FBHive

Facebook privacy settings are great. Just a few minutes of tweaking allows you to create complex rules that makes sharing on Facebook easy AND safe.

Or so we thought.

I’ll start by prefacing this with two recent developments. The first is that Facebook is now one of Americas most trusted companies, and the second that around 65 million users are now accessing Facebook from mobile devices. It’s these two factors that make the following so concerning.

Have a look at the privacy settings below:

These settings allow friends to see wall posts with the exception of the “Employees” group. This group has specifically been removed rights to see wall posts. Or so the setting says…

This setting is does not work correctly and does NOT work at hiding any wall posts made from Facebook mobile (including the Facebook iPhone app). This bug is a massive privacy concern.

A friend of the above account in the “Employees” group could not only see wall posts from mobile devices, but also post to the wall, clearly against the privacy settings that were in effect. Wall posts from non-mobile devices were not visible.

The following screenshot shows a wall viewed from an account which has been added to the ‘Employees’ group with the privacy settings as above.

We have no way of proving we haven’t ’shopped the screenshots above but feel free to try the settings with a friend to prove it to yourself. We also hope the previous hole we uncovered should give some credibility to our claims.

So there you have it. If you have your boss hidden from seeing wall posts, you’d better stop your friends posting on your wall from their phones…

On a side note, the privacy setting does work for status updates made from mobile devices.

Facebook have recently added a new easter egg in Facebook Chat with a brand new penguin emoticon:

You can use this emoticon with the following combination: <(“)

We’re unsure of the reason for penguin love at Facebook, but they also had an unbranded free penguin gift back in July.

For more, check out our full guide of Facebook Chat features.

Screenshots posted in a note on the Facebook Design Page today may have revealed a little more than just the differences between rounded and square corners.

FBHive have noticed two mysterious new features on Facebook Product Designer Alexandre Roche’s profile. The first is a News Feed filter with a lab beaker icon labelled “Outside World”. The second is a plus (+) icon and number next to the Comment and Like numbers for a video in the Highlights section.

Screenshot and our thoughts after the jump.

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In our last post we discussed at some depth the current problem with Facebook Pages.

At present, Facebook Pages fall under two categories:

1. Pages for legitimate businesses, celebrities, artists, organisations and products
2. Pages for activities and objects people are “fans” of

The first is the reason Pages were created, and allows groups and organizations to keep in contact with their fans through publishing events, news, notes and interacting through their fans with comments.

The second is proving more popular to Facebook users as they wish to display their love of activities like “walking on the beach” and “steamy sex” as well as generic products like “chocolate”. These activities and generic products have no legitimate need to contact their fans, leading to the underbelly of spam and advertising we discussing in our previous post.

This leads us to an area of Facebook profiles that seems to be receiving little attention from Facebook these days: the Info tab. The Info tab contains an area for “Activities” and “Interests” – what a fantastic coincidence! This provides users of the site with a way to display these activities and interests without receiving the spam.

We think Facebook should take a simple two step approach to fixing the problem.

1. Ban outright generic products and activities from pages
2. Increase the publicity of “Interests” and “Activities” on Facebook profiles with a ‘Me Too’ function

The ‘Me Too’ function would allow users to easily add activities and interests to the Info tab of their profile.

At the end of the day, this would increase the quality and exposure of legitimate Pages for businesses and other interest groups, as well as better exposing users’ interests on their profiles.

Since the beginning, Facebook has always had a desire for “real connections”, encouraging users to create a profile using their real name, and connect with people they already know.

The introduction of Facebook Pages in November 2007 added a whole new level to this “real connections” model and has become a great way for businesses, bands and celebrities to connect and interact with their fans. Unfortunately, it has also become a cesspool for spam, ridiculous Pages and unrelated advertising.

A quick skim through the biggest Facebook Pages shows a high number of generic Pages (such as “Pizza”, “The Beach” and “Massages”). A lot of these Pages – while against Facebook’s Terms of Use – are harmless, but there are also many that have been using (and abusing) their large fan bases to advertise tenuously related websites or products.

In May it was reported the creator of the “Kisses” Page auctioned off and sold the Page (and it’s one million+ fans) for an undisclosed sum. The winning bidder, OraBrush, has now turned it into an advertisement for stopping bad breath, the emphasis on kissing now just a memory.

Two weeks later, Facebook decided to tackle these generic Pages head-on by taking away their ability to update their statuses. Whilst it was great to see Facebook finally take some action, it was too little too late, and they’ve failed to follow through since with unscrupulous Page owners still breaking the Terms of Use.

The minor offenders simply encourage their fans to join their other Facebook Pages, but the worse offenders have completely changed their Pages from everything to do with the original topic, with only the name remaining.

We don’t expect Facebook to police every page created, but some of these Pages have fan bases in the millions. Facebook needs to spend some time cleaning out these Pages that are now exploiting the fan bases they’ve built up with unrelated advertising.

To be clear, the purpose of Pages is for advertisers to connect with Facebook users, but these Pages build up fan bases under misleading pretenses of “fun” topics before converting their content and spamming their users.

Although just a small sample of the problem, these Pages have over 3.3 millions fans between them.

Besides their flagrant abuse of the service and disregard for Facebook’s Terms of Use, it’s surprising that these Pages are still around for another reason: by allowing these Pages to operate, Facebook is taking money away from its own advertising sales. Why pay Facebook for ads, when you can create a generic Page like “cuddles” or “sleeping” that’s viral enough to advertise itself?

In our next article we will be explaining how we at FBHive think Facebook could drastically (and easily) overhaul the system for all, but while you wait, tell us: what you think Facebook should do with Pages like those above, and what could be done to improve the system for the future?

1) Sync Facebook Events with your calendar program

Every event page features an export link. It’s an easy way to quickly add Facebook events to your favorite scheduling program, such as Google Calendar, Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook.

However, it’s a bit of a pain to have to continually do this for every event. Fortunately, Facebook provides an iCalendar URL for all your upcoming events that updates automatically.

Simply click the “Export Events” link on the top of the Events page, and copy the URL that follows into your favourite iCalendar supporting program.

2) View who joined Facebook because of you

It’s not only possible to view whom you’ve sent Facebook invitations to, but also who joined because of you. Simply head on over to the Invite History page of Facebook.
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It seems after all the warnings from Facebook that once you choose a username for your profile you’re stuck with it forever, Facebook have now quietly added the ability for you to change it.

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This free gift is no longer available.

We’re not quite sure why, but Facebook has a very cool free gift we can’t attribute to an event or sponsor. We’re not complaining though! It’s a limited edition with only 20,000 available for gifting and is only available until Friday! Thanks to Meghan for the heads up on this one.

Penguin Love

To send this free gift, go to:Facebook Gifts

To celebrate the cinema release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince today, Facebook Gifts have released three free gifts:

Memory Vial, Cauldron and Potions Book

To send these free gifts, go to:Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Since our last post on the upcoming Facebook for iPhone 3.0, the sole developer of the app, Joe Hewitt (pictured right), has been working hard and tweeting regularly regarding the app’s current and future status.

Those who own an iPhone 3GS will be pleased to learn that Joe has now decided that since it was so easy to code, video uploading will be available in version 3.0, with an upload progress bar included. However, at this stage it will not be possible to watch Facebook videos on any iPhone as they are encoded with a bitrate that is too high for the iPhone OS to play.

Full support for Notes will now be included, which means you will be able to write, edit, save and delete notes and drafts.

In response to a question about opening external links within the Facebook app, Joe has revealed that the new version will include a built-in browser, which will (presumably) present a more streamlined experience that doesn’t require app-switching to Safari to display web content.

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