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On Thursday, Web site-monitoring firm WatchMouse released the results of a study about the performance of 104 social-media sites--social networks, blogging communities, bookmarking sites, and the like--and boldly deemed them to be overall "slow and inaccessible."

WatchMouse used its "Site Performance Index" (SPI) methodology to track the reliability and load time of the sites in question; this figure is computed by calculating the time needed to call up a site's home page and applying a penalty for each failed request. Lower is better: an SPI of 500 is considered good, whereas the Utrecht, Netherlands-based WatchMouse … Read more

Google and Facebook are joining ranks on DataPortability Workgroup. As the ReadWriteWeb put it, "Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges." While the process of opening up data may well take a long time, it's instructive that the web is doing what the offline software industry has thought tantamount to corporate suicide: Opening up.

Data has been the web's lock-in point, as Tim O'Reilly, in particular, has championed. Some believe this is the only way to make a buck: Remove customer options such that they're forced to continue doing business with a … Read more

Little over a month since Facebook's Beacon advertising service came under fire over privacy concerns, the company's chief revenue officer has said that the "social ad" will remain a key focus for the social-networking site.

Owen Van Natta, chief revenue officer at Facebook, told an audience at the Consumer Electronics Show that most Facebook users are comfortable with sharing information about the products and services they consume.

Facebook's Beacon is an advertising service which posts messages on users' Facebook profiles about any purchases they make on Facebook-affiliated e-commerce sites. These social ads expose to other … Read more

There's been plenty of talk about data portability over the past few weeks, what with Facebook taking issue with a Plaxo script that imported user data from one social network to the other. But the news has mostly dealt with tiffing and squabbling--until now.

A group called the DataPortability Workgroup announced Tuesday that representatives from Facebook, Google, and Plaxo have signed on as members. The group, spearheaded by Chris Saad of start-up Faraday Media, is a sort of alliance of Web thinkers devoted to "(putting) all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for … Read more

I wanted to touch on two Facebook apps this afternoon that are highly useful for people with a lot of friends. One is to keep an eye on them, while the other is simply a means of extending your presence on multiple networks at the same time.

The first is called Unfriender, and it's been kicking around since last month. Once installed and given access to your data, it'll keep an eye on people you've added as friends and let you know if they've removed you as a friend later down the line. As a reason … Read more

This post was updated at 12:14 PM PT to include comment from Plaxo.

A representative from business networking site LinkedIn has denied a claim from contact management service Plaxo pertaining to last week's controversy over transporting data from one social network to another. According to LinkedIn, it doesn't approve of Plaxo scripts that import LinkedIn contact information.

Last week, Facebook blocked "power user" Robert Scoble's account when he attempted to test out a new feature from Plaxo that synchronized Facebook "friends list" e-mail addresses with Plaxo's contact management system. Scoble's … Read more

Update at 12:10 p.m. PST: Comment from Zango has been added.

Good riddance: Facebook has banned the "Secret Crush" application due to reports of its affiliation with a notorious spyware manufacturer.

The social-networking site confirmed the breakup on Monday: "Facebook is committed to user safety and security and, to that end, its Terms of Service for developers explicitly state that applications should not use adware and spyware," a statement from the company read. "We have contacted the developers and have disabled the Secret Crush application for violating Facebook Platform Terms of Service."… Read more

MANCHESTER, N.H.--It sounded like a good idea at first: let Internet users be part of, virtually speaking, the Democratic and Republican presidential debates on Saturday evening by posting comments on a special Facebook message board.

But it turned out to be one of those ideas that may be better in theory than in practice. During the East coast broadcast of the debates, Facebook users posted around 35,000 "Soundboard" messages, meaning that at perhaps 50 characters each, that's some 1.75 million characters to read during an approximately three-hour period. All of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, by contrast, is only 700,000 characters.

To read all those messages, at 20 per page, you'd have to refresh your browser's screen 1,750 times. That's not even counting comments posted by west coast Facebook users (Facebook, which co-sponsored the debate here with ABC News, said the west coast figures were not yet available).

No doubt, the political twitterers must've felt empowered to know their Soundboard comments were being beamed out to an audience of potentially millions of Facebook users, and, if plucked by ABC's designated Facebook-monitoring reporter on TV, millions of offline viewers as well.

Still, it's a little unclear whether the comments will prove all that useful for campaigns looking to boost their candidates' standing.

… Read more