I know, I know. Facebook has 100 million users, but it still trails MySpace, which claimed it owned at least 110 million “active” users throughout the world.

I am a big fan of Facebook, and believed that it will not close users’ accounts simply because it is overpopulated. To strengthening your belief in Facebook, you need to subscribe to this Facebook Security page. All those chain letters are hoax. We know Facebook will fix it, just like they fixed the worm attack recently. Meanwhile, you can join and donate to this cause, i.e. Stop Facebook Chain Letters if you want to.

If you never heard of Facebook Connect, it is a new big thing. There will be a talk on this Facebook Connect in September next month. A talk purposely for developers. I wish I’ll get a Live Coverage of it, hopefully.

Hey -

At Facebook, our goal is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. More than 90 million people across the world have joined this movement and are using the site to communicate and share information with the people they care about most. Today, we’re happy to invite you to check out the next evolution of our product. We’ve been working on it for a while, so we’re really excited to show it to you.

We had three goals to improve Facebook in this version. First, we wanted to make everything clean and simple to use. Reducing clutter makes it easier for you to find what you’re looking for and share information with others. Second, we wanted to give you more control over your profile. Everyone should be able to express themselves how they want, which means privacy controls and control over how content appears on your profile. Lastly, we wanted to show the most recent and relevant content. People share so much on Facebook that it’s easier to keep up with your friends by focusing on the newest and most important information.

You may have seen the preview Page we created a few months ago to get suggestions from the community on the changes we were thinking about making. I want to thank all of you who wrote in and gave us feedback. It’s always great to hear from people using our products all around the world. As you use the new Facebook, please feel free to let us know what you think using the “Send Feedback” link at the top of new pages.

To try out the new Facebook, look for a banner at the top of every page. If you get lost, there are help links available as well as the option to switch back to the older version for a little while. I hope you enjoy this next evolution of the site as much as we do.

Mark Zuckerberg

(Message from the Founder)

A former StudiVZ executive said Facebook had been negotiating for months to try to buy StudiVZ, “Facebook may have the superior technology, but it doesn’t have the users in Germany,” said this executive, who insisted on anonymity because the talks were confidential. “That is what Facebook wants with StudiVZ.”

As of present, this is hard to predict which approach might be more profitable for Facebook, sue over or buy it for long-term success, but it is the size of the user base of StudiVZ that attracted Facebook. StudiVZ has more than 12.2 million users in Germany in June, compared to 1.2 million German users of Facebook.de, the Facebook Germany.

At the same time, the challenge for Facebook in buying StudiVZ is that Facebook did not meet the asking price of the existing owner of StudiVZ, the Holtzbrinck Gruppe, based in Stuttgart, which reported paid €85 million, or $134 million in January 2007 in order to acquire StudiVZ.

Plan for the acquisition was far from clear, it is due to the fact that StudiVZ is in “the enviable position of not having to sell,” a former StudiVZ executive said. “This lawsuit is an attempt to encourage Holtzbrinck to sell StudiVZ.”

“We spent most of last night working on a fix for a worm, which was targeting people on Facebook and placing messages on Walls urging users to view a video that pretends to be hosted on a Google or YouTube website. We’ve identified and blocked the ability to link to the malicious websites from anywhere on Facebook. Less than .002 percent of people on Facebook have been affected, all of whom we notified and suggested steps to remove the malware.”

In matter of fact, this worm has been widely reported in the virus new forums, as one of the well-established Internet security firms Kaspersky even purposely wrote an article to inform social networking users on such security vulnerability a week ago. This worm namely Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b, which targets Facebook users, creates spam messages to the Facebook users and its ultimate purpose is to urge the users to download a network worm that could potentially cause a huge loss to the users’ own machines .

With that so many features rendered by Facebook platform, and every complex piece of code probably has some vulnerability in it, it is wisely to listen to Facebook’s serious advice in their blog post. There are few important security measures that each one of us must take: report any spam message postings, never share your Facebook password, keep an eye and prioritize all the security flaw of your own computer’s operating system, and the last one, be aware of your surroundings in your online community.

But for the fake group, I think I found the answer which I hope I won’t make a mistake. My simple conclusion for a Facebook group is: Good admin is good group. It’s a rare exception where good Facebook group don’t accompany good admin(s), or it’s even a rare exception where a Facebook group don’t have any admin(s).

Last week, I found that a Facebook group which have no admins. There is a statement appeared on the Group, i.e. There are no admins left in this group! Beware of this kind of groups, that’s because one good admin will not simply build a Facebook group and then leave the group, before she has properly introduced another Facebook member to take over the admin jobs.

Enjoy reading.

via [AdRANTs]

Update: I checked out the eBay link, it showed “This listing (260249755056) has been removed or is no longer available.“

I tried to log-on to Facebook, but unfortunately it is down. A big question is, why does Facebook is down, and what’s the problem that cause the “Error?” I like to figure out what is going on behind the scenes at Facebook. To me, Facebook is not what I read from some China blogs, that Facebook Chinese translation name is “非死不可,” sure going to die in China. Will the history repeat of itself in China? That most of the well-known U.S. Internet startups can’t make it in China. I like Facebook very much, this down incident give me a reason to think about what this world would be like without Facebook.

Aha, I tried and tried again to log-on to Facebook, I see a small notification icon appeared and disappeared for a second. I had a new friend accepted my friend request, whom he/she is?

CNBeta said after China users log-on to this China Facebook version, users will see the familiar Facebook home.php in English. Only if they re-register a new account, their profile will thus show in Simplified Chinese next time they log-on to it.

1. You don’t have to make friends with people you don’t know. Think before you poke.

2. Wait 24 hours before accepting or removing someone as a friend. The delay will help you gather your thoughts.

3. Birthdays, engagements and weddings are not “virtual” events. Always send cards or phone friends when there is an important event.

4. Think before posting a friend’s photo what you would feel like if it was you.

5. Think carefully about your profile picture. Would you want it to be appearing in your local newspaper?

via [Reuters UK]

Users are allowed to remove any stories that they do not want to show, but not advised to try to remove the whole mini-feeds, as told by Facebook.

Meanwhile, when you adding your friends to your Facebook, the add friend box now featured an advanced friending capability, by directly adding your new friend to a new Friend List. This save you time and effort in categorize your friends into different list after your friends accepted your Facebook friends request.

In addition, one of the Facebook’s high-profile features such as “People You May Know” reflected Facebook’s well known prowess in recommendation technology. Justin Smith of Inside Facebook said that there was a new tab called “Apps You May Like,” however, I still only see my first tab in the Application Directory remained as “Recently Popular.” I’m not sure this new application recommendation feature is only available to the U.S. users, as all the bloggers announced this news are from the U.S.

Does this mean that the Facebook clones will become a new emerging trend in the social networking industry? Hardly.

According to The Tech Chronicles, Causes on Facebook has raised $2.5 million in charitable donations from about 40,000 users to help nearly 20,000 groups. At the same time, it attracted more than 12 million users with a global vision of supporting 80,000 non-profit causes.

In an interview conducted by Contribute Magazine, Causes on Facebook co-founder Joseph Green said, “Nonprofits tend to focus their fundraising efforts just on the wealthy. But cause networking unleashes the power of a multitude of younger, mainstream donors and gives what they care about a way to be heard.” Adds Sean Parker, “Facebook Causes is a way of leveraging the power of your social network to raise money or ultimately achieve a social goal. We’re very much trying to take social dynamics that exist in the real world and represent them online, which wasn’t really possible a few years ago.”

From the preview of this new profile page, you’ll find that the new redesign is all about tabs. User’s information will be organized into a better layout, instead of the previous one single long page. There will be few tabs allowed: personal information, news feeds, photos, applications, etc. On the top of the profile page, you’ll see that there’s three different tabs, Wall, where you can post a wall message, About, contains personal information or data such as address, history and Photos, a place where you can browse and upload photos to the profile.

At first glance, another changes will be the organization of the sidebar. At now, Notes and video are slotted into the left hand side, but under the new redesign of profile page, they are in the right hand side, and carefully notice the mini-feed, the new changes will only display five stories, not the ten (10) stories as we getting used to. One thing for sure, those members who created a long one page profile page can no longer view their profile pages in the same way again.

Consider the new redesign of profile page demands the input of feedback from the Facebook users, Facebook plans to introduce changes slowly, allowing a selected group of testers to use it in June next month before making it available to all of its members later. Meanwhile, Web developers that created third-party applications for Facebook will be given chances to step into sandbox and play with the new design this week.