With 800 million+ users, its a country of its own. Facebook would file IPO around Wednesday of next week (i.e. Early Feb 2012). Morgan Stanley would be leading the deal, but it could fall into hands of Gold man sachs as well, who valued them last year.

Of course Facebook and other investors have refused to talk about the matter but its already going deeper as me news resources. People familiar with the matter have said the company is targeting an IPO sometime between April and June.

A $10 billion Facebook offering would rank 4th among IPOs for U.S. companies. It would beat the record set by Google Inc., which raised $1.9 billion in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation. At a $100 billion valuation, Facebook would be worth about the same as McDonald’s Corp. and nearly half of Google. The IPO will mint a new generation of Silicon Valley millionaires on the level not seen since Google’s offering. Some 3,000 people work at Facebook.

Like Google, Facebook’s revenue is driven by advertising. In 2011, Facebook achieved $3.8 billion revenue.

For last few years, Facebook was reluctant about going public but it all makes more sense now as they could start gaining some financial benefit from an IPO, rather than stay private but have to release its financial information.

This year, the overall market has risen, and on Friday other Internet stocks rallied on news that Facebook would soon file for a deal. “,” said Max Wolff, an analyst at GreenCrest Capital, which researches companies going public.

The recent IPO climate hasn’t been particularly strong, but the excitement around Facebook is still enormous.

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Facebook is rolling the feature first to developers, and in next few weeks for rest of the users. You can get it now, using the easy steps below:

To summarize, the new features are available to Facebook developers as of today and would eventually be available in next few weeks. But you can get around this by becoming a developer. No you don’t need to code, just create an app on Facebook, and you are good to go.

New Facebook features include Social Gaming, Social Music, Movies, Social books, etc

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How to Migrate Facebook friends to Google Plus

Facebook won’t let you export your Facebook friends to Gmail or Google Plus for their own anti-competitive reasons. But what you can do is export Facebook contacts to a new Yahoo account and then import to Google Plus. It might silly but this is the only reliable way to do it.

1. Exporting Facebook contacts: Create a new Yahoo account, if you don’t have it already. Once you’ve created an account, sign in and head to the Contacts tab. Click on “Import Contacts” and choose the Facebook option. You should now see all your Facebok friends in your Yahoo address book.

2. Importing Facebook contacts, Inviting all: Now goto Google+ Circles tab. Click “Find and Invite” and then click the Yahoo button. It’ll add all your Facebook Contacts that were previously added to your yahoo account. In Find and Invite page, add your Facebook friends to your circles and they should get the invites. You may also find all the people that already are on Plus.

Migrate Facebook Photos to Google Plus

You can even migrate all your Facebook photo albums to Picasa (hence Google Plus) using Chrome a& Firefox extensions. Install & run them, it should take couple of minutes depending your number of photos.

Migrate Facebook Videos to Google Plus

Unfortunately,  this one takes some effort as you would have to download them all and re-upload. You can do this Account > Account Settings, and scroll down to “Download Your Information”. Click on “learn more” link and then Download button. It will take a while to gather your info, but you’ll receive an email when it’s done, and you can download a ZIP file full of your photos, videos and profile information.

Goto Google+, click on your profile, and go to “Videos”. Hit the “Upload New Videos” link and re-upload your videos to your Google+ profile.

Update Twitter, Facebook with Google Plus

That’s it, you are all set, Happy Plusing!

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Within a week of its launch, it managed to get 5 million+ users (unofficial number), and have engaged users like never before. It happened to me aswell, where I never spent more than couple of minutes on Facebook, ended up spending hours on G+. For some users its a goodbye to Facebook, (and for few twitter too), but the reality is, it won’t happen that soon.

Every social network needs some time to evolve, grow on user base. So till the time Google Plus gains its full potential, I don’t mind cross-posting my status to Facebook, twitter & other social networks.

Sync Google+ status, post with Facebook / Cross-post to Facebook

1: Open Facebook mobile on your desktop browser and get your personalized email address which is used to post via email.

2. Go to Google+ Circles, click “add a new person” and enter the personalized email address and create a new circle drag this to a new circle name it “FB share” or “Social share” or whatever.

3. (optional) Change the privacy settings for this circle to “not visible to public”, You can do all privacy settings about circles by going into the Privacy options in Google+.

4. From now on,  include your hidden circle “FB share” that contains the Facebook email and check the box which says ‘Also emil x people’. Since your facebook email is not using Google+ so your status will be sent to facebook via this email. You are all set.

How to Cross-post from Google+ to Twitter, other Social networks

Use Ping.fm to crosspost the same status message to multiple Social networks using your profile’s unique ping.fm email address, just like you did for facebook. You can now Sync your Google+ status/posts with almost any social network.

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Plusbar adds couple of new things to Google+ like  audio and video media player. Although the plans are pretty wide, at the moment plusbar offers Amazing Radio, DFH Radio, Grooveshark, BBC News and TWiT livestream. It integrates beautifully into Google plus as if it was a native part of the stream.

We are addicted to Google+ and spend hours on it, this is definitely a nice add-on to accompany the navigation. We love Chrome CSS tricks, check it out (chrome only).

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You can get the beautiful Google Plus Circles on Facebook to manage your friends pretty easily.

Circles brings a simple drag and drop interface, making creating and modifying lists an absolute breeze. Circles reduces the pain that you get because of ever growing friend-list. Even Facebook’s Zuckerberg once said – ‘nobody wants to make lists’. But Google did it right, and why not Facebook can Haz easy lists?

A new web-app aims to bring both Google Plus’s Circles and Facebook’s lists together. Circles Hack, works well for what its designed. All you have to do is allow the app to take control of your credentials and within seconds, all your friends in boxes at the top of the screen, and a number of Circles across the bottom to which you can drag and drop friends.

Facebook’s lists had been very unpopular till now. We believe with circle hack coming to the platform, facebook users would start creating them more easily than ever.

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Google would go step further and bring Social gaming platform to Google+, which plans to be better than Facebook’s approach.

Here is the html source of the Google+ that leads us to no doubt that Social Gaming is just around the corner:

“… have sent you invites and more from Google+ Games”

This actually makes us believe that even Social Gaming is already Live and available to select users who are testing in a closed group before it hits the masses.

Google had acquired few social gaming companies, it all makes sense why. “Google+ Games” could be Google’s take on Apple’s Game Center, a social gaming portal. Of course Apple could be a long term rival, but for the moment, its all about Facebook. Facebook had been popular with its addictive games such as Farmville. Facebook, however, doesn’t have a centralized way to manage high scores or even collaborate users at gaming. If Google actually creates one, it could actually succeed, in hitting both the targets.

Developer API for Google+

Developer APIs are coming, it might be in next few days or may be few. As Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of social for Google, told on eof the reporters:

“I’m a developer guy at the core. It is inconceivable I would build something without a platform. We’re just getting started!”

More functions will be definitely be added to Google+, along with tighter integration with other Google apps. Giving developers access to full API might not be a great idea since most of the stuff is itself in alpha stages. IT makes sense that Google builds a mature base before developers start duplicating features, apps.

If they integrate chrome app store kind of stuff to Google+, it might look a lot nicer than Facebook’s spammy approach. We would start seeing Zynga games, along with popular titles like Angry birds and what not.

Google+ is getting strong positive reviews all over the internet and when we talk about GooglePlus vs Facebook, most actually foresee a better future with Google Plus.

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The Android video call app works over Wi-Fi or 3G/4G data connections, no hacks needed.

"With approximately 30 million concurrent users logging into Skype at any given time and making up to half a million simultaneous video calls, the Skype video chat on Android app makes it even easier for users to share moments with their contacts wherever they are."

Skype 2.0 gets a complete redesign of interface, other than improved support for Phone calling, and SMS. There’s a new main menu on the Skype app for Android where users can navigate easily through their contacts, access their Skype profile to change personal details or see the balance of their Skype Credit. Skype also gets a bit social by letting users set mood message.

Video calling for Skype isn’t supported on all devices, right now it would just work with the HTC Desire S, Sony Ericsson Xperia neo, Sony Ericsson Xperia pro and the Google Nexus S. More phones soon. Hopefully we would find a hack to Enable Skype video on any android phone, soon.

Get Skype

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Disclaimer: Most reviews of Google+ are desperately vague and written by authors who haven’t actually used it. I got to spend nearly 12 hours with it and finally created an opinion of my own, views expressed here are unbiased and to the point.

Note: Checkout official demos of Google+.

What Google Plus is about:

Its a Social network built by taking Facebook as the platform base, and building all new interface and features on top of it. Google Plus integrates almost all major Google services into one place pretty nicely.

What Google Plus is Not:

Its not an instant Facebook killer. Google plus is far from complete on features, but just like facebook, it would gain over time and eventually beat facebook, provided Google doesn’t suck at marketing this time.

Google Plus – Initial impressions

Google has learnt a lot from Buzz mistakes and technical advancements of Google Wave. The combined experience must have been a shocker for the management that actually lead to a new approach to next generation Social network built entirely on HTML5.

Click to see fullsize

On the first look, Google+ looks cleaner, snappier and more intuitive than Facebook. And after having it used for nearly a day, the opinion has grown stronger. Every part of the user interface is faster than Facebook, and yet better on eyes. Searching for people, for instance, is super fast. Think of people search as Google Instant for Social.

Lets go deeper into various interface components of Google Plus Project:

Circles:

All your social contacts happily reside inside Circles. Circles give you a very graphical representation of your contacts grouped into “geometric circles” each belonging to different categories like Family, Friends, Co-workers, etc. Organizing contacts is among the easiest you could find on a web application, thanks to HTML5. Finding & Dragging multiple contacts into circles is fun. It took me couple of minutes to organize all my contacts.

Sparks:

What excites you? With Sparks, Google is trying to capture the market of “topic based following”, the ones that are already popular with Quora or, #hashtags of twitter. You can now follow topics of your interest from around the web with a click of a button. This is not Facebook pages or groups by any sort, these are plain meta tags, and the returned results are site agnostic.

Hangouts:

This is something Skype is already jealous of and Facebook would hate in the future. Live video collaboration for upto 10 people is now actually possible using Hangouts on G+. You chat and have live audio/video stream like never before.

Notifications:

Just like Google got notifications right in Android, they can’t go wrong in Google+. Notifications are clean, interactive and are placed in the upper right corner of the navigation bar.

The notifications are visible across all google sites, and come handy. For Instance when you receive a comment on one of your posts, you can click and bringdown a dialog which actually lets you comment inline without having to navigate away from the page you are currently on. Facebook forces you to goto the page and of course doesn’t notify anywhere other than its own site.

Apart from that, Google+ can send email and sms notifications for almost all sorts of events that you choose to.

Photos:

If there is feature I’ve to chose that I love the most, photos would be it. With the Picasa integrated into Google+, you can’t really go wrong. Photos on Google+ are more like Picasa on steroids, its fast, nifty and intuitive. Unlike Facebook where you only see photos of a limited size and resolution, Google+ takes it to near fullscreen placing the comments nicely along the side bar and a slideshow at the bottom.

Whats more is that you can edit photos and give some easy touches using the inbuilt photo editor, thanks to the Picnik acquisition.

If you like photography, you would love upgrading from Facebook to G+.

The Mobile app

The Android Google+ app is one pof the best apps I’ve seen on android or iPhone. The interface is slick and smooth. Its powerful yet easy. You can quickly jump between the circles, profile, photos, and share new stuff with a click of a button.

You even get to see the buzzword around your place under “near me” sliding tab.
Camera photos are automatically uploaded to a private album which can later be shared on Google+ streams of your choice.

iPhone users are pretty much out of luck till apple approves the Google+ app. Meanwhile, web app should satisfy the tastes.

Verdict: Google plus Vs. Facebook

Google + has done a good job at rethinking Social networks. We need webapps that take full advantage of our modern browsers that are capable of HTML5 and great graphics, animations. Facebook has started to go there but Google+ has already attained it.

Google+ is short on features, at least for now. What I miss on Google+ is Fan Pages for business, websites. Facebook pages are great for attracting millions of fan following. I don’t know if its even on Google’s Todo list or not, but we definitely miss it.

Other than that third party API, and applications are not yet available. To stay in market Google would have to push them soon enough. With release of API, we would start seeing 3rd party apps building Google+clients & start integrating other webapps, native apps with Google+. Applications is other part of the story, Facebook users love playing games and other time killing applications. May be google integrates it with Chrome Webstore or something else to make apps possible, but it would be a must.

We don’t believe Google+ would be a Facebook killer instantly, even though its better. The point to consider is that Facebook is 700million users strong, it would take a year or move even if all of them start thinking about it.

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Pronounced “Google Plus,” the product is officially written as Google+ — making placing any punctuation after the name fairly awkward. But what looks more natural is the user interface. Facebook has  good UI but Google+feels even better, at least initial mockups. With Google+, the search giant plans to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software.

“It’s ‘Plus’ because it takes products from Google and makes them better and ‘project’ because it’s an ongoing set of products,” said Vic Gundotra, the senior vice president of Google’s social products.

Circles: share what matters

Unlike Facebook, Google+ is built from the ground up around the concept of sharing material with groups of people, called “Circles.” Here’s an example of what sucks with the current generation of social networking:

• We only want to connect with certain people at certain times, but online we hear from everyone all the time.
• It’s scary. People fear privacy before sharing any kind of info.
• It’s insensitive.

From close family to foodies, Google realized that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks.

+Sparks: strike up a conversation

Start talking about things you love based on topics. Oh this would be like Quora integrated into something truly social. Once you get started with things that intersts you: Cars, biking, motor sports, spaceships, photography, or tech, great content can lead to great conversations. ITs true that today on facebook it’s still too hard to find and share the things we care about—not without lots of work, and lots of noise. Google created Sparks!

+Hangouts

Here’s what Skype and facebook would hate about Google+, group video chats. With Google+ you can make on-screen gatherings fun, fluid and serendipitous. Casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you’re free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face in large groups

+Mobile

The same experience of the web brought to mobiles plus more. +Location – Checkins and more +Instant Upload – Photos and Videos Instant Upload automatically uploads photos to private album to your account, they can be shared at a later point. App is available on Android market, soon on iOS App Store.

+Huddle

Google+ includes Huddle, a group messaging experience that lets everyone inside the circle know what’s going on, all in real-time.

Google+ would start sending out invites after you show interest/ register for it.

Update: Indepth Revew: Google Plus vs Facebook handson

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Note: If you don’t have an iPhone or Android, you can automatically wish Birthdays using AutoBudder directly on Facebook.

Automatically wish your Friends Birthdays on Facebook using iPhone

Using Facebook Genie, you can forget to wish birthdays while it takes care of messaging your friends on facebook.

Launch ‘FB Genie’. Turn on/off the location and/or song tracking. Add as many posts you want. While adding posts, you will choose who to post it to as well as the day and the month. Facebook Genie runs in the background and sends your posts to Facebook at the right time. All posts are considered re-occurring, so every year in the same day and month the post will be sent to Facebook.

Automatically Wish your Friends Birthdays on Facebook using Android

I don’t visit Facebook very often, so I automating birthday wishes is always a good idea. With BestWishes, you can configure a time range for it to post. The app will randomly pick a time within the range and publish the custom Birthday wishes. you can select from one f the 10 pre-installed wishes, add your own where close friends get a more personalized note. And yes, you can always exclude/include specific friends

Free version of the app is without a time limit and allows you to say “happy birthday!” only. For custom messages, checkout the paid app.

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Government has shifted its older ways of monitoring traditional landlines, phone calls, to cell phones and email, while they try to hunt down the criminals and terrorists.

We don’t care about this, coz its for our own safety at the cost of privacy that remains in the hands of officials behind closed doors. But the truth is, giving backdoor access to governments make a business’ data more vulnerable to the bad guys as well.

Which Countries spy on citizens?

Governments in US, UK and EU already monitor citizen’s mode of communications.

How do they do it?

Government may not peek into everything, but the most relevant data like: Email subject lines, mobile phone GPS locations, call histories. Trust me, this data dtogether makes up piles of data that is sent for monitoring to governments.

Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks,  stated that tech companies, such as Facebook, are so accessible to US intelligence agencies that they act as de facto information gathering sources. You would be surprised to knwo the facts shown in the video below:

EU is working with several telecom giants to assist them in establishing automated data mining for mobiles, email, social networks, etc. This data, however, is not accessible to any human, a unless required. Mostly smart algorithms would determine suspicious activity before they are put under scrutiny.

Backdoors that grant access to the FBI or NSA also serve as tempting targets for everyone else. Whether they are exploited for identity theft, or used to coordinate concentrated cyber attacks from other nations, wiretapping access is a proven weak point in telecommunication security.

Here’s another news video on the topic:

How secure is your online information? Depends on how much attention you’ve gained by posting an update to the web.

via NYtimes

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You can now +1 web links and your friends will be able to see your recommendations. This is very much like the Facebook LIKE button, but could be even better as it has much wider reach.

The beauty of +1’s is their relevance—you get the right recommendations (because they come from people who matter to you), at the right time (when you are actually looking for information about that topic) and in the right format (your search results).

Checkout the Video:

How to Get/Enable Google +1 in Search

Google Search will now incorporate recommendations from all sites you’re connected to, you can edit those under “Social Circle and Content” section of the Google Dashboard.

To kick start, create a Google profile or upgrade it. You can use your profile to see all of your +1’s in one place, and delete those you no longer want to recommend.

Google PlusOne +1 is rolled out to US then other countries, if you cant wait goto experimental search site and then visit google.com/ncr . Initially, +1’s will appear alongside search results and ads, but in the weeks ahead they’ll appear in many more places (including other Google products and sites across the web).

Enjoy the new Social search experience as Social recommendations start appearing over time.

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With these changes, whats even more attractive is the ability to edit comments in Facebook. Comments can now be edited if an action is taken within few seconds from the time it has been posted.

How to Edit Comments on Facebook

Say you commented on a friend’s photo, status or a link, you can immediately hit the cross button ‘X’ in the top right corner to edit it. You would enter the edit mode almost instantaneously.

Here’s how it would look:

However there’s a catch, it would not work when:

• More than 5 seconds have passed since the time comment was published.
• If someone else is faster than you are and comments immediately, you are out of luck. Workaround? Stick to the old method: delete it and repost.

Note: Just like any other new comment, everyone gets notifications whenever you edit your comment. That makes it ugly! Wish they had built the feature a bit more nicely, its not hard to do so.

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Facebook won’t give you a wide landscape, without ads, they would go offline. Instead, you will have to rely on 3rd party apps that let you see the Facebook’s news feed just like a newspaper, with a much wider aspect ratio.

The company PostPost claims that with Newspaper kind of reading, you will actually waste less time reading all updates. The total time would now be reduced to 30seconds, instead of minutes.

The newspaper UI is AJAXy, and even lets you watch the embedded videos, like posts or comment. The boxes automatically realign themselves based on the size of your screen, bringing in the best viewer experience.

If you are troubled by any kinds of apps, just like Facebook stream, you can choose to hide specific posts and get rid of mess.

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Google will change the final product’s name, eventually as it matures till that time, we’ll call it “Google Plus One”.

TechCrunch’s source suggests another possible name Google is considering: “@Google” or “At Google”. More interesting than the name though is who is said to be taking a very active role in the development, the co-founder,  Sergey Brin.

Sources claim that “there is still a lot of grumbling” surrounding the project internally. This seems to sync up with previous reports of internal disagreement that has led to delays. Google VP Vic Gundotra has been leading the project.

Its is said that at this stage Google +1 appears in the form of a toolbar that exists across many of Google’s services, works with Chrome web browser (not confirmed news if it works with others, I bet it should). Few believe that it is powered by a chrome extension.

Lets hope Google gets it right, this time with +1, and we get the social network which is secure and maintains user privacy, and we will be out of the mess Facebook has created for years.

via TechCrunch

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Twitter has now announced that whenever an account that you follow mentions you, you’ll immediately receive a notification. You’ll know who is talking to or about you on Twitter, and you’ll be able to continue the conversation in real-time.

To get started with free sms on your phone, turn on SMS notifications by going to twitter.com/devices and tick mark all options under “Text message notifications” and select your carrier along with your phone number.

Note: To activate, you will have to send a Text message to a defined number with shown text.

You can customize sms notifications to anything that suits you: like what time of the day, and things like “set mentions all’ to turn on notifications for @mentions from everyone, rather than just those whom you follow.

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And we’re hearing rumors that Facebook is about to unveil “Project Titan,” a integrated Email as a Google’s Gmail rival.

Facebook is launching a web-based email client, as well as further integration with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps.

The event starts at 10 am PST

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Facebook is serious about enhancing the Mobile experience for its existing users. As per the reports, 200Million users are active on Facebook Mobile. This is a huge number considering the fact that Facebook has just 500 Million users. Numbers show how important this customer base is, and Facebook anticipates its value.

The social giant is laying stress on the location-based services, a set of new “deals” for maketers & consumers, new stuff for developers:

Here’s a quick Highlights of the things being announced:

Single Sign-On: Ditching the OpenID, Facebook wants to prevail the Facebook’s SSO to login to almost every service on the web, when on mobile. This enables users already signed into Facebook on smartphones to sign in to other sites with a single click – removing the friction where a sign in is required to access the app’s content or functionality. And not to forget, this time Facebook is giving user the control over his privacy. So, how do users login? They will simply be prompted to push a “Login with Facebook” button, rest is done under the hood.

Facebook Places for iPhone & Android: The iPhone, Android app is updated with some new features. On iPhone, places support has been improved, and its newly introduced to Android.

Groups for Mobile: Both iPhone and Android apps will now allows users to access the recently launched Facebook Groups.

Facebook Places API: Facebook is making its local data and activity stream available to third party publishers and developers. This is competitive with the Google Places API.

Facebook Deals: This is arguably the major announcement of the day, with far reaching implications for both users and businesses large and small.

First and foremost Deals provides a reason for “regular people” to use Facebook Places, to get access to deals or rewards as a by-product of checking in. It also provides a way for large and small marketers to reach Facebook’s massive mobile audience on the go. Emily White, Facebook’s Sr. Director of Local, told me that merchants were observing people check in on their Places pages and wanted a way to interact with those Facebook users.

iPhone will fully support this, android will get it later, but for the meantime its available via web interface: touch.facebook.com

How Deals Works

This new concept will launch with 4 types of Deals (including charitable contributions).

• Individual Deal
• Friend deal
• Loyalty deal
• Charity deal

The most popular of course would be discounts based on check-ins: for instance Gap has started  “Be one of the first 10,000 people to check in at Gap on November 5 receive a free pair of jeans.”

Here is a sample from the page to create a new Deal:

It’s easy to create one, and this will act as a magnet for the millions of small businesses that will undoubtedly be interested in this offering.

How does it work on Phones? Users can access deals by simply looking at the map or list of nearby businesses.

Here’s how it looks on the iPhone:

Businesses with deals will be “tagged” with yellow coupon markers (image on the far left). Users then pull up the Place Page and “get the deal” by clicking on a button. At the point of sale the user shows the coupon on the screen to the relevant person at checkout (though there could be some friction there).

For years developers have been building portals that offers deals, coupons, discounts for certain regions, but of course none of them had this appeal & such a huge audience. Deals will be a big hit with both consumers and marketers, whether large or small, would love it.

Coupons is the next big deal for every mobile user.

Its now as easy as that with a a Firefox extension called Firesheep which can  hijack a person’s current user-session over an open Wi-Fi connection.

Firesheep is a work of  Eric Butler who made the proof oc concept public after after presenting at a Security event. The purpose of the experiment was to showcase the security risks associated with session hijacking, aka sidejacking.

So what all can be hacked with Firesheep? Nearly  26 online services, which includes all popular online services: Amazon, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, The New York Times, Twitter, Windows Live, WordPress and Yahoo.

The extension is so flexible that it can be customized to allow a hacker to target other Websites not listed by Firesheep.

While Firesheep sounds scary, its not as scary as it may sound first. Even though the extension is downlaoded more than 100,000 times, there’s nothing to be scared of.

How Firesheep works

Firesheep is basically a packet sniffer that can analyze all the unencrypted Web traffic on an open Wi-Fi connection between a Wi-Fi router and the personal computers on the same network. The extension polls around network for someone to log in, when someone does, browser’s site-specific cookie communicates with the site and contains personally identifying information such as your user name and an site specific session ID.

As victim’s browser swaps cookie information back and forth with the Website, our packet sniffer can capture this information and hijack the session. Coz cookies has no password information and it  has session timeout, it does eventually. But on a serious ote, even temporary access to the account can bring havocs.

How to use Firesheep

Install WinPcap on windows (Mac Os doesn’t need this) and get the Firesheep extension and then open it up by clicking on View>Sidebars>Firesheep. Click the button that says “Start Capturing.”

Once you click the button, it starts snooping. Then onwards all sessions that are captured are automatically displayed

How to Bypass Firesheep Hijacks?

1. If you feel your account has been compromised, immidiately logout. As soon as you do that, hijacked cookie becomes invalid, and no longer can be mis-used.
2. Use A VPN: Try using a Virtual Private Network client such as the free version of HotSpot Shield. This piece of software basically creates a secure tunnel for your data that runs between the Wi-Fi router and your computer.
3. USe HTTPS Everywhere: If you’re a Firefox user you can also use extensions such as HTTPS Everywhere built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This extension forces certain Websites to use a secure SSL connection for your entire browsing session instead of just the login.
4. Use Strict Transport Security (STS): Strict Transport Security (STS) is a relatively new security feature that is starting to appear in some browsers. STS automatically forces your browser to make a secure connection with every Web page that supports SSL encryption. Once you start using STS, you will not be able to use an insecure connection ever again when connecting to a specific site such as Facebook or Amazon. Chrome has supported STS since Chrome 4, and Firefox 4 will include STS when the official version launches in the coming months.
5. Encrypt your home/office network:  Use the strongest possible encryption on your Home and office Wifi connections.  WPA2 is much better than WEP.

Now users can now create/select groups to whom an update would be shared rather than sharing it to everyone  or all friends. It’s a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them in a private space. The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group, along with group chat with members.

What’s even better is that Facebook now allows you to download everything about your profile, in one click. This includes – your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information. Once the feature rolls out to your account, All you need to do is head to Account > Account Settings > Download Your Information. From there, you can download a zip file containing all your profile information, including your photos, wall posts, messages, videos, friend lists, and other content. If you unzip the file, you can actually view a simple HTML page of your profile, with simple links to all of these things.

A new dashboard has also been announced that would give you visibility into how applications use your data to personalize your experience. Definitely, this will prevent all the spammy messages from appearing, which apps had been flooding Facebook with. Also, it provides account usage detail by each of those apps.

Hope all this will cleanup the clutter on facebook and reduce the frustration of millions of users.

We write about Google, Twitter, Security, Open Source, Programming, Web, Apple, iPhone,Android and latest in Tech @taranfx on Twitter or by subscribing below:

Facebook Live will have its launch party with special appearance from actress America Ferrera.  In addition to special celebrity-oriented videos like today’s, the live video channel will also be used for official Facebook announcements, press events, live chats with Facebook engineers and live streaming of its developer conference, f8.

Facebook Live Features: Live Video, Live Feed, Live Q&A
It would not be just another Live channel, rather it would feature interactive Live Feed technology to facilitate interactions between the viewing audience and the speaker.

The current Live feed feature will be reused int he Facebook Live video channel creating a ”viral News Feed” story. It will also include an “Ask a Question” feature.

Facebook Live as an App
Facebook Live will integrate into existing Facebook Pages.

Embedding Facebook Live

Different types of embeds will be available, including the Player widget, the Video Library widget and the Chat widget. In addition to Facebook itself, users will also be able to share videos on Twitter, Google Buzz, MySpace, Delicious, Digg and via email with special sharing buttons. A shortened URL (http://livestre.am/xyz) will also be provided. In short, just another Ustream.

The videos will be available for later viewing too, if needed.

Watch the Facebook Live Launch Event Live

via rww

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Facebook recently announced 500 Million users, of which 100 Million are leaked and are fully available, uncesored, unaltered for download on PirateBay. Every 3rd profile is available, and if these not so lucky users had most stuff in “info” tab open to Public, congratulations, its all in there.

Background:

A researcher, Ron Bowes, has compiled a list of more than 170 million Facebook users and the Web address of their profile page on the site and released it on a BitTorrent site, meaning it is making it accessible to millions of web users. Initially, he wrote a script to download all Facebook profiles listed in the social network’s public profile directory, which only includes people who have configured their settings for Public Search Listings to be available on Facebook.

He had the information published in his blog, which has been down for long now.

“I realized that this is a scary privacy issue,” Bowes wrote. “I can find the name of pretty much every person on Facebook.”

He also said:

“Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details,” he wrote. “If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture. So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not! Oops ”

What you should do

There’s a little you can do if the information is already in there.

But to clarify any doubts, either download the Torrent file to lookout for your name  OR  Verify your settings on Facebook.

Checking Facebook Privacy settings: Goto  ”Account”  and click on “Privacy Settings.” Then select “Basic Directory Information” and “View Settings.” If “Search for me on Facebook” is marked for “Everyone,” your information might be on the list.

With no surprises from Facebook, they were calm and cold as the restated the useless words “members have control over their settings and the information collected on them they had chosen to make public”. Even Facebook’s bug that lets Hackers delete User’s Friendlist, had cold responses from this company.

Facebook Privacy Flaw

Many Facebook members may not understand how they can configure their settings to avoid sharing more information than they would like to. Members have complained that they were forced to reset their privacy settings back to higher privacy when the company made changes to the site that undid their settings.

“Facebook isn’t going to do this for us; we have to do that for ourselves,” he said. “This is a solved problem (with cryptography)… it’s just that these sites aren’t going to implement it.”

Stay safe even with your Browser, with Browser Fingerprinting: Privacy is a Myth.

We write about Google, Twitter, Security, Open Source, Programming, Web, Apple, iPhone,Android and latest in Tech @taranfx on Twitter or by subscribing below:

As itProPortal reports, Paul Adams, a Google employee, has released a presentation that gives some basic insight of where Google ME, the new Social networking initiative from Google, is heading.

Update: Google stops Wave, Social network hinted

Update2: Google buys Slide, for better Socail sharing

The 216-page document, which is available here (and below), explores the many facets of human interaction when people use social media and pays particular attention to the differences between social networks online and offline. More surprisingly, Adams does not hesitate in blowing away darksides of Facebook. The slides look very convincing form the Google’s perspective, and sure looks promising.

Little is known what all it will be based on. Its highly likely that Google could potentially rebrand Orkut as Google Me  with a totally revamped User Interface and put the cherry on the cake by adding killer features from the most popular products: Google Latitude, Friend Connect, Mail, Google Voice, Talk, Buzz, Wave, Docs, Picasa, or Youtube.

We definitely dont need another facebook, especially when we are troubled with the privacy issues. What we do need is a better social ecosystem altogether which provides more clarity to controls, and assures user’s privacy at all times and Google seems to be working very hard at building one.

Its worth going through the slides, check it out: Pay particular attention at the part that describes how real world social networks work.