At first, you would think that Facebook is no other than another social networking website which only targets subscribers and copy the concept of Friendster and MySpace. While these were the preliminary assessments, Facebook is now an obvious leader thanks to the applications that it has added to the fray, making people log on to play with them rather than pay attention to meeting new people.

Games and quizzes have been added to be integrated with Facebook and many people are getting hooked on to them. The best part of it is that they were not developed by Facebook but independently. The ease of integration has become profitable for Facebook, something other social networking sites failed to consider.

The social internet is still in total flux with them growing in terms of member numbers that have swelled immensely, the winner of dominance still remains to be seen as they grow by leaps and bounds day after day. People have been scooping up social site memberships by the thousands with Facebook still at the helm with more members mainly due to it’s roots in the America’s. There are a lot more social sites all over the world, each with their own local favorites like Google’s Orkut, China’s QQ and more. Read more

China has announced a mandatory measure that would have all computers sold in the country to get software installed that would filter the internet locally which is not surprising for they have been monitoring and screening the internet for quite sometime. China has long been blocking access to the many social and news web sites in what they say is a measure that upholds the law, something the rest of the world sees as a continuing repression of the right to information. Read more

Image source: www.softpile.com

This product is intended to trade songs and videos transversely the Internet using “peer to peer” (P2P) networking.

It works like this: thousands of customers install WinMX on their PCs, and freely open their hard drives to each other. As these thousands of people log on to the Net using WinMX, the pool of available WinMX hard drives changes moment-to-moment. Every WinMX user is authorized to search for songs and movies, and then begin downloading and uploading music files to each other. Equitable sharing of music and movies is endorsed, and people will often share gigabytes of files with their fellow WinMX users.

This WinMX P2P network system employs its own custom file sharing client software, created by FrontCode Technologies. The WinMX is highly controversial software because of copyright laws, and WinMX users do risk possible fines and lawsuits.

This is the second time that Facebook has made a booboo. Wasn’t it only last year that this particular social utility added a “news feeds” feature which only resulted to threatened protests from many of Facebook’s users. The company apologized, and I think it needs to do that again as there are reports of new complaints regarding a recently launched marketing program that apparently allows users and friends to see their online purchases. Facebook has been making steps to alleviate the situation but personally I think they need to hasten as a lot of users are getting pissed about how they put it as an invasion of their privacy.

Source: Yahoo! Internet News