Maximum PC facebook RSS Feed

Facebook Wins $873 Million Case Against Spammer

Paul Lilly — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:55:53 -0600

As it's turning out, the fight against spam might not be so futile after all. Edward Davidson, who became known as the 'spam king' by sending out millions of falsely labeled emails, found himself behind bars in April, and then more recently, the FTC shut down one of the largest organized spam rings in the world in HerbalKing. And less than two weeks ago, the FTC scored another major win by shutting down a web host thought to be responsible for 75 percent of the world's spam. Now it's Facebook who's getting in on the fight.

Ruling on a case filed by Facebook against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital on August 14, 2008, Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel has awarded Facebook over $873 million in damages. Atlantis Blue Capital found itself under legal fire for allegedly accessing Facebook's servers, setting up phishing websites to acquire Facebook logins and email addresses, and sending out millions of emails to the social networking site's members.

"It's unlikely that Geurbez and Atlantis Blue Capital could ever honor the judgment rendered against them (though we will certainly collect everything we can)," Max Kely, Facebook's director of security, wrote in a blog post. "But we are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users."

The sentence, which is likely to knock Atlantis Blue Capital out of business, also forbids Geurbuez to access, retain, or use Facebook data in any way, nor is he allowed to create or maintain a Facebook profile.

Twitter De-Friends Facebook, Possible Merger is Off

Andy Salisbury — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:38:46 -0600

A few weeks back Twitter and Facebook ended some big talks, where Facebook was looking to snatch up twitter for $500 million of its stock.

Sometime in mid-October Facebook had instigated talks with the San Francisco- based Twitter about possibly bringing them both together. And while the idea seemed great on paper (the world’s fastest growing microblogging site along with the obscenely popular social networking site), concerns of integration and cost were a large part of why the deal didn’t come to fruition.

Still, Twitter executives and board members felt that they should work on building their own revenues before they look at the possibility of a merger. Currently, they’ve got none.

What the future holds for Twitter, we don’t know. But in the meantime, we’ll continue to keep all of you updated on how we feel by using it.

Would You Buy From a Facebook Music Store?

Andy Salisbury — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:16:24 -0500

Today the New York Post revealed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may be looking to follow MySpace’s lead by offering a digital music store. Not through licensing their own content, mind you, but working through a third party that already has the nasty licensing business worked out.

MySpace’s music service currently works as a proprietary service built from the ground up using source licensing, with all their content hosted directly from MySpace. Whereas Facebook is reportedly looking to work with Rhapsody, iLike, Lala and IMEEM as content providers and licensers.

Supposedly, listening to the music itself will be free, and sold through Amazon. Listening to songs on Facebook would prompt on-screen advertising.

“Facebook is a serious challenger to MySpace,” said Phil Leigh, of Inside Digital Media, “and they would certainly want to do anything that record labels would allow them to do with advertising-supported music.”

So what say you, social networking site user? Would you use a Facebook powered music store? Let us know in the comments.

10 Billion Photos Now Hosted on Facebook for Your Boss to Scrutinize

Andy Salisbury — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:24:13 -0500

10 billion, that’s a pretty sizeable number. For the sake of this story, let’s see that number in its natural state: 10,000,000,000.

That’s the number of images that Facebook is now hosting, according to a post by engineer Doug Beaver on Facebook’s official blog. While this number might sound like it’s lost in the crowd of other photo-sharing sites, bear in mind that Flickr only hit 2 billion photos a little less than a year ago and Photobucket’s active ticker puts them at 6.2 billion at time of press.

Beaver’s post also listed some impressive stats on the amount of photos that Facebook is now handling. “To celebrate, we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups,” he said, “One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon.” They’re also receiving a staggering two to three terabytes of photos per day, and their photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 images served per second.

As monumental as this is, the hardware isn’t free. Facebook reportedly borrowed $100 million in May to help cover the colossal costs of hosting all those photos, and it’s not evident that revenues will be level with server demands anytime soon.

Britain: Facebook Slows Down After Frantic Run

Pulkit Chandna — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:57:40 -0500

Facebook is the most visited social network globally and Britain is no exception to this fact. The website is the second most popular website in the UK after Google UK, according to Hitwise. Its popularity in recent times can be gauged from the fact that it registered a staggering growth rate of 2905% from September 2006 to 2007. Of course, the website is probably never going to replicate its performance during that period – its halcyon days. Its annual growth rate has come down to a more digestable level of 88%.

Its growth in the UK is certainly slowing down. There was only a 4% increase in its traffic between August and September, which is almost negligible compared to the 50% growth during the same period last year. Facebook’s average session time has also come down to 20 minutes.

Is there a message hidden in these numbers? Are social networking websites marching towards their popularity threshold? Will there be a corrective decline in their traffic?

Facebook Commences Live Search Service

Pulkit Chandna — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:33:37 -0500

Now that the possibility of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo has been wiped out, Microsoft is steadily trying to improve its standing amongst search engines through strategic acquisitions and deals. To this end, its Live search service has now been integrated into Facebook. Users can now search the web using Live search from the familiar search bar on the top right corner of the popular social networking website.

The search results are displayed within Facebook and are accompanied by advertisements on the right side - as is the norm with search ads. This particular move is being viewed as a giant stride – at least potentially - for Live search, although Facebook will still has to convince users to use the search feature.

Absolutely Scrabulous!

Thomas McDonald — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:00:00 -0500

There’s a game that’s become part of my daily regime. It’s one of the first things I do after firing up the laptop over my morning coffee and the last thing I do before shutting down the laptop with an evening gin. It never takes more than a few minutes, and I do it throughout the day, like answering email. In fact, it is answering email, except with little lettered tiles.

Yes, I am completely addicted to Scrabulous (www.scrabulous.com). Email games are certainly nothing new, but good, well-supported, free email games that a wide variety of people can play without any initial purchase are pretty rare.

Scrab on, after the jump!

Survey: 22% Bosses Scrutinize Social Networking Profiles of Job Aspirants

Pulkit Chandna — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 23:34:30 -0500

Even though many managers find the sly social networking habits of their employees detrimental to their organization’s output, a new survey has revealed that a considerable number of bosses screen social networking sites before hiring people. Twenty two percent of bosses value social networking profiles of job applicants as much as their résumés, a survey conducted by CareerBuilder.com revealed. The figure has shot by a 100% from 11% in 2006. And 34% of those managers that scrutinize social networking profile of candidates have the audacity to even drop candidates based on their profiles. The survey sampled the opinion of 3,169 managers. So rush to put your online house in order, your future boss might just land uninvited.