What Facebook Knows About You

What Facebook Knows About You - You’re probably familiar with Facebook advertising. If you’re in marketing, you may even use it. But many of us are still unsure about what types of user data Facebook collects and how they use it for advertising.

In an attempt to shed some light, here is an outline of the ways Facebook incorporates user data into its advertising (and the ways it doesn’t).

Your Data

There are a few pieces of data required to create a Facebook account, such as your name, gender and network (e.g. your school or company). That information, along with your profile and cover photos, is publicly available, no matter what.

Facebook privately stores all your activity within their platform. Engagement with other users, such as commenting or sending a message, check-ins, Page likes, and other activity is recorded and privately stored.

Facebook uses its records of your activity to tailor your experience on the site. For example, the friends you interact with most are likely to be featured prominently in your News Feed.

Your Data and Facebook Ads

Facebook also uses this activity data for advertising.

Facebook allows advertisers to target their messaging based on self-reported demographic information, relationship information, location data and recorded Facebook activity. This advertising, though highly targeted, is 100% anonymous.

Here’s how it works: an advertiser can target their ads to married women between 18 and 35 who live in New England and like the TV show ‘The Bachelor.’ Facebook will then give the advertiser an approximate number of users who fit that criteria, but will not provide the names or any information that might personally identify those users. So, in this example, the advertiser would know that they can target the 10,000 people on Facebook who fit their criteria, but they won’t know that Jane Smith of Boston is one of those 10,000 people.

Facebook also creates broader segments of users who share interests. Segments are groups like “Sports Fans” or “Moviegoers” that are compiled based on behavior or profile information. Someone who has liked the Oklahoma Thunder’s Facebook Page is likely to be in the “Sports Fans” segment, as is someone who lists ‘basketball’ under their interests. Someone who frequently posts status updates about new movies is likely to fall into the “Moviegoer” segment. Segmenting is valuable to advertisers, because instead of simply targeting people who want to see the new Batman movie, they can target all moviegoers and get in front of a larger, but still relevant, audience.

Segmenting is done programmatically—profiles are segmented based on the presence of certain keywords. No Facebook employee reads through individual profiles to assign users to segments.

Your Data and Facebook Exchange

Recently, Facebook announced they will be launching a real-time bidding platform called Facebook Exchange. The exchange, when it launches, will allow partnered DSPs and retargeting providers to purchase selected Facebook ad inventory in real time. Advertisers will be able to target ads based on their own data about users (e.g. whether the user has previously visited the advertiser’s website.) This will allow technologies like retargeting (serving ads to users who have visited your website) to operate within Facebook.

One common misconception about the new platform is that advertisers will be able to target based on data they’ve collected in addition to the rich user profiles owned by Facebook. This is not the case. Advertisers whose retargeted ads appear on the exchange will not have access to Facebook data about those users, and will not be able to further segment retargeting campaigns based on demographic data or interests.

Within this exchange, Facebook is operating as just another web property, like the Huffington Post or your favorite blog. DSPs and retargeters can place ads based on prior site visits, but not based on whether you’re a moviegoer who lives in Atlanta. ( retargeter.com )

READ MORE - What Facebook Knows About You

Why are Brands Shutting Their Facebook Stores?

Why are Brands Shutting Their Facebook Stores? - Eager to monetize the large followings they had built on Facebook, many large brands set up shop on the social network for the first time last year.

Now many of those Facebook stores are closing.

A Bloomberg report this weekend pointed out that Gap, J.C. Penney, Nordstrom and GameStop have all opened and closed shops on Facebook within the past year -- undermining expectations that the social network will become a major revenue driver for retailers over the next decade.

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Ashley Sheetz, VP of marketing and strategy at GameStop, told Bloomberg. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”
GameStop opened a store on Facebook in April 2011, and closed it six months later.

“There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research, added. "But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

The End of F-commerce?

Still, none of this proves that social networks don't have potential as sales channels. It may be that retailers simply haven't harnessed the power of these platforms in the right way.

In most cases, retailers have entered the f-commerce market by importing their online catalogs and making them available for purchase in a Facebook app. The experience is nearly identical to shopping on their websites, with two major differences: 1) Shoppers can complete their entire browsing and checkout experience without leaving facebook.com; and 2) the Facebook apps tend to work more slowly.

In other words, consumers have little to no incentive to shop via these Facebook apps.

Others simply have not dealt in enough volume -- offering, say, just one item for purchase each month, or discounting one or two items for a short period.

Although these efforts have generated a fair amount of PR buzz, most of these companies are losing money on these efforts because development costs are so high, says Maureen Mullen, director of research and advisory services at luxury research and consulting firm L2.

Or the problem may be Facebook's competition. If spending time on Facebook is akin to spending time with your friends at a bar, Pinterest is more like heading to a craft fair, Forbes's Jeff Bercovici points out -- you're there to browse and to shop, and brands are finding the platform worth investing in.

Facebook, at present, isn't built for that kind of shopping experience. But it could certainly build Pinterest-like tools to make it that way.

At the very least, Facebook has become an important traffic driver to retailers' websites. For instance, 1.9% of traffic to Burberry's website in September 2010 came from Facebook; a year later, 29.1% of site traffic was from the social network, Mullen wrote in an email to Mashable.

"[Burberry is] using the platform to drive traffic at a fraction of the cost of what it would have to pay on Google and other search engines. In addition a significant portion of that traffic and resulting sales is likely incremental," she added.

Mullen also pointed out that half of shoppers are logged in to Facebook while they shop on third-party ecommerce sites, which lets retailers "capture the massive amount of user data Facebook has," she says. Brands such as Smashbox and MAC are also incorporating friend recommendations within their ecommerce pages.

In other words, it's too soon to lament the demise of F-commerce. What we do know is that replicating retailers' ecommerce sites is not the way to go about generating revenue via Facebook, at least for now. ( Mashable )

READ MORE - Why are Brands Shutting Their Facebook Stores?

Is It a Bad Idea to Friend Co-workers on Facebook?

Is It a Bad Idea to Friend Co-workers on Facebook? How About Your Boss? - It’s nice to have a friendly work environment. But in some cases, work friends shouldn’t be Facebook friends. Why not? A status update published on a Tuesday night can easily turn into office gossip on Wednesday morning. Even worse: co-workers and managers could take you less seriously, you could be skipped over for a promotion and you might find yourself first in line when layoffs occur, all based on your activity on Facebook.

In a new report conducted by my company, Millennial Branding, and Identified.com, we gathered information from 4 million Gen Y Facebook profiles to see how their personal and professional online identities overlap. We discovered that, to some degree, most users limit the details of their professional lives on Facebook. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of Gen Y Facebook users don’t list their employer in their profile, some likely out of worries that they could be easily searchable by co-workers — a situation they’d prefer to avoid.

We also found that the typical Gen Y Facebook user is connected to about 700 friends. But only 16 of those friends, on average, are co-workers.

Even so, are young workers today connected to too many colleagues and prone to sharing so much that it could hurt their careers? Through Facebook, one’s personality, self-image and interests are exposed, and these details can affect how we’re perceived by co-workers and managers.

There’s even reason to be careful about friending people you don’t work with. The data shows that young people are job hoppers. They spend just over two years at their first corporate job before moving on. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average American will have about nine jobs between the ages of 18 and 32. All this job hopping increases the likelihood that a Facebook friend will someday be a colleague at work — perhaps even an in-office rival or the person who decides whether you get a promotion.

Placing friends in certain groups on Facebook is difficult because the status of your connections evolves over time. The smartest approach is to assume that what you’re sharing will eventually be seen by people you work with and to be mindful that your Facebook timeline could give an employer a reason to decide against hiring, promoting or recommending you.

Here is more advice for using Facebook in the least-risky fashion possible:

Don’t friend co-workers you don’t trust. Gen Y is known as a competitive group in the workplace, and especially in the shaky state of the job market, every employee is looking for an edge. So be careful — paranoid, even — about which co-workers you’re friends with online lest a “friend” sabotages your career.

Avoid friending your direct manager. Your boss has a big influence on your career trajectory. He or she helps decide who gets a raise and who doesn’t, and who takes on what projects. Basically, your manager can make your work life wonderful or miserable, and to avoid the latter, it’s safer to keep Facebook out of the equation.

Set your privacy settings and review them regularly. On Facebook’s privacy-settings page, make sure to check the option that allows you to approve all tags, pictures, videos and mentions of your name. This way, you’ll have recourse when a friend shares something that you don’t want your followers to see.

Be smart about what you post. The main picture used in your profile is the first impression people will get of you, so choose wisely. It’s also, obviously, a bad idea to complain about your boss or co-workers or to say anything negative about your employer in Facebook posts. Griping online may feel therapeutic, but it can also hurt your career. With a smart phone, Facebook users can post from anywhere in the world, and they do so instantly and impulsively — greatly increasing the chance that they’ll share something they later wish remained private. What happens in Vegas, or anywhere else, will be forever exposed to the world on Facebook if you let it.

Build your network intelligently. The people you associate with have an impact on how successful you are. If you align yourself with the wrong people and they post hurtful, racist, outlandish or immature comments on your wall, it makes you look as bad as they do. Think twice before adding friends who could tarnish the reputation you’ve worked so hard to build. ( time.com )

READ MORE - Is It a Bad Idea to Friend Co-workers on Facebook?

Sex, drugs more common in hyper-texting teens

Sex, drugs more common in hyper-texting teens - Teens who text 120 times a day or more — and there seems to be a lot of them — are more likely to have had sex or used alcohol and drugs than kids who don't send as many messages, according to provocative new research.

The study's authors aren't suggesting that "hyper-texting" leads to sex, drinking or drugs, but say it's startling to see an apparent link between excessive messaging and that kind of risky behavior.

The study concludes that a significant number of teens are very susceptible to peer pressure and also have permissive or absent parents, said Dr. Scott Frank, the study's lead author.

"If parents are monitoring their kids' texting and social networking, they're probably monitoring other activities as well," said Frank, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

Frank was scheduled to present the study Tuesday at a meeting of the American Public Health Association in Denver.

The study was done at 20 public high schools in the Cleveland area last year, and is based on confidential paper surveys of more than 4,200 students.

It found that about one in five students were hyper-texters and about one in nine are hyper-networkers — those who spend three or more hours a day on Facebook and other social networking websites.

About one in 25 fall into both categories.

Hyper-texting and hyper-networking were more common among girls, minorities, kids whose parents have less education and students from a single-mother household, the study found.

Frank's study is billed as one of the first studies to look at texting and social networking and whether they are linked to actual sexual intercourse or to other risky behaviors.

"This study demonstrates that it's a legitimate question to explore," said Douglas Gentile, who runs the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University.

The study found those who text at least 120 times a day are nearly three-and-a-half times more likely to have had sex than their peers who don't text that much. Hyper-texters were also more likely to have been in a physical fight, binge drink, use illegal drugs or take medication without a prescription.

Compared to the heavy texters, the hyper-networkers were not as likely to have had sex, but more likely to have been involved in other risky behaviors like drinking or fighting.

A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that about half of children ages 8 to 18 send text messages on a cell phone in a typical day. The texters estimated they average 118 texts per day. That study also found that only 14 percent of kids said their parents set rules limiting texting.

Other studies have tied teen texting to risky or lewd behavior. A Pew Research Center study found that about one-third of 16- and 17-year-olds send texts while driving. And an Associated Press-MTV poll found that about one-quarter of teenagers have "sexted" — shared sexually explicit photos, videos and chat by cell phone or online.

The latest survey did not ask what students texted or what they discussed on social networks.

One suburban Cleveland student said her texts involve non-sexual small talk with friends, homework assignments and student council bake sales.

"I text with my mother about what time I need picked up," said Tiara Freeman-Sargeant, a 14-year-old Shaker Heights High School freshman. She said she sends and receives about 250 texts a day.

Talking on the phone just isn't appealing to some teens, said her classmate, Ivanna Storms-Thompson.

"Your arm gets tired, your ear gets sweaty," said Ivanna, who also doesn't like the awkward silences.

Like her friend, Ivanna said she mostly gets A's. Whether kids who text do well in school or behave in a crazy, risky way is coincidental, she said.

"It depends on who you're talking to and whether they have their priorities straight," she said. ( Associated Press )

READ MORE - Sex, drugs more common in hyper-texting teens

More privacy headaches for Facebook: gay users outed to advertisers

More privacy headaches for Facebook: gay users outed to advertisers - Facebook's privacy problems continue this week after researchers discovered that Facebook may inadvertently be outing gay users to its advertisers. Saikat Guha from Microsoft and Bin Cheng and Paul Francis from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems set out to study the challenges in targeted advertising systems (PDF) online, but found that advertisers can ferret out gay users from straight users just by looking at who's clicking—even when that sexual orientation is hidden.

The team set up profiles for straight men, straight women, a gay man, and a lesbian to see how the ads differed between the different types of users. The ads did change for the gay and lesbian users, though the difference in the ads was much greater for the gay males (compared to the straight males) than gay females, "indicating that advertisers target more strongly to [gay males]" reads the paper.

This in itself isn't a huge cause for concern, but the researchers were disturbed by the fact that the text for the ads were sexual-orientation-neutral, even though they were measurably different. Half of the ads were exclusively shown to gay men, but the text associated with them was neutral, therefore not giving a clear indicator to those users that the ads they click were directly tied to their sexual orientation.

"The danger with such ads, unlike the gay bar ad where the target demographic is blatantly obvious, is that the user reading the ad text would have no idea that by clicking it he would reveal to the advertiser both his sexual-orientation and a unique identifier (cookie, IP address, or email address if he signs up on the advertiser’s site)," wrote the researchers.

If the advertiser in question also collects other data, such as Facebook ID, the info can be tied together without much thought, even if the user has not made that information public. As we saw earlier this week, Facebook IDs and other user info are running rampant across ad networks and third-party app developers, and the collection of such information (especially when tied to something as sensitive as sexual orientation) could spell disaster for a user who thinks he's being fastidious when keeping his profile private.

Facebook's official policy is that any data collected by advertisers must be anonymized, but given this week's discoveries regarding Facebook IDs, it's pretty clear that there isn't anyone making sure the policies are enforced until after the fact. This is one area that two Congressmen focused on in their recent letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but it's unlikely that any major changes to how Facebook handles its advertisers will come anytime in the near future. ( arstechnica.com )

READ MORE - More privacy headaches for Facebook: gay users outed to advertisers

Seeking. You can't stop doing it

Seeking. How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous. Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information.
We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about.

Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."

We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls.

In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. They would stick an electrode in a rat's brain and, whenever the rat went to a particular corner of its cage, would give it a small shock and note the reaction. One day they unknowingly inserted the probe in the wrong place, and when Olds tested the rat, it kept returning over and over to the corner where it received the shock. He eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.

Olds, and everyone else, assumed he'd found the brain's pleasure center (some scientists still think so). Later experiments done on humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.

But to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. Those self-stimulating rats, and later those humans, did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The animals, he writes in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, were "excessively excited, even crazed." The rats were in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects described feeling sexually aroused but didn't experience climax. Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, "where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy" (and Panksepp wasn't referring to Bing).

It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, "Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits "promote states of eagerness and directed purpose," Panksepp writes. It's a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.

Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting "enter" to get our next fix.

University of Michigan professor of psychology Kent Berridge has spent more than two decades figuring out how the brain experiences pleasure. Like Panksepp, he, too, has come to the conclusion that what James Olds' rats were stimulating was not their reward center. In a series of experiments, he and other researchers have been able to tease apart that the mammalian brain has separate systems for what Berridge calls wanting and liking.

Wanting is Berridge's equivalent for Panksepp's seeking system. It is the liking system that Berridge believes is the brain's reward center. When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid system, rather than our dopamine system, that is being stimulated. This is why the opiate drugs induce a kind of blissful stupor so different from the animating effect of cocaine and amphetamines. Wanting and liking are complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop. When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. "The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire," Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.

Just how powerful (and separate) wanting is from liking is illustrated in animal experiments. Berridge writes that studies have shown that rats whose dopamine neurons have been destroyed retain the ability to walk, chew, and swallow but will starve to death even if food is right under their noses because they have lost the will to go get it. Conversely, Berridge discovered that rats with a mutation that floods their brains with dopamine learned more quickly than normal rats how to negotiate a runway to reach the food. But once they got it, they didn't find the food more pleasurable than the nonenhanced rats. (No, the rats didn't provide a Zagat rating; scientists measure rats' facial reactions to food.)

That study has implications for drug addiction and other compulsive behaviors. Berridge has proposed that in some addictions the brain becomes sensitized to the wanting cycle of a particular reward. So addicts become obsessively driven to seek the reward, even as the reward itself becomes progressively less rewarding once obtained. "The dopamine system does not have satiety built into it," Berridge explains. "And under certain conditions it can lead us to irrational wants, excessive wants we'd be better off without." So we find ourselves letting one Google search lead to another, while often feeling the information is not vital and knowing we should stop. "As long as you sit there, the consumption renews the appetite," he explains.

Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

The system is also activated by particular types of cues that a reward is coming. In order to have the maximum effect, the cues should be small, discrete, specific—like the bell Pavlov rang for his dogs. Panksepp says a way to drive animals into a frenzy is to give them only tiny bits of food: This simultaneously stimulating and unsatisfying tease sends the seeking system into hyperactivity. Berridge says the "ding" announcing a new e-mail or the vibration that signals the arrival of a text message serves as a reward cue for us. And when we respond, we get a little piece of news (Twitter, anyone?), making us want more. These information nuggets may be as uniquely potent for humans as a Froot Loop to a rat. When you give a rat a minuscule dose of sugar, it engenders "a panting appetite," Berridge says—a powerful and not necessarily pleasant state.

If humans are seeking machines, we've now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly. This perhaps should make us cautious. In Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin writes of driving two indoor cats crazy by flicking a laser pointer around the room. They wouldn't stop stalking and pouncing on this ungraspable dot of light—their dopamine system pumping. She writes that no wild cat would indulge in such useless behavior: "A cat wants to catch the mouse, not chase it in circles forever." She says "mindless chasing" makes an animal less likely to meet its real needs "because it short-circuits intelligent stalking behavior." As we chase after flickering bits of information, it's a salutary warning. ( slate.com )

READ MORE - Seeking. You can't stop doing it

Police chief criticises Myspace and Facebook

Police chief criticises Myspace and Facebook. A senior police officer has criticised Myspace and Facebook for refusing to put a panic button on their pages to allow victims of abuse or bullying to call for help.

Jim Gamble, head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Centre, said the two social networking sites could do more to keep youngsters safe.

His comments came after their competitor Bebo, now owned by AOL, adopted the ''Ceop report'' button.

The button enables users to report online abuse, bullying and illegal activity as well as offering advice about hacking and viruses.

It was launched just a day after charity Beatbullying pinpointed Bebo and Microsoft's instant messaging service as hotspots for bullying.

The charity polled 2,094 young people across England and found nearly a third (30%) of 11 to 16-year-olds who had been ''cyberbullied'' had been targeted on Bebo.

Mr Gamble said there is ''no legitimate reason'' for Facebook and Myspace refusing to put the button on their websites.

He said: ''I do not want my criticism to be taken as a swipe at the online industry. The vast majority of players are doing a good job and doing their best to make the environment safe.

''This is aimed specifically at social networking sites. They are creating a public space that attracts young people, children and adults, so they can make money through advertising.

''We applaud that but do not forget while you do that there is a responsibility, a duty of care, to the young and the vulnerable.

''We are here to help at a low cost, in fact, this is free, we are giving away this service. What cost can you put on child protection? I have seen the horrible aftermath of it.''

Mr Gamble said some sites claimed technical issues block the button while others suggest companies do not want to lose a potentially-lucrative advertising space.

He added: ''It is tiny and does not take up any significant real estate. The bottom line is there is no legitimate reason for not taking it and placing it on a site.''

The Ceop report button allows computer users to report fears directly to the Ceop Centre in central London.

There are also links to 10 other sources of help including Childline and charity Beatbullying.

Up to 10,000 people are already pressing the button every month through other online services.

But there appeared to be some teething problems on Bebo, with users pressing the Ceop report button receiving a security warning.

The automatic reply said the button connected to an invalid link probably set by fraudsters attempting to steal personal details.

Sir Hugh Orde, president of Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), joined the call for other websites to adopt the button.

He said: ''I think this is a very responsible approach by Bebo and I commend them for it.

''This is an ideal opportunity to keep young people who use social networking sites as safe as possible while they are online.

''I can see no reason why other sites would not consider adopting the same approach and would encourage them to embed the Ceop report button for the benefit of all users.''

A Facebook spokesman said: ''The safety of Facebook users is the top priority for the company, which is why we have invested in the most robust reporting system to support our 300 million users.

''We also work closely with police forces in the UK and around the world to create a safe environment. Our teams are manned by trained staff in two continents giving 24-hour support in 70 languages.

''We are constantly looking to strengthen our procedures further and are in dialogue with Ceop on this and a range of other issues.

''We look forward to hearing about the experience of Bebo using the Ceop button and will take account of their experience in any future evaluation of our reporting systems.'' ( telegraph.co.uk )

READ MORE - Police chief criticises Myspace and Facebook

Facebook's 'Unfriend' verb is voted ' Word of the Year'

Facebook's 'Unfriend' verb is voted ' Word of the Year'. The Facebook term,‘unfriend’ has topped the New Oxford Amercian Dictionary’s ‘Word of the Year’ list.

The verb, which is used across several social networking sites, has been defined by the dictionary as: "To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook."

The New Oxford American Dictionary's 'Word of the Year' list was heavily populated with tech-related terms.

This year’s list of new words was heavily populated by tech-related words, such as ‘hashtag’ – referring to the way Twitter users tag their material and ‘sexting’ – which is the sending of sexual texts by mobile phone.

Speaking about the verb ‘unfriend’, Christine Lindberg, a language researcher for Oxford's U.S. dictionary, said: “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year."

There has been some debate across blogs and Twitter, about whether ‘defriend’ is the more commonly used term, especially when referencing Facebook. However, Oxford spokesman Christian Purdy said researchers found that ‘unfriend’ was more commonly used.

Other tech-related words which made the short list were: ‘paywall’ – which is a way of blocking content online unless a user has paid for access and ‘intexticated’ – which describes people who are distracted by texting while driving. ( telegraph.co.uk )

READ MORE - Facebook's 'Unfriend' verb is voted ' Word of the Year'

Facebook 'fails to protect children'

Facebook 'fails to protect children. Facebook and MySpace, the social networking sites, were criticised last night for failing to do enough to protect children using the internet by a senior police officer responsible for protecting children online.

Jim Gamble, head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Centre, said Facebook and MySpace could do more to keep youngsters safe.

He said he was disappointed the two internet giants have not adopted a panic button for children who fear they are at risk.

His comments came after their competitor Bebo, now owned by AOL, adopted the ''Ceop report'' button.

The button enables users to report online abuse, bullying and illegal activity as well as offering advice about hacking and viruses.

It was launched just a day after charity Beatbullying pinpointed Bebo and Microsoft's instant messaging service as hotspots for bullying.

The charity polled 2,094 young people across England and found nearly a third (30%) of 11 to 16-year-olds who had been ''cyberbullied'' had been targeted on Bebo.

Mr Gamble said there is ''no legitimate reason'' for refusing to put the button on a website.

He said: ''I do not want my criticism to be taken as a swipe at the online industry. The vast majority of players are doing a good job and doing their best to make the environment safe.

''This is aimed specifically at social networking sites. They are creating a public space that attracts young people, children and adults, so they can make money through advertising.

''We applaud that but do not forget while you do that there is a responsibility, a duty of care, to the young and the vulnerable.

''We are here to help at a low cost, in fact, this is free, we are giving away this service. What cost can you put on child protection? I have seen the horrible aftermath of it.''

Mr Gamble said some sites claimed technical issues block the button while others suggest companies do not want to lose a potentially-lucrative advertising space.

He added: ''It is tiny and does not take up any significant real estate. The bottom line is there is no legitimate reason for not taking it and placing it on a site.''

The Ceop report button allows computer users to report fears directly to the Ceop Centre in central London.

There are also links to 10 other sources of help including Childline and charity Beatbullying.

Up to 10,000 people are already pressing the button every month through other online services.

But there appeared to be some teething problems on Bebo today, with users pressing the Ceop report button receiving a security warning.

The automatic reply said the button connected to an invalid link probably set by fraudsters attempting to steal personal details.

Sir Hugh Orde, president of Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), joined the call for other websites to adopt the button.

He said: ''I think this is a very responsible approach by Bebo and I commend them for it.

''This is an ideal opportunity to keep young people who use social networking sites as safe as possible while they are online.

''I can see no reason why other sites would not consider adopting the same approach and would encourage them to embed the Ceop report button for the benefit of all users.''

A spokesman for Facebook said: "The safety of Facebook users is the top priority for the company, which is why we have invested in the most robust reporting system to support our 300million users.

"We also work closely with police forces in the UK and around the world to create a safe environment. Our teams are manned by trained staff in 2 continents giving 24 hour support in 70 languages.

"We are constantly looking to strengthen our procedures further and are in dialogue with CEOP on this and a range of other issues." ( telegraph.co.uk )

READ MORE - Facebook 'fails to protect children'