Inside Facebook

ComScore: Facebook on Top Since May – comScore reported that Facebook experienced triple-digit growth in the U.S. in 2009, sitting on top of all other social networks since May of last year. Facebook finished with 112 million visitors in December, up 105% from the previous December in 2008; Facebook also grew “substantially” across almost all performance metrics, including unique visitors, page views and time spent on the site.

The average minutes per usage per day is up, the average usage days per visitors is up, and the amount of time spent on Facebook grew three-fold in the span of one year.

Massive Facebook Data Set for Academic Release – Pete Warden, a former Apple employee and game developer, is set to release data on 215 million public Facebook accounts to the academic community this week. Warden wrote on his blog Wednesday that he was hoping to have released it then, but he’s incorporating suggestions that came in after he published a “How to Split up the US” post Saturday.

One of these suggestions comes from Facebook, he says. They “asked for a little more time to check the privacy implications.” The data set includes friend, fan and name data from the 215 million profiles, as well as much more, and concerns some people like Michael Zimmer because of the implications for user privacy.

Zimmer writes that Warden exploited Facebook’s infrastructure to access public profiles without having to be signed into a Facebook account and that this data set may be problematic to those in it, “It is impossible to predict who might use Warden’s dataset and to what ends, but this threat is real.”

Play Facebook Photos in a Slideshow – A Facebook Slideshow prototype was released recently that allows you to view photos in a slideshow as opposed to having to click through. After activating the prototype you click on “Play,” located in the upper right-hand corner of your photo to see a new photo every five seconds.

[Image via TechCrunch]

Facebook’s Lexicon Disappears – Facebook’s Lexicon tool that provided information on site-wide trends disappeared this week, as spotted by Steve Rubel. Facebook provided the following message: “Thank you for your interest in Lexicon. We are removing the Lexicon product from Facebook for the time being. We may bring components of Lexicon back in the future, but we are focusing development on our analytics tools for Page owners, advertisers and Platform developers.”

This may be because Facebook doesn’t want to appear to support data mining of the stream with its own tools, even though that’s what marketers would ideally want. However, it might also mean that an even better tool than Lexicon is in the works.

Qik Allows Facebook Comments – Mobile video sharing company Qik announced a new Facebook integration that allows users to see comments on Qik videos posted on Facebook. Video comments in Qik are automatically posted onto Facebook videos as well.

A Peek Into Facebook User Testing – Newsweek’s Nick Summers got the chance to see how Facebook conducts its user testing recently, recounting his experience in a blog about the company’s user lab in Palo Alto. Summers said the user lab occupies two narrow side-by-side rooms, one for engineers and the other for users, with a large display for the engineers that duplicates usage from the user’s monitor.

Facebook engineers apparently do care about what users experience on the social network, Summers said they groaned when a first-time 24 year-old named Mark had trouble uploading photos, “We gotta change this,” they said. But, Summers also plainly points out that Facebook has always done what’s best for Facebook, noting that moving the notifications menu to the left of the page brings with it a 10% increase in clicks.

Facebook Talks Internal Dashboard – On Thursday engineer Michel Novati discussed Facebook’s internal dashboard at length in a note on Facebook Engineering’s Page. Internal dashboards have to primary functions, he wrote, to allow non-engineers to build dynamic pages completely in the browser without having to rewrite code and to give engineers the chance to break down complex tools into simple widgets.

Facebook Email-Style Messaging Upgrade Coming Soon? – The company has long suggested that its messaging service could use an upgrade — the feature is an important part of the site, and has replaced email for some users. Now, Facebook is working something called “Project Titan,” and employees are even calling it “the Gmail killer,” TechCrunch hears. Potential features include “full POP/IMAP support” so people could download or otherwise read and respond to Facebook messages from other email clients, and the ability to have your Facebook vanity URL as your email name (yourname@facebook.com). Note: Gmail creator, FriendFeed cofounder and now Facebook employee Paul Buchheit says: “No, I am not working on anything related to email (nor do I plan to).”

Pew Study: Facebook Most Popular Among American Adults – A study entitled “Social Media and Young Adults” from the Pew Internet & American Life Project was released this week. One finding concluded that blogging has declined for young people but increased slightly for adults 30 and above; the report also noted that wireless connectivity use is rising for young people. A large percentage of American teens, 73%, use social networking sites, 47% of adults do and 72% of 18-29 year-olds use them. Among adults 52% said they have two or more different profiles, with Facebook being the most commonly used online social network, 73% of adults reported maintaining a profile there.

39% of Facebook Users Donated to Haiti – Facebook’s Facebook Global Disaster Relief page, which launched shortly after the recent Haiti earthquake, recently surpassed 250,000 fans. Videos with former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as links to a whole host of charities, are included on the page. A joint survey between Facebook and The Nielsen Company found of Facebook users in the U.S., U.K. and Australia: 32% donated money, 4% donated goods, 3% donated both, 21% haven’t yet given but plan to and 13% donated via text messages — 23% in the U.S.

European Commission to Revamp Privacy Laws in Response to Facebook – The European Commission announced this week that Facebook and other social networking sites may face regulation if they fail to adequately protect users’ privacy. Plans for comprehensive new laws governing data protection and privacy are in the works, given that rules currently date back to 1995. The commission is concerned specifically about Facebook, as well as other social networks, but also other technology, such as radio frequency identification, behavioral advertising and airport security. The changes are set to revise the commissions 1995 Data Protection Directive.

Print Facebook Ads Receipts – Wednesday Facebook announced that a printer-friendly version of billing receipts for Facebook ads. Those who have accounts for Facebook ads may now see a printer-friendly version of their billing manager receipt, which includes a Facebook logo and address and other billing info. The feature is available in the Billing section of the Ads manager for each transaction, the Printer-Friendly Version button is in the top-right corner of the page. Facebook said the changes are intended to streamline accounting and tax processes for customers.

Study Says Facebook is the “Most Dangerous” Social Network – A survey of 500 companies across the globe found that more than 70% reported spam and other infections arrived via social networks in 2009 and 2008, last year 72% of these companies were concerned about security breaches due to employees’ use of these networks. Facebook especially, as 60% named Facebook the riskiest network of the bunch, partly due to the fact that it’s the largest social network and also because new privacy settings expose more member-generated content to the entire Internet. Of course, saying Facebook is the riskiest doesn’t mean that it is actually risky for the typical user.

Facebook Set to be Globe’s News Reader – Facebook is set to become the world’s top news reader, according to a post from Experian Hitwise this week. Although Google Reader has most recently been the leading news reader, last week it only accounted for .01% of upstream visits to news and media websites, whereas this number was 3.52% for Facebook there’s a graph at the link. Facebook, according to Hitwise, was the fourth most popular source of visits to news and media sites last week.

Mystery Facebook Music App Appears, Disappears – This week some Facebook users found a mysterious Music application on their list linking to Facebook.com/music, but it didn’t work, linking instead to the news feed. Facebook then said they removed the application, said it might have been a bug and that Facebook has no plans to launch a music service.

Facebook Moves to Dismiss Click Fraud Lawsuits – Facebook has moved to dismiss litigation brought by several marketers as the result of click fraud this summer, arguing that Facebook’s contract with RootZoo and other online marketers provides that they must pay for all clicks — despite fraud. MediaPost reported this week that Facebook alleges in its motion that cost-per-click advertisers had to check a box agreeing to terms and conditions, including: “I understand that third parties may generate impressions, clicks, or other actions affecting the cost of the advertising for fraudulent or improper purposes, and I accept the risk of any such impressions, clicks, or other actions.” The case is currently pending in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.

Yesterday, Facebook announced updated terms of service for third party advertising and offer providers on the Facebook Platform. You can see our full analysis here.

Most of the terms relate to compliance with all existing Facebook terms of service and advertiser policies. However, one part in particular relates to the disclosure of third party information – including “payment details” – for any third party ad provider on the Platform. It reads (emphasis added):

3. The ad provider agrees to provide to Facebook the names, email addresses, and business addresses of all operators and employees of the ad provider and any other related information requested by Facebook for the purpose of maintaining a direct relationship with the ad provider. The ad provider also agrees to share with Facebook the contact information, implementation specifics and payment details, for each developer or application on Facebook for which the ad provider provides services.

We asked Facebook for more information on what it meant exactly by “payment details” in the new terms. i.e. Does that mean that third party monetization providers must share developer revenue numbers, revenue sharing terms, and the like, with Facebook?

The company told that payment information “will only be requested if there is a very clear need to do so.”

What we believe Facebook means by this is that they will only request this kind of sensitive financial data from third parties when substantial questions arise about the legitimacy of what either party is doing in order to investigate potential abuse. Nevertheless, many people in the developer ecosystem are concerned about the theoretical possibilities that could occur according to a strict reading of the new terms.

Ultimately, while we do not think Facebook is going to suddenly go around asking everybody to disclose their finances, this is the first instance that we are aware of in which Facebook has explicitly written a condition like this into the Platform terms of service. It’s a reflection of how Facebook views its expanding role in Platform governance – if you’re doing something suspicious or abusive, Facebook is reserving the right to look at your books and see where the money’s going.

Facebook has been investing in tools to detect and block automated systems and scripts created by spammers heavily in recent years. When it comes to user email addresses on Facebook profiles, Facebook for years has taken the extra step of listing user emails in an image format in order to make it harder for scripts to scrape massive numbers of email addressess. However, it has recently switched to providing them in plain text. Why?

A Facebook spokesperson told us today:

Showing email addresses in plain text makes it easier for people to use the information to connect with their friends.  We’ve improved our tools for detecting and preventing profile scraping over the last few years such that this additional precaution is no longer necessary.

For the average user, the change’s impact is only that they can now copy and paste email addresses from Facebook profiles.

OCR, or optical character recognition, has become a more widely understood technology in recent years. Formatting text within an image, as Facebook has done, does not necessarily provide meaningfully greater security. In fact, some companies have used such tools to scrape email addresses from within Facebook (that didn’t work out for other reasons).

Facebook is also trying to make email sharing easier in other ways, like allowing users to provide emails or email aliases to developers on the platform.

Facebook’s new, more public privacy settings are here to stay. And there are a lot of details that you should make sure you’re clear about. Otherwise, you may be exposing (or not exposing) the information you intend to.

The company has spent a lot of time communicating about the changes, and it has also been working to upgrade its help pages so people can find exactly what they’re looking for. You may already be familiar with the settings and the changes. But this comprehensive, step-by-step guide to 17 key settings might help you quickly spot what changes Facebook has made, and what changes you should make as a result.

If you haven’t been following the changes, here’s a quick explanation of what Facebook is doing. Facebook has always had pretty strict privacy rules by default. The service originally started on college campuses, and gradually branched out and grew. Today, more than 350 million people are active on Facebook each month around the world. The company’s methods of managing privacy have changed, as well — you used to need to use your college’s email address to join, for example, and you used to need register with a regional network. Both of those features, and others, have been removed or heavily altered as the company has grown. Facebook’s overall strategic direction has been, for several years, to become more open. The latest changes pushed users to share their information more widely. Every single person on the site was asked to go through a step-by-step review of their privacy settings in early December, as we covered, with some features, like status updates marked to be open to more people than what users have have previously designated them.

Facebook also changed some information, like friends and some demographic information, to be public by default. Developers and marketers stand to benefit by being able to access Facebook data, because they can do things like tailor applications and campaigns to specific types of users. Real-time search companies, for example, could use Facebook status updates to show the latest news and the biggest trends. But users need to make all this information publicly accessible for the rest of the web to benefit.

The company has seen other companies, like Twitter, benefit from open data services, and it intends to make itself a key part of the entire web. But it needs users to make more of their data open to access this value, hence the changes. At the same time, it needs to try to preserve the privacy that many users have long found to be a key part of their reason for using Facebook in the first place. This is a monumental problem to try to solve. Facebook’s efforts have been criticized by some members of the press and privacy groups. They believed Facebook pushed too much data open without appropriate consent from users.

So here’s our list of the 17 steps to make sure you have your settings set right.

1. Editing My Privacy Settings

There are two ways to get to your privacy settings. In the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page there’s the Settings drop-down menu that allows you to edit your Account Settings, Privacy Settings and Application Settings. Privacy may be accessed by selecting that option on this drop-down menu or clicking Manage on the Account Settings option for Privacy.

How you choose to set your Privacy Settings depends largely on who you are and how you want others to know you. For many professionals, or aspiring ones, keeping private thoughts and moments of bad judgment out of the claws of the Internets’ cache is extremely important. Whereas for others, either meeting people or getting your name out to as many people as possible is more important than privacy. In either case, Facebook’s new privacy settings are capable of serving your needs in very specific ways, with some fine-tuning.

2. What’s Not Private

It’s important to understand what information Facebook considers public, according to their new privacy policy, “Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings.”

Facebook points out that, with your Privacy Settings, you can limit how easy this information is to find.

However, minors are automatically restricted by Facebook, and allowed only to share with friends, friends of friends and verified networks.

3. My Profile Information

You do control who sees other things, such as: Status updates, Website, Education and Work, Videos, Links, Photos, About me, Birthday, Hometown, Religious and political views. It’s really personal preference what you make public here, although you might want to uncheck birthday to safeguard against things like credit card fraud, as your birthday is often part of the security questions for your bank, credit card and phone accounts. Just select your preferences by checking or checking the boxes and saving your changes.

To protect your Profile Information, select Privacy Settings from the Settings drop-down  menu on your homepage and then click to the Profile Information section.

Once there, you have the option to alter the privacy settings of the About Me, Personal Info, Birthday, Religious and Political Views, Family and Relationship, Education and Work, Photos and Videos of Me, Posts by Me, Posts by Friends and Comments on Posts.

Your choices for privacy settings are: Everyone (literally everyone, including Google and other search engines), Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, Only Friends and Customize. The Customize option allows you to include or exclude particular networks, or people, which could be particularly useful if you’re in a situation where you share Facebook with co-workers or family.

4. My Contact Information

The Contact Information section gives you the option to limit who can see you: IM Screen Name, Mobile Phone, Other Phone, Current Address, Website, Hometown, Add me as a friend, your email address and who can message you on Facebook. Depending on your needs, select whether you want to share with Everyone or Only Friends.

Account Settings, on the Settings drop-down menu, gives you the option to change everything from your contact information, to what networks you’re in, to what notifications you receive from Facebook and even how you make payments on the site.

5. Who Can See Me?

The Settings tab includes all your basic info; you can control who sees your name on a Facebook search by clicking on Name, where you can decide to enter an Alternate Name, show only part of your name or display your name in your profile and search results. If you don’t want your name shown, uncheck the box.

6. My Email and Linked Accounts

Which email you use is another option on this page, depending on your privacy needs, it might be savvy to use an email you don’t mind sharing with the world to, or one that you want everyone to have. You may also sync your Facebook account with your other accounts in the Linked Accounts section here.

7. Ads with My Name and Photo

Finally, the Facebook Ads tab in this section is another area for you to gain better control over your identity by deciding whether or not Facebook and third party platforms may use your name, actions and likeness in ads within Facebook to people in your network.

There are two places you can choose to opt out of this.

At the top of this page is a drop-down menu asking you to “Allow ads on platform pages to show my information to,” prompting you to choose whether you want to do so to only your friends or no one. Facebook explains to you here that, as of now, the site does not allow third party applications or ad networks to use your name or picture in their ads. The selection you are making here, either No one or Only my Friends, will be used if and when this is allowed. After making a selection, save changes.

Another drop-down box further down the page asks you elect whether or not you want Facebook to use your name and likeness in Facebook ads, which it explains are sometimes paired with social actions (like becoming a fan of something), but it points out that these ads are only displayed to your confirmed friends. If your photo is used, it will be your profile photo, and Facebook points out that they don’t sell your information to advertisers. Your options here are Only my friends and No one, once you make a selection, save your changes.

8. My Photos

Profile photos were part of Facebook’s new privacy changes, as they were made public by default under the new policy, but you may select different privacy settings for each of your photo albums, photos, and videos you’ve been tagged in by selecting Privacy Settings from the main drop-down menu and selecting Profile Information.

Settings range from everyone to only your friends to your network friends of friends, and here you change your settings according to your privacy needs in the drop-down menu and save them.

Some users have noted what appears to be a bug where photo albums are made more publicly accessible than users had set them to.

9. My Wall

Allowing friends to post to your Wall is another personal choice, easily made by checking or unchecking the indicated box, and gain added control by creating lists (see below).

10. Hiding My Friends

One of the outcries after Facebook’s new privacy setting went into effect was the inability to keep your list of friends off of your profile. Consequently, Facebook modified the policy and as of December 10, 2009 there’s an option to hide your friends so they “won’t appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out.”

To hide your friends, click on the pencil icon in the top right corner of the Friends box on your profile, uncheck the “Show my friends on my profile” box to prevent your list from appearing on your profile.

11. Making Lists to Restrict Access

Another way Facebook has previously given users control over who sees your information is the creation of friend lists. You can create lists and restrict access to your page to people on a given list. To do so, click on the Friends menu at the top of your home page and either click on the Create link on the left-hand side of the screen or the Create New List button at the top of your list of Friends. A pop-up window appears asking you to select the friends to add to the list and also name it.

To take this list and restrict access to its members, select Privacy Settings under the Settings drop-down menu, click on Profile Information and then select Customize as an option for one of the options, type in the name of your list in the box that says “Hide this from,” and you’ve restricted the entire list from seeing your information.

12. Blocking People From My Profile

Of course if there’s a person you don’t want to see your Facebook page at all, you can always block them completely by selecting Privacy Settings from the Settings drop-down menu and clicking on Block List. Note, though, that while friendships/relationships on Facebook will be removed when you block someone, they may still use some apps that you do, be fans of the same things, etc., so you may still have some communication with them that way.

13. What My Friends Share About Me

Some of the worst privacy breaches can happen when your friends share information about you on Facebook. But, there is a way to control for this with Facebook’s privacy settings.

To change this, go to the Applications and Websites options under the Privacy Settings menu, where you have the opportunity to check or uncheck boxes which delineate your boundaries allowing your friends to publish information about you on Facebook. Again, depending on your professional, friendship or familiar preferences, this is a chance for you to gain greater control over your online persona.

Under the Notifications tab you have a chance to be notified when others post photos or videos of you, or comment on them. If you’re concerned about this being done without your knowledge, you can elect to be notified about it, along with other notifications such as if someone confirms you as a friend or comments on a link you posted by checking or unchecking the corresponding boxes and saving your changes.

14. Searching for Me on Facebook and the Internet

If you’d like to take your control over who can find you on Facebook to the next level, you may also decide who on Facebook, as well as the world — as in Google — can see about you. The Search options under the Privacy Settings menu allow you to opt-out of public searches on services like Google by checking a box and adjust your privacy settings within Facebook via a drop-down menu ranging from Everyone to Only Friends.

You have the option to see a preview of what your information looks when you allow yourself to be searched.

15. My App Privacy

Editing the privacy settings of the apps on your Facebook profile is another way to protect your privacy, given that most apps access the information on your profile as a condition of use. Select Application Settings from the Settings dropdown menu or go to the Applications and Websites section of Privacy Settings in the same dropdown menu to edit these settings.

As with most privacy settings on Facebook, when you click on Edit Settings of a particular application you may decide who you want to see your activity within that app, which in this case includes items like your Notes and Wall. To edit SuperPoke, for example, click on Edit Settings and decide who you want to see your activity there: Everyone, Networks, Friends of Friends, Friends or Only Me.

In the Applications and Websites menu under Privacy Settings you can click on the Learn More button to find out what Facebook says you share with, potentially, the world when you access and app or other web sites.

Specifically, “When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application or website, it may access any information you have made visible to Everyone as well as your publicly available information. This includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages. The application will request your permission to access any additional information it needs.”

The page prompts you to edit your privacy settings after reading.

16. Blocking an App

On this page you may also Edit Blocked Applications, which essentially does what it says: blocks apps from your page. This is an option than can also be accessed on the Requests page, and comes in handy on the twenty-seventh request to join Mafia Wars, for example.

In this vein, if you have a friend who uses every single app on Facebook and wants you to as well, you have the option to Ignore Application Invites from certain friends, an option also available on the Requests page, located in the upper right-hand side of your homepage.

17. Deactivating Your Account

And for those of you who are done with Facebook — literally — there’s the Deactivate option for your account, found under Account Settings, although simply clicking on deactivate will not erase your account.

First, Facebook will beg you to stay, reminding you with photos and requests that you have friends who will “miss you” and ask you to send them a message before erasing your account. There’s also a survey asking you what your dissatisfaction with the service was.

Conclusion

To conclude, the privacy settings on Facebook are somewhat confusing, in part because there are multiple places to edit the same settings. But, it’s also worth noting that Facebook continually redesigns its interface and likely will re-arrange some of the locations for privacy settings.

It’s worth taking a look to ensure that you’re getting exactly what you want out of Facebook— whatever that may be.

Facebook and McAfee announced a partnership last night aimed at protecting the more than 350 million users of the social network from a barrage of security risks to their accounts.

One part of the partnership allows Facebook users to download a six month subscription to McAfee’s Internet Security Suite software for free, then gives them the opportunity to continue the service at a 30% discount after the six months are up.

In a blog entry, Facebook recommended users take advantage of the six month subscription; the post also supplied computer security tips and noted that the company has developed a “unique” process for re-securing compromised accounts. This process has incorporated McAfee software, asking users of compromised accounts to run a scan on their computers before regaining access to Facebook.

The software offer is located on the “Protect Your PC” tab on McAfee’s Facebook page.

After becoming a fan and selecting your country from a list on the Facebook page you are prompted to enter your credit card information to McAfee’s web site, although the site says your credit card won’t be charged for six months. Unless you cancel by calling a 1-800 number your subscription to the security subscription will be automatically renewed at the end of the six months.

McAfee was selected by to enter the partnership from among several security firms to be the “exclusive provider of consumer security software” for Facebook; the social network noted that it’s “applying all financial incentives from this partnership to the benefit of its users and will not be taking a share of any revenue from user subscriptions.”

McAfee’s software protects against viruses, spyware, spam, phishing and also includes a two-way firewall, identity protections and parental controls.

The offer will be available to Facebook users in mostly western countries, but also in parts of Latin America, including: U.S., U.K., Australia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and additional countries are to be added in the upcoming months.

With more than 350 million monthly active users around the world, Facebook has a lot of users who want to make new friends. And now the company is testing out a feature to make friending a little more meaningful. Once you mark “ignore” on a friend request, you’ll see a new option in addition to being able to report the person for abuse or spam: “Mark that you don’t know” them.

Facebook has never shown friend rejections; rather, the person who made the friend request just never gets a confirmation. Some people don’t seem to get the hint, though, and make multiple friend requests to people they never get friend confirmations from. The new appears to make it so that the recipient can block future requests from the person. Like the long-time option of blocking all application notifications from a friend, it’s another way to reduce the social spam generated by poor etiquette on social networks.

Facebook doesn’t say exactly what happens when somebody gets marked as not known. “Our security team is currently just testing this feature to help inform certain limits on friend requests and combat spam,” a spokesperson told us.

Like a spammy app, it sounds like Facebook has some sort of limit it is testing out on how many friend requests a user can send over a given time. Also, the site is becoming a larger target for automated spam and phishing attacks, and one tactic is for spammers and scammers to set up fake profiles and friend people — this points to another use for the “mark you don’t know.” If used by enough people, it could help alert Facebook to problem profiles early on before they can cause too much damage.

Causes App Now Runs the Facebook Charity Gift Shop – Facebook app Causes, which helps charities gain supporters on the service, now powers the Facebook Charity Gift Shop. The change made this week means users may send gifts to friends’ profiles and the proceeds will go to charity. For example, “Your purchase of a Healthy Baby Kit Gift will help the International Rescue Committee provide a baby delivery kit with a warm blanket for a child born in a crisis zone.” As of Friday, Causes had more than 23 million monthly active users.

Facebook Not #1 in Uptime, But #1 in Response – Facebook played second fiddle to Twitter’s uptime last week, and both got beaten by YouTube, according to AlertSite’s benchmarks from December 28, 2009 through January 3. Facebook had 97.22% availability, while Twitter clocked in at 97.97% and YouTube at 99.13%. However, Facebook beat everyone’s response time with 2.21 seconds.

Another Lawsuit Hits ConnectU Founders – Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who alleged that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole their code and business plan, are being sued themselves by a former partner claiming the pair shut him out of their business.

Wayne Chang filed the suit December 21 in Suffolk County Superior Court in Massachusetts, naming defendants as the twins, their father Howard Winklevoss, business partner Divya Narendra and attorney Scott Mosko and his firm Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner.

For his troubles Chang is seeking a 15% stake in ConnectU, a 50% stake in the dissolve joint venture with the twins, i.e., part of their $65 million cash/stock from their case against Facebook.

FTC Didn’t Greenlight Facebook’s Privacy Policy – Federal Trade Commission Jon Leibowitz told The Washington Post this week that his agency is not “generally in the business of giving general advisory opinion in advance.” When it introduced major changes to its privacy features in early December, Facebook said that it had discussed its “privacy program” with the FTC and other regulators. The December changes prompted FTC complaints from a number of privacy organizations. Leibowitz now says that the complains are being reviewed and that online privacy is an FTC priority in the future. Facebook also clarified to The Post that the it didn’t specifically seek approval from the FTC for its December changes.

GOSO’s App for Auto Dealers Streams Inventory to Facebook – Social media marketer GOSO unveiled a new Facebook app this week that allows auto dealers to connect their inventory to their Facebook page. The  BMW of Minnetonka, Minnesota is the first dealership to use it. The app meshes inventory management with social media marketing, as well as allowing dealers to monitor buzz surrounding their products, according to GOSO.

AdNectar Reaches 2 Billion Virtual Goods – AdNectar, the Palo Alto-based word-of-mouth social network marketing service, announced this week that it reached a benchmark 2 billion virtual goods served from its platform and 10 million virtual goods have been sent between friends on social networks. The caveat is that this number is almost certainly a small fraction of the number of virtual goods served overall. AdNectar’s clients include Gillette, Nestle Toll House, Malibu Rum and Snapple/Dr. Pepper and often virtual goods for these companies spread virally; 1 million Malibu drinks sent in two weeks and more than a million Nestle cookies during a recent campaign. Engagement rates range from 2% to 6%, leading to a 16% rise in purchase intent for Nestle and a 9% increase in brand favorability for Malibu.

France Eyes Internet Ad Tax for Facebook, Google, Among Others – France, ever the culture lover, may be set to institute taxes on Internet advertising revenue for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo!, according to a report commissioned by the culture ministry. Up to €20 million ($29 million USD) a year could be gleaned from the taxes to end the “endless enrichment without payback,” as one author, Jacques Toubon, wrote in the report. President Nicolas Sarkozy reported asked Budget Minister Eric Woerth to study the issue further. The tax would help finance artists and online cultural content.

Zoosk Signs onto TBG Facebook Advertising Tool – Zoosk, an online social dating community with more than 6 million monthly actives, signed on to use ONE Media Manager this week, an online display advertising campaign management system TBG developed to simplify and accelerate the social media advertising process.

Zoosk users can use Facebook Connect to combine their dating with social networking and now with ONE Media Manager Zoosk will be able to test and adapt different advertising strategies to different audiences. So far TBG has signed up 20 clients to the service and expects to double their business this year.

Bra Colors Take Over Facebook Status Updates – When women started posting random colors on their Facebook statuses — lavender, black, blue, etc. — many began wondering what the point was. A chain letter passed around between Facebook inboxes prompted women to post the colors of their bra on their statuses to raise awareness about breast cancer, although the success and the veracity of that campaign has been up for debate.

LivingSocial Scores $5 Million in December – LivingSocial closed a $5 million Series A-1 round on December 18, led by investors Grotech Ventures, Steve and Jean Case, as well as LivingSocial’s CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy. The additional funds, in conjunction with July 2008’s Series A round of $5 million, brings total funding to $10 million. Having grown a big base of users on Facebook, the company is set to continue expansion, particularly growing LivingSocial Deals group buying service.

Facebook Shuts Suicide Machine Down – Facebook shut down the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine this week, sending a cease-and-desist letter as it did previously with the similar service Seppukoo, and also shutting down access to Facebook from Suicide Machine’s servers. The cease-and-desist letter was similar to the one Seppukoo received, in that it alleged that the Suicide Machine was violating policy for accessing Facebook users’ information without appropriate permissions. So far the service claims to have unfriended more than 58,000 people on about 900 deactivated accounts.

Former Google Manager New CEO of SocialMedia.com – Former Google AdSense Executive/Director of North American Sales Operations Kurt Abrahamson was named CEO of SocialMedia.com this week. He also served as COO of Jupiter Communications and President of Jupiter Media Metrix from 1994 to 2003, helping build that company’s business from 12 people to an international organization with 520 employees around the world. The change signals that SocialMedia.com is moving away from its social ad network and focusing on becoming an ad platform business for social networks, previously raising $10 million in two rounds to this end.

FBI Adds Widgets, Quizzes to Profile – The Federal Bureau of Investigation updated its Facebook page this week, adding a video widget, quiz and updating the FBI Most Wanted iPhone app. The video widget allows users to embed the FBI’s videos in their pages and blogs, the quiz allows users to determine what FBI career would best suit them and the iPhone app features the FBI’s most wanted list, as well as news about breaking crime stories and a geo-locator for their nearest office.

Flixster Acquires Rotten Tomatoes – Flixster, Inc. turned its partnership with movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes into a business deal this week, when it acquired Rotten Tomatoes. Now, the two companies claim to be able to reach 30 million monthly moviegoers through their primary sites, Facebook (where Flixster has long had the leading movies app) and other social networks, and iPhone, Blackberry and Android apps. The combined service provides a database of movies, user and critic reviews, trailers, videos, editorial content, showtimes, theater maps and online ticketing. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Privacy Changes Leave Users Vulnerable to Marketers – Facebook’s new privacy policy has left its users potentially sharing more information about themselves than they likely realized, according to blogger Max Klein. He uploading a list of emails saved as a CSV file to Facebook, and found that you can match those email addresses with the publicly-available information provided by those users in their Facebook profiles.

[Leibowitz photo from FTC.gov]

For the millions of Facebook users who are trying to figure out the nuances of the service’s many features, the company has recently upgraded its Help Center. Most notably, it has added a new search results page and an improved left-hand navigation box.

The search results page has already shown results from Facebook’s own answers to frequently asked questions, as well as results from user discussions. Now, it also provides links to pages about related topics. And, if users are searching in a language that doesn’t have answers in a particular topic, the results on each topic will show them results from other languages.

The left-hand interface now more clearly divides the sub-site into conceptually different areas. The top link, “Using Facebook,” shows Facebook’s own responses. The second link, “Added Applications,” shows all of the applications that a user has added; click on each app and you can provide feedback to Facebook or the app owner.

The third link, “Help Discussions,” shows user-generated discussions on various site features. Facebook had previously more tightly integrated user discussions beneath its official explanations. Now, for example, each FAQ answer and community discussion thread now comes with its own unique URL so you can share them more easily with friends in need.

The fourth link, “Getting Started,” provides a step-by-step guide for new users. The last link, “Safety,” provides a detailed explanation of Facebook’s safety policies and efforts, as well as links to other resources on internet safety.

Other notable updates include notices on the right-hand side of the site alerting users to the privacy changes that Facebook introduced earlier this month, as well a guide to what to do if your account has been hacked or phished.

Facebook has seen strong growth among teenagers in recent years, leading to the company to make child-safety issues more of a focus. It has now formalized some of its efforts in this area by creating a “Safety Advisory Board” currently comprised of five online safety organizations from North America and Europe. Members include Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, Childnet International, The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) and WiredSafety, although the company may add more as it continues to expand around the world.

The first agenda item for the board is “an overhaul of the safety content located in Facebook’s Help Center” to provide more content for teens and their parents and teachers, according to press release. Note that Facebook doesn’t allow users under the age of 13 on the site, so we expect the new content to have a high school focus.

Facebook has been getting child-safety input from some of these organizations for years, and it has also been working with law enforcement to go after threats (it recently worked with the New York state attorney general to ban thousands of convicted sex offenders, for example). We’ll let you know as the new Safety Advisory Board recommends any new policies or releases any new material.