facebook

Facebook is moving to the next step of its $10 million FBFund developer grant program, the company announced Friday in a blog post by employee Catherine Lee. The first round, announced early in August, is now closed, and 25 winning proposals will be announced on September 22; 5 final winners will be chosen out of all first-round winners who apply for the second round, and winners will wind up with grant money between $25,000 and $250,000.

"Our team has been busy reviewing each submission and we're amazed and excited by what we've seen," Lee … Read more

It looks like social music site iLike will launch its developer platform early next week.

The Seattle-based company, which announced plans to build a third-party developer platform in July, has begun notifying news outlets that it will have a "significant technology announcement" on Wednesday.

Two weeks ago, iLike's President Hadi Partovi, wrote an e-mail to third-party developers notifying them that the company was "gearing up to prepare for launch" of the platform. According to Partovi's e-mail, the iLike Developer Platform is designed to add "interactive music features to Facebook apps and Web sites.&… Read more

For the 122 companies that were featured presenters at DemoFall and TechCrunch50 this week, the pressure of making their cases onstage to the audiences of press, venture capitalists, and analysts is now over.

To be sure, those companies now have to make good on the products they introduced, and the market will soon make it very clear who the winners and losers are.

But as the dust settles from DemoFall, where I and my colleague Elinor Mills spent Sunday through Tuesday watching dozens of companies' presentations and talking to many of the people behind those products, I have a few … Read more

After several months of beta testing its new design, Facebook on Wednesday began rolling out its new site to all of its 100 million users.

Under the new design, the social-networking giant initiated changes designed to simplify the site's look and feel, provide greater user control over profiles, and dish up recent and relevant information, according to the company's blog posting.

To date, approximately 40 million, or 40 percent, of Facebook users have tried the beta version of the new site, which debuted in July. Of that group, 75 percent remained with the new version, according to the … Read more

If you're not a fan of the preloaded ringtones on your cell phone, Verizon Wireless is providing an alternative way to get more catchy tunes on your mobile. On the eve of CTIA Fall 2008, the carrier announced Ringback Buddies, a Facebook application that lets you browse, purchase, and manage ringtones and "jukeboxes" from the social networking site.

You can install the Ringback Buddies application by searching for the word "ringback" on Facebook, and from there you can do a number of things. First, you can see what songs your friends like or want, purchase … Read more

The evil power of Dr. M is even greater than we thought...strong enough, in fact, to tarnish the shining reputation of the long-awaited Spore. Also in the news today, DVD ripping goes legit, a little too late, thanks to RealDVD, but we determine it's probably not worth getting sued over. And we put gurus against geniuses in a battle to the tech support death. Listen now: Download today's podcast

Happy Birthday Google - 10 http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9930 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-09-06-google-ten-years_N.htm

DVD ripping goes legit with RealDVD … Read more

Updated Sept. 8 with National Geographic saying the app is not sanctioned by them.

Researchers have created a proof-of-concept application for Facebook that turned the machines of people who added the app to their Facebook page into elements of a botnet that in a demonstration launched denial-of-service attacks on a victim server.

"Social Network Web sites have the ideal properties to become attack platforms," according to a paper entitled "Antisocial Networks:Turning a Social Network into a Botnet," that was authored by five researchers from the Institute of Computer Science in Greece and one from the … Read more

Social networks are designed to be all about friends, right? Yet when it comes to the competition behind the scenes at social networks, I'm reminded of the '70s song by War, "Why can't we be friends?"

That song especially comes to mind with Google's OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit that was officially established this week to promote the open developer platform OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a common set of application protocol interfaces (APIs) for social networks. It's designed to make it easy for companies to create a social network or related applications and have them work … Read more

It's hard to think of Apple and Facebook as obstructions to innovation and the free flow of information, but that's exactly what the companies could become one day, according to Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor and a proponent of free speech on the Web.

Apple and Facebook have generated lots of consumer satisfaction by each creating environments where third-party developers can tailor software for the iPhone or Facebook's social network. Part of their success is due to the quality control the companies maintain over the applications running on their platforms, Zittrain said. But he also worries … Read more