According to Forbes, Facebook may be launching a music streaming service any day now. Sources familiar with the situation have divulged that the giant social network is partnering up with European-based music service, Spotify.

The service is reportedly going through testing at the moment and could be available two weeks from now. When launched, it will be an integrated feature that youll find on the left side of your newsfeed right below your usual photos and events icons. When you click on the Spotify icon, the service will install on your desktop in the background and give you access to its library of millions of songs.

You would then be able to access the music via Facebook, and even listen to the same music simultaneously with your friends. Its not certain yet whether it will be called Facebook Music or Spotify on Facebook but either way its only available to those in countries where Spotify is supported. Currently, that excludes folks in the United States.

Spotify is still in the process of negotiating with labels here in the U.S., but as weve seen how unsuccessful Google has been with label negotiations for their Music Beta, it could certainly be a long road ahead. It also makes sense that the once rumored Google and Spotify deal didnt pan out.

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Facebook just announced the availability of a new feature for users creating accounts on the social network: Suggested Interests. Facebook will now recommend that new users sign up for updates from (“Like”) publishers with high reader engagement and subscribed-to by people demographically similar to themselves. That’s a unique combination of factors that only Facebook could offer.

If this intersection of 3 key social software trends is someday exposed more fully to all 500 million Facebook users and more – the Facebook vs. Google battle could become a fight between Recommendation and Search. Facebook recommendations are in the sidebar for most users today, but they are so powerful that it’s worth betting they’ll be center stage in the future.

User demographics, audience engagement metrics and syndicated feed subscription are each data plays that can change the way software intersects with users. Put them all together and there may never have been a platform that knew so much about people, monitored publisher effectiveness so closely and made subscription so easy for such an incredible number of people.

What other website do people tell as much about themselves as Facebook? What other website do

people connect as directly with people they know in the physical, off-line world? Facebook’s ability to recommend friends that you actually know when you create an account, based only on your email address, is pretty jaw dropping in and of itself. Facebook says the page recommendation is based on users similar to yourself, but these recommendations are surfaced before you fill out your profile information. Facebook is using some seriously magical secret sauce to figure out who your friends might be, then what you might like based on your shared demographics, before asking you anything more than your email, name and age. That’s pretty amazing. Presumably they are pinging 3rd party email databases – but that would be an interesting story to dig into!

All these personal details and connections can be cross referenced to create a rich picture of who you are and what you might like. There have been a lot of behind-the-scenes user tracking and profiling technologies developed over recent years – but what can come close to a system people opt-into and tell all about themselves?

Likewise, Facebook has for years been paying very close attention to the click-through, commenting and update-hiding rates of publishers on its platform. If your application gets a good response from users, for example, it’s allowed to push more updates out over time. If relatively few people click on your links, then applications see their rate of allowed updates lowered.

Organizations, “brands” and other publishers with Fan Pages that people subscribe to (“Like”) have their click-through rates tracked similarly. On the surface at least, it’s a pretty straight-forward relationship between user demographics, publishers you’re most likely to be interested in and who get a lot of engagement from their current subscribers.

The end result is subscribers for publishers on the Facebook platform and subscriptions for users. RSS never caught on with the mainstream, but Facebook updates have. Subscription to syndicated updates from a potentially infinite variety of niche publishers has long been one of the dreams of the internet. This represents an important upgrade from Facebook’s introduction of about 100 suggested Pages to Like in February.

The Google-Battling Power of Recommendations

That Facebook says these recommendations cannot be purchased and are entirely algorithmic is very important. That’s an important nod towards the democratizing nature of the system. Another would be if the algorithm privileged some relevant and high-quality but long tail publishers – not just what’s popular and successful among similar people. It’s hard to believe there won’t be some paid option some time in the future.

Recommendation-geeks have argued that recommendation may someday become bigger, more important and more lucrative than search. Recommendation is like a smarter, pre-emptive search before you even thought to search for anything. The richness of the data that this is based on inside Facebook is truly incredible. This could be how the battle between Facebook and Google plays out: as Recommendation vs. Search. User demographics vs. search personalization. Publisher engagement vs. Pagerank. Now what does Google have to offer against Facebook’s key feature – the Newsfeed people opt-in to get subscriptions (and ads, basically) pushed in front of them, side by side with baby pictures and friend updates, into the indefinite future?

It’s too bad this had to happen under a proprietary platform with privacy problems. These subscriptions people sign up for were turned irretrievably public in the Great Privacy Implosion of last December. The idea of irretrievably public subscriptions is comparable to a requirement that your library book check-out history be printed on paper and nailed to the front door of your house. It’s crazy and anti-social. Then, at the last F8 Facebook developers’ conference, the company changed this policy and allowed users to make their subscriptions private – though they still default to being public.

None the less, I’m not sure there’s ever been a platform in history that knew so much about people, monitored publisher effectiveness so closely and made subscription so easy for so many people.

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Security researchers are warning of the newest Facebook threat, something they’re calling “likejacking,” a Facebook-enabled clickjacking attack that tricks users into clicking links that mark the clicked site as one of your Facebook “likes.” These likes then show up on your profile and, of course, in your Facebook News Feed where your friends can see the link and click it, allowing the vicious, viral cycle to continue.

According to security firm Sophos, hundreds of thousands of users have already fallen for this new “likejacking” trick thanks to the clever and tantalizing linkbait the spammers use to entice people to click their links. For example:

"LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE."

"This man takes a picture of himself EVERYDAY for 8 YEARS!!"

"The Prom Dress That Got This Girl Suspended From School."

After clicking through on a link, victims don’t get to see the promised content, but rather a blank page reading “click here to continue.” This page contains the clickjacking worm (Troj/Iframe-ET) embedded via an invisible link. Click anywhere on the page and the message is posted to your profile and News Feed, allowing the worm to further its spread.

This particular exploit is made possible by way of Facebook’s new like button and its associated developer code. According to the like button documentation, the buttons can be customized with meta data that includes things like the title of the Web page, the name of the website and the URL of a picture for the page. By customizing these fields, spammers and hackers can easily create links that are, in fact, malicious “likes.”

Told You So

The popularity of this particular attack vector is not surprising. Soon after the launch of the Facebook like button, its potential as a threat, noting how incredibly easy it is to create like buttons that link to anything on the Web – even pages you have never visited.

It was only a matter of time before spammers and hackers started exploiting this weakness for their own purposes. (Frankly, we’re surprised it took this long.)

The problem has to do with the overly simple way Facebook has implemented the “like button” feature. Non-developers can plug a URL into a wizard that generates code that can be copied and pasted anywhere on the Web. Like buttons created this way or manually, via handwritten code, will function properly even if they point to a webpage that’s on a different domain from the page where the button is being hosted.

Kyle Bragger, a Web entrepreneur who just launched Forrst, an online community for developers and designers, warned Facebook users of “like fraud” back in April by way of a personal blog post. To circumvent potential likejacking attempts such as these, he created a Facebook “like” bookmarklet that safely “likes” the page you’re on, allowing you to feel secure that you’re actually liking the real thing and not some shady linkbait. (Or likebait, if you will).

If you’ve been hit with this likejacking attack, the best you can do is remove the like from your profile and delete the post from your News Feed. You might want to apologize to your friends with a Facebook status update, too.

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Facebook confirmed today that it is working on a location-based product but said that it has re-evaluated its plans to focus more on places like restaurants.

As part of a larger blog post about clarifying language around privacy controls, Facebook deputy general counsel Michael Richter said today that the company now has “different ideas” that are “even more exciting” than what it previously planned to do with location. More details will be available, including regarding privacy, as the company finalizes the product.

That doesn’t sound like an open product development cycle with privacy policy discussions going on before the product is finalized, but from an innovation perspective it’s hard not to be excited about something “more exciting” than simply adding location to posted items.

Anonymous sources told the New York Times earlier this year that Facebook was developing a location feature to be released at the F8 developers conference in April.

Here’s the relevant section of today’s post:

The last time we updated the Privacy Policy, we included language describing a location feature we might build in the future. At that point, we thought the primary use would be to “add a location to something you post.” Now, we’ve got some different ideas that we think are even more exciting.So, we’ve removed the old language and, instead added the concept of a “place” that could refer to a Page, such as one for a local restaurant. As we finalize the product, we look forward to providing more details, including new privacy controls.

The reference to Pages like local restaurants may allude to a very close tie-in with local business advertising at the launch of the location feature.

The difference between location and “place” is a significant one. Substantial resources are dedicated by location-aware social networks to determine what “place” your location refers to. That might mean neighborhood, it might mean business name and it might mean recognizing when you are posting from home so that location can be selectively hidden if you so choose.

What kind of “place” analysis does Facebook have in mind that goes beyond location? Time will tell, but hopefully user privacy will be handled effectively. Location disclosure is a very touchy subject and Facebook’s recent about-face towards a default all-public privacy stance could cause a substantial backlash when it comes to the mainstreaming of location sharing.

Physical location is one of the most sensitive forms of information we posses and it’s going to be very tempting for Facebook to push people towards being more public than they might like. Can the company get the balance right? Privacy and useful features are the two big questions.

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Imagine visiting a website and finding that it already knows who you are, where you live, how old you are and who your Facebook friends are, without your ever having given it permission to access that information. If you’re logged in to Facebook and visit some as yet unnamed “pre-approved” sites around the web, those sites may soon have default access to data about your Facebook account and friends, the company announced today.

Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, told us in an email that “the right way to think about this is not like a new experience but as making the [Facebook] Connect experience even better and more seamless.” There will be new user controls made available, but this is a new experience: this makes Facebook Connect opt-out instead of opt-in.

The proposed change was first written about by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch, who called it Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For.

Here’s the language Facebook used to describe the draft policy:

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications. In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website). In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy.

That sounds downright creepy. It’s nice to have one-click access to your Facebook info if you decide to share it with other sites – that’s what Facebook Connect does – but the prospect of having that information automatically shared when you show up on another website seems like an idea that won’t be well received by users. There’s a big difference between opt-in and opt-out “data portability.”

Schnitt says: “People love personalized and social experiences and that’s why Facebook and Facebook Connect have been so successful. We think there are some instances where people would benefit from this experience as soon as they arrive on a small number of trusted websites that we pre-approve.”

Shnitt is the man who told us in a previous interview about Facebook’s fundamental shift away from being private by default (Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy) that users generally go along with the company’s default privacy settings because they agree with the company’s recommendations and because the world is changing to be less private. He cited the growth of Twitter, blogging and reality TV as evidence that the world was changing this way and that people are less interested in privacy.In that interview, Schnitt also acknowledged that business reasons, like pageviews and advertising, were part of why Facebook was transforming away from privacy as well. We asked if this new opt-out Facebook Connect was the first step in a Facebook Ad Network, where your profile on Facebook is used to target ads that Facebook sells on sites all over the web. Schnitt told us, “this has absolutely nothing to do with advertising.”

Do you buy all that?

Do you trust Facebook to select trustworthy websites to automatically share your data with when you browse around the web? If you don’t trust Facebook’s judgement, you will be able to opt-out of exposing that data. But by default you’ll be sharing it.

By default, you’re sharing more and more these days, with more and more people. Perhaps that’s because of your love for Twitter and reality TV, but perhaps its because of Facebook’s cultural and commercial agenda.

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Pedophilesare using Facebook to lure children, and the authorities are not happy about it.

Under governmental pressure, Facebook has stated that it has no objection in principle to adding a panic button to the website for kids who feel that they may be in danger.

What function the button would actually have has not been released in great detail, or if there is a time schedule in mind. Renewed calls for a panic feature comes after a high-profile murder involving a child and a Facebook stalker, pretending to be someone who he was not.

Facebook, like any other social network, has privacy issues. You cannot let everyone join, without letting everyone join. Some people are just not out to make new friends and connections.

Of course, even a new function on the website allowing children to alert the authorities of possible misconduct (if the feature is notblatantlyabused, which it most likely will be), will not stop the problem. Posting information and communicating online has risks, and nothing except careful parental oversight will help kids navigate those waters successfully.

While a panic button does not address the roots of the problem, it may help in a percentage of the cases, making it of endless use and value. Facebook has its own systems currently in place, but like anything else they can be improved on.

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Theres an email going round asking Facebook users to reset their password. The email is a fake and contains a virus, do not open or follow any of its instructions.

Facebook is reportedly in the process of letting its users know, but be sure to let anyone you know be aware of the email.

The message says the following:

The message appears to come from Facebook Support with help@facebook.com as the email address.

If you use a web based email client, you shouldnt be too concerned with the viral part of this but if you download your email, its worth virus checking your computer to be safe. The attachment contains a password stealer that can potentially access any username and password combination used on the computer, not just the login credentials for Facebook reports CNet.

More details to come.

Via All Facebook

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Social Networking site Facebook is now offering its users the opportunity to share cash with each other, real cash that is.

You can send and receive small payments via a Facebook application called Buxter and the company behind Buxter that will process the transactions is online payments company ClickandBuy.

Setting it up is easy. If you already have a ClickandBuy account, and millions of people across the globe do, then all you have to do to take advantage of the service is set up your Buxter account on Facebook.

If you dont have a Click and Buy account then you need to set one up before you can load cash in or out of your Buxter account.

Transactions on the Buxter system are limited to a maximum of 50 euros or less and are free to process between friends although there are small fees (minimum of 2 euros) for transferring money out of Buxter and into your bank.

You cant make purchases from anywhere though; you will only be able to trade with your friends on Facebook.

To send cash to a friend you simply select your friends name from a drop down menu and enter the amount you want to send. Easy!

People share their statuses, their information and their pictures on Facebook so the question is why not share money there too? said Christian von Hammel-Bonten, senior vice president at ClickandBuy.

He hopes people will use the service to share expenses for things like cinema tickets and restaurant bills or small gifts; its not designed for anything more than that.

Were not trying to compete with national banking systems. This is not somewhere to pay your gas or rent he said.

To receive any cash you send to a friend they just have to accept the Buxter application and enter an email address.

That friend will then be free to transfer the money to any of their friends or into their bank account if they wish.

Buxter is the application that will see Facebook members use the platform not just as a way to stay in touch, but also as a fast, easy and secure way to exchange money or buy and sell products or services said Charles Fraenkl, chief executive of ClickandBuy.

The only currencies offered by the service at the moment are US dollars and Euros but support for the UK pound will be added in the coming weeks.

It will be interesting to see how many Facebook users end up using it.

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