Google to block data from Facebook

Google Inc will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users' information, highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants.

Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users' email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users' information.

Facebook, with more than 500 million users, relies on email services such as Google's Gmail to help new users find friends already on the network. When a person joins, they are asked to import their Gmail contact list into the social network service. Facebook then tells the user which email contacts are also on the social network.

In a statement, Google said websites such as Facebook "leave users in a data dead end." Facebook did not immediately provide a comment on Friday.

While Google framed the move as an attempt to protect its users' ability to retain control of their personal data on the Internet, analysts said the move underscored the battle between Google, the world's largest search engine, and Facebook, the dominant Internet social network.

"The fundamental power dynamic on the Web today is this emerging conflict between Facebook and Google," said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. "Google needs to evolve to become a big player in the social Web and it hasn't been able to do that."

"If people do search within Facebook, if they do email within Facebook, if they do instant messaging within Facebook, all of these will chip away at Google's properties."

Reciprocity 
Google said that while it makes it easy for other Web services to automatically import a user's contact data, Facebook was not reciprocating.

"We have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren't aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook, they are effectively trapped," Google said in an emailed statement.

"We will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users' Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites," Google said.

Some technology blogs were reporting that Facebook still appeared to be allowing users to import their Google Gmail contacts into Facebook as of mid-day Friday.

A Google spokesman told Reuters that the company had begun enforcing the new rules "gradually."

Google also stressed that users will still be able to manually download their contacts to their computers in "an open, machine-readable format" which can then be imported into any Web service.

Google has coveted the wealth of information that Facebook's half-billion users generate and amass. Having access to that data could be especially valuable to Google, whose business model is based on allowing its users to find any information anywhere on the Web.

"Google is trying to use the leverage that it has to get as much access to the Facebook social graph (network of friends and interests) that it can, so it can provide the best search function that it can," said Wedbush Securities analyst Lou Kerner. "The more data Google has access to the better its search results are going to be."

Last month, Facebook announced a deal with Microsoft Corp allowing Facebook information -- such as Web pages that Facebook users have endorsed by clicking on "like" buttons -- to appear within Microsoft search results.

Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in September the company would add social "layers" to many of its existing Web products in the coming months, following its less-than-stellar track record of developing stand-alone social networking products like Orkut and the recently shuttered Wave service.

Google also has acquired a slew of small social networking companies in recent months, including Slide and social payment company Jambool.

Gartner's Valdes said access to the explosion of new types of data generated by Web services, such as location-based services, would provide further flashpoints between Google and Facebook.

"It's one skirmish among many to come," said Valdes.

Google's shares closed Friday's regular session down 81 cents at $625.08.

How 100 mn Facebook users' info got leaked

The man who harvested and published the personal details of 100 million Facebook users has said that he only disclosed what was already public information.

Ron Bowes, a security consultant, used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user's privacy settings.

The list, which contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user's profile, name and unique ID, has been shared as a downloadable file. Bowes said that he did it as part of his work on a security tool.

"I'm a developer for the Nmap Security Scanner and one of our recent tools is called Ncrack," the BBC quoted him as saying. "It is designed to test password policies of organisations by using brute force attacks; in other words, guessing every username and password combination," he added.

By downloading the data from Facebook, and compiling a user's first initial and surname, he made a list of the most common probable usernames to use in the tool.

In theory, researchers could then combine this list with a catalogue of the most commonly used passwords to test the security of sites. Similar techniques could be used by criminals for more nefarious means.

Bowes said his original plan was to "collect a good list of human names that could be used for these tests.” "Once I had the data, though, I realised that it could be of interest to the community if I released it, so I did," he added.

Bowes confirmed that all the data he harvested was already publicly available but acknowledged that if anyone now changed their privacy settings, their information would still be accessible.

"If 100,000 Facebook users decide that they no longer want to be in Facebook's directory, I would still have their name and URL but it would no longer, technically, be public," he said.

Bowes said that collecting the data was in no way irresponsible and likened it to a telephone directory. "All I've done is compile public information into a nice format for statistical analysis," he said

In a statement, Facebook confirmed that the information in the list was already freely available online. "No private data is available or has been compromised," the statement added.

Bowes supported the view by adding that harvesting this data highlighted the possible risks users put themselves in. "I am of the belief that, if I can do something then there are about 1,000 bad guys that can do it too. For that reason, I believe in open disclosure of issues like this, especially when there's minimal potential for anybody to get hurt.

"Since this is already public information, I see very little harm in disclosing it," he said Facebook has a default setting for privacy that makes some user information publicly available. People have to make a conscious choice to opt-out of the defaults.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Only 503 Microsoft Kins Sold?

Barely days after Microsoft s (in)famous Kin disaster wherein the company had to take the not-so-difficult decision of scrapping the entire project, here comes a shocker. According to one rumour, Microsoft, in all actuality, sold a total of just 503 Kins. That s including both the handsets.

While the 503 figure does seem unrealistic, this is what is the number claimed by John Gruber of Daring Fireballs who in turn claims to have heard it from an unnamed source from Microsoft. There is a different twist to the story as well with Pocketnow pointing out another interesting stat. Pocketnow noted that the Kin, being a social networking handset, came with a Facebook application. The interesting thing about this app is that this app is specific only to the Kin and using it one can actually see the number of monthly active users of the application. Since this app can only be used on a Kin, a rough estimate of the number of Kins out there can be guessed by the number of users that are connected to Facebook using it. This number is way off the 503 mark and is somewhere close to the 8,000 mark. Having said that, even 8,000 isn't such an awe inspiring number but heck, it is anytime better than the 503 figure we first heard.

                                                                                               Kin One
                                                       
In a different twist to the story, according to Business Insider, the fact that even Microsoft employees weren't particularly impressed or hopeful about the Kin is somewhat evident from the sentiments from the blog posts at Mini Microsoft, a blog of sorts where Microsoft employees rant about their problems. The blog has interesting quotes from people who are either current Microsoft employees or had worked for the company and left it as well, looking for greener pastures. A former Danger employee (Microsoft took over Danger) calls Microsoft a "dysfunctional organization where decisions were made by politics rather than logic". Another person commented, "I for one can't believe that no one has been axed over the Kin debacle. Billions of dollars were wasted, not to mention all of the smart people over there who spent 3 years with no return on the investment."

                                                                                             Kin Two

With the kind of things going on at Microsoft, looks like it is going to have a big task at hand ensuring Windows Phone 7 doesn't end up like the Kin.

Airtel Brings Free Facebook Access

Airtel has announced that it will offer free access to the mobile version of Facebook on its network. The company, which has a subscriber base of over 130 million will offer free access for a period of two months ending August 31.

The mobile version of the site enables users to post status updates, comment and write on walls, message others, and also be able to view or upload photos.

For existing mobile Internet customers on Airtel, there is no need to do anything - they can immediately start connecting with their friends by visiting the Facebook mobile site. Those who are accessing the mobile Internet for the first time need to SMS 'FACEBOOK' to 54321 to take advantage of this offer.

Airtel will also offer Facebook in six Indian languages - Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam, initiating with Hindi and English.

Looks like Airtel customers who are Facebook fans have a lot to rejoice!

Google building Facebook rival

Web world is abuzz with rumours that Google's Facebook rival is in works. The rumour mill began churning after Digg founder Kevin Rose posted a tweet last weekend (saturday to be precise), saying, "Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch facebook competitor very soon 'Google Me,' very credible source."

Wondering how Google Me will really work? Experts believe that Google already has almost 30 different social properties that it has acquired or built including YouTube, Picassa, Google Profiles, Google Docs, Google Friends Connect and Google Latitude. So, the company largely has almost every component that it requires to built a Facebook killer. All it needs to do is a bit of organisation and create a common platform for all these networks.

However, so far Google is still to get a hit in the social networking space. Orkut, one of the pioneers in social network, today has little following except in Brazil and India. More recently, the company made another foray into social networking arena with Google Buzz, which aims to upgrade Gmail into a social networking hub from just an e-mail service. However, the service has been relegating to more of a Web 2.0 sharing tool than a social networking hub.

Several analysts also wonder if Google would really risk waging a full-scale war against Facebook, which has seen its fortunes soar in the past year.

Writes eWeek's Clint Boulton, "Google challenging Facebook in social is like Facebook challenging Google in search," he writes. "People are comfortable socializing on Facebook, which is where their friends (and their friends of friends are) and they are comfortable searching on Google, which is where all of the data about businesses, places and other facts live. Unless and until there are technological improvements on both sides, paired with practical user behavior shifts from consumers, never the twain shall meet."

While analysts may continue to debate the issue, the rumour has been further fanned by Adam D’Angelo, former Facebook CTO and now founder of Q&A service Quora (on Quora only).

Here's what Angelo wrote on Quora.

* This is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.

* They realized that Buzz wasn't enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook.

* Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google.

* They had assumed that Facebook's growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn't be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn't stop, and now they are really scared.

iPhone Gets Windows Live Messenger

It's not like you cannot login to Windows Live Messenger on the iPhone already (using chat clients like Nimbuzz). But then, an official Windows Live Messenger app for the icon is always newsworthy, right?

That's exactly why we are talking about it too. Microsoft already had the Bing app out there for download at the Apple App Store. And now, it is the turn of Windows Live Messenger to make it there. That's right. Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger app has made an official entry into the Apple App Store and from what we see, it looks quite slick and replicates its PC version.

The client is now available in U.S., Canada, the UK and France and is a free download. The app is capable of updating your status message and see your friends' updates. Users will also soon be able to access other services like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn (coming soon), and more through the new Windows Live Messenger for iPhone.

While the messenger has gone social in its approach, the core functionality of instant messaging is still in there. Starting an IM with friends is easy. You just tap a person's name on the Friends tab, or tap their picture from anywhere in the app. So, if you're scanning through the highlights on the Social tab and you see some new pictures that a friend just uploaded, you can instantly send her compliments on her new photos. Microsoft is also working to add Facebook chat support in the app later this year.

The app can also notify you about new e-mails in your Hotmail account. All you need to do is to tap the Hotmail icon inside the Social tab. This takes you to the mobile web version of Hotmail right inside the app.

Now, a Muslim-only 'Facebook'

Pakistanis outraged with Facebook over "blasphemous" caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed have created a spin-off networking site that they dream can connect the world's 1.6 billion Muslims.

A group of six young IT professionals from Lahore, the cultural and entertainment capital of Pakistan, launched www.millatfacebook.com for Muslims to interact online and protest against blasphemy.

The private venture came after a Pakistani court ordered a block on Facebook until May 31, following deep offence over an "Everyone Draw Mohammed Day" page considered "blasphemous" and “sacrilegious.”

"Millatfacebook is Pakistan's very own, first social networking site. A site for Muslims by Muslims where sweet people of other religions are also welcome," the website tells people interested in signing up.

Dubbed MFB, after Facebook's moniker FB, its founder says professionals are working around the clock to offer features similar to those pioneered by the wildly popular California-based prototype.

Each member has a "wall" for friends to comment on. The site offers email, photo, video, chat and discussion board facilities.

The Urdu word "Millat" is used by Muslims to refer to their nation. The website claims to have attracted 4,300 members in the last three days -- mostly English-speaking Pakistanis in their 20s.

The number of aficionados may be growing, but the community is a drop in the ocean of the 2.5 million Facebook fans in Pakistan and there have been some scathing early reviews of the start-up.

Neither has Facebook been immediately reachable for comment.

"We want to tell Facebook people 'if they mess with us they have to face the consequences'," said Usman Zaheer, the 24-year-old chief operating officer of the software house that hosts the new site.

"If someone commits blasphemy against our Prophet Mohammed then we will become his competitor and give him immense business loss," he said, dreaming of making "the largest Muslim social networking website.”

How to decline Facebook request

A colleague I just met at work has invited me to be their friend on Facebook. I don't want to offend them, but nor do I want to share my candid photos and lousy Scrabble scores with someone I hardly know. Can I ignore their invite?

"Can I be your friend?" might work as an ice-breaker among small children, but it's not a question you hear often between adults, at least not outside of Las Vegas.

Friendship, it is generally understood, is a relationship that evolves through shared interests, common experiences and a primeval need to share your neighbor's power tools.

Yet for many people, Facebook permits a return to the simplicity of the schoolyard.

Rather than inviting someone to be our Facebook friend only after we've become friends in the real world, many of us are using Facebook as a short-cut around all that time-consuming relationship building.

Why bother asking someone you've just met questions about their family, interests and ability to run a farm or aquarium, when you can simply send them a friend request and read the answers in your Facebook news feed? And so we think little of receiving friend requests after we meet someone for the first time at, say, a dinner party.

If you like the person, perhaps because they brought an excellent bottle of wine to the party, then you can accept the request in the hope of further opportunities to sample the contents of their cellar.

If you didn't get to taste the wine because they accidentally spilled the bottle over your brand new party dress, then etiquette experts would probably agree that you can decline the friend request, send them a dry-cleaning bill and humiliate them in a derisory posting to your real Facebook friends.

In the workplace, however, the dynamic is very different. The consequences of offending someone by ignoring their friend request are greater with a colleague you see every day than with a careless dining companion you may never meet again.

So why are people you work with increasingly offering to share their Facebook output?


Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher who studies social software in the workplace, said it's partly because some people just don't anticipate the ramifications of sharing their personal life with colleagues.

But it's also a function of the Facebook interface, which recommends other people for you to friend.

"Once you've connected to one person you work with you get recommendations to connect to others that you work with," she said.

Of course, many people don't have a problem with being Facebook friends with colleagues, especially those they know well. But for those who would rather keep their work and private lives separate, there are options other than ignoring an unwanted friend request.

One is to accept the invitation and then use Facebook's privacy settings to limit the flow of information between you and your new "friend". To do this, you can create a "colleagues" list from the Friends menu and then add to it your new friend. Then navigate to the privacy settings and use the "Profile Information" section to control what information people on the "colleagues" list can see.

An alternative, says workplace etiquette expert Barbara Pachter, is to suggest to the colleague that you connect instead on LinkedIn, a social network for professional relationships.

"You can just go ahead and ask them to join you on LinkedIn and hope they forget they sent you a Facebook friend request," said Pachter, the author of New Rules @ Work.

"Or you can say, Thanks for asking me. I'm keeping Facebook for my family and friends. I'm asking you to join me on my professional network instead.'"

Pachter said that whatever you do, it's important not to offend your colleague -- and that's not just because politeness is good etiquette. "The person you offend might end up being your boss next year," she said.

Yahoo, Microsoft scoff at Google Buzz

Google's fired another salvo in its quest to rule the Internet space. The company launched Google Buzz that brings social networking right into users mail boxes (Gmail) and takes on social networking giants Facebook and Twitter right on their turf.

Though the verdict is still not out if Google Buzz will be able to usurp users from Facebook and other social networks, Google's rival seem little impressed by Google's new launch.

Just minutes after Google unveiled Google Buzz, both Yahoo and Microsoft said that they have been running a similar service for years.

"Busy people don't want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation," Microsoft said in a statement. "We've done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008."

Yahoo tweeted a similar scoff.

"Two years after #Yahoo! launched #Buzz, Google follows suit. Check out the original: http://buzz.yahoo.com/"

Gmail adding features to rival Facebook

Google is gearing up to give serious competition to Facebook, Twitter and other networking sites. The search giant's free email service Gmail is reportedly planning to make Gmail more social by allowing users to exchange status updates with friends and share Web content links.

According to a report in Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the change will add a module to the Gmail screen that will display a stream of updates from individuals a user chooses to connect with.

These status updates are expected to eventually include content shared by a users' Google contacts through other Google properties, such as YouTube and Picasa.

Presently, Gmail users can only post a brief message about their status through its Chat system, which is linked to Gmail.

Last year, Yahoo too added a similar feature to its mail allowing users to see if their friends have uploaded a photo or put a new staus message.

Gmail has been trying to integrate social features in various ways. Google users can chat via Jabber or AIM, make video calls, and send SMS messages from Gmail's web interface.

A report in Financial Times says that Google will soon be holding a press conference at its Mountain View, California, office to show off the new features.

Google is still far and away the No. 1 most-visited website, with 173 million US visitors in December, according to measurement service ComScore Media Metrix, up 16% from the previous December. But Facebook is close behind. The social network was the fourth-most-visited site in December, with 111.8 million visitors, up 105% from the prior year.

Facebook lands women into Dark Net

A mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place - strangers' accounts with full access to troves of private information.

The glitch - the result of a routing problem at the family's wireless carrier, AT&T - revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.

In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn't appear the users could have done anything to stop it.

The problem adds a dimension to researchers' warnings that there are many ways online information - from mundane data to dark secrets - can go awry.

Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this, in which the wrong person was shown a Web page whose user name and password had been entered by someone else. It's not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. But experts said such flaws could occur on e-mail services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone.

"The fact that it did happen is proof that it could potentially happen again and with something a lot more important than Facebook," said Nathan Hamiel, founder of the Hexagon Security Group, a research organization.

Candace Sawyer, 26, says she immediately suspected something was wrong when she tried to visit her Facebook page Saturday morning.

After typing Facebook.com into her Nokia smart phone, she was taken into the site without being asked for her user name or password. She was in an account that didn't look like hers. She had fewer friend requests than she remembered. Then she found a picture of the page's owner.

"He's white, I'm not," she said with a laugh. Sawyer logged off and asked her sister, Mari, 31, her partner in a dessert catering company, and their mother, Fran, 57, to see whether they had the same problem on their phones.

Mari landed inside another woman's page. Fran's phone - which had never been used to access Facebook before - took her inside yet another stranger's page, one belonging to a young woman from Indiana. They sent an e-mail to one of their own accounts to prove it.

They were dumbfounded. "I thought it was the phone. Maybe this phone is just weird and does magical, horrible things and I have to get rid of it," said Candace Sawyer.

The women, who live together in East Point, Georgia, outside Atlanta, had recently upgraded to the same model of phone and all used the same carrier, AT&T. The problem wasn't in the phones. It was a flaw in the infrastructure connecting the phones to the Internet.

That illuminates a grave problem. Generally Web sites and computers are compromised from within. A hacker can get a Web page or computers to run programming code that they shouldn't. But in this case, it was a security gap between the phone and the Web site that exposed strangers' Facebook pages to the Sawyers. Misconfigured equipment, poorly written network software or other technical errors could have caused AT&T to fumble the information flowing from the Sawyers' phones to Facebook and back.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said its wireless customers have landed in the wrong Facebook pages in "a limited number of instances" and that a network problem behind those episodes is being fixed.

It's unclear how many people were affected by the problem the Sawyers discovered, and whether it was limited to Facebook.

The reason all three women experienced the glitch is a function of the way cellular networks are designed. In some cases, all the mobile Internet traffic for a particular area is routed through the same piece of networking equipment. If that piece of equipment is misbehaving or set up incorrectly, strange things happen when computers down the line receive the data.

Usually that means a Web site simply won't load, said Alberto Solino, director of security consulting services for Core Security Technologies. In the Sawyers' case, ``somehow they got the wrong user but they could keep using that account for a long period of time. That's what's strange,'' he said.

The AP tried to contact two of the people whose Facebook pages were exposed to the Sawyers, but the calls and e-mails were not returned. It's unclear whether they are also AT&T customers, though security experts said that's likely the case.

Indeed, it was the case in a similar incident in November. Stephen Simburg, 25, who works in marketing, was home for Thanksgiving in Vancouver, Washington, when he logged onto Facebook from his cell phone. He didn't recognize the people who had written him messages.

"I thought I had gotten really popular all of a sudden, or something was wrong," he said. Then he saw the picture of the account owner, A young woman.

He got her e-mail address from the site, logged off and wrote the woman a message. He asked whether he had met her at some point and she had borrowed his phone to check her Facebook account. "No," she wrote back, "but I was just telling my family that I ended up in your profile!"

Simburg and the woman figured out they were both using AT&T to access Facebook on their phones.

Facebook to give McAfee security to all users

Facebook, in collaboration with McAfee is going to provide all of its 350 million users with a free six-month security trail pack of McAfee's INternet Security Suite.

The popular social networking site Facebook has taken this step after various cyber attacks such as the 'Koobface virus'.

Facebook said that a scanning tool will also be provided to its users whose computers have fallen prey or show signs of being attacked. This scanning tool is also being offered without any cost as such. The new scanning tool is available immediately for English-language users of Facebook, with versions for other languages coming soon.

After the 6-month trial period, the subscription will be available at a discount for Facebook users.

This will protect users from online threats such as hackers, viruses, trojans, spyware etc.

"We feel like we've done a great job in protecting our network and accounts on Facebook, but we're always looking at ways we can do better," said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt.

Facebook users in the United States, Britain, France and eight other countries have immediately access to the free version of McAfee Internet Security Suite, with additional countries to come through the first three months of the year. Those in India might have to wait just a little bit linger.

Facebook policy upsets millions

Millions of Netizens suddenly face the prospect of having key personal information and posts made accessible to everyone, unless they consciously monitor their privacy settings.

Facebook, the world's largest online social networking site, recently announced that in order to encourage members to share more information on the internet, it has upgraded its privacy settings, making several categories of information of its users visible by default to everyone.

Why this assumes significance is because Facebook allows its users to chose their level of privacy, by letting them restrict access to either friends, friends of friends or everyone. It's a feature that has helped the site gain many users and is in line with its mantra of "control what you want to share."

But with the recent change -- unless users actively manage their privacy settings themselves -- their information like Family and Relationship, Education and Work, and their posts will be made visible to everyone, regardless of what their previous privacy settings were.

This has made many of the sites 350 million users see red. "The way these changes have been implemented has created a sense that I'm being forced to share more than I want," says Manish Sinha, an IT professional. Online observers believe the revised settings are a tactical move by Facebook to get search engines to index more information from the website, in order to counter growing competition from microblogging sites like Twitter.

"I wouldn't want prospective employers to see profiles that I create on social networking sites," points out Sinha. Electronic privacy groups are already up in arms against Facebook. Recently, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a legal complaint in the US against the social networking site's new privacy settings, claiming the changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook's own representations.

Cyber law expert Pavan Duggal says the development is likely to open up a Pandora's box of interesting legal situations for social networking sites. "A large number of netizens do not look at the existing settings pertaining to the privacy once they have created their accounts. By a single stroke of change of settings and change of terms which have not been given enough coverage within the netizen community, we are going to see a recipe for potential privacy violations," he says.

On their part, Facebook officials have claimed that the changes have been aimed at providing more options for users and that regulatory bodies like the Federal Trade Commission had been informed about these changes. But among surfers, the site seems to have lost some face.

`Facebook captures true personality’

People use online social networks such as Facebook to express and communicate real personality, instead of an idealized virtual identity, says a new research.

Psychologist Sam Gosling at The University of Texas at Austin said: "I was surprised by the findings because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves."

The expert added: "In fact, our findings suggest that online social networking profiles convey rather accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren’t trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off.

"These findings suggest that online social networks are not so much about providing positive spin for the profile owners," he adds, "but are instead just another medium for engaging in genuine social interactions, much like the telephone."

To reach the conclusion, Gosling and a team of researchers collected 236 profiles of college-aged people from the United States (Facebook) and Germany (StudiVZ, SchuelerVZ). The researchers used questionnaires to assess the profile owners’ actual personality characteristics as well as their ideal-personality traits (how they wished to be). The personality traits included: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness.

In the study, observers rated the profiles of people they did not know. These ratings were then compared to the profile owners’ actual personality and their ideal-personality.

Personality impressions based on online social network profiles were accurate and were not affected by profile owners’ self-idealization.

Accuracy was strongest for extraversion — paralleling results of face-to-face encounters — and lowest for neuroticism. Those findings were consistent with previous research showing that neuroticism is difficult to detect without being in person.

"I think that being able to express personality accurately contributes to the popularity of online social networks in two ways," says Gosling. "First, it allows profile owners to let others know who they are and, in doing so, satisfies a basic need to be known by others. Second, it means that profile viewers feel they can trust the information they glean from online social network profiles, building their confidence in the system as a whole."

Hackers cripple popular social-networking sites Facebook and Twitter

Twitter and Facebook suffered service problems from hacker attacks on Thursday, raising speculation about a coordinated campaign against the world's most popular online social networks.

The attacks, which came a month after the White House website was targeted in a similar online assault, left millions unable to carry out daily routines that have assumed an increasingly central part of their lives.

The incidents also underscored the vulnerability of fast-growing Internet social networking sites that have been heralded as powerful new political tools to counter censorship and authoritarianism.

Twitter, which allows people to broadcast short, 140-character text messages over the Internet, became a key form of communication in Iran amid the protests and clampdown that followed the country's disputed June elections.

In a blog post on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company preferred not to speculate about the motivation of the malicious attack that knocked the site offline and made it inaccessible for several hours earlier in the day.

"Twitter has been working closely with other companies and services affected by what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack," said Stone.

Members of Facebook, the world's largest Internet social network with more than 250 million active users, saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles. Like Twitter, Facebook said the problems appeared to stem from a so-called denial of service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website's servers with communications requests.

Once access to Twitter had been restored, many of the site's users posted short messages lamenting the disturbance.

"now I know Im addicted to Twitter...I wasnt rite all day," Twitter user hotlilNINA posted.

Speculation swirled on the Internet that other sites, including Google, had also come under attack, after relatively lesser-known site LiveJournal said it, too, had been targeted by hackers on Thursday. But those rumors could not be confirmed.

Google said in an emailed statement that it was in contact with some non-Google sites that were impacted by Thursday's attacks to help investigate.

"Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services," the statement said.

Anti-social attacks
Motives for denial-of-service attacks range from political to rabble-rousing to extortion, with criminal groups increasingly threatening to hobble popular websites that don't pay demanded fees, according to security experts.

In July a wave of similar attacks disrupted access to several high-profile U.S. and South Korean websites, including the White House site. South Korea's spy agency said at the time that North Korea might have been behind the attacks.

Twitter's newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, said Steve Gibson, the president of Internet security research firm Gibson Research Corp.

The number of worldwide unique visitors to the Twitter website reached 44.5 million in June, up 15-fold year-over- year, according to comScore data.

Security experts said a single group could have been behind the problems on Twitter, Facebook and the other sites as hackers evolve their ability to attack multiple sites at once.

"History would tell us that it's probably the same attacker or group of attackers that is launching both attacks," said Kevin Prince, the chief technology officer of security services provider Perimeter eSecurity.

While there are ways for websites to protect themselves from denial of service attacks, Prince said the defenses were expensive, whereas mounting an attack was a relatively simple feat for hackers.

Twitter said in a blog post later on Thursday that its site was back up, though it said certain users would experience degraded service while it recovers completely.

Some Twitter users appeared to be taking the incident in stride.

"It's just an annoyance. Remember Twitter was down in 2007 and 2008 all the time," said Robert Scobble, a commentator on the technology industry who boasts 93,000 "followers" on Twitter, referring to a period when Twitter's rapid traffic growth occasionally led to several service disruptions.

For lawyer Zabi Nowald, it was just another day -- Twitter or no Twitter -- as he headed to work in downtown Los Angeles with a laptop in one hand and a Blackberry in the other.

"None of my friends do Twitter; none of my employers do," said Nowald, 27. "It affects my life zero. I lost something I never had."