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]

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.

Facebook has notched up a new record by launching two European versions of its site in this month. Firstly, it launched the German version, and now unveiled its French version. According to Facebook, more than 2000 German-speaking users on Facebook have helped to translate the site to the local language in less than two weeks. And for the Facebook French, the site was produced with the help of its 4,000 French users. The launched of these two local sites is a positive development for Facebook, as they’re now targeting to expand into the Europe market.

However, as I said several times before, distance still a matter. For instance, the hottest social networking platform in Germany is studiVZ, leading the industry with reported 5 million of users.

In February, Facebook has also launched its Spanish version, as stated by Facebook, there are more than 1,500 users participated in the project mainly helping to translate the site from English to Spanish. Additionally, Facebook has more than 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain and the Spanish site will thus strongly engaging the people there.

Facebook German Version

Facebook French Version

Facebook Spanish Version

I found the video regarding 2008 SXSW keynote discussion between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and reporter Sarah Lacy, as embedded in the below. If you want to know more about the keynote discussion, there is a further report published by News Blog.

I particularly like the following quotation of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs on Facebook.

You have to remember what Facebook’s core business is about. It’s not about helping people stay in touch with friends or express themselves. It’s not about changing the world or creating an ecosystem for small apps makers. It’s not even about selling ads. Facebook is a vehicle through which a bunch of investors in the Valley hope to turn a small pile of money into a much bigger pile of money by selling shares in the public markets. That is Facebook’s core business.

via [Valleywag]

Imo.im, a startup that I covered when it launched in September last year released its own Facebook application. With this application, Facebook users can thus communicate with their friends on Facebook platform without having to leave Facebook. IM (Instant messaging), has became a critical real-time communication tool, and this imo.im removes the barriers to IM and video chat to almost 60 million of Facebook users.

All the features of the imo.im are available with this application. You can link your AIM, GTalk, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger or any other standard IM services on your Facebook now, simply with a click of install on your Facebook account. All the while, imo.im served as an IM aggregator, aggregate all of an user’s standard IM services, but now with this Facebook application, we might just realized the true value of imo.im.

There was a buzz on the Web that Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, holds a majority stake in TOM Group has invested $60 million in Facebook, equivalent to 0.4 percent stake in Facebook, however TOM Group has denied such a report.

“TOM Group advised that it has not made any investment in Facebook,” said in a statement issued to the Hong Kong stock exchange, reported by Hong Kong newspaper 明報 (in Mandarin).

The founder of Powerset search engine, Barney Pell has unveiled a Facebook application called “Unfriender“, with the help of a developer Siqi Chen, who co-created the popular Facebook app called Friends For Sale!.

Unfriender is actually an app that help you to keep inform when people you have added as friends on Facebook that have removed you from their friends list. For instance, Facebook will not send an alert to you when someone removes you as a friend, however Unfriender’s feature will let you know about this by posting a notification to you.

I am trying to access Unfriender to get a glimpse of it, unfortunately it is not available at the time of my writing.