Facebook opening up public profiles to search engines

facebook_public_profile.gifLog in to your Facebook profile (of course you have one) and you may see a new alert letting you know that you could soon have a “public search listing”.

Facebook’s developers yesterday announced that they’d be opening up publicly-available member profile information to the likes of Google and other search engines, and allowing non-members to search for people from the front page of Facebook.

All users have a choice over whether their listings are accessible in this way, by altering their privacy settings. However, given recent member stupidity, that’s easier said than done. A lot of Facebook users, it has to be said, are more interested in adding bizarre applications and letting their personal information spread itself all over the place, rather than limiting their profiles.

Opinion: why I think Bluetooth Facebook is a grand (if stalker-ish) idea

katpicture6.jpg Katherine Hannaford writes…

I take back every mean-spirited thing I’ve ever said about students. Yes, even on those nights out in Kingston, Hammersmith, or Clapham, when they’ve filled the gutters, emptying their stomaches of all the Snakebites they can hold, when I’ve resembled a middle-class snob, shaking my head as I pass them soberly (well, vomitless, anyway), muttering under my breath ‘damn students’.

Why am I suddenly revoking my student-hating membership card? Why, because the clever little sods have developed possibly the world’s best Facebook application. Yes, even better than the Karl Pilkington quotes app. We’re talking Bluetooth Facebook. Read on, social-networking fiends…

Opinion: Facebook numpties deserve to be defrauded!

Jon_small_new.jpgJonathan Weinberg writes…

Two days into the week and TWO Facebook security threats appear. The first in The Guardian on Monday warned secret code from FB’s inner-workings had been published on the internet prompting warnings of a security risk for users. Boring! Code, schmode, it’s far too technical.

But then this piece of wonder appeared today in The Times and it’s far more worrying, not least because everyone I know does it – and also because it involves a frog!

Freddi Staur is a cute green frog who has stolen email addresses and mobile phone numbers from users on the social network website – in an experiment to show how easily people give out their personal information to strangers…

Top 5 new Facebook applications: Buffy, Beer Diary, Heat and more…

buffy-facebook.gifYou can’t beat a good Facebook application, although you can bury it with hundreds of rubbish ones – something that due to the popularity of Facebook’s development platform, is in danger of happening.

I wonder if the site will introduce proper five-star ratings for apps, so you can sort through them that way. In the meantime, I’ve been combing through the list of recent new apps to find five worth putting on your profile. Starting with…