twitter profiles.
• Hovercards – show a small preview of a user’s Twitter profile when you hover their username.
• Follow buttons – allow one-click following of a specified user. No need for them to leave your website to follow you or anyone else you would like.
• Tweetbox – allow your visitors to easily send a tweet from your website, optionally specifying default content for them to tweet. Very useful if you use your imagination.
• User login and signup – some activities of @anywhere require the visitor to connect their Twitter account to your site. Stuff like Following and tweeting, for instance. You don’t have to include a separate login button, though.

At the very least, you probably want a follow button so that your visitors can easily connect with you on Twitter. Hovercards are also useful in allowing visitors to take action on users and it implies the auto-linkify feature. To enable hovercards, place the following code in the footer of your site before the </body> tag.

<script type="text/javascript"> twttr.anywhere(function (T) { T.hovercards(); }); </script>

Adding a follow button is a two step process as you will need to create a place for the button to go, and then include the code to actually draw the button. So, first we create a <span> element on our page with a specific id, which we will refer to in a moment. You might place this in your blog’s sidebar, for instance.

<span id="follow-blackweb20"></span>

Next, place the following Javascript code before the </body> tag of your page. In this case, we are creating a follow button for the Twitter user @blackweb20 and we are telling the @anywhere API to put the button in the page element with an id of “follow-blackweb20.”

<script type="text/javascript"> twttr.anywhere(function (T) { T('#follow-blackweb20').followButton("blackweb20"); }); </script>

Your pages can include multiple anywhere blocks to keep your features separate.

That’s It

There are multiple @Anywhere plugins for WordPress. I can’t vouch for any of them yet, but give them a shot and let me know which you like. If you are very wary about editing your template, these will probably be your best bet. Of course, if you want to get a little advanced, feel free to ask questions in the comments if you have any problems.

Also, for those more technically inclined or with creative minds, what uses can you think of for @anywhere?

Scribd, the popular online document sharing site, has decided that it doesn’t see Flash in it’s future. According to co-founder Jared Friedman, “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.”

Chalk this up as another loss for Adobe, who is currently facing major criticisms from Apple and others regarding it’s Flash product. The hottest new mobile gadget, the iPad, does not support Flash at all. There are no plans for it to support Flash. Steve Jobs has taken time out to write lengthy rants about Flash. Other companies and brands are moving to support HTML5 alongside Flash, many just so that their stuff works on the iPad.

Scribd is taking a major step here in dropping years of Flash development to embrace a technology that’s not even the standard yet. I think they will reap great benefits in the long run, though. Porting away from Flash to HTML5 means that their books will be readable on the iPad as well as a host of other mobile devices. You will no longer need to download or purchase ebooks from some proprietary online store as they will be available via Scribd in a simple format. You will be able to share them across your social networks and view them from just about any browser just like any other standard webpage.

The change just seems to make sense. A document isn’t so complicated that it should require so much overhead. When you think about it, it makes no sense that we often have to view documents inside a little flash box. Friedman plans to take our documents out of these little boxes and hand us the content. He has been working on this in secret for the past six months and believes that 97 percent of browsers will be able to view the new Scribd books. We have mostly heard about video as it relates to HTML5, but this part of the standard is new. Documents rely on features of HTML5 that are older and more widely supported.

Scridb will convert about 200,000 of it’s most popular documents tomorrow. The rest are soon to follow.

via Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5

According to WSJ, the federal government will use ancient rules designed for phone networks to regulate broadband lines. This is only the beginning of a huge battle, putting broadband Internet providers and phone companies against Silicon Valley and the consumer.

Net neutrality sounds like such a boring topic, but it’s very important to so many different groups of people that it bears paying attention to. The basic principle is whether high-speed Internet providers can treat some traffic different than other traffic or whether they must take a completely neutral stance and treat everything the same. Other issues include regulations on broadband rates, which could affect what companies are able to charge you. Digging even deeper are regulations on the actual broadband lines and how that would affect a provider’s ability to do business.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowskih is the man behind the decision to push forward with this net neutrality initiative. He wants all traffic treated equally, with no specific traffic being slowed or blocked. Just last month, Comcast won a federal appeals court ruling against the FCC. While this threw into question whether the FCC even has the authority to enforce net neutrality, the ruling simply stated that they went about it the wrong way.

While there are strong opinions on both sides, what it boils down to is specifics. At this point, we don’t know exactly how the FCC will go about implementing net neutrality. Some say that such a plan could affect under served and underrepresented individuals like minorities and lower-income households, indirectly denying them access to the Internet. Others argue the exact opposite, saying that net neutrality will increase availability of broadband access to those same groups. It’s hard to know who to trust.

President Barrack Obama vowed to support some type of net neutrality and accepted donations from Silicon Valley. Bill Clinton says, “The question is how heavy a hand will the regulatory touch be. We don’t know yet, so the devil is in the details. The network operators have to be able to treat some traffic on the Internet different than other traffic—most people agree that web video is different than an email to grandma. You have to discriminate in some fashion.”

Telecom companies say regulations on pricing could scare away their share-holders. They are afraid that they might be forced to open up their broadband lines to competitors and that regulations could impeded their ability to keep up with the growing expansion and demand for broadband access.

There are many variables to consider here, but I think the most important outcome is how these changes will affect minority communities. It will be interesting to see exactly how the plan is layed out.

Everyone’s favorite Internet calling service Skype will be conducting a public beta test for a new group video chat function. This will allow up to five people participate in a video call at the same time. While this isn’t something that’s never been done before, it will definitely be awesome to have and was actually one of the most requested features from current Skype users.

There are a few services out there that do group video chat, but having the Skype brand attached would make this one more credible. There is also the huge, worldwide user base that works to make this new addition more attractive.

Video chat will be launching next week and will be free for the moment, giving existing users a chance to get attached to it. According general manager of Skype’s consumer business segment, Neil Stevens, this will only be temporary. Video chat, along with a few other features to be released in the coming months, will become a premium feature and will only available to paid users.

Skype will also be updating it’s existing subscription plans. They currently focus mostly on calls to land lines, but this will be changed to include options for contacting cellular phones. While it’s cheaper for Skype to route the calls to land lines, it appears that users might be willing to pay to connect to cell phones as well. These new subscription plans should provide more options for users, which is always a plus. Look forward to being able to call cell phones and land lines in over 170 countries.

Skype was sold by eBay for $2 billion late last year, purchased by an investors group which included it’s original founders. This may be only the first of many interesting changes Skype may go through as it falls back into the hands of it’s creators. While it has stayed in the forefront for Internet calls, Skype hasn’t really delved into a lot of the latest things we see going on with video and telephony, and I’m definitely curious to know what they have up their sleeves.

Do you Skype? Would group calls change the way you do business?

A new Facebook security hole makes it simple for your friends to read your instant messages, your instant messaging history, see your messages and friend requests. This isn’t even hard to do for the average person. There is no special technical knowledge needed. As a matter of fact, users may already be exploiting this bug to stalk you on the hush. Ever wondered why that certain someone has a knack for knowing things about you that they shouldn’t? Maybe Facebook snitched. In just a few clicks, you can get a good look at your friends’ personal information.

• Login to Facebook and click the Account tab on the top right
• Choose Privacy Settings from the drop-down
• Go to Personal Information and Posts
• Click Preview My Profile on the right

Now, you should be looking at a preview of your profile as other users see it. Here is where all the magic happens. Pick a victim real quick (I chose little brother, but feel free to be creative) and type their name into the “Preview how your profile appears to another person” box. The page will update and you should be able to access the person’s chat information on the bottom right. You should also see their pending friend requests, messages, and notifications on the top left.

I tried this out and it work. Very freaky stuff. I suspect that Facebook has started working on the problem immediately because, as of this writing, the hole behaves erratically and Facebook chat is down for maintenance. Even still, for a company that is advocating throwing privacy an caution to the wind and pushing everyone to become more public, they’re not doing a very good job of instilling confidence in their user base.

Even as one of the minority who is kind of on Facebook’s side as far as seeing the benefits of becoming more public and sharing more online, a bug which lets people accept and deny my friend requests and view my chat history turns my stomach. Just as in the real world, if you see one bug, there are probably a few more where it came from. I hope that this pushes Facebook to take a good long look at their code because I’m pretty sure many privacy advocates are hard at work trying to break it. This is especially true given their recent changes in stance.

via eu.TechCrunch.com

UPDATE: Facebook just recently sent this statement to TechCrunch EU regarding the security hole, acknowledging that they fixed the problem and also patting themselves on the back a little.

“For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users’ chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the “preview my profile” feature of Facebook privacy settings. When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented.”

There are a lot of black people on Twitter. The numbers, taken from the annual report on Twitter by Edison Research, don’t lie. While black people make up about 12% of the general population, they account for 25% of the population of users on Twitter. I always felt like this was true in my day to day use of Twitter and trending topics, but now I have confirmation. The question is why is such a large percentage of the Twitter population African American? There are a few conclusions that can be drawn here based on similar research.

The mobile arena is blowing up and blacks and Hispanics are at the forefront of this growth. 55% of Americans connect to the Internet wirelessly and, out of that 55%, 59% are Black/Non-Hispanic. Black people and other minority groups are just generally more likely to access the Internet via some type of mobile device. Taking that into consideration, Twitter is just about the most mobile-friendly social networking application out there.

Even if you don’t have a data plan, you can still use Twitter via SMS. I know many black households that may not have a computer or may not have broadband Internet access, but they definitely have cell phones in the home. Mobile devices solve the general problem of phone communications as well as providing basic Internet access to social media and business applications.

Another major factor is how quickly black celebrities have taken to Twitter as compared to white celebs. You have people like Ashton Kutcher going hard and promoting the service, but it seems there are many more black celebrities with active Twitter accounts. This includes musicians, athletes, actors, and organizations. It probably doesn’t hurt that Obama himself, the first black president of the US, popularized the service during and after his successful campaign.

According to this same report, Twitter is most popular among the 25 to 34 year old crowd. The median age for blacks or African Americans is about 31 while the median age for whites is about 40 according to the 2006 census. This means that blacks are younger on average and also mostly fall directly in the middle of the group that has the most interest in Twitter.

One last point is that Twitter users tend to be not only more educated, but more wealthy. On a related note, higher income African Americans are the fastest growing segment of web users. You have educated and wealthy black people getting online in droves. Even lower income blacks, while they may not have broadband at home, are still able to access Twitter on their mobile devices. At the same time, most of these people are right in the sweet spot for people being interested in Twitter and many of the celebs they follow are already on the service asking them to join.

I know many have seen this and have some strong opinions on the subject, so I encourage you to share them here. What reasons can you think of as to why so many black people are on Twitter? What are they doing with it?

via SFGate