Diaspora, the privacy focused Facebook rival released an Alpha version of its core code this week, and is now opening the project up to the developer community. The announcement came with much fanfare and glee, but that was to be short lived. Shortly after the code release, privacy and security pundits chimed in with their…

Facebook has been pretty prominent on the media this week with some news touching on light topics and yet some touching on the more serious aspects of social media.   Facebook Launches Page Discovery “Browser”: for one, Facebook seems to be experimenting on yet another innovation designed to strengthen the popularity of its Facebook pages.…

Facebook Places continued to receive prominent coverage this past week about its features, popularity (or lack thereof) and implementations. Surprisingly, one report stated that 96% of people do not use location based services of any kind. This leaves plenty of opportunity for growth for Places, Four Square and Gowalla. It will be interesting to see…

  Our featured story last week involved Facebook Places and its privacy and safety implications for Facebook users. “Places” was again front and center this week as social media pundits, privacy experts and technology gurus all put their 2 cents in on the issue. The general consensus is that Facebook did a little better job…

Facebook Places Well, we’ve made it through another week! The word on the street this week was the impending announcement of Facebook’s location based features being released, and Facebook didn’t disappoint. Learning from past mistakes, the default setting for Places is “friends only”. If you want to totally opt out of Places, then check out…

Good morning Facecrooks! One of the funniest stories of the week actually turned out to be a hoax.“Girl quits her job on dry erase board, emails entire office (33 Photos)” “Jenny DryErase was created by John and Leo Resig and was featured on thechive.com. It turns out that “Jenny” was actually played by Elyse Porterfield,…

Here is a new twist on one of the oldest scam tricks on Facebook. Never click any links that go out of the way to peak your curiosity or shock you in some way. Especially don’t click them if they are recommended by a friend or posted on their wall. There is a good possibility…

This scam involves the impersonation of Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior commander of US troops in Iraq. The rogue messages is : “If you pay $200,000, your son can get sent home early.” This is obviously an attempt of would be thieves to steal money from emotionally vulnerable family members of US servicemen serving in…

Social media in the workplace was in the news once again recently as Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtless used his twitter account to announce the impending execution by firing squad of convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner. Tweeting once to announce the time of the execution drawing near, and following it up with a tweet indicating…

The barrage of public scrutiny and outcry over Facebook’s privacy changes remains unabated this week. Senators, heads of state and would be politicians are all chiming in on the latest Facebook privacy fiasco. Here are a couple of related articles featured this week: Open Letter to Facebook on Privacy Ways for Facebook to Improve User…