Yesterday, thousands of Facebook users were chosen to test the beta version. Many logged on to see this message on their home page:

Unfortunately, I haven’t been selected as of yet, but hopefully we will be able to post a review of sorts of the service.

There is debate whether Facebook Lite is another direct attack on Twitter. Facebook has been trying to make itself more competitive with Twitter over the last few months. It has been introducing features such as  public profiles, profile fans, public status updates, and realtime search. This new service is another attempt to simplify Facebook, but whether it has anything to do with Twitter or Friendfeed, is just speculation so far.

Facebooks official response was:

We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook “Lite” is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept Friend requests, write on people’s Walls, and look at photos and Status updates. We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience.

This evening, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake. We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time. People who are not part of the test and are trying to access “Lite” will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.

Given that only handful of users have been selected for testing, getting a preview screenshot of Facebook lite is quite difficult. However, courtesy of jasonlbaptiste.com, we have a screenshot to show what Lite looks like:

From this screenshot, there doesn’t seem to be that much different from the normal Facebook, but it does seem to have a much more cleaner, polished feel to it. Arguably the normal Facebook, has evolved into a much more cluttered site than it was, so this Lite version seems very interesting.

What are your opinions of Facebook Lite? Do you think the main intention is to create a speedier version for slow connections, or is there a hint of a direct attack on Twitter? Will people use it? If any readers have also been lucky enough to test it, please do feel free to write you thoughts in the comments!

Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook have shocked the world by acquiring feed aggregators Friendfeed and also hiring the social networking sites four founders to important positions inside the newly purchased company.

The four founders of Friendfeed were ex-google staff Paul Buchheit, Sanjeev Singh, Jim Norris and Bret Taylor. Most notably, Buchheit was the mastermind behind creating gmail, launching inital advertising products as well as the trusted don’t be evil philosophy.

It is not a huge surprise that Facebook have finally bought Friendfeed since over the past couple of years, they have taken numerous features from the content aggregator site including the “like” option. In addition, Facebook knew themselves that their competitors had a more developed news feed set-up with real time updates, which users from facebook could really do with since they have to refresh the page every other minute!

In addition to acquiring Friendfeed, Facebook have also announced that it is going to release its own unique search engine and they feel that having ex google engineers by their side from Friendfeed will give them all the experience they require! Are Facebook going in for the kill to be the next search engine giant by competing against Google? The next couple of months will be very interesting to see since Google will soon be concerned with how much traffic they recieve in comparison to the ever growing Facebook.

Friendfeed’s reaction to the purchase

Earlier today, Friendfeed released their own press release displaying their feelings towards the takeover, expressing this is the best thing for the company:

The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.

Facebook’s feelings towards the acquiring of Friendfeed

Yesterday, Facebook released their own press release effectively saying that this a great move since the two social networking sites have been close friends over the years:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Do you think Facebook will ever become bigger than Google since they have such experienced ex-workers with them now? Or will Google react quickly and effectively by perhaps purchasing Twitter? Please feel free to comment below

Twitter's user loyalty always been lower compared to other social networks

According to analysts, research has suggested that more than 60% of Twitter users stop using the social network within 30 days, most of whom use it for commercial gain.

As you can see from the above graph, at this moment in time Twitter has a retention rate of 40% demonstrating that over 60% quit the micro-blogging service, for most they have had enough of the facebook shortened micro blogging service.

Twitter could have a bigger retention rate if it wasn’t for the high profile sign ups including Barack Obama, Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey who sustain much of the typical user’s time in which they see what the celebraties are up to. Oprah Winfrey quite recently made a statement conveying her trust in Twitter, boosting traffic towards the 40% retention mark.

Retention rate half as much

The micro-blogging service, that enables users to post a message in 140 characters, popularity seems to declining as it was almost a short term thing. Worryingly, the above graph also demonstrates that at the same time, Facebook and Myspace had retention rates much higher and now stand at almost double, 70%.

However, researchers have not taken into account the retention rate coming from widely used third party applications such as Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck, which incidentally half of the twitter population use meaning the retention rate for the whole of Twitter would be much higher, whereas traffic goes straight to the other social networks like Facebook, as there are no other third party apps available.

Twitter has bigger retention rate than analysts originally anticipate excluding 3rd party apps

“If this is a genuine attempt to give users control then give them a genuine vote, not a symbolic one Otherwise, stop wasting everyone’s time.”

In late February when Facebook declared that it was going to produce its own site governance to user poll, Facebook CEO said this action was a unprecedented effort to enable participation on the web. Now, can you stand here and say you believe that? I thought you might not.

To support this theory, huge global privacy watchdog, Privacy International revealed to the world that they thought this was only a “publicity stunt and a massive confidence trick on its 200 million users.”

Back in February two documents were unveiled for site governance, the Facebook Principles and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. After Facebook took back the terms of use change, Mark Zuckerberg said publically they needed feedback leading to these documents being released.

This meant users could either for the current Terms of Use or the Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

In the original post Zuckerburg quoted,

“For this vote and any future one, the results will be binding if at least 30 percent of active Facebook users at the time that the vote was announced participate. An active user is someone who has logged in to the site in the past 30 days,”

In reply Privacy International, Director Simon Davies said,

“While we support the concept of user participation, the idea of establishing a thirty percent participation threshold is a complete joke. It will never be reached, and Facebook knows it. Earlier this year the figure had been set at 25 percent, and it was edged up because of concerns that users might actually succeed in changing the terms and conditions,”

In addition, Davies suggested that if this is a genuine attempt to give users control then give them a genuine vote, not a symbolic one; otherwise, stop wasting everyone’s time. This to the public meant, they either were ok for now about it or will soon be frustrated and abide against the terms of use.

If any votes were given, Privacy International would not be happy at all!

Young users now feel abliged to spend time whilst doing homework.

The Massive Social-Networking has impacted the student world, for the worse

I know I do it but well something needs to be done. Every student who has a facebook, is always whilst doing homework, it is the worst distraction there is. There are so many options when you are on Facebook that you can’t resist.

University students tend to be more responsible for this as they have more free time, but when the geography essay is in for tommorow, thinking that he can do an all nighter, he collides with a good old social friend, Mr Facebook. The student will stay on that all night, forget about the essay and fail the course, most of the time anyway.

Research is now available to back up this theory which, in my eyes, is completely true. They even have groups on Facebook saying, “I was doing my homework but got distracted by facebook” which thousands and thousands of users often join as a result.

The Sunday Times of London stated that researcher Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State University’s education department said surveys completed by 219 U.S. undergraduates and graduates found that those who used Facebook achieved lower grades, backing up the theory.

The Times also announced that Karpinski found that 79% of study respondents who admitted to Facebook usage felt such online activities did not impact their studies.

“Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying,” Karpinski said. “Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon. It is the equivalent of the difference between getting an A and a B.”

Those people at University based in the UK are being affected by the deadly site, Daisy Jones who is 21 studying at Loughborough Uni quoted,

“I was in the library trying to write a 2,000-word essay when I realised my Facebook habit had got out of hand.I couldn’t resist going online. You do that, then someone’s photo catches your eye. Before you know it, a couple of minutes has turned into a couple of hours and you haven’t written a thing.”

After these allegations were introduced Facebook responded in saying,

“There is also academic research that shows the benefits of services like Facebook. It’s in the hands of students, in consultation with their parents, to decide how to spend their time.”

Well, if I was a parent with a child being influenced by Facebook, I would possibly restrict the time they are allowed on Facebook, or if they do not abide by these rules just message Facebook saying for these reasons I want my son/daughter’s account deactivited as it is affecting his/her studies.

However, I warn you not to put pressure on your children not being affected by Facebook, you can see if they are or not by simply looking at the last report in comparison to the one before, or going straight to the lecturer/teacher.

Something should be done very soon about this issue as it is affecting the child’s future opportunities, and here at TechCombo, you will be the first to here!

"I did it out of boredom," Mikeyy said. What could real hackers do if they did it for something else....

Twitter has fallen victim to the Mikeyy Worm for the fourth time.

The Popular Social Networking site, Twitter, has been struck by more protection schemes over the last couple days. Surprisingly, this time the worm acted differently as its aim this time was just to have some and mess about instead of more serious actions such as hacking into Twitter accounts.

The Worm who is referred to as, “StalkDaily” ripped through the micro-blogging service like lightening. Literally when a normal Twitter onto a twitter account that had been infected, their account would automatically post a “spam” message promoting Mikey’s site.

“StalkDaily” has already owned up to his actions, who has been identified as Michael “Mikeyy” Mooney and said he acted this way as an act of boredom.

On the Twitter Blog, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote,

“At about 2AM on Saturday, four accounts were created that began spreading a worm on Twitter.”

““From 7:30AM until 11AM PST, our security team worked on eliminating the vectors that could identify this worm. At that time, about 90 accounts were compromised. We identified and secured these accounts.”

After being hit hard throughout the weekend, Twitter workers had to work fast!

“Our team quickly pulled together and started fighting the attackers in real time.”

“Again, we secured the accounts that had been compromised and removed any content that might help spread the worm. All told, we identified and deleted almost 10,000 tweets that could have continued to spread the worm.”

Twitter will have to look at the codes carefully to stop anything like this occuring again as for Mikeyy or any other hacker, it could be easier to hack and worse than last time. As Mikko Hyponnen, chief research officer at anti-malware firm F-Secure attempted to call out to the Twitter public and suggest you shouldn’t just go on any link you see!

“This is not over, There’s going to be quite a few modified Twitter worms for a day or two. Be careful in Twitter.”

Surely, after the set of the attacks on Twitter, many users must feel the need to delete their accounts and go to other secure networks such as Facebook or Myspace.

If you have “Mikeyy” you should do the following:

-Clear your browser cache and turn off JavaScript.

-Log into Twitter and delete any messages your profile automatically posted that contain the word “Mikeyy”.

-You can turn JavaScript back on so you change your bio and URL, and reset your color scheme from your profile as well as Password.

-Finally logout and try and use a third-part application such as WordTwit or Twitterfeed.

*IMPORTANT* Do not Retweet anything whilst you have the worm

This deeply upsets me because for such a site with heavy traffic to be easily compromised, the security must get up to scratch otherwise no one will feel safe or ever will be safe on Twitter. Potentially this means Twitter could possibly lose everything, its users and everything it has worked so hard for.

Remind you of any other social networking site?... Thought so!

 Futuristic Design attracts much attention

FriendFeed offers a different kind of service to its customers. As well as posting updates like Twitter and Facebook allow you to do, it also  is a feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from other micro-blogging services. 

People do not really pay much attention to FriendFeed until now even though it is being used by over 200 million people. The best thing about FriendFeed is that it accumulates and distrubutes lots of information to you so quickly without having to refresh your page. However, in other services like Facebook you have to refresh the page and even then there is limited information, many people refer to it as “static.”

Oh yes, that is where I saw it from!

Though Friendfeed has re-designed its site to attract the same amount of visitors as facebook. However, it has a long way to go still as there are over triple the amount of users using FriendFeed in comparison to Facebook.

Now that FriendFeed has used Facebook’s design to its advantage, inevitably it will soon take small, useful features which will be good for FriendFeed, but I wonder what Mark Zuckerberg would think!

Saying this, I still think Facebook has a long way to go until it becomes the central website on the Internet. Perhaps, if FriendFeed would possibly share their features such as “Like” which they have already done. Facebook with FriendFeed’s aid and vice-versa, they could both benefit from each others help which makes each social network so unique.

Generally, I think Social Networking as a whole is going in the right direction, they are using each others findings well and soon this category will be people’s homepages as well the world’s number one site, perhaps even in front of the mighty Google or Yahoo!