Daily Archives: August 27, 2009

Facebook today announced plans to further improve people’s control over their information and enable them to make more informed choices about their privacy. These improvements will include new notifications, additions to Facebook’s Privacy Policy, and technical changes designed to give people more transparency and control over the information they provide to third-party applications.

The changes announced are a result of the company’s work with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, which has spent more than a year reviewing Facebook’s privacy policies and controls. In their report, The Office of the Privacy Commissioner gratefully acknowledged Facebook’s cooperation in the course of the investigation and commended Facebook for providing its users with extensive privacy settings. The Commissioner also made a number of recommendations, to which Facebook has responded with commitments for significant enhancements that will be implemented over the next 12 months. The Commissioner has reviewed these proposals and is satisfied with the commitments Facebook has made.

“Our productive and constructive dialogue with the Commissioner’s office has given us an opportunity to improve our policies and practices in a way that will provide even greater transparency and control for Facebook users,” said Elliot Schrage, Vice-President of Global Communications and Public Policy at Facebook. “We believe that these changes are not only great for our users and address all of the Commissioners’ outstanding concerns, but they also set a new standard for the industry.”

Specific changes Facebook will be making:

• Updating the Privacy Policy to better describe a number of practices, including the reasons for the collection of date of birth, account memorialization for deceased users, the distinction between account deactivation and deletion, and how its advertising programs work.

• Encouraging users to review their privacy settings to make sure the defaults and selections reflect the user’s preferences.

• Increasing the understanding and control a user has over the information accessed by third-party applications. Specifically, Facebook will introduce a new permissions model that will require applications to specify the categories of information they wish to access and obtain express consent from the user before any data is shared. In addition, the user will also have to specifically approve any access to their friends’ information, which would still be subject to the friend’s privacy and application settings.

Work on the planned changes will begin immediately. However, some changes will take some time before they are visible. For example, updates to the Privacy Policy will require a notice and comment period for users. In addition, the changes to how users share information with third-party applications will require significant time and resources, both for the updating and testing of the new Facebook API, and for third-party application developers to reprogram and test their applications. Facebook anticipates this entire process will take approximately 12 months.

“We strongly believe that the changes to the permission model for third-party applications will give users more confidence in Platform and will, thus, help ensure the long-term health and vitality of the ecosystem that has grown around Platform,” said Ethan Beard, Director of Platform Product Marketing at Facebook. “We will be communicating regularly with developers about the changes and we’re going to take our time to make sure the outcome is something users understand and that developers have ample time and notice to adapt.”

About Facebook

Founded in February 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a privately held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

With the launch of Heritage Auction Galleries has now placed its bidder-members and followers right in the middle of the American Social Media boom.

The recent additions of a Heritage Auction Galleries page on Facebook, where all the latest press releases and pertinent announcements from the company are posted, complimented with frequent updates from Heritage on Twitter.com and daily postings on The Heritage Blog, make it easy for Heritage users to follow the day-to-day media happenings at Heritage Auction Galleries. You can view a compete archive of Heritage press releases at www.HA.com/PR.

Besides updates regarding the latest press releases, prices realized and special lots, visitors to the Heritage Social Media page will also be able to follow Halperin via his Twitter account, receiving updates and insight from one of Heritage’s co-founders.

“The increasing power of social media is impossible to ignore in this day and age,” said Jim Halperin, Heritage Co-Found. “Heritage has always been in the forefront of technological innovation, and we intend to lead the way among major auction houses with our social media initiatives.”

Heritage Auction Galleries is the world?s third largest auction house, and by far the largest auctioneer of rare collectibles, with annual sales more than $700 million, and 450,000+ registered online bidder members. For more information about Heritage’s auctions, and to join and gain access to a complete record of prices realized, along with full-color, enlargeable photos of each lot, please visit www.HA.com.

PeoplePond, a leading online service providing increased personal brand visibility, easy reputation management and advanced identity verification services within a single platform, announced today that bloggers can prove they are who they say they are and claim ownership of their blogs.

PeoplePond is able to confirm blog ownership for bloggers who use blogging platforms that support OpenID or Oauth. Notable examples include Blogger, LiveJournal, Drupal, and WordPress. Ownership will be confirmed and viewable on the blogger’s PeoplePond profile.
“This is part of our continued effort to enable those using PeoplePond to verify ownership of their online identities wherever they may be, including blogs,” said PeoplePond CTO, Al Castle. “Our purpose is to help promote and protect our users’ online identity. Look for more leadership in this area from the PeoplePond team very soon.”

Additionally, the PeoplePond Identity Verification service confirms to profile visitors that the profile owner has proven they are who they say they are. This takes the teeth out of online identity thieves by providing a bona fide point of reference for online identity. Combining personal identity verification with service authentication provides visitors of PeoplePond profiles a means to know exactly who they are engaging online.

PeoplePond profiles enable personal brands to achieve greater visibility in online search results by training search engines to provide higher ranking to their online identity. Each PeoplePond profile is designed to provide the owner full control to implement a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that consolidates, verifies and boosts visibility for their entire online identity.

PeoplePond recently launched a sister site, CompanyPond, that boosts visibility of a company’s online identity by leveraging the numerous PeoplePond profiles a company has. This also trains search engines to promote online content produced by staff, evangelists, board members, etc. in their company’s search results.

About PeoplePond
PeoplePond (www.peoplepond.com) and CompanyPond (www.companypond.com) are part of the Cranberry Venture Partners, LLC network of Web sites. Cranberry is home to an unmatched team of innovative developers led by Internet visionary David McInnis. McInnis is best known for founding the first direct-to-consumer news service, PRWeb, which changed the way the world uses press releases. For more information about PeoplePond, LLC and the Cranberry Venture Partners, LLC network of Web sites visit www.cranberryventurepartners.com.

Los Angeles-based travel tour provider Tours4Fun has capitalized on social media by setting up shop across the spectrum of social networks from Twitter to Facebook to Myspace and Youtube. Social media has taken communication and the sharing of information over the Internet to another level. Recognizing the effective leverage that social media provides to connect with people all over the world, Tours4Fun has established itself on all the prominent networks, providing answers to all customer inquiries.

Twitter and Facebook have taken social networking by storm and Tours4Fun has been active on both sites for quite some time now. By publishing posts related to travel news, destinations and tips on planning your vacation, Tours4Fun has gained an impressive following on Twitter. In addition, Tours4Fun uses MySpace as a platform to interact with travel enthusiasts all over the world. “We realize that in the digital age, having multiple channels of communication is in the best interest of our customers and company” said Kevin Du, Co-Founder of Tours4Fun, Webeez, Inc.

Tours4Fun has also acknowledged the rising popularity of social bookmarking sites, by gaining visibility on Delicious and Newsvine. These sites exercise a non-hierarchical keyword categorization system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords thereby increasing search engine visibility. Tours4Fun utilizes these time-saving and easy to use methods of sharing their exciting travel related news by bookmarking on these sites.

To further spread the word across the expanses of the World Wide Web, Tours4Fun also employs the real time feed aggregator FriendFeed to consolidate all the posts from their social sites and blog. An interactive blog that is rich with travel information, where readers can participate and leave comments regarding some of their helpful “Find Things to Do” or even ask questions about special travel deals. Tours4Fun invites all inquiries and or suggestions, which is why they can be found on all the major fronts of social media.

About Tours4Fun
Tours4Fun, founded in 2006, is a thriving online travel supplier, dedicated to providing the finest online purchasing experience for all your travel needs. Tours4Fun strives to be the ultimate online travel superstore with the widest selection and best prices. http://www.tours4fun.com

What is the next thing for Social Networking? Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and their competitors let you find friends, build brands, and form groups. But a newer site lets you do those things, plus monopolize a chunk of the Internet around a social issue, philosophical question, research problem, niche art form, or environmental challenge that you are passionate about. And all for free. The rationale for the World Mind Network (WMN) stems from events over the last five years or so – the advent of new Web 2.0 tools which have hit society like waves, one after another: MySpace, Skype, Facebook, YouTube, all the various iPhone and Blackberry applications, and now Twitter.

But to a large degree, Web 2.0 tools have been used historically for rather trivial purposes such as games, gossip, silly videos, and inconsequential chatter.

The WMN wants to help people use these tools for grander purposes. Members can use these vastly expanded powers of networking to improve education, do research, build community across political divides, and utilize collaborative online mind-mapping to address common problems. Equally important, their tools allow an individual or small group to attract so much search engine traffic that they may become almost synonymous with their favorite cause.

The WMN Board of Trustees includes five Nobel Laureates.

The first project was helping a multimedia ICT Education center in Kenya receive funding through donation of unused cellphone minutes (SambazaGroup.com).

Joining the World Mind Network is like having a Facebook or Twitter account, but it assumes that one is interested in improving the world somehow. Participants can join a forum devoted to improving science education co-moderated by a Nobel Laureate (Peter Doherty), start a psychological research project, or contribute to an interactive blog on the world economic crisis co-hosted by another Nobelist (Edmund Phelps).

A new project, Twit Lit, invites users to create poems in classic forms short enough to become Twitter feeds (TwitLit.net).

Members are setting up live webcam links between secondary classrooms in South Africa, Macedonia and Japan.

In the works is a program using solar powered cell phones recently invented by Samsung to track the spread of the Aedes mosquito that carries the deadly Dengue fever in East Africa.

The new Institute for Digital Music (Institutefordigitalmusic.ning.com) invites visitors to compose, perform and collaborate with others in creating music through elements such as iPhone apps, Leaf Trombone and Ocarina.

One WMN member is starting a contest to award the best Keitai Shoushetsu, or cell phone novel, a cultural phenomenon that has taken Japan by storm.

A wiki devoted to the psychological effects of H1N1 influenza is at emotionalcontagionandswineflu.wetpaint.com.

For more information, including how to start or co-moderate a project, write to [email protected], or visit www.theworldmindnetwork.net.

This release was issued on behalf of the above organization by Send2Press(R), a unit of Neotrope(R). http://www.Send2Press.com