Categories
Internet

Get Your Facebook Vanity URL

I know what I’m doing tomorrow – Friday night – at 9pm. I will be behind my computer, on Facebook, to set up my own vanity URL. Indeed, Facebook is finally allowing users to get their own usernames.

Categories
Internet

Myspace, FaceBook and Google Embrace Data Portability

data portabilityThe 3 bigs are starting to embrace data portability by making available sets of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday. The following day, FaceBook rushed to announce FaceBook Connect, and Google is expected to present Google’s Friend Connect on Monday.

This whole Data Portability thing will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch says:

The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data.

Google will have to catch up with MySpace and FaceBook as it doesn’t have a gigantic pool of active users like the 2 social networks sites already have. What? Google is not leading the way for once?

Categories
Business Internet

Microsoft feeling FaceBook!

Microsoft gauged Facebook’s interest in a possible acquisition after the software giant’s failed takeover attempt of Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal reported today.

The newspaper reported on its Web site that Microsoft’s bankers put out subtle signals to Facebook, the social networking Web site, to see if it would be open to a full acquisition.