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Facebook rolls out standalone mobile-chat app

(Credit: CNET)

Facebook today doubled down on its mobile efforts with a new mobile application that breaks out its messaging service into a single app.

Dubbed “Messenger,” Facebook is making the app available for both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Users can log in with their Facebook credentials to get access to existing chats and message threads from Facebook for interacting with them on the go. Included is group messaging, along with a component that lets users share photos and their location.

“The Messenger app is an extension of Facebook messages, so all your conversations are in one place, including your texts, chats, e-mails, and messages. Whether you’re on your phone or on the Web, you can see the full history of all your messages,” Lucy Zhang, Beluga co-founder and Facebook engineer, said in a post on Facebook’s blog.

For all intents and purposes, the app is the same as Beluga, a group-messaging app Facebook acquired in March. In fact, the team that made Facebook Messenger is the same one that made that application, and the feature set reflects that. Nonetheless, this app is not replacing Beluga, according to Facebook.

“Nothing is going to change for Beluga right now,” a Facebook representative told CNET. “The apps will remain separate. We’re considering ways to possibly migrate Beluga messages over to Facebook Messenger but have no specifics to announce at the moment.”

The move to break out messaging is of special note, given the murmurs of Facebook doing something similar for photo sharing. A report in June from TechCrunch pulled together screenshots of such an app in the works that would combine sharing elements akin to apps like Instagram, Color, Picplz, and others, while tapping into Facebook’s photo servers. That differs substantially from Facebook’s existing mobile strategy, which has been to pull the various site features together into one experience, similar to what’s available for desktop users.

Notably missing from this iteration, and Facebook’s other apps, is video chat–a feature it launched as part of a partnership with Skype last month. In a question-and-answer session following the unveiling of that feature at Facebook’s headquarters, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the two companies would begin work to bring that feature to mobile phones immediately.

Update at 2:25 p.m. PT: You can grab the app from iTunes here. Android users, can get it here. The company is also offering to send download links directly to your device from its Messenger home page.


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20090207-93/facebook-rolls-out-standalone-mobile-chat-app/#ixzz1UeJ2DzJ9


Would You Trust Facebook With Your Money?

These days, brick and mortar businesses displaying some kind of signage saying “Like us on Facebook,” are nearly as common as those displaying Visa and MasterCard logos. That’s worth considering, when you think about using Faceabook as a way to pay for goods and services in the physical world.

Of course, Facebook users have developed some trust issues with the site over the years. It would be quite interesting to see if a PayPal-like service from Facebook would be widely adopted. It’s one thing to trust a third party with your status updates and photos. It’s another to trust them with your money.

Would you trust Facebook to handle your money?

Last week, Facebook announced that it is getting rid of Facebook Credits, in favor of real money. Facebook users will start paying for virtual goods using their native currencies: Dollars, Pounds, Yen, etc. This represents the beginning of users being able to treat their Facebook account like a bank account, or at least like a PayPal account and paying online. I’m not sure if Facebook is FDIC insured.

While Facebook did not say anything about using currency to pay for things in the physical world, one can simply connect the dots. For one, Facebook has over 900 million users. Many of them carry it around in their pocket all day long. Now, consider that Facebook recently acquired Tagtile, described as “your universal loyalty card,” for which you can “visit local stores, tag the Tagtile Cube with your phone, and get rewarded for being an awesome customer.”

If Facebook is going to offer a digital loyalty card to use at stores, and Facebook is going to have user account balances based on actual money, it seems only logical that users will simply be able to pay with their Facebook accounts, as long as businesses adopt the technology.

Of course it would give Facebook yet another way to compete directly with Google.

Plink co-founder Peter Vogel wrote at TechCrunch, “Last year, 15 million people bought Facebook Credits, according to their S-1 filing, so it’s assumed Facebook has close to 15 million credit cards on file. By the end of this year, once paid apps are added to Facebook’s App Center, it wouldn’t be surprising if 50 million people, or about five percent of Facebook’s users are purchasing apps and other digital good, like movies, music and TV episodes, which means Facebook would have a pool of 50 million people who have entrusted it with their credit card information.”

“At that point it’s a very short distance to a ‘Pay with Facebook’ blue box showing up every time you make an online purchase (on web sites everywhere, not just on Facebook),” he adds. “Why re-enter your credit card number when you already trust Facebook to handle the transaction and bill your card? For Facebook users this could be seen as more convenient and safer than entering their credit card number on multiple sites. Facebook is PayPal on steroids, with the strength of a billion members.”

That’s an incredibly good point. Think about how the Facebook sign-in option already works for many sites in the web (and especially from mobile devices). It is so much more convenient to simply tap the button to sign in with Facebook than having to enter a whole other account name or email address and password. Paying this way could save a lot of time and hassle.

This already exists, you know:

 

 

If Facebook can get people paying online regularly, people may start putting more of their money into Facebook accounts, which will make them a lot more likely to pay for things offline.

The Trust Factor

That trust factor could be a major obstacle for Facebook, however. Privacy issues have been rampant with the the social network’s dealings for years. Last year, as the result of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, regarding privacy, Facebook had to agree to regular third-party audits to make sure it remains in compliance. This all came after Facebook was found to have not kept its promises, by not warning users of privacy changes or getting their approval in advance. Essentially, changes were made an an opt out basis, rather than users opting in.

Just this week, the company switched default email addresses of users to Facebook email addresses without warning. This isn’t exactly a privacy issue, but it’s another change being made to users’ personal accounts for them. Things like this tend to irk users, and don’t do much to make users more comfortable with how the company is handling their accounts. A Lifehacker article even goes into all the reasons why the switch to a Facebook user email address is less than beneficial.

Another big Facebook story this week is about a feature that Facebook rolled out called “Find Friends Nearby,” which was quickly pulled after the CEO of Friendthem claimed Facebook has stole their idea, and threatened to sue. If you’ve seen The Social Network or read book it was based on, you’ll know that Facebook has a long history of being accused of such things. That’s not to say whether or not these things have merit, but public perception is a valuable thing. Some people already have a hard enough time trusting banks with their money.

Side note: It’s unclear, by the way, if the Friendthem situation was directly related to Facebook pulling the feature. The company claims it was only a test, and not a formal roll-out anyway. It does appear to be based on the company’s acquisition of social discovery app Glancee.

Another question worth considering is whether or not people want one company to have so much control over their lives. Do you want to keep so much personal information, photos, videos, and money all under one Internet-based account. There are major hacking stories in the news frequently these days, and many may be hesitant based on that very fact.

This month, another prominent social network, LinkedIn, fell victim to a password leak. LulzSec hackers managed to gain access to 10,000 Twitter accounts via a vulnerability in a third-party app. Consider how many third-party apps are connected to Facebook. According to the company, as of March, over 9 million apps and websites were integrated with Facebook users. How much bigger of a target would Facebook be with more people keeping their money tied up in their accounts.

Of course, people are already keeping some amount of money tied up in Facebook, on a much smaller scale than what the future may very well hold.

“People can store their payment information on Facebook in a trusted environment and then make purchases across a range of apps – without having to re-enter their payment information in each app,” Facebook says about its current Payments offering. “Payment options include credit and debit cards, PayPal, mobile payments, gift cards and numerous local payment options around the world.”

If Facebook makes a significant transition to the offline, non-app world (like its peers are also trying to do), will you make the transition along with them? Will you use your Facebook account to buy burgers, gas or other every day items?

How to Migrate Your Facebook Account and Data to Google+

You may not be ready to ditch Facebook for good, but now that you’ve had a chance to kick the tires on Google+, you might be ready to make it your go-to social network. The problem: You’ve built up a lot of friends, photos, videos, and other data on Facebook over the years, and you don’t want to simply lose all that data. Here’s how to migrate it all from Facebook to Google+.

Photo remixed from an original by Shutterstock.

When Google+ came out, it’s success was very much up in the air (remember Google Buzz?). However, it seems a lot of people have already thrown themselves into Google+ full force—Facebook may have 750 million users, but Google+ has already crossed the 20 million user milestone in only 30 days. If you’re ready to give it a shot as your main network, here’s what you need to do.

Migrate Your Friends

A social network is nothing without a group of friends with whom to talk, so the first thing you’ll want to do is migrate your friends. Not everyone you know is going to be on Google+ yet, but it’s a good idea to make sure you don’t leave anybody out—and you can always send those other late adopters an invite to encourage them.

The easiest way to migrate your Facebook friends is to import them through a Yahoo email address. I know that sounds awful, but hear me out: While a few people have created browser extensions and other migration methods, Facebook shuts them down pretty quickly, since they don’t like non-partners pulling friend data. In addition, the non-Yahoo methods usually add your Facebook friends to Google Contacts, which you probably don’t want. You may not have a Yahoo account, but that’s what makes this method great—no need to fill up your main address book with Facebook junk. Plus, it really does only take a few minutes.

To do this, head to mail.yahoo.com and click the Create New Account button (if you already have a Yahoo or Flickr account, you can skip this step). Once you’ve created an account, sign in and head to the Contacts tab. Click on “Import Contacts” and choose the Facebook option. You should now see all your Facebook friends in your Yahoo address book.

Lastly, head to Google+ and go to the Circles tab. Click “Find and Invite” and click the Yahoo button. It’ll add all your Yahoo Contacts (or Facebook Friends, in this case), to the Find and Invite page and you can add your Facebook friends to your circles. I, for one, was shocked at how many of my friends were already using Google+ without me knowing.

Migrate Your Photos

Migrating your photos is ridiculously easy with the previously mentioned Move Your Photos Chrome extension. Install it, click on its icon in the extension bar, and log in to your Facebook account. Select the photos you want to transfer and click the upload button at the very bottom of the page. You’ll see the progress in the lower right-hand corner. Don’t log out while it works, just let it do its thing.

When it’s done, you’ll see those albums in Google+. By default, they won’t be public, and you can adjust each album’s privacy settings by going into them and clicking on the “Edit” link under “Visible To”.

If you don’t want to use Chrome, you can grab a similar extension for Firefox, but you have to transfer albums one by one. If you have Chrome installed, I recommend using the Chrome extension just this once because it’s much faster.

Migrate Your Videos

The only way to migrate your videos, unfortunately, is to download the entirety of your Facebook data and re-upload them. To do this, head to Account > Account Settings, and scroll down to “Download Your Information”. Hit the “learn more” link and hit he Download button. It will take awhile to gather your info, but you’ll receive an email when it’s done, and you can download a ZIP file full of your photos, videos, and profile information.

Strangely, when I did this, one of my two videos was missing from the “videos” folder in the ZIP file. However, I was still able to download that video from Facebook by installing the Video Download Helper extension for Firefox, navigating to the video you want to download, playing it, and clicking the arrow next to Download Helper’s icon in the add-on bar.

Once you’ve wrangled all the videos you want to move to Google+, you’ll just have to upload them one by one. Head into Google+, click on your profile, and go to “Videos”. Hit the “Upload New Videos” link and re-upload your videos to your Google+ profile.

Update and View Both Networks at Once

Now that all your data’s been migrated, you can enjoy using Google+ as your main social network. However, chances are you still have a few friends on Facebook you want to keep up with. The best way to do this is with the Start Google Plus extension for both Chrome and Firefox. Once you install it, you’ll see a Facebook and Twitter icon in the upper right-hand corner, which you can click on to connect your other accounts. Once your Facebook account’s been linked, every status update you make on Google+ will have the option of posting to Facebook as well, just by clicking on the Facebook icon. It’ll take with it any links, pictures, or other data that the status contains.

Start Google Plus will also plug your Facebook feed into your Google+ feed, so you don’t even need to check Facebook anymore. Just check your Google+ feed, and it’ll show you all of Facebook’s news feed as well, with links to comment if you so desire.

If you prefer to not use an extension, you can also update your status on both networks at once using Facebook’s “Upload via Email” feature. Just head to Facebook’s mobile page, copy your Upload via Email email address, and add it to its own “Facebook” circle on Google+. From now on, when you update your status on Google+, you can just include your Facebook circle to send that status to Facebook as well. This method isn’t perfect, however: it’ll only work with statuses of up to 50 characters, and it doesn’t work with photos. However, it does work over mobile, which is nice, and without any extensions.

It’s also worth mentioning the previously mentioned Google+Facebook extension. While it’s a much easier way to update both statuses at once, it’s been hit by a bit of controversy, which you can read more about over at our post and on this Reddit thread. The company has responded to accusations of malware injection, and it seems more accidental than something that was actually of malicious intent, but we still recommending you use this at your own risk. The “update by email” method is still the safest, but this is a possibility as well. With other extensions out there like Start Google Plus, there’s really no reason to take the risk.


There isn’t a foolproof, one-step way to migrate your data, but this should help make the process quite a bit easier for you Google+ fans out there. Got any of your own migration tips to share? Let us know in the comments.


You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.


 

Check Out These Tools to Help Safeguard Facebook Privacy

Hopefully, why you should never trust Facebook is obvious by now. Perhaps you feel like you still need it, though — or stubbornly refuse to believe it is really all that bad, whether because you think it is not much of a risk or just do not believe the evidence.

You may take all reasonable precautions, including using no personally identifiable or sensitive information in your account or profile data. Maybe you use a password and email address for the account that you use for nothing else, and refuse to communicate with anyone who actually knows any personally identifiable information or secrets about you on Facebook. Even so, there are risks.

Facebook clearly is not concerned with your privacy any more than the absolute minimum required to keep itself in business. There’s no such thing as a trusted brand, but there is certainly such a thing as a brand that is thoroughly suspicious — and Facebook seems to fit the description when it comes to personal privacy. Any time Facebook appears to care about your privacy, keep in mind that it took Congressional posturing to keep the corporation in line even to that small degree.

It is clear that even when Facebook offers something that looks like some kind of privacy protection, the offer is not a promise, and relying on it is a recipe for disappointment. With that in mind, the problem of protecting even the most minimal sense of privacy while using Facebook seems insurmountable. Thanks to the efforts of a number of hackers and entrepreneurs who actually care about privacy — not only theirs, but that of others as well, even if only because it serves as a convenient business model — there are some options that can help at least a little.

In no particular order:

1. SaveFace
Untangle offers the SaveFace bookmarklet, a script that can be saved as a bookmark in your browser. When you click a bookmarklet, it does “something” — usually involving whatever page you happen to be visiting at that moment. In the case of SaveFace, you can visit your Facebook page then click on the bookmarklet to rest your privacy settings to Private. According to Untangle, it currently covers Contact Information; Search Settings; Friends, Tags, and Connections; and Personal Information and Posts.

2. ReclaimPrivacy.org
A similar bookmarklet is offered by ReclaimPrivacy.org. Unlike SaveFace, the purpose of ReclaimPrivacy.org’s tool is to scan your Facebook settings and detect certain types of privacy vulnerabilities in your account settings. In theory, at least, it should be more thorough than SaveFace — but less automated as a means of protecting yourself.

3. Connect In Private
At ConnectInPrivate there is an annoying tablike thing floating over the left-hand side of the page. Take a closer look: it reads “Secure Your Facebook Profile”. If you click on that, it takes you to a Facebook application that offers a fairly comprehensive Facebook privacy feature set. Of course, what it provides is little more than a convenience layer over manually adjusting your own Facebook privacy settings, but it can be used for free and, if you like that kind of thing, you might find it valuable.

Using Connect In Private’s Facebook privacy scanner is a remarkably tedious and uncomfortable process for something so simple. It involves reading, and thinking about, a series of questions about what kind of privacy preferences you have — in ways that are poorly defined, and requiring Facebook account access that should make the average security concerned user hesitate. Access to the source code is not exactly a matter of easy access the way it is with the JavaScript in the ReclaimPrivacy.org bookmarklet and the .js page it references, either.

A final word
Connect In Private has one definite advantage over the other tools, though: it is more actively maintained. As of this writing, ReclaimPrivacy.org’s script is not compatible with current Facebook privacy settings, and there is a note on the page to that effect. SaveFace is far from a complete solution, for that matter. None of them are perfect, and there is always a risk if you trust your private data to a site like Facebook. Each of them might help a little, though.

In the end, I for one find it difficult to trust the Facebook application offered by Connect In Private. Your mileage may vary.

To read the original article in it’s entirety Click Here

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