A new social network targeted toward Muslims was launched by a “25-year-old Pakistani man” in response to the offensive Facebook group that resulted in Pakistan banning Facebook for over a week. While the concept isn’t a bad one, there are a couple things going against this company. First, their name includes the word “Facebook”, so good luck not getting a letter from Facebook’s lawyers.

Second, they failed to copy Facebook’s well-optimized call-to-actions. For example on the Facebook homepage, any user can immediately begin registering by entering their name, email, password, sex, and birthday. On millatfacebook they need to click a link first. Granted, this isn’t the most significant hurdle and thanks to press there’s a good chance that the site could get some traction.

Unfortunately for Omer Zaheer Meertold, the company’s CEO, Pakistan restored access to Facebook. Despite the odds against Meertold, he has a legitimate idea. The only problem that he has started off on the wrong foot. The site even comes with its own anti-West content. As NYDailyNews.com points out:

There are also music videos and personal photos, but the site is not without its anti-West propaganda.

“All Muslims must get to gather(sic) and we easily can remove Bloody Israel from the map of the World !” reads a post by the user Paiman.

Another post urges members to unite and defeat the “Zionist-owned” Facebook.

You can check out the full-site here,

Yesterday afternoon Facebook released a new video which educates users about the company’s new social plugins service. Most important is that it educates users about the privacy issues surrounding the plugins. Many in the press have inaccurately stated that Facebook’s social plugins share data with website owners. Due to the misunderstanding, Facebook felt that it would be useful to provide users with more information about the ways that social plugins work. The result is the video which is embedded below.

While Yahoo! has previously announced their intention to release a comprehensive integration with Facebook, few details have been available as to what exactly that means. Yesterday, Techcrunch released screenshots of the new integration and so far it’s nothing that it is exactly unexpected. Instead it’s simply deep product integration of Facebook into Yahoo’s existing product suite, including Yahoo! Mail, and the company’s massively popular homepage.

Yahoo’s Integration So Far

After first announcing site wide integration of Facebook Connect within Yahoo! properties, the company has already launched a number of Facebook integration points. The first significant integration was the Facebook Contact importer which enables Yahoo! mail users to integrate all of their contacts’ email addresses.

Then at the end of March, Yahoo! integrated Facebook within Yahoo! Mail further by “enabling users to update their Facebook status from Yahoo! Mail as well as view their contacts profile photos when they’re emailed”.

Today’s Announcements

Today the company is expected to release further integration with Facebook, enabling users to update their status from the Yahoo! homepage as well as view their Facebook feed from the Yahoo! homepage and the Yahoo! mail inbox. While the product integration is something that any other company leveraging the Graph API is able to accomplish, it’s substantial because Yahoo! is one of the largest internet companies.

Aside from the fact that Yahoo! is a big company, there really isn’t much else to this announcement. Below are screenshots of the new integration.

Yesterday I posted an article on here which suggested Facebook or Google had accidentally “leaked” user emails, through Facebook’s opt-out system. The logic we used at the time to deduce this was completely off. The reality was that the users had placed the original opt-out emails that they had been sent within public forums. In other words, it was user error that led to emails being exposed.

Points Of Clarification

• Google does not use links found in your Gmail to crawl websites - Google has clarified that they never crawl links found through your Gmail account. This conspiracy theory assertion that I submitted was off base.
• Facebook and Google no longer expose the page - As I explained in the previous article, the Facebook page that was being indexed (o.php), probably shouldn’t have been. As such Google (and other search engines), have pulled those pages from their index and Facebook has added o.php to their Robots.txt file. If you don’t understand the technical aspect of this, don’t worry.
• Facebook’s Friend Finder is safe - We came to the conclusion yesterday that the only source of the problem could be Facebook’s friend finder. It actually wasn’t, so you can feel comfortable using the Friend Finder feature moving forward.

Since the article was so off base, we decided to pull it all together. While the logic we used was a round-about logic, we weren’t the only ones confused. However rather than updating a post which has practically become useless, we’ve pulled it all together.

A Rhode Island lawyer has filed a class action lawsuit against Facebook over their new “Instant Personalization” program on behalf of Derrick Rose of East Providence, Rhode Island. The suit is a bit questionable as the class action published on the lawyer’s website states “Facebook is abusing personal information for private profit”, although it’s pretty clear that Facebook is not directly profiting through the Instant Personalization program.

While this may simply be an attempt/stunt by Peter Wasylyk to gain national attention, there are legitimate concerns raised in the suit which effectively turn users’ complaints over the Instant Personalization program into legalese:

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, alleges that Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” feature has violated users’ privacy rights and seeks to certify a national class of Facebook users.

The suit also states that “The activation of Instant Personalization and the sharing of information about users with unrelated third party websites violated users reasonable expectations of privacy”. While I’m a little bit skeptical of how this first class action against Facebook over the program will work out, since there are significant typos (parts of sentences missing) in the release on the lawyer’s homepage, I think it’s a sufficient statement.

Peter Wasylyk, who’s representing Derrick Rose, claims that Facebook has broken the law with their new program by violating users “reasonable expectations of privacy”. I have no idea how substantial a case something like this really is, as many of the suits we’ve seen in the past, which have resulted in some form of settlement, come from large firms.

While I’m not sure how the lawyer will argue that Facebook is using the Instant Personalization program for profit, it’s no doubt interesting to see the first suit over the program.