Google+ Users Accuse Facebook of Fearmongering with Automatic Security Flags

Some Google+ users are complaining that Facebook is making it harder for friends to access their posts on the competing social network, by throwing up a security warning on Google+ links. Facebook is claiming security issues, and has its partner, Norton Antivirus-maker Symantec, to back it up. But users are crying foul.

Several Google+ users who have set the service to automatically update their Facebook pages say when friends click on the links directing them back to their Google+ profiles, they get a Norton Antivirus-branded warning message reading, in part, that “the link has been identified as potentially unsafe.” Facebook signed a deal with Symantec to offer free antivirus protection in April.

We’ve asked Symantec and Google for comment and will update this post when we hear back from each company.

Update: Facebook spokesman Frederic Wolens said the company would "never" use its external blacklist system for competitive reasons.

"We integrate with many different external blacklists including Norton and when there's a block on their service we provide a warning to our users," Wolen said in an email. "I have already reached out to Norton to notify them, however, the cause for the block is a question best suited for their PR Team." 

“Both companies know that a link to Google+ is perfectly safe. There are no banner ads and no way for malicious code to be downloaded from Google+. There has never, to the best of my knowledge, been a malware event originating from a Google+ link,” Mike Elgan wrote in a Google+ post to his followers. “Even after you click "Ignore this warning," every single link is flagged in the same way, with no "learning" or option to accept all links from the site.”

Update: Elgan added another Google+ post saying Facebook had removed the warnings, but some commenters said they were still seeing a warning, only without the Symantec branding. 

Tech blogger Liron Segev went one step further, running Norton’s Safe Web Check on Google+. The check came back with no identified threats.

Facebook rolling out central location for apps

There's more to Facebook apps than ``Angry Birds'' and Pinterest, but many users wouldn't know that because there hasn't been a good, central way to find them. 

Facebook Inc. is trying to change that. On Thursday, Facebook is beginning to roll out its App Center to its nearly 1 billion users, so they can find games and other applications with social components more easily. 

The App Center, available on Facebook's website and on Apple and Android mobile devices, will recommend apps to users based on their interests, the types of apps their friends like, or the apps they have liked in the past. 

Many people are introduced to Facebook apps in the form of sometimes-annoying requests from their friends for poker partners, Scrabble buddies or neighbors on virtual farms. Those requests haven't necessarily matched a user's specific interests. 

The new App Center will initially feature about 600 Facebook apps, mostly games, reviewed by the company to meet its quality standards. Games, such as Zynga's ``CityVille'' and Electronic Arts' ``The Sims,'' are the most popular types of apps on Facebook. 

But the company is betting that by personalizing recommendations to users, people will find new types of applications beyond games, along with games that are more interesting to them. There are all sorts of social apps that use Facebook, from music-listening services such as Spotify to what-you-just-ate tools such as Foodspotting. 

``We spend all day, every day building a platform (so that) great social games and apps can exist,'' said Matt Wyndowe, product manager for apps and games at Facebook. But a common question has long been where to find them. ``Up until now, we haven't had a great answer to that question.'' 

Facebook said that on mobile devices, the App Center won't compete with other app stores, such as Apple's or Google's. Rather, the App Center will send users to those other stores to download the programs. People can also get mobile apps from their regular computers by using a feature called ``send to mobile.'' 

Among the roughly 600 applications included in the App Center at launch will be the Nike Plus GPS running app, which lets users track their runs and broadcast it to their Facebook feed. Ricky Engelberg, whose title at Nike is experience director at digital sport, said having a place where apps are showcased will ``let more people be part of the Nike Plus community.'' 

The App Center, which Facebook announced last month, will be rolled out to US users beginning Thursday night and to everyone else over the coming weeks.

Facebook Posts Its Internal C++ Software Library

Facebook has released a library of C++ software components used to help run its site, the social networking company announced Saturday.

Facebook engineers also announced the release at a C++ conference the company is holding Saturday at its campus at Menlo Park, California."One clear bottleneck to releasing more work has been that any open sourced project needed to break dependencies on unreleased internal library code," wrote Facebook software engineer Jordan DeLong, who posted an entry on Facebook announcing the release.

Facebook has relied on open-source software, such as MySQL, PHP and memcached, to run its sites. And so the company has made a point of releasing its own internal programs as open-source software as well, such as the HipHop PHP compiler and the Thrift service sharing framework.

For many of its open source releases though, Facebook developers have had to rewrite some of the functionality that was borrowed from this library. By releasing the library itself, Facebook will be able to "continue open sourcing parts of [its] stack without resorting to reinventing ... internal wheels," DeLong wrote.

Even if developers don't plan on using Facebook developed applications, they should still take a look at this library, as it includes many utilities of possible to use in other environments, DeLong said. Many of the components available in Folly run more quickly than their equivalents available elsewhere, he boasted. "Our motivation was to build components that were faster and more efficient than what we previously used," he wrote. These utilities were designed to be used in heavy production environments, across thousands of servers.

The components cover a range of functionality. One component was designed to use memory more efficiently. Another reduces contention. The AtomicHashMap utility cuts the amount of time a piece of data in memory is locked by an operation, which can slow performance and cause bottlenecks in heavily used environments. A set of string manipulation components use fewer CPU cycles than formatters in other C++ libraries, DeLong boasted.

The Folly library is posted on GitHub, and Facebook will add new components as they are written, according to DeLong.

Facebook implements 10-second rule to reduce auto-sharing app spam

Tired of seeing every single thing your Facebook friends read and watch on the internet on your news feed? That could change now that Facebook has implemented a 10-second rule for all its applications.

So what does the rule mean for you exactly? Let's say you and your friends have one of Facebook's applications installed on your account. You now have to spend at least 10 seconds reading the article or watching the video on the website connected with the application before it can post a status update for you.

While 10 seconds may still be too short, this rule could lessen accidental sharing, because we're all guilty of clicking links we never actually meant to click. If you'd rather not share your app activities on Facebook altogether — your boss could be in your friends list after all — you can revoke an app's permission to post status updates for you.

When you install an app on your account, check if you opt out of automatic status updates from the start.

Facebook app controls

For apps you already have installed, go to Account Settings, navigate to Apps, then click the small x next to "Post on your behalf," or change the apps posting permission visibility to "Only Me."

Facebook app control panel

Cloud computing: How tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon store the world‘s data

In the evening of April 11, 2012, Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, gave a talk in San Francisco. What he must have known, though his audience didn't, was that in less than 24 hours, Mark Zuckerberg would announce that he was buying Instagram for a billion dollars. 

Given that he was about to become A Very Rich Man, Krieger hid his excitement well. The talk called "Scaling Instagram" was a long and technical one about the challenges of growing the popular photo app. One of the final slides (number 176 of 185) had just two words: "Unprecedented Times". The next one said: "2 backend engineers can scale a system to 30+ million users." On the eve of the Facebook deal, Instagram had bumped up that total to five engineers. 

If this doesn't sound quite as remarkable as it should, it's because we are now inured to Silicon Valley startup stories originating in garages with a couple of geeks, who end up making millions - or a billion. Look at this 'growth' in a different way then: it's as if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computer and within a day or two of building that first prototype, were able to ship several thousand models to customers. 

So you might retort of course, that software is different. You can 'scale' bits and bytes in a way you can't with metal or glass or plastic. Fair enough. 

So imagine this scenario: you create a piece of software which allows millions of users to upload millions of photographs and tweak them and tag them and share them. You need someplace to store those photographs and you need to be able to handle thousands or millions of users swarming over your website or app everyday without it going down. 

In a world where competition is intense, users will simply dump you, if your app slows down or freezes. So your 'downtime' has to be pretty much close to zero. For the user, whether they are in New York, or Tokyo, or Ankara or Mumbai, you have to be always up, and always running, 24 hours a day. 

Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounces American citizenship

The Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin officially defriended the United States in September, giving up his American citizenship for the more tax-friendly residency status of Singapore. 

Saverin, who was born in Brazil and has lived in Singapore since 2010, plans to remain indefinitely in the Asian island nation, where the maximum personal income tax rate is 20 percent and capital gains are not taxed. 

A spokesman for Saverin insists his client did not renounce the citizenship he has held since 1998 for financial reasons. "I have worked with him for over a year, and that never came up," said Thomas Goodman. "Obviously it was a big decision, but he's making all these investments in Europe, Asia and the U.S. It just seemed a lot simpler." 

Goodman declined to say exactly what simplifications the impending billionaire would enjoy, other than the financial. 

The renunciation, published by the State Department at the end of April and reported first by Bloomberg on Friday, became public just days before Facebook shares are expected to be sold to the public. The company is expected to be valued at more than $85 billion. 

Saverin owns less than 5 percent of Facebook, but is expected to be worth more than $3.5 billion after the public offering. The decision was made several months ago, Goodman said. "Everyone is trying to tie this to the IPO and taxes," he said. "It was never about that." 

Loss of his citizenship in September makes it likely that the process was initiated sometime around last May, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. People leaving U.S. citizenship under such circumstances typically pay an "exit tax," which is a final bill based on all assets. 

Saverin, 30, helped found Facebook while at Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, all of whom remain U.S. citizens.

Facebook buys Glancee in another mobile play

Facebook confirmed on Friday night that it has purchased Glancee, a mobile app that uses your location and Facebook login to connect you with like-minded individuals who happen to be near you in real life. Details of the deal were undisclosed but it looks like Glancee will be shutting down and some or all of the team will be joining Facebook — and they will be working on location-related features for the giant social network. Facebook confirmed the deal in a written statement: ""

We are thrilled to confirm that Facebook has acquired Glancee. The acquisition closed today. We can’t wait for co-founders Andrea, Alberto, and Gabriel (Chief Executive Officer Andrea Vaccari, Chief Operating Officer Alberto Tretti, and Chief Technology Officer Gabriel Grise) to join the Facebook team to work on products that help people discover new places and share them with friends.

On the heels of Facebook’s $1 billion buy of Instagram, this deal likely isn’t in the same league financially, but some view it as another indication that Facebook needs to ramp up its mobile experience. Ahead of its initial public offering, Facebook watchers seem obsessed with two primary stories: the glut of money that some people stand to make, and Facebook’s lack of competitiveness in the mobile arena.

Glancee does have some cool elements, and the promise of being able to connect my virtual Facebook life with my physical one using the Glancee app is certainly compelling. However, unlike its Instagram buy, where the service is staying up and running, Glancee is getting shut down. How much of what it does gets incorporated into new location features that Facebook might be working on remains to be seen.

Instagram had the benefit of not just being a cool photo-sharing app, but a viable mobile social network all on its own — and a fairly massive user base — whereas Glancee seems to be a mere tool. And so like other tools Facebook has purchased (hey remember Hot Potato or the April purchase of Tagtile?) Glancee may turn up later as a cool recommendation feature. Or not.