According to AP, the private photographs of celebrity Paris Hilton and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg have been exposed by a Vancouver, Canada computer technician namely Byron Ng. Ng was reported that he has started to look for the Facebook security weaknesses since last week and surely he found his way to access to some Facebook private photos that were supposedly be protected. It was a serious blow to Facebook as they just launched two new security features which include a “Friends of Friends” privacy option last week. It seemed like for some unscrupulous hackers, the tricks they’re manipulating could helped them in divulge personal information of all the Facebook users. That is sad, and identified as a predictor that Facebook is still not at its best to protect the valuable users’ data.

Though Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said Facebook was patched the bug after the security alert within an hour, this is neither the first time nor the last time a Facebook photo flaw can be found on the Web. A blog called laatedaa has published a post on the issue of Facebook private photos code in January, on that blog, an user can simply follow the instructions and enter the Web address, she is allowed to access to somebody’s Facebook private photo albums. (Update: A most latest comment showed that the code doesn’t work anymore)

Nonetheless, that such security flaw happen is alarming. For Facebook users, they didn’t have much choice in preventing the revelation of data.

via [AP]

Baidu, the China search giant has officially launched its instant messenger (IM) page. Its foray into the IM market has been a big win. They got a huge publicity on the China Web market, as I observed most of the major online news providers, blogs, most of them are reporting about their latest IM move. In the beginning of the month, I did posted a brief introduction on Baidu IM, now I knew that China users can download the IM software by visiting this page.

Baidu, now not only compete directly with QQ, the most popular IM software in China, it also clear that they’re attempting to offer a full range of Web products to the China users. What will be their next move, Baidu Mail, or Baidu English version of search engine?

Diigo, a company that specialize in social bookmarking service is releasing a new and updated of its core product, i.e. Diigo version 3.0. Diigo v3.0 comes with a completely new User Interface and code base, as well as over 100 new features has aimed to give its users a different experience in using the social bookmarking and annotation service. Based on the features of Diigo v3.0, it is undoubtedly that it has been cited as the top 10 research tools by CNET.

For readers that aren’t heard of Diigo, it is a free social bookmarking service that helped an user to highlight text or comment on a Web page, particularly if she just want to highlight one sentence from a 5,000-word article she found on the Web. There are in fact many free social bookmarking services available on the Web, such as del.icio.us, QQ Shuqian (China), Mister Wong, Xerpi, CoReap, and etc.

Apparently, masses of users access to these social bookmarking services and use it in hopes of achieving their own ends, it is unlikely for an existing player to offer the features that will suit all the users’ needs. Thus, I’m not sure this make Diigo to offer a bunch of features in order to cover all the needs of the users. However, as stated on Diigo’s press release, some of the features found in Diigo v3.0 are really impressive. Their newly features include the improved usability as a research tool, improvements as a team research platform, social browsing, personalized social content, and social information networking.

To know more about Diigo v3.0, there is a video embedded in the below.

Eleven months had passed since MySpace China launched in last year, and now they have a new Chinese partner, i.e. Youku, one of the China’s popular video sharing platforms. According to Youku (in Mandarin), both companies have form alliance and agreed to build a jointly video portal called MySpaceYouku.

MySpaceYouku will primarily feature the Chinese video clips, coupled with the technical support and resources, i.e. videos provided by Youku.

Amazon has recently tapped into the powerful Facebook social network by launching two of its unique applications, Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine. I believed that Amazon has reached a tipping point where these two applications will help them to reach a far more broader user base, a higher chance of success and attaining a higher quality of customer experience.

Amazon Giver, allows Facebook users to see what’s on the Wish Lists of their friends, and thus provide a platform to purchase those items for their friends. Not only Amazon Giver list the Wish List of a Facebook user, it also provides recommendations based on a profile’s interests and likes. On the other hand, Amazon Grapevine updates Facebook users’ friends their recent public activities on Amazon.com, such as write a review of Amazon product or tag an Amazon book, and etc. via Facebook’s News Feed.

“Amazon.com is pleased to bring the convenience of shopping on Amazon to our customers, many of whom are also Facebook users, with the Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine applications on Facebook Platform,” said Eva Manolis, Vice President, Amazon.com. “By combining Amazon’s vast selection of products with Facebook’s millions of users, we are able to make activities like gift-giving more efficient and rewarding for Facebook users.” According to Amazon’s press release.

When I was a student studying management long time ago, I thought that if companies are robots, whether or not they have social responsibilities wouldn’t matter. Apart from this, when management gurus analyze company of choice, they usually begin by looking at the activities of a particular company and examine whether the business has undertook its social responsibility. Yet not many companies sufficiently spend time and money in carrying out their responsibilities in the society.

On this topic, I just found that Yahoo! China has done their part, at least in building a site to promote the social awareness of the China people there. Of course, to promote their own users in this aspect is a demanding, and yet idealistic standard, but it seems that they have the aspiration to achieve this goal. On the landing page of Yahoo! GongYi (mean charity), we can find the up-to-date charity news, case studies, such as Chinese Universities students help to make a green planet, and etc., GongYi video site, latest GongYi activities, and finally, the list of philanthropists.

There are two very interesting stories listed on the site. The first one is a survey article, ask the China people whether or not they willingly to pay $20 each to set up a plant foundation, and another article stated that at least five (5) China billionaires have donated more than $100 million each in the past years. In many of these news and articles, I found that while a lot China users were concerned with the issues of philanthropy, such as how to make our planet a better home, curb the poverty, and etc. and they did showed that they’re willingly to spend sufficient time in doing all these. With the launched of this Yahoo! GongYi, I hope they have planted the seeds, and hopefully what we do today will make our tomorrow better.

via [Sina Tech]

Jobster, the Web 2.0 job site has burned through $45 million since it raised from 2005, a burn rate about $1 million a month. The site, lost about $11 million in 2007, and has less than $3 million in bank, now facing the financial difficulty in operating the business, as reported by ere.net. Its ex-CEO Jason Goldberg has also left the company and starting up a new site called Social|Median, as the product still in early alpha stage.

The other day I came across a new micro-blogging platform called Poodz. This startup was originally launched in France last year and in recent months, it shows steadily increasing its user base, mostly the French-speaking users. Poodz, in the first glance, functions like Twitter in which allowed users to post latest updates, but have great potential for improving the user experience in terms of richness such as the likes of Pownce (updates, files, conversation, and etc.) as well as Twitxr (Micro-blogging with image). Instead, Poodz allowed their users to use their mobiles or PCs to post messages with videos, pictures, sounds and publish them anywhere. For the mobile users, they can simply send their ideas, or latest news to share with their friends by MMS or emails. Or for the PCs users, they can record their messages in video clips by using the Webcams, or audios using the microphones and record them on Poodz’s platform. Too many options can be used on Poodz, as Poodz’s team believed that one of a key drivers behind a good user experience is the flexibility of using various tools in posting the recent updates.

The recent development of Poodz showed their seriousness in this field, as now they are compatible with CamTwist, a Mac software package that let users add special effects to the video chats. In addition, Poodz also migrated their database to a new and better server, and released their public API.