Recently in Social networking Category

So it seems that a second friend has had her Facebook account broken into. I urge everyone not to list any personal details on their profiles, such as your email address and mother’s maiden name. If you haven’t logged in recently, do so just to make sure everything’s OK. Both my friends hadn’t logged into Facebook for a while, and didn’t realise what was happening immediately.

My friend told me that the only thing she recalled clicking on recently was Facebook Chat. I thought that couldn’t be possible, because that is an official Facebook feature. However, my Facebook Chat appeared at the bottom right corner of my screen, while hers was on top. When she clicked on it, apparently nothing happened. When I clicked on mine, I started chatting to my Facebook friends.

So now I have a question for my readers: If you’ve got Facebook Chat enabled, is your Chat window at the top or bottom right corner? Let’s get to the bottom of this.

Seems that there is Facebook hacking and spamming going on. The situation is still unfolding, but one of my Facebook contacts started posting penis enlargment messages on my wall.

As she is usually quite professional, I figured her account got hacked. So did some of her friends. Then I did a search and turns out there is an ongoing discussion on Facebook regarding exactly this penis enlargement message.

Whoever is doing it are dickheads, and the community should go to great lengths to catch the perpetrators.

I’m making guesses now, but if you get the same message, do NOT visit the URL mentioned because it probably somehow breaks into your Facebook account, which you’d presumably be logged into at that point in time.

Any more updates on this, post them as a comment here. Thanks!

Want to find out which are the hottest buzzwords on Facebook? Check out Lexicon, which was launched on 15 April 2008.

Lexicon counts occurrences of words and phrases on Facebook Walls, over time. I made a few searches.

Not surprisingly, “Obama” appears more frequently than “Clinton.

The sharp spikes make sense as they corresponded with interest in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, particularly Super Tuesday (5 Feb 2008) which accounts for the highest peak so far.

For targetted marketing, it would be better if we could narrow our searches further, within specific networks - such as Facebook users in the Singapore network. It’s good to think global, but sometimes words and phrases have different meanings in different cultures.

Also, while Lexicon indicates what Facebook users are interested in, it doesn’t indicate if people are for or against it. A keyword could appear many times but what if Facebook users were talking about a campaign AGAINST it? I have yet to prove my case, though, as there were no results for the phrase ‘child porn’ and limited results for ‘pornography’.

In the meantime, we can at least assure ourselves that even on Facebook, Love is all around.

I hear Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg (limited profile) get loads of Facebook friend requests.

On the other end of the spectrum, the average Joe probably has a smaller list of people whom he actually knows. He doesn’t add anyone he doesn’t know. That’s straightforward.

For the rest of us, somewhere in between, we may have requested friendships of people whom we don’t know personally (famous or not). Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington is my Facebook friend though we’ve never met before, because he invited all his readers to add him as one. So I did.