Some ignorant KC Chiefs fans on Facebook

Further down the line, a voice of reason:

Wow. There are some ignorant rednecks subscribed to this feed. Look, face the fact that our country has an increasing Spanish speaking population. If it bothers you unsubscribe and stop making Kansas and Missouri look as intolerant and backwoods as the rest of the country already views us.

Facebook quizzes reveal more than you think

Facebook quizzes are not only annoying, they can potentially reveal private information to the quiz developers.

The Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has put together a campaign to raise awareness of privacy issues surrounding Facebook applications, in particular quizzes. According to this group, the millions of Facebook users taking quizzes are revealing far more personal information to application developers than they are aware of. This is mostly due to the fact that Facebook's default privacy settings allow access to all your profile information whether or not your profile is set to "private." Even worse, the ACLU reports that even if you shun quizzes yourself, your profile info is revealed when one of your friends takes a quiz. Want to see how bad the problem is? Just take the ACLU's Facebook Quiz and prepared to be shocked.

Wow. So if you find out what Harry Potter character you are, then the quiz developer can know just about everything that is on Facebook. No matter your settings.

(Tip o' the hat to Trip for the catch... on Facebook no less)

Murdoch: Facebook is just a directory

I'm not completely convinced that Rupert Murdoch completely gets these whole "internet" and "social networking" things. Murdoch, of course, owns MySpace through his company News Corp.

And even as MySpace loses market share to Facebook, Murdoch doesn't quite get it, calling Facebook just a directory.

Speaking about the recent shakeups at MySpace:

I mean, it will be a very different social site to, say, Facebook.

Facebook is more of a directory. People go looking for their relatives or their friends, who they are going to meet. With MySpace, people go there to find common interests, share music, that sort of thing.

I disagree -- both sites are places where people go to connect with people they already know, and Facebook's design and lack of annoying flashing ads has made it much more popular over recent months.

Facebook has more US users than MySpace

I have hated MySpace for a long time now. I prefer Facebook, and it appears that many Americans feel the same way as I do.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Facebook Inc., after eclipsing MySpace in global users last year, now leads its social-networking rival in the U.S. as well, according to research firm ComScore Inc.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company had 70.28 million U.S. users last month, topping MySpace's 70.26 million, ComScore said. Facebook's users almost doubled from a year earlier, while MySpace lost 5%.

Facebook has more than 300 million users worldwide.

Are Facebook's user names a mistake?

Facebook announced earlier this week that they would start letting users choose their own names.

But is it a good idea? Douglas Rushkoff, writing for The Daily Beast, says no. I don't know whether it's a good or bad idea, but Rushkoff's arguments are not very well thought out.

Rushkoff compares it to how AOL let its users to the wider internet beyond the gated community that was AOL. Rushkoff writes:

By opening itself to the greater Internet, AOL revealed itself as something of a wading pool. A mini-Internet. Once people could use AOL as a portal to the true, unadulterated, global net, the company was reduced to an ISP. AOL became series of phone numbers you dial to get online, and little more. Steve Case knew his moment was over, and used his inflated stock price to purchase some real assets like Time Warner. We all know how that turned out.

There is a huge difference here between the two cases.

Many internet novices thought that AOL was the internet. But users of Facebook are not operating under the same delusion.

Tabbed browsing has now become ubiquitous -- Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari and every new browser at there has the capability to have multiple pages up at once. I have six open here on Chrome and another dozen open on Firefox.

Why is that relevant? Because one of those tabs is open to Facebook pretty much all day.

Also, Facebook always has driven users away from its pages. Hell, I found this story on the Daily Beast from a story from my co-worker Trip Jennings on Facebook.

This would be true if people's knowledge of the internet had stayed the same for the past decade since the death of AOL as a major entity, but it hasn't. People know that Facebook isn't the internet -- they know it is a page on the internet.

In fact, using Rushkoff's logic, MySpace would never have been popular. People were immediately given the chance to create their own usernames. Yet people continued to use it until they found something better.

When something better than Facebook comes around, then that may kill the social network -- but adding user names?

Come on, don't be ridiculous.

Debt collectors infiltrating social media

Beware who you befriend on Facebook or MySpace. If you don't know who they are, they might just be a debt collector.

From Alternet:

According to a post on Consumerist last month, "Debt collectors are using cute chicks as bait on Facebook to track down and keep track of debtors." It told the story of one employee of a debt-collection agency, who after "friending" some 658 people, declared (rather bizarrely):

haha you guys i tricked you all my name is actually Emily and i work for cbv collections as a skip tracer i bet you guys got calls from them saying you owe money thats all my doing :) you want to call and bitch? i dare you to call me 604-[redacted]!!! I wait to hear from you :)"

Another reason why not to befriend people who you have never met on Facebook.

Vanity URL landrush coming to Facebook

Facebook is launching their "vanity urls" on Friday at 12:01 ET, the Facebook blog announced.

I'm surprised that it took this long before it happened.

Right now, my Facebook profile is something like "http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=##########" with the # symbols being actual numbers. Not exactly something that is easy to put on a business card next to my Twitter account, my e-mail and my cell phone number.

But soon, Facebook urls will look like this: "http://www.facebook.com/USERNAME."

So when is this available? Well, I said above. But here is the lowdown from the Facebook blog:

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you'll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/. You'll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.

Everything he needed to know about social media he learned from being @the_swine_flu

I've met Baratunde a couple of times, and he is hilarious. He made fun of my other blog's name from the stage at the Big Tent in Denver during the Democratic National Convention (though, admittedly, New Mexico FBIHOP is a pretty damned weird name).

He happens to be one of those people who "get" Twitter -- he uses his Twitter account in one of the best ways of anyone who I follow. Ditto with his Facebook account (and probably a hundred other social media networks that I don't know about).

He also one of the few people I know that sends out more tweets than I do, which is pretty impressive.

But here is a video of him showing, using his experience as @the_swine_flu, how to use Twitter correctly and to get attention effectively. Using humor, of course.