Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

McAfee Labs Lists Geolocation Services As Top Target For Emerging Threats In 2011

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

On December 28th, McAfee Labs unveiled their 2011 Threat Predictions Report, and they’ve listed Geolocation Services as one of the top targets for cybercriminal activity in 2011. Geolocation services particularly include services involving check-in activities which publish your location. Geolocation services include Facebook now, as well as Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Geolocations

From my perspective, McAfee’s inclusion of geolocation services is unsurprising and perhaps even overdue.

I wrote back in 2007 how geolocation technology is core to click-fraud detection, as well as for credit card sales, banking, and user profile verification.

Just a couple of common risks involving geolocation services involve criminals being able to use your current location information in order to victimize you. Obviously, if a criminal knows where your home is, and you’re involved in a geolocation service which is showing that you’re located in another city or across town, they could rob your home. (more…)

Oh, Facebook – Why Must You Rehost Wikipedia?!?

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

In a move perhaps inspired by Google Map’s adoption of Wikipedia content and Google’s overall preferential rankings of Wikipedia, Facebook has been testing out articles that are highly similar to Wikipedia’s. In fact, Facebook’s article pages have actually sucked in Wikipedia’s initial article content for topics in a great many cases I’ve seen thus far:

Wikipedia articles on Facebook

From my perspective, this sort of breaks one of the great benefits of hypertext that made the internet great: linking to source content. (more…)

Is Facebook Planning To Steal Wikipedia Marketshare?

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

This afternoon, I saw a link on the lower right of my Facebook page, inviting me to become a Facebook beta-tester. Interested, I clicked it, and this is what I saw:

Facebook Beta Tester Application

As you can see, the application consists of having the applicant submit some writing which they’ll assumably assess for quality.

It would appear that Facebook may be planning to launch topical articles, similar to a Yahoo! Answers or Wikipedia.

If a large knowledge library on a variety of topics becomes available through Facebook, then the platform becomes even stickier, retaining their users for even longer. One hypothetical question occurs to me:

“How might Facebook take marketshare from Wikipedia, now that the service already is competing strongly against Google?”

I think we’ve found that particular answer.