Now the NY Times says scientists at Facebook (they have scientists at Facebook?) determined there are an average of 4.74 acquaintances between any two people.

That’s based on a dataset of 700 million Facebook users.

That’s really quite interesting if you think about it. I think it adds perspective to the people you hear about in the news, either the notorious (Osama bin Laden, Conrad Black) to the rich and famous (Bill Gates, Barrack Obama).

Related posts:

1. The Origins of Facebook, Hacked E-mails, and Privacy
2. FBI Locates Osama bin Laden … on Google Images
3. Google Will Index Facebook, Disqus, and Other JavaScript Comments

Traditionally, comments have been managed by websites themselves. They were saved on the website to which they pertain itself, and they showed up even if you had JavaScript turned off. In the past two years, Javascript-based comments have started to used on more and more sites.

The JavaScript-based alternatives have presented themselves as having the following advantages:

• The website owner doesn’t have to manage the comments, and they don’t present a burden to its server.
• The commenter doesn’t have to create an account to log in. Instead he can use the same account he uses to log in everywhere else.
• Finally, the commenter can track all his comments across the Web.

My take: I had to see more and more sites go this route:

• It makes JavaScript necessary to even view the comments on a site. Some people (me) don’t like that because it slows your browser down, and also downloads a bunch of useless stuff.
• Sometimes, you can’t resize the font on these types of comments (with Ctrl+=).
• You’re encouraged to use one login for all your comments across the Web, which has privacy implications.
• The comment service providers can track you across the Web, which (from their perspective) is the point.

Anyway, since Google is going to start indexing these types of comments, I think they may become even more common. Via

Related posts:

1. Facebook Surpasses Google: What Does It Mean?
2. Heise’s 2-Click Solution for Facebook Privacy
3. Google Buys Picnik, a Free Online Photo Editing Website

But with the latest Facebook update, the Facebook Timeline feature, you can. You just click on a given year in the timeline. There’s a list, “Made x New Friends”. If someone un-friended you (or you them), there’ll be a link next to his name.

Via

Related posts:

1. Heise’s 2-Click Solution for Facebook Privacy
2. The Origins of Facebook, Hacked E-mails, and Privacy
3. Facebook Surpasses Google: What Does It Mean?

This protects your privacy because, normally, the button image (downloaded from Facebook’s servers) automatically tells Facebook that you’re visiting that page when it loads.

Facebook didn’t seem to like that very much, which they said as much in their reply to the site. The fact is even if you don’t click on the Like button, it’s giving all sorts of valuable data to Facebook, namely the site’s you’re visiting, whether you “Like” them or not.

But if the “Like” button isn’t loaded from Facebook (it’s a locally-hosted image in Heise’s case), it doesn’t know what site’s you’re going to.

My comments

Of course Facebook doesn’t “like” it if you disable their Like button: that’s where they’re getting all their tracking info. My opinion: don’t browse the web logged into Facebook.

So is the “Like” button something you can live without, or can’t live without?

Resources

Heise article on 2-click Like button
Slashdot article
JWZ’s rant

Related posts:

1. The Origins of Facebook, Hacked E-mails, and Privacy
2. How Facebook Runs PHP and MySQL
3. Facebook Announces a Better, Faster PHP: HipHop PHP

Hitwise blogged that the weekly market share of visits was 7.07% for Facebook and 7.03% for Google in the week ending March 13.

A loss for the open Internet

My opinion is that this represents a loss for the open Internet.

Although there are legitimate concerns about data privacy and some other concerns in regards to Google, in comparison to Facebook, Google looks like an angel.

Origins

Origins are important because the founders set the tone for the entire rest of the company as they hire people and pass on a corporate culture.

Compare the origin stories for the two Web giants: Google was born as a kind of cool and nerdy experiment. Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google as part of a Ph.D. research project. For the longest time, there were no ads at all on Google.

Facebook, on the other hand, was conceived in sin. I blogged before on Facebook’s dubious origins. It’s alleged that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook while he was contracted by another group of Harvard students to create a Facebook-like site, all the while stringing the other group along making them believe progress was being made on their site. Money was foremost on Zuckerberg’s mind while he allegedly went to the extent of hacking competitors’ site to enhance his own.

The World Wide Web

Google is all about the World Wide Web, created in the early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee as a connected group of hyperlinked pages and sites. The main focus of Google has always been to give you a search result for a web page and send you on your way to exploring the Web, hopping from one link to another.

Facebook, though, is a walled garden. Once you get on the site, you’re supposed stay on it. Even to get in, you need a login. Every page you view, every action you take is logged by the same, single site, instead of multiple sites across the Web.

JavaScript and cookies

You can use much of Google without logging in, including the main focus (searching). You can’t do the first thing on Facebook without logging in. Same for JavaScript, cookies, and so on.

Ads

Google’s the progenitor of nice, reasonable text-mode ads. Although Google has some other kinds of ads as well now, Facebook ads are the definition of obnoxious, and possibly scammy.

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Google Will Index Facebook, Disqus, and Other JavaScript Comments
2. Heise’s 2-Click Solution for Facebook Privacy
3. Facebook Timeline Will Let You Know Who Unfriended You

But most people don’t know the story of how it was founded.

BusinessInsider.com features a long investigative article about how Facebook started up. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, was a student at Harvard and a programmer. Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra (also at Harvard), wanted a programmer to develop a website which would later be called ConnectU.

But, the article says, instead of creatign ConnectU, Zuckerberg strung that site’s owners along, and developed his own site (then called thefacebook.com) instead.

But that’s not all, BusinessInsider.com also alleges that Zuckerberg used login information from Facebook to hack into Harvard Crimson writers’ e-mail accounts. Later, he also allegedly broke into ConnectU by guessing passwords and then disabled the accounts he broke into.

Obviously, there must have been somthing to the allegations, because Facebook paid ConnectU $65 million dollars to settle their dispute.

On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg went on to become the head of a web property used by 400 million people.

My comments

Knowing Facebook’s origins does certainly give a different perspective when you hear about the latest Facebook privacy problem. It’s certainly a different origins story as compared to Google.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Surpasses Google: What Does It Mean?
2. Back Up Gmail, Facebook, WordPress, and Other Social Media with Backupify
3. How Facebook Runs PHP and MySQL

It was offering free accounts till January 31.

Now the offer has been extended until the 15th of February.

Granted, sometimes companies like to extend offers many times just to get everyone that could possibly be interested in their product. But since it’s totally free, there’s no reason not to sign up.

See my previous blog post about backing up Google, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress for details on how Backupify works.

Resources

Backupify

Related posts:

1. Back Up Gmail, Facebook, WordPress, and Other Social Media with Backupify
2. Cadmus Helps You Avoid Social Media Overload
3. Digital Photo Frames Meet Social Networking

Now Facebook, which also runs on PHP, has announced a new version of PHP that runs twice as fast.

This also means that if you have a popular WordPress blog, you might only have to have half the server size you use now.

How PHP Works

PHP, in its usual incarnation, is an interpreted language. This means that a program (such as a PHP module in the Apache webserver) reads the PHP instructions in your script and executes them in turn. Every time the PHP script is executed, it has to be turned into machine code, even if the script runs 1000 times per hour. Obviously, this is inefficient, but people put up with it because PHP is considered easier to develop in than other languages.

By comparison, C++ is a language which is usually compiled (changed to machine instructions which run directly on the CPU). This happens only once, and every time the program runs, it runs directly on the processor. Because there’s no intermediate interpretation step, C++ programs run much faster.

Facebook’s HipHop PHP

Facebook announced what they are calling HipHop PHP, which translates PHP into C++. Then you use g++, the GNU C++ compiler, to compile the C++ program.

Here’s how the process works:

HipHop PHP Transformation Process

Facebook says compilation of their PHP code results in savings of 50% in server usage.

They also released HPHPi, which is an optimized PHP interpreter that doesn’t require you re-compile your code.

Download HipHop PHP

Facebook is going to release the code to HPHP under the PHP license on Github for download at this address (but it’s not there yet).

Caveats

In order to optimize PHP to the maximum, they left out some rarely used dynamic functionality, such as the eval() function.

I’ll report more on HipHop PHP as Facebook releases more information.

Resources

Facebook HipHop PHP announcement

HipHop release video

Facebook HipHop developer mailing list

ZDNet article

HipHop for PHP: Who Benefits?

BestTechie article

Feed2Meme article

Facebook’s HipHop Goes Public With a New PHP Runtime

PHPC: A PHP Compiler

Roadsend PHP compiler

An interview with a Facebook employee about PHP

PHP Facebook release

Related posts:

1. How Facebook Runs PHP and MySQL
2. Heise’s 2-Click Solution for Facebook Privacy
3. Facebook Timeline Will Let You Know Who Unfriended You

For example, people who use Gmail prefer accessing e-mail through a web browser instead of downloading their e-mail and viewing it with an e-mail program.

But what happens if Google loses your e-mail? The answer, for some, might be Backupify, a new cloud backup service.

Coincidentally, today is the last day they are offering free accounts, and today is the day I found out about it. So before you read the rest of this article, go and sign up for an account here: https://secure.backupify.com/signup

Note: Although it asks for your personal details (including address and phone number), all you have to enter is your name and e-mail address to get signed up.

Why you need to back up your social media accounts

How much did you pay for your Gmail account? For your Twitter account? Facebook? $0?

Well, how much liability do you think they have if they lose your e-mail, your tweets, your updates? Right, zero dollars.

While it’s true that these services have all kinds of great servers hosting your data, it’s also true that problems do occur. If you get a lot of advantage from your social networking presence, you’ll likely not want to take the risk of losing all of your hard work.

Cloud services that Backupify backs up

Backupify backs up:

• Flickr
• Twitter
• Delicious
• Zoho
• Google Docs
• Photobucket
• WordPress
• Services in Beta
• Basecamp
• Gmail
• Facebook
• FriendFeed
• Blogger
• Hotmail

It will back up the following cloud services later:

• Youtube
• Xmarks
• RssFeed
• Tumblr

After you sign up, you’re sent to the Settings screen:

Backupify Settings

Just click on a Manage for a given service to back up your account on that service.

Backing up Twitter

For example, to back up your Twitter account, click on Manage for Twitter, and then provide your account credentials:

Backupify: Backup Twitter

Backupify goes out to Twitter, downloads your tweets, and backs them up.

You can choose to back up daily or weekly.

Backing up WordPress

Backupify can back up your WordPress blog, too. To do this, you first have to install a WordPress plugin.

How Backupify works

Backupify uses account information that you give to access your accounts. For some kinds of services, it doesn’t send a username/password over the wire, but rather depends on something called a token to avoid having to exchange authentication information.

To the extent possible, Backupify keeps your data in encrypted format. It’s true that you have to trust them to a certain extent. If you don’t trust them, don’t give them any of your user account info.

It’s worth mentioning that, according to Alexa, Backupify is about the 15000th most popular website in the United States, so it’s not just a fly-by-night operation.

My comments

Although I haven’t decided to what extent I want Backupify to back up my social media accounts, I’ve gone ahead and signed up for the free account, which, again, they say the last day for is January 31.

Thanks to Bob Buskirk, whose article on Backupify I just caught today.

Resources

Backupify

Related posts:

1. Backupify Social Media Backup Free Account Offer Extended
2. Cadmus Helps You Avoid Social Media Overload
3. Digital Photo Frames Meet Social Networking

It also uses C++ and Java in places, but it’s the fact that it uses the little scripting language that could (PHP) is what is interesting. Aditya Agarwal of Facebook describes how the social networking giant does it in a presentation at QCon SF 2008.

The story is being discussed on Slashdot here.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Announces a Better, Faster PHP: HipHop PHP
2. Creating a Database in MySQL with MySQL Query Browser on Ubuntu Linux
3. Will the Real MySQL Please Stand Up?