F-Commerce has not delivered expectations.

Last April, Gamestop opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered.

Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap, JC Penney and Nordstrom have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook’s social networking site.

Facebook, which this month filed for an initial public offering, has sought to be a top shopping destination for its 845 million members. The stores’ quick failure shows that the California-based social network doesn’t drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Mulpuru said in a telephone interview. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

A year ago, investors hailed so-called F-commerce as the next big thing, speculating that the company had potential to threaten Amazon.com and PayPal. Facebook is the most-visited website in the world. Some people thought that persuading visitors to shop would be easy, Mulpuru said.

David Fisch, Facebook’s director of business development, said in June that the site would make shopping online, previously a solitary experience, more social.

Hanging out

“This is where people are hanging out,” Fisch said at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in San Diego.

Facebook planned to profit from retailers buying ads to drive traffic to their on-site stores. Business consultant Booz & Co. predicted in January 2011 that physical goods sold through social commerce would balloon to $US30 billion from $US5 billion by 2015, with Facebook contributing a majority of sales.

Even as some businesses shut storefronts, many companies continue to devote advertising dollars to the social network. Facebook’s sales surged 55 per cent to $US1.13 billion in the fourth quarter. The company aims to use e-commerce more as a way of getting users to stay longer than as a way to boost revenue, said Krista Garcia, an analyst at EMarketer in New York.

Chris Kraeuter, a Facebook spokesman, declined to comment.

Customers had no incentive to shop at Gamestop’s Facebook store rather than the company’s regular website because purchasing online is already convenient, said Ashley Sheetz, who is the Grapevine, Texas-based company’s vice president of marketing and strategy.

Shut quickly

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”

Gap, which has 5.6 million Facebook fans from its namesake, Banana Republic and Old Navy pages, opened and discontinued a storefront last year, said Liz Nunan, a company spokeswoman. The San Francisco-based company also discovered customers preferred shopping on its own sites, she said.

“We will continue to evaluate if this is something we want to bring back in the future,” Nunan said in an emailed statement.

Nordstrom tested ways to make shopping “seamless through Facebook” and decided on a broader social media focus, Colin Johnson, a spokesman, said.

JC Penney featured assortments in a Facebook “shop” tab beginning in 2010, and took it down in December 2011, Kate Coultas, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

Other advertisers, such as Procter & Gamble, have kept their F-stores running, including Olay, Tide and Cover Girl.

An Australian online business, however, had a re-think about selling its goods through a Facebook store, after considering the costs.

Eugene Tan, director of Aquabumps, a business selling daily photographs of Bondi and other beaches, has a meaningful fan page on Facebook but declined the offer to create a new e-commerce engine or merge his current one on the social network.

“I had a look at some of the guys providing the service to create a shop and I thought (the site) was slow. A lot of apps that run on Facebook are slow. And I can’t control it. I’d rather people come to me (from Facebook).”

Tan said he also didn’t like to put a “hard sell” on his Facebook page. “We’re very subtle on the sell. My buyers would switch off.”

Tan stores about 1000 images on his site and offers 12 permutations in framing and sizing options.

“It’d be very difficult to have two stores, and expensive too. They (third party) wanted a monthly fee and a percentage of sales. With my own site I can control the costs – I paid a one-off fee to create it and pay the credit card transaction fees; that’s nothing,” Tan said.

Cracks in model

Wade Gerten, chief executive officer of social media developer 8thBridge, previously known as Alvenda, opened a Facebook store for the florist 1-800-FLOWERS. Minneapolis-based Gerten went on to develop commerce strategies for Delta Air Lines, Diane Von Furstenberg Studio and denim-maker Seven for all Mankind.

Cracks in the model showed quickly, Gerten said in a telephone interview. Clients “have taken a different approach,” shutting stores or scaling back their offerings.

“It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites,” Gerten said. “I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F’.”

Private photos of facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg uploaded to his Facebook have leaked oot into the public internet following the discovery of yet another security flaw, one of the many that have plagued the social networking website since its inception in February 2004.

The flaw, which Facebook has acknowledged, appears to have first been posted about on a body building forum along with step-by-step instructions on how to obtain access to the private photos of any Facebook user.

The forum post has since been deleted and upon discovering the security flaw, Facebook said it “immediately disabled the system” used to obtain private photos and would only “return functionality” once it had confirmed a fix.

The flaw “allowed anyone to view a limited number of another user’s most recently uploaded photos irrespective of the privacy settings for these photos”, Facebook said in a statement, and was “the result of one of our recent code pushes”.

It was live for “a limited period of time”, it added.

One of the photos extracted from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s profile shows him holding a chicken upside down as if it were dead. Another shows him holding two plates, one with what looks to have battered chicken on it and the other, thinly-sliced potato chips.

If reports of Mr Zuckerberg only eating meat he has killed are anything to go by, it’s likely the chicken was slaughtered.

Other photos show him with “Beast”, his fluffy white dog, and girlfriend Priscilla Chan at their home.

There are also photos of Mr Zuckerberg with friends while eating and drinking, with US President Barack Obama and with children in costumes, likely taken during Halloween in the US.

Facebook has had a long history of access control vulnerabilities, especially around unauthorised access to photos, said Ty Miller, chief technology officer at the Australian security firm Pure Hacking.

In December 2009 a privacy overhaul of the social networking site saw almost 300 photos of Mr Zuckerberg and his friends as well as his calendar and wall posts made public to even non-friends. His access privileges were revised to “friends of friends” following reports of the photo treasure trove.

“Facebook users should expect variations of this type of security flaw to continue into the future,” Mr Miller said. “As a precaution Facebook users should ensure that they only upload content … that won’t negatively impact them if it is leaked.”

He added that the social networking giant should ensure that penetration tests were performed on all updates to the site to ensure that vulnerabilities like the recent one were detected prior to being released to the public.

Despite many registering their ‘dislike’, the social network’s new features are here to stay.

WHEN Facebook revamped many of its most heavily used features lately, millions of users were not exactly happy. For days, the hashtag #newFacebook on Twitter was a litany of complaints: the new features were too busy, too complicated, too ”un-Facebook”.

But the changes – which chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook brains trust see as the most important since the addition of games and other software apps in 2007 – are not going away. Perhaps the biggest innovation, a feature called Timeline, which Zuckerberg calls ”the story of your life”, isn’t even officially available yet.

Facebook is taking the main feature people use to keep up with the activities of their friends and splitting it into two: Ticker and News Feed.

The significant addition is Ticker, a virtually unfiltered, automatically updating stream of the actions of your friends. Ticker, which scrolls down the upper right side of the home page, is supposed to provide a real-time sense of what your friends, and the brands and businesses you like, are doing at any moment.

By clicking a Ticker item, you can join in instantly – from sending a happy birthday wish, to friending someone your friend is friending, to listening to the new Wilco album through the Spotify app.

The stream of Stories that runs down the centre of the home page is still there but it has been changed.

Since it was launched five years ago, News Feed has been a primary way people keep track of their friends. ”[It] is the lifeblood of Facebook,” says Meredith Chin, a communications manager for the company.

You used to be able to toggle back and forth between Top Stories, the posts Facebook’s algorithms judged most interesting to you, and Most Recent, the freshest content. Now, there is one News Feed with the content Facebook judges to be most interesting based on your interests and social connections.

Relationships on Facebook used to be two-way connections; both parties had to agree. Now the Subscribe button allows you to create one-way relationships with anyone, just like Twitter.

Celebrities or leading business figures on Facebook are unlikely to agree to friend requests from millions of fans. But by visiting their profile pages and clicking Subscribe, every post publicly shows up on a News Feed. Existing friends are automatically subscribed to each other but the feature allows you to adjust whether you want to see all their posts, some of them or only the most important ones – useful for people you don’t dislike enough to unfriend but who share too much.

Also in Slate, predict how much The Social Network will take at the box office.

Adam Goldberg In a parallel universe, there is a blockbuster movie coming out soon about a Web site that changed the world. It’s called The Social Network. It stars Jesse Eisenberg as the site’s wunderkind creator. It features wealth and drama and Ivy League shenanigans. But it’s not about Facebook. It’s about another site, Campus Network, and its founder, Adam Goldberg, a guy who came within arm’s reach of a multibillion-dollar idea that ultimately just slipped his grasp.

As The Social Network dramatizes, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook after allegedly backing out of a commitment to work on another networking site, Harvard Connection. Lawsuits ensued, and Zuckerberg ended up shelling out tens of millions of dollars in a settlement with his one-time partners. What the film doesn’t mention are all the other college social networks that Facebook shoved aside as it expanded across the country. Of those sites, perhaps the greatest threat to Facebook’s dominance was Campus Network, then called CU Community after Columbia University, where it was founded.

“If you talk to Mark, he’ll be the first to tell you he thought CU Community was the biggest competition that Facebook ever had,” says Goldberg, now 26 years old and living in New York City. While I was unable to confirm that Zuckerberg agrees with this statement—the Facebook CEO and the company’s PR reps didn’t respond to my requests for an interview—it is true that Facebook and CU Community were running neck and neck for a brief moment in Internet history. Facebook had Harvard, CU Community had Columbia, and both were mulling plans for expansion. Only one site would survive. It wasn’t to be Adam Goldberg’s.

Goldberg got the idea for Campus Network in 2003, during his freshman year at Columbia’s school of engineering. As president of his class, he heard a lot of complaints about the university’s lack of community spirit. Over the summer, he wrote a simple script for a social network for engineering students. The site let users share personal information, post photos, write journal entries, and comment on one another’s posts. In just a few weeks, Goldberg says, most of the engineering students had profiles. Over winter break, he rebranded the site CU Community and opened the site to all undergraduates in January. Goldberg says that nearly all  Columbia students signed up in just over a month.

On Feb. 4, Facebook launched. “At first I was like, Oh my God, they copied my Web site,” says Goldberg. Unlike Zuckerberg’s Harvard Connection adversaries, however, the CU Community founder quickly changed his mind. “I saw it was totally different. It had an emphasis on directory functionality, less emphasis on sharing. I didn’t think there was that much competition.”

As of early 2004, Goldberg’s social network was a lot more advanced than Mark Zuckerberg’s. The first incarnation of Facebook—known as The Facebook back then—let users post a photo and basic biographical information. It let them “friend” and “poke” each other. But that was about it. Fancier tools like photo sharing and Groups and the Wall didn’t come till later. Meanwhile, CU Community already had blogging and cross-profile commenting. Facebook’s simplicity and the fact that it was available only to Harvard students made it easy for Goldberg to dismiss. “We were the Columbia community, they were Harvard,” he says.

The illusion of safety crumbled a month later when Facebook opened its doors to students at Stanford, Yale, and Columbia. While Facebook grew exponentially at Harvard and Stanford, growth was slower at Columbia—in part, says Goldberg, because CU Community was already so entrenched. Some Columbia students launched a campaign to “Google bomb” Facebook by linking the search term “cucommunity ripoff” to TheFacebook.com and “worthless safety school” to Harvard.edu. The Columbia Spectator called the effort “marginally successful.” (I wrote for the Spectator at the time.) Despite this online agitprop, Facebook continued to grow. That summer, it overtook CU Community as the most popular social network on campus.

That spring, Goldberg started instant messaging with Mark Zuckerberg. In March, he met with Zuckerberg and Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and early Facebook investor, at a Starbucks on 96^th Street. According to Goldberg, Parker tried to persuade Zuckerberg to acquire CU Community. Zuckerberg didn’t tip his hand, but Goldberg says they kept in touch. In June, he says, Zuckerberg invited him to Palo Alto, Calif., where the Facebook crew had moved to work on the site. Goldberg flew out and stayed with Zuckerberg and pals for two weeks. “I think we went to one Stanford party,” he says. There was “no crazy partying or drinking,” Goldberg says, despite what The Social Network may suggest.

The invitation to come to Palo Alto was basically a job offer, says Goldberg. “They didn’t give me a clear salary and working terms. It was, Come out here and work with us.” He remembers that Zuckerberg even offered to pay for Goldberg’s flight.

Goldberg said no, thanks. “I really believed that Campus Network was a better product,” he says. He spent the summer of 2004 coding a new site, rebranded it Campus Network, and launched it at five other schools in September. But Facebook was expanding, too. “We made a strategic decision to go after Big 12 schools,” says Wayne Ting, who ran business and legal operations for Campus Network. “But when we went to the Big 12, Facebook immediately went to the Big 12, too. They were clearly monitoring our activity.”

Ting’s analysis squares with a description of Facebook’s “surround strategy,” as described in David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect. “If another social network had begun to take root at a certain school,” Kirkpatrick writes, “Thefacebook would open not only there but at as many other campuses as possible in the immediate vicinity. The idea was that students at nearby schools would create a cross-network pressure, leading students at the original school to prefer Thefacebook.”

Beating Facebook would take all the time, energy, and cash that Goldberg had. He and Ting decided to take time off from school. They moved to Montreal, hired three employees, and set up shop in the offices of a programmer friend of Goldberg’s. They slept on the office floor. Every morning, they woke up early and put away the air mattresses before the employees arrived. “We didn’t want them to know we were homeless,” says Ting.

It quickly became clear that Facebook was winning. One factor was that Zuckerberg’s site had the financial means to expand. Goldberg says he turned down advertisers, including MTV, and didn’t seek out venture capital: “We would have if we thought the reason we couldn’t succeed was because of money.” By the time Facebook hit 1 million users, Campus Network had only 250,000. Goldberg knew there was no catching up. He returned to Columbia in the fall of 2005 and shut down Campus Network. Goldberg declined to put a figure on how much the whole effort cost him, but Ting estimated it was somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000.

In the meantime, Goldberg had launched a social network for high schools called Friendex. But he says he killed the project after a month at the request of Zuckerberg and the Facebook team. “They made me feel really bad for having launched it,” he says. “So I took it down.” Facebook soon expanded to high schools.

Why did Facebook succeed where Campus Network failed? The simplest explanation is, well, its simplicity. Yes, Campus Network had advanced features that Facebook was missing. But that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Goldberg’s site smothered the user with doodads. Its pages were fully customizable, with multiple designs and backgrounds, not unlike MySpace. To sign up for Facebook, on the other hand, users had to fill in three fields: name, email, and password. User profiles were uniform, their contents intuitive—favorite movies and relationship status and class schedule. While Campus Network blitzed first-time users right away, Facebook updated its features incrementally. Facebook respected the Web’s learning curve. Campus Network did too much too soon.

Other factors contributed to Campus Network’s downfall. User profiles were open to the public, scaring off some potential enrollees and allowing cyberstalkers to satisfy their curiosity without joining. Campus Network didn’t expand quickly enough, either, allowing Facebook to get a first foothold in potential markets. And its aesthetics didn’t help. “It looked like somebody who loves Dungeons & Dragons,” says Ting. “It had that look and feel.” And of course there’s the H-Factor. “I think the name had a lot to do with it,” says Ting. “When we go to a school and say this site is from Columbia, it doesn’t carry the same marketing punch as, This is from Harvard.”

Neither site, of course, can claim to be the first social network—Friendster and MySpace already had large followings in 2003. But both Facebook and Campus Network had the crucial insight that overlaying a virtual community on top of an existing community—a college campus—would cement users’ trust and loyalty. Campus Network figured it out first. Facebook just executed it better.

Does Goldberg regret not hopping onboard the Facebook express when he had the chance? To borrow a phrase, it’s complicated. “In some ways I do, some ways I don’t,” he says. “I wasn’t ready to drop out of school, to give up my own project. I thought the best way to do it was to do it myself.” Ting tries not to dwell on it. “There are still moments when you feel a deep sense of regret, especially when I read an article about this movie or Mark Zuckerberg or see him on the cover of Time, and you ask, Could this be me? Could we have succeeded? I think that’s a really painful question. … There are fleeting moments like that. But I’m much prouder that we took a risk and we learned from it.”

Goldberg took two years off after graduation to study language in Argentina and France. He started writing a food blog. Now he’s getting ready to launch a new site, Topic.org, a Wikipedia-style forum where users lay out arguments on issues like the BP oil spill and the death penalty. He maintains a Facebook profile, but it’s hard to find unless you’re already his friend. On his Facebook page, Goldberg has this as his favorite quote: “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

Sourced from slate & published by Henry Sapiecha

SKYPE VIDEO AND FACEBOOK MARRIAGE

Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is stepping up competition with Google by teaming with Skype to offer free video calls.

Facebook also said it has more than 750 million users, up from 500 million, in an announcement today at an event in Palo Alto, California, where it is based. Microsoft, a long- time Facebook partner, is acquiring Skype in a $US8.5 billion deal expected to close later this year.

Video chats can help Facebook fend off competition from Google, which introduced a social network with that feature last week, and offer an alternative to Apple’s FaceTime for the iPhone. Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg is using partnerships and media features to increase Facebook’s audience and avert user defections.

“You’re going to have more and more competition between Facebook and Google,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie Capital. “The two companies are going to be battling it out for some time to come.”

Facebook also unveiled a multi-person chat feature that lets several people hold online conversations at the same time.

‘Cool new scenarios’

“We’re using the best technology that’s out there for doing video chat with the best social infrastructure that’s out there in order to create some really cool new scenarios,” Zuckerberg said during a presentation at the event.

Facebook began holding talks with Skype about offering web video calls on its social network in 2010, a person familiar with the discussions said earlier this year. An October update to Skype included voice calling between Facebook friends. Microsoft agreed to buy Skype in May.

“This is a really strategic long term deal between Skype and Facebook,” said Neil Stevens, vice president and general manager for consumer at Skype . “This isn’t just a one shot one deal implementation of a product. This is a long term relationship.”

Google’s new site, called Google+, includes Google’s maps and images, messages, comments and other content from selected groups of friends, as well as a video chat feature.

Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, invested $US240 million in Facebook in 2007 and entered an agreement to sell ads on the social network.

Facebook is forging ties with other media and technology companies. It added Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to its board of directors in June and discussed incorporating more social features into the online video-streaming service. In March, Time Warner’s Warner Bros. studio announced plans to offer movie rentals on Facebook for $US3.

Facebook is valued at $US71 billion on SharesPost Inc., an exchange for shares of private companies.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

FACEBOOK NOW HAS A SERIOUS RIVAL

A screen shot of the Google Plus social network is shown in this publicity photo. Photo: Google/Reuters

• Demo the Google+ service here

Google, which has been frustrated by a string of failed attempts to crack the social networking market, has introduced a full-fledged social network dubbed Google+. It is the company’s biggest foray into social networking since co-founder Larry Page took over as chief executive in April.

Page has made social networking a top priority at the world’s No. 1 internet search engine, whose position as the main gateway to online information could be at risk as people spend more time on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

“They had the luxury of making mistakes in the past with their social initiatives. They don’t really have that luxury now,” said Ray Valdes, an analyst at research firm Gartner, referring to Google.

“Companies that are successful with the social web will get the page views, they’ll get the engagement and they’ll eventually get the advertising dollars that are so important to Google,” he said.

Google+, now available for testing, is structured in remarkably similar fashion to Facebook, with profile pictures and newsfeeds forming a central core. However, a user’s friends or contacts are grouped into very specific circles of their choosing, versus the common pool of friends typical on Facebook. ( http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/06/28/first-look-at-the-google-plus-social-network-the-top-secret-demo/ )

Enticing consumers to join another social networking service will not be easy, said Rory Maher, an analyst with Hudson Square Research.

“They’re going to have an uphill battle due to Facebook’s network effects,” said Maher, citing the 700 million users that some research firms say are currently on Facebook’s service.

“The more users they [Facebook] get, the harder it gets for Google to steal those,” he said. But he added that Google’s popularity in web search and email could help it gain a following.

To set its service apart from Facebook, Google is betting on what it says is a better approach to privacy – a hot-button issue that has burned Facebook, as well as Google, in the past.

Central to Google+ are the “circles” of friends and acquaintances. Users can organise contacts into different customized circles – family members, coworkers, college friends – and share photos, videos or other information only within those groups.

“In the online world there’s this ‘share box’ and you type into it and you have no idea who is going to get that, or where it’s going to land, or how it’s going to embarrass you six months from now,” said Google vice president of product management Bradley Horowitz.

“For us, privacy isn’t buried six panels deep,” he added.

Facebook, which has been criticised for its confusing privacy controls, introduced a feature last year that lets users create smaller groups of friends. Google, without mentioning Facebook by name, said other social networking services’ attempts to create groups have been “bolt-on” efforts that do not work as well.

Facebook, in an emailed statement, said “we’re in the early days of making the web more social, and there are opportunities for innovation everywhere.”

Google+ started rolling out to a limited number of users yesterday in what the company is calling a field trial. Only those invited to join will initially be able to use the service. Google did not say when it would be more widely available.

Google, which generated roughly $US29 billion in revenue in 2010, said the new service does not currently feature advertising.

Learning from Buzz

Google’s stock has been pressured by concerns about rising spending within the company and increasing regulatory scrutiny – not to mention its struggles with social networking. The US Federal Trade Commission, among others, is currently reviewing its business practices.

Its shares are down almost 20 per cent this year after underperforming the market in 2010.

To create Google+, the company went back to the drawing board in the wake of several notable failures, including Google Wave and Google Buzz, a microblogging service whose launch was marred by privacy snafus.

“We learned a lot in Buzz, and one of the things we learned is that there’s a real market opportunity for a product that addresses people’s concerns around privacy and how their information is shared,” said Horowitz.

Google drew more than 1 billion visitors worldwide to its websites in May, more than any other company, according to web analytics firm comScore. But people are spending more time on Facebook: The average US visitor spent 375 minutes per month on Facebook in May, compared with 231 minutes for Google.

Google+ seems designed to make its online properties a pervasive part of the daily online experience, rather than being spots where web surfers occasionally check in to search for a website or check email.

As with Facebook’s service, Google Plus has a central web page that displays an ever-updating stream of the comments, photos and links being shared by friends and contacts.

A toolbar across the top of most of Google’s sites – such as its main search page, its Gmail site and its Maps site – allows users to access their personalised data feed. They can then contribute their own information to the stream.

The company has combined the Facebook and Twitter models of social networking in Google+: a person can have friends in their network with whom they share information and they can also follow certain people, say a movie critic, as occurs on Twitter.

Google+ will also offer a special video chat feature, in which up to 10 people can jump on a conference call. And Google will automatically store photos taken on mobile phones on its internet servers, allowing a Google+ user to access the photos from any computer and share them.

When asked whether he expected people to switch from Facebook to Google+, Google senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said people may decide to use both.

“People today use multiple tools. I think what we’re offering here offers some very distinct advantages around some basic needs,” he said.

Reuters.. Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

AUSSIE GIRL SONG GOES VIRAL ON FACEBOOK

A 16-year-old Australian girl who posted a video of herself singing with a guitar while describing her annoyances with Facebook has gone viral.

Madelaine Zammit of Adelaide, South Australia and her “Facebook song” were brought into the spotlight over the weekend after international blogs Mashable, The Daily What, Geekologie and Failblog posted about it.

According to Madelaine’s manager, Sam Helyard, also 16 and a close friend, she was “hysterical with excitement” when told of how her song began to go viral. “She couldn’t believe it.”

• Watch the song here (Warning: coarse language)

The song was written by Madelaine about 3 months ago, Sam said, and was only posted to YouTube at the beginning of this month. “I told her to record a song and put it on YouTube … it’s just gone from there.”

The video describes of common Facebook experiences many adolescents go through. As of this morning it had been viewed 150,781 times and had 3076 “likes”. By 12 pm it reached 156,462 views and had 3246 likes.

Further, Madelaine’s Facebook fan page “Madelaine Zammit Music” – created by Sam only a week ago – has attracted more than 6000 fans and thousands of supportive comments.

“I [want to] give you a hug,” one of the comments on her Facebook page said. “It’s a hilarious song. [I am going to] go and make everyone I know watch and listen. Will you pretty please make it availible (sic) on iTunes?”

In one Facebook experience Madelaine describes of “another 40-year-old man” attempting to add her as a “friend” on the social networking site. In another she describes how a number of male youths post pictures of their cars instead of images of themselves and how young girls wanting attention were “posting photos of them[selves] wearing nothing but their extensions”.

Sam said Madelaine “always had a passion for singing” and that one day when they were “bludging” at school she picked up her guitar and began playing the Facebook song to him. Sam, a member of the Vows Of A Massacre band, said the song was “all related to what [Madelaine] thinks of Facebook”.

“She just writes what she feels,” he said. “When she’s bored she just writes music.”

He said Madelaine had five other songs and that she planned to finish school before becoming more involved with music.

On her Twitter, Madelaine said she hadn’t done any “proper [music] gigs yet” but hoped to do one soon.

Madelaine’s song isn’t the first time a video about Facebook has gone viral. YouTube user Lynnea Malley did a parody earlier this year describing how Facebook had given her the “ability to find the profiles of hot guys on campus whose names I don’t know”.

PAUL CEGLIA THE FACEBOOK SCAMMER???

Paul Ceglia, who says that a 2003 contract entitles him to half the Facebook holdings of the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, showed no deception on a polygraph test about his claim last week, his lawyers said in a court filing.

The June 11 test was disclosed in papers filed on Friday by Ceglia’s lawyers opposing Facebook’s request that it be allowed to immediately inspect the original of the alleged contract and the emails Ceglia claims he exchanged with Zuckerberg in 2003 and 2004, before being required to turn over any evidence to Ceglia.

“I respectfully suggest that Mark Zuckerberg undergo the same polygraph examination I have in order to expose who is really telling the truth,” Ceglia, 37, said in a sworn statement submitted on Friday to the federal court in Buffalo, New York, where his suit is pending.

In the filing, Ceglia’s lawyers asked the court to order both sides to turn over evidence to determine whether the contract is genuine, including all of Zuckerberg’s documents, emails and instant messages relating to Facebook before July 30, 2004. Ceglia asked the court to order both sides into mediation.

Ceglia hasn’t shown the original contract publicly or to representatives of Facebook. The two-page document is in a bank safe-deposit box in Hornell, New York, according to Ceglia’s lawyers.

Stake in Facebook

Ceglia claims he is entitled to a multibillion-dollar stake in Facebook. The closely held company may be worth $US69.3 billion, according to Sharespost.com, an online marketplace for investments in companies that aren’t publicly traded. Palo Alto, California-based Facebook runs the world’s biggest social networking site.

In its June 2 request, Facebook called Ceglia “a hustler” who has engaged in various swindles over the past several years. The company said Ceglia’s claimed contract is “an amateurish forgery” and the emails fabricated. Facebook argued it needed to examine the documents immediately to put an end to a fraud on the court.

“Ceglia’s lawsuit is a shell game, shifting and changing with every filing,” Orin Snyder, a lawyer for Facebook and Zuckerberg, said in a statement responding to Ceglia’s filing yesterday. “Ceglia does not dispute that he has a track record of forging documents to rip people off.”

‘Terrible toll’

Snyder said polygraphs are easily manipulated and routinely disregarded by courts.

“This case and the tactics of Mark and Facebook have taken and continue to take a terrible toll on me, my wife, our two sons, and even our parents,” Ceglia said in his sworn statement filed Friday. “I have been repeatedly called a liar in the press and in the papers filed by defendants in this action.”

Ceglia sat for the polygraph test on June 11 in the Erie County, New York, office of Michael Pliszka, who administered the test, according to the court papers.

“The questions asked during the polygraph examination were designed to determine whether Mr. Ceglia had fraudulently forged or doctored the agreement,” Pliszka said. “It is my opinion that the examination results are classified as ‘No Deception Indicated.’”

In his statement, Ceglia said he and Zuckerberg met in the lobby of a hotel in Boston on April 28, 2003, and signed the contract, which Ceglia prepared by cutting and pasting from two different forms.

Document testing

Ceglia’s lawyers proposed subjecting the original contract to testing, which would be conducted by a mutually agreed or court-appointed expert, to determine the age of the ink on the contract. The necessary tests would destroy part of the document, they said.

Included in Friday’s filing are the opinions of two document experts and a computer expert.

John Evans, a computer expert hired by Ceglia, said his firm took from him 169 floppy discs, 1075 compact discs and two computer hard drives. One of the floppy discs has three Microsoft Word documents containing copies of email correspondence between Ceglia and Zuckerberg. Ceglia said he copied the messages from his internet-based msn.com email.

In an amended complaint filed in April, Ceglia quoted from emails he said he exchanged with Zuckerberg, which he said support his claim that the two men formed a partnership that gave Ceglia half-ownership of Facebook when it was started in 2004.

Zuckerberg said in a court filing that Ceglia hired him in 2003 to do web-development services for StreetFax.com, a business Ceglia was trying to start at the time. Zuckerberg, then a student at Harvard University, signed a contract drafted by Ceglia, which referred only to the StreetFax work, he said. The contract made no mention of Facebook, which Zuckerberg started months later, he said.

Facebook sly grog deliveries

set to dry up because of legalities

Facebook: the new sales frontier

Forget website sales – a new class of business is instead focusing on Facebook to build and market products and services.

This approach has become increasingly popular since Facebook added shopping cart functionality to its site, allowing businesses to transact through the popular social networking forum

Sourced & Published by Henry Sapiecha

 

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