Google’s Realtime Search offers you a convenient way to search through status updates, news articles and other links that are shared on the social web, mainly Twitter and Facebook.

Microsoft too has a similar search product called Bing Social and though both these tools are powered by the same data coming from Twitter and Facebook, I find Bing’s Social Search a slightly better product than Google’s Realtime Search.

Both Bing and Google display search results from Facebook and Twitter in a self-updating river of news format but with Bing Social, you have an option to filter out status updates by source.

That means you can limit your search results to either Twitter or Facebook, something that is currently not possible in Google’s Realtime search.

Bing Social is also an excellent tool for searching news stories and blog posts that are being shared on Facebook without you having to log into your Facebook account.

Search for a topic on Bing Social, limit the source to "Facebook" and click "Shared Links." It shows the number of times a particular story has been shared by Facebook users and thus, it gets so easy for you to discover popular stories around your topics of interest in near real-time.

Related: Social Sharing Stats for your Website

     

This article, titled Better Facebook Search through Bing Social, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Internet.

Kirstie Allsopp among those affected as spammer exploits weaknesses in passwords and in Facebook code to try to tempt people to 'free' gadgets

A spammer has exploited a serious vulnerability in Facebook's photo upload system to spam both Facebook and Twitter with photos promising "free" iPads and iPhones.

The photos, which were posted to peoples' walls by exploiting a flaw in which it was not checked whether a photo could be posted to someone's profile, pretended to be from the profile owner and promoted schemes promising cheap or free gadgets - particularly iPhones and iPads.

Among those affected were a friend of Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg - who responded, says the security company Sophos; Zuckerberg responded to the picture by asking his friend "Is this real or did your account get hacked?"

Robert McMillan for IDG was the first with the detail, which he says let the spammer post "thousands" of messages on peoples' Walls.

People who saw the fake postings appear on their Wall, and knew they hadn't put them there, would assume it was their own account which had been hacked and change their password - but this made no difference, because the flaw is in Facebook's basic photo authentication code.

As the company told McMillan, "Earlier this week, we discovered a bug in the code that processes photos as they're uploaded. This bug caused us not to make the correct checks when determining whether a photo should be posted to a person's profile... We quickly worked to resolve the issue and fixed it shortly after discovering it. For a short period of time before it was fixed, a single spammer was able to post photos to people's profiles that they hadn't approved."

It remains to be seen whether that's the last of the problem. Meanwhile, Twitter users have had their own problems: property doyenne Kirstie Allsopp was among a number of people whose accounts were hacked at the weekend to send out (yet more) "free iPad" and "OMG free iPhone" tweets.

Sophos notes that Allsopp has since removed the offending tweets, which would have led anyone who followed them to webpages where they were encouraged to apply for "free" iPads in exchange for personal information and sign up for scams that charged £4.50 per week.

"Interestingly, the spam messages were sent 'via web', suggesting that it wasn't a third party application or linked website that was used to send the messages," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, Sophos. "It seems likely that Kirstie Allsopp's Twitter password was stolen via a phishing or spyware infection on her computer, or that she was using the same password on multiple websites – which is never a good idea."

Allsopp isn't pleased: "Hacking is a pain in the bum" she observed pithily after changing her password, profile picture and deleting the offending tweets. Yup - which only makes the case for better passwords stronger.

Company headed by ex-Microsoft founder Paul Allen claims patents relating to e-commerce and search held by Interval Licensing have been infringed

Eleven major companies including Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Apple have been accused of infringing patents belonging to a company linked to Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft - sparking another debate online about the value of "patents" in cyberspace.

Interval Licensing says that the companies, also including eBay, AOL, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples and Google's YouTube subsidiary are infringing the patents, which relate to e-commerce and search. Notably absent from the list of targeted companies are Amazon and Microsoft - though the owner of a patent is not obliged to sue everyone considered to be infringing at once, or at all. Interval is seeking damages and the end of the infringement.

Google, Facebook and eBay said they will fight the accusations by Interval, which owns a portfolio of technology patents but does not manufacture anything. "This lawsuit against some of America's most innovative companies reflects an unfortunate trend of people trying to compete in the courtroom instead of the marketplace," a Google spokesman said in an emailed statement. "Innovation - not litigation - is the way to bring to market the kinds of products and services that benefit millions of people around the world." Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said: "We believe this suit is completely without merit and we will fight it vigorously." None of the other companies had a comment on the lawsuit.

The claims, made late on Friday night, have led to accusations by some observers that Allen is acting as a "patent troll" - suing active companies via patents obtained by now-defunct or inactive companies which are not actively developing technology.

However David Postman, a spokesman for Interval spokesman, defended the lawsuit as necessary to protect its investment in innovation."We are not asserting patents that other companies have filed, nor are we buying patents originally assigned to someone else," he said. "These are patents developed by and for Interval."

Perhaps in an attempt to distance itself from accusations of patent trolling, the lawsuit points out Allen's deep history with Google, including his early funding of its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page - apparently to try to distinguish this lawsuit from other opportunistic patent litigation, Stanford professor and IP litigator Mark Lemley told the Associated Press. "It's usually an indication either that the patents are invalid, or they're overclaiming them," said Lemley, whose law firm represents Google and Netflix in unrelated matters. "Part of what's going on here is the plaintiffs are going out of their way to say, 'Hey, look, we're really important people. We're real innovators."

Among the patents are one for the "Browser for use in navigating a body of information, with particular application to browsing information represented by audiovisual data" (USPTO 6,263,507); two for an "Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person in the vicinity of a display device" (USPTO 6,034,652 and 6,788,314) and another for "Alerting users to items of current interest." (USPTO 6,757,682).

Allen's shares in Microsoft - which he founded with Gates in 1975 but from which he resigned in 1983 after being diagnosed with non-Hodkins lymphoma - have helped make him the 37th-richest person in the world, worth about $13.5bn. He co-founded Interval Research in 1992 to develop communications and computer technology. At its largest it employed more than 110 scientists and engineers, and filed patents covering internet search and display innovations, according to the lawsuit. Interval Research officially closed in April 2000; its 300-odd patents were taken over by Interval Licensing.

Patents on software and business processes have become a bête noire among web companies, who have claimed that they act as a financial drag on innovation online, and that the US Patent Office is especially poor at examining patent claims for "prior art" which would disqualify them, or that it awards patents on needlessly wide claims which mean that it is almost impossible for companies to use accepted web technologies without accidentally infringing on them.

One of the most notable was Amazon's patent for its "1-Click" shopping system, which was filed in 1997, accepted and then rejected and finally passed by the USPTO in March this year. Amazon has licensed the technology to Apple, among others.

Such patents have repeatedly created controversy. in 2000 British Telecom attempted to claim that it had a patent on the hyperlink; its claim collapsed in 2002 on the basis that the patent referred to a "central computer" - which the internet does not have. More famously, SCO claimed to have patents that would cover significant parts of the free Linux operating system.

Another former Microsoft executive, Nathan Myhrvold, has been accused of "patent trolling" after his company Intellectual Ventures began amassing patents, apparently with a view to suing active companies that it viewed as infringing them.

Interval Licensing has issued a press release about the case.

Facebook developers testing its 'Places' app have already left a trail around London. But a new site shows the risks inherent in our geotagged data

Someone tagged this place as 'Wimbledon' - which it isn't - on Facebook on 29 June. But who?

Were you in a pub in Tower Hill on the afternoon of Tuesday 29 June? Did you see someone furtively updating their mobile phone as the TV in the corner showed the Wimbledon match between Kim Clijsters and Vera Zvonareva? Then you probably saw a Facebook employee trying out its new Places product, months ahead of its launch.

There is some speculation that the person who posted the update - which appears as a neat little map - might have been Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Certainly some of the timing fits, as Arun Stephens (who seems to have been the first to spot this) points out in a blog post:

"Facebook Places has been in development for around 8 months, but I've found evidence (for want of a better word) that it has been working, outside the US, at least since June, when several Facebookers were in London, for a hack day and a special edition of the Facebook Developer Garage."

He continues:

"I've been working out of TechHub [Facebook Place] this week, and there were four Places in the area. One was the Barbican Centre, which was where the Facebook Developer Garage was. Another was labeled "Wimbledon" but was in fact probably a pub near Tower Hill. Whoever was at that pub that day was watching Clijsters versus Zvonareva, which puts it a week after the Facebook event at the Barbican. The South Bank Centre was also visited (spelt with English spelling, rather than American, too). Another was arjunabeats."

You may have spotted the weakness in his argument: Zuckerberg wasn't in the UK for a whole week. He's a busy guy, people to see, gigantic social networks to build, that sort of thing. And Facebook has pointed out that "Place has been in beta test for all Facebook employees for a while, not just US ones" - which means that the person who was watching that tennis match probably wasn't Zuckerberg, but instead was one of the UK staff of the company.

But the idea that you might stalk Zuckerberg (the - shocking! - only person on Facebook you can't block) gets a little extra piquancy with the warning from Sophos that geo-encoded data in those pictures you put online could aid stalkers. As Graham Cluley explains, many photos taken by GPS-enabled smartphones will contain location data in the metadata of the picture. "The location data isn't visible to the naked eye in the photo, it's embedded as encoded meta-data inside the picture, alongside information about what type of camera was used, camera settings, and so forth. That means, anyone who accesses your digital photos can (if you haven't wiped the location meta-data) work out where you were when you take the snapshot. And as many people upload their pictures virtually instantly to Twitter via services like TwitPic, someone could find out where you are even if you had no intention of sharing that information with the world."

That's the warning that I Can Stalk U, another "scary them into understanding it" site, tries to make real. (Though note that it says: "We do not stalk anyone, nor do we wish anyone be stalked.") It scans Twitter and services like Twitpic and picks out the metadata, and then displays it on the site. The reminder: putting too much information about your location can be risky, even if you hadn't thought of it in that way. And if you need a reminder, or just missed it during the holidays, can we point you to Leo Hickman's piece about location and cyberstalking, "How I became a FourSquare cyberstalker" - though you don't need that particular location service to do it.

The fact that Places aren't immediately tied to particular people may be one of its benefits - but some people are rushing headlong into geolocation because the technology enables it, without quite considering the full extent of the risks involved. Like every technology in the past, social networking has been blamed for enabling people to do harm; it would be nice, if perhaps optimistic, to think that we'll be more careful with geolocation.

Foursquare and Gowalla may fear Facebook's new geo-location service – but perhaps it's really aimed at classified ads

Facebook's geo-location service has finally arrived – ladies and gentlemen, Facebook Places. It mimics the "checking-in" functionality made famous by Foursquare and Gowalla, and allows Facebook users to see where their friends are, and when.

But it goes deeper than that. Facebook has worked with Foursquare and Gowalla to fully integrate their services; it allows badges and check-ins to be imported – not only from Foursquare and Gowalla, but MyTown and Yelp too. The smaller services are exposed to hundreds of millions of users while Facebook becomes a geolocation services aggregator overnight.

Whether these services should be worried depends on the space Facebook moves forward into. Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown rely on a strong gaming element to gain traction. Foursquare helps local businesses and national brands generate and deepen consumer loyalty. Yelp is about peer recommendation. Facebook could move into any one of these spaces without blinking.

But perhaps there are bigger fish to fry – namely Craigslist. In 15 years, nobody has challenged the site's supremacy in the area of classifieds. That's not to say there aren't start-ups that consider themselves contenders, but none have come close to the site's (rumoured) nine-figure annual turnover or its ubiquitous association with online classifieds.

Since 1995, Craigslist has been instrumental in migrating a cash-rich revenue stream from newspapers to the internet. But Craigslist hasn't moved on since. The most obvious evolution of classifieds is the migration to mobile, utilising geolocation. Craigslist has had more than two years to play with the iPhone, yet has no mobile presence other than a third-party app that mimics the navigation of the site, instead of playing to the strengths of the device.

The iPad version is even worse – all that on-screen real estate, and it's still menu-driven. Why not a map, for crying out loud? Craigslist's own efforts are non-existent – despite its millions of dollars, the site isn't optimised for mobile browsers.

Craigslist, in a continued attempt to keep things simple, has dropped the ball. The mobile web – through web and native mobile apps, and optimised websites too – will revolutionise business in the next five years, just as the internet did 15 years ago. Ignoring trends in design is one thing; ignoring consumer-driven platforms is quite another.

When I look at Facebook Places, I see an impending marriage with Facebook Marketplace and a serious threat to Craigslist. Don't think of Facebook Places as simply being about checking in; it's about the broader ability to create geo-tagged content that can have relevance to tens of thousands of users in a given vicinity.

A simple Marketplace button on the mobile app (and the site) that mashes together Google Maps and local listings local to the user – or allows the user to add simple, geo-tagged listings with photos too – would enjoy massive takeup and become an essential service in no time. Why would you ever look at Craigslist again?

Facebook has unveiled a new location based service called Facebook Places to help you easily broadcast your current location to your friends on Facebook.

For instance, if you are inside a shopping mall, you can tell your friends where you are through Facebook Places and the service will also show you other people who may be near that place around the same time. Watch the following video to learn more:

What is Facebook Places

Who’s gets to see your location on Facebook

Privacy will obviously be a concern and, fortunately, this time Facebook has added extremely simple settings to let you control the visibility of places where you are checking-in.

You may go to Facebook Privacy –> Customize Settings and change the option under “Places I check in” to friends, friends of friends or set it to everyone in case you would like broadcast your current geographic location to the whole world.

Hide Location from all

If you would like to hide your geo-location from everyone, either don’t check-in with Facebook Places at all or simple go back to “Places I check in” and set it to Custom –> Only Me.

Show Location to Selected Contacts

Finally, if you are connected with a large number of people on Facebook and would like to share your location only with close friends and family members, you can do that as well.

Go to your Facebook Friends page and create one or more lists of people with whom you want to share your current location. Then go back to your Facebook privacy page, choose Custom –> Make this visible to and type the names of your new friends list.

You may use Facebook Places using the mobile browser of any cell phone that supports HTML5 and geolocation. The service however is currently available only in the U.S. and everyone else may have to wait a bit.

     

This article, titled Display your Location on Facebook to a Select Few, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Facebook, Location, Privacy, Internet.

What do you do when you need a group photo of your team but some of the team members aren’t around for the shoot? The answer is simple – go ahead with the shoot and add all the missing employees to the photograph later with the help of Photoshop.

I think that’s exactly what Facebook did with this group picture that they recently uploaded to the Facebook India page. Look at the picture closely and you’ll notice that the two women who seem to be standing behind their male colleagues aren’t there for real.

The picture seems to be part of Facebook’s thank you project which is quite a good initiative but I can’t think of a reason why they had to such a clumsy Photoshop job for that.

     

This article, titled Facebook is Pretty Bad at Photoshop, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Facebook, Photoshop, Offbeat.

The latest Big Idea from Wired editor man Chris "Atoms Are the New Bits and Tails Are Long" Anderson: "The web is dead." Why? Apps, Facebook, iPhones. More »

Japanese publication The Nikkei has reported Capcom's going to enter the Facebook gaming arena, treading on FarmVille's turf with titles like Street Fighter and Resident Evil. It's not 100% confirmed, but the games are expected to be free. [CrunchGear] More »

Would you like to create a mosaic style picture of your own self without doing any of the hard work? Then give Frintr a try.

Frintr will fetch profiles pictures of all your friends on Twitter and Facebook and turns them into one large mosaic that resembles one of your own pictures (see example).

Frintr, by default, will pick your default profile picture from your social networks but you may even upload a new one from your computer.

You can create any number of photo mosaics on Frintr for free but they do charge a reasonable 99¢ fee for generating high-resolution posters. Thanks @Orli for the tip.

Related: Turn your Pictures into Photo Mosaics

     

This article, titled Make a Photo Mosaic from your Friends Pictures, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Facebook, Twitter, Internet.