Egypt Facebook pages vanish before vote

Two Egyptian opposition pages on the social network site Facebook were deleted from the Internet ahead of Egypt's parliamentary election on Sunday then restored after discussions with the site's administrators, web activists who run the pages said on Friday.

The activists said they suspected the Egyptian government had played a role in the disappearance of the pages, possibly by covertly bombarding Facebook with complaints about the pages that resulted in their removal, but offered no evidence to support the allegation.

Egyptian interior and information ministry officials were unavailable for comment on Friday, a holiday in Egypt.

Facebook said in an email message that its security systems, designed to protect users on the site, had led it to remove the pages.

"We have been working with political and human rights groups both inside and outside of Egypt since this was brought to our attention to explain the measures they need to take to keep their accounts and associated activity within the site rules," said Stefano Hesse, Facebook head of communications for Europe, Middle East and Africa Stefano Hesse said.

"This has led to the two large pages that were of most concern being reinstated," he added.

The web is one of the few public platforms for dissident voices in a country where an emergency law in place since 1981 makes political activism a challenge by hampering efforts to establish a popular, united opposition movement.

"It is strange that the two biggest Facebook pages in Egypt and the Arab world are all of a sudden deleted," one activist, who ran one of the pages but did not want to be named, told Reuters.

One page, called "We are all Khaled Said" and with 330,000 registered users, reappeared 15 hours later after Egyptians living abroad pressed Facebook's administrators to reinstate it, the page's creators said.

The second, called "Mohamed ElBaradei" after the former U.N. nuclear watchdog chief, an Egyptian native who led a now-fizzled constitutional reform campaign, resurfaced later on Friday. That page boasted 298,000 users.

Khaled Said was a web activist who human rights groups say was killed as a result of police brutality but state authorities say died by choking on drugs. It is Egypt's largest such page.

Facebook campaigns played a key role in galvanising protests in 2008 against rising prices and low wages that led to clashes with police in the city of Mahalla el-Kubra.

Sunday's parliamentary vote is widely expected to produce a routine victory of President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party, following a state-run crackdown on media in recent weeks.

The government has shut 12 television stations and forced a number of government critics off the air, saying the channels aired content that violated their permits.

Its founders told Reuters the Khaled Said page had called for a day of anger on Friday to commemorate the death of another Egyptian, Ahmed Shabaan, 19, whose body was found in a canal in Alexandria last week.

"Facebook decided to close the page after the arrival of a large number of complaints from sources who want to silence our voice," one of its founders said.

Facebook moves closer to trademarking 'face'

Facebook has moved a step closer toward trademarking the word "face" - at least in certain contexts.

The company's 2005 application with the US Patent and Trademark Office received a "notice of allowance" Tuesday, which means Facebook now has six months to show that it uses the trademark and pay a $ 100 fee, said Cynthia Lynch, administrator for trademark policy and procedure at the agency. Or, it can file for an extension for up to 36 months. Once that's done, the trademark can be approved or rejected.

Even if it's approved, Facebook wouldn't have a trademark on "face" in every instance, only in online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for the "transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter," according to the Patent and Trademark Office's database entry on the application. It oddly exempts uses "primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars."

So another company could well use "face" in a different context - think Delta Air Lines and Delta Faucets, Lynch said.

Facebook sought to trademark the word in December 2005. Since then, no one has filed an opposition to the proposed trademark, Lynch said. Aaron Greenspan, a former Harvard student who owns a mobile payment system called FaceCash, asked for more time to oppose the application, but never filed any objection within the extended time period.

Greenspan is among the lesser-known Harvard students of Mark Zuckerberg's era to claim a role in inventing Facebook. His company, Think Computer, filed petitions in 2008 and 2009 to cancel Facebook's registration of the term "Facebook," which was approved by the trademark office a couple of years earlier. As part of a settlement with Facebook, Greenspan agreed last year to cancel its petitions.

Facebook, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., is also trying to rein in use of the other half of its name. In August, it filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Teachbook.com, an online community for teachers.

The "face" trademark notice was reported earlier by several blogs, including Inside Facebook.

Facebook keeps record of users' former lovers

Social networking website Facebook keeps a record of users' former lovers, if they had typed in the data earlier, but has now been forced to change a feature which caused their photos to appear when they logged in.

After users reacted over the Photo Memories sidebar, which gave users an "unpleasant surprise" by dredging up old photographs of ex-wives or husbands, Facebook has now blocked such photos.

Sam Odio, Facebook's project manager said: "While users may still see Photo Memories of their former romantic partners if they didn't declare the relationship on Facebook - as well of their current partner with that person's former partners - the change should help heal the heartache for many users."

However, in order to successfully block the "hurt-inducing" snaps, the site is now keeping a record of its users' ex-partners - those who have used the site, The Independent reported.

If a person has told Facebook his or her relationship history, there is very little he or she can do to retrieve the information.

According to Facebook's policy: "Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, or it was copied or stored by other users."

Facebook says the fact that it maintains a log of people's romantic associations should not be a cause for concern.

"There is nothing Facebook could do with this information, just as a doctor couldn't share your past medical history with someone else," a spokesman said.

The New York Times has also said if Facebook disables a user's profile, it amounts to seizing his or her personal information. Even though the user vanishes from the site, yet Facebook retains the data which that user had submitted.

Facebook Chatwala

Social network game developer Zynga unveils 'CityVille

Social network game developer Zynga has unveiled "CityVille," the first globally released online game built by the hot startup behind play hits "FarmVille" and "Mafia Wars."

"CityVille is where Monopoly meets Main Street," said the game's general manager Sean Kelly.

The game challenges a player to build his or her dream city from the ground up and incorporates winning aspects of popular Zynga titles "FrontierVille" and "FarmVille."

"Instead of harvesting crops you're harvesting your neighborhood; instead of clearing your friend's frontier you're working on a friend's franchise," Kelly said, referring to the title as Zynga's most social game to date.

Zynga rocketed to success at Facebook, where people recruited friends to join them in online play and shared game accomplishments at the world's leading social network.

More than 320 million people have played Zynga games since the San Francisco-based company was launched in 2007, according to its founder Mark Pincus.

The number of people playing Zynga games each month tops 225 million, according to the firm.

Test, or beta, versions of "CityVille" will be rolled out worldwide in coming weeks in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

"CityVille" play involves creating thriving cities while balancing the needs of virtual inhabitants and tending to jobs such as running businesses and harvesting crops.

Players in the roles of city managers will also need to cultivate beneficial relationships with neighboring cities.

US warns troops about FB privacy issue

The United States Air Force is warning its troops to be careful when using Facebook and other popular networking sites because some new features could show the enemy exactly where US forces are located in war zones.

In a warning issued on its internal website earlier this month, the Air Force said that "careless use of these services by airmen can have devastating operations security and privacy implications." The message was also sent to senior commanders, who were asked to get the word out to their forces.

The applications, which are offered by a variety of services including Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt, can identify a person's location, even pinpoint it on a map.

A key concern is that enemy forces could use such features to track troops in the war zone who have a Blackberry or other smart phone and use those networking services.

Location services have grown in popularity as more people get smart phones that have GPS and other means of determining the user's location.

In most cases, however, users have to go into the program manually and check in or list a location in order for that location to show up.

According to Facebook's practices, for example, users must either download the Facebook application and then check in to a location, or go to the mobile Facebook page to check in.

The default setting for Facebook then allows a user's friends to see the location, but that setting can be manually changed to allow friends of friends or "everyone" to see the location.

Facebook mail

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the newly launched Facebook messaging system will soon replace the regular mail.

"We spent lot of time building a handful of products to fit what we think the need is in a modern messaging system," said Zuckerberg in his fresh attack on rival Google.

So what is the difference between the newly launched Facebook messaging system and the good old Gmail?

The new Facebook system unifies all your conversations that happen through e-mails, Facebook messages, SMS, other chat clients and puts them as a thread on your new @facebook.com email address.

Your e-mail username will be similar to your profile name and you will be able to send your emails from within your Facebook page.

Facebook's 'Social Inbox'; much like Gmail's 'priority inbox' will sort your personal messages and prioritising notes from Facebook friends. All other messages go in a second inbox. You will be allowed to move people from one folder to other.

Facebook has about 500 million users so this product is a direct threat to Gmail's 170 million users and Yahoo!'s 303 million users.

The new feature is already being rolled out in the US but might take a while to reach your inbox. And you will have to sign up for this service at .

So should you switch from your e-mail to this? Considering Facebook's track record on privacy maybe you should wait and watch.

Facebook worth $ 41 billion

Just an hour before Facebook is set to announce its 'gmail killer', it now ranks as the third largest web company, with an estimated valuation of USD 41 billion which is greater than EBay.

According to Bloomberg, the social network's latest valuation, based on the selling price of shares on SecondMarket, an exchange for privately held companies, makes it the country's third-largest online business after Google

(USD 192.9 billion) and Amazon (USD74.4 billion).

Since Facebook has yet to go public, its forecasted revenue and worth in the public market is all still theoretical. Facebook, which expects sales of at least USD 1.4 billion this year, has called the figure "fundamentally speculative."

Based on recent private-market transactions, Facebook has a total estimated value of USD 41 billion, exceeding eBay's USD 39.4 billion in market capitalisation.

The only two web companies worth more than Facebook are Amazon, at USD 74.4 billion and Google, Inc., at USD 192.9 billion.

Today's value of Facebook comes from an "off-the-record" conversation that Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Brian Womack had with someone who had access to recent transaction data on SecondMarket.com.

Now if Facebook were trading on an exchange that the public could access, the size of the company's total market capitalization might increase over the course of the trading day depending on the exact details that Mark Zuckerberg announces at today's 10 am PST press conference.

Facebook's value has been growing for almost three years now, but it seems to be accelerating recently.

While there's no doubt that Facebook is one of the biggest websites and one of the biggest companies of the moment, it's hard to know if the company's estimated valuation has anything to do with its actual worth.

And there is no way of knowing that until Facebook finally files for an initial public offering.

Based on what Facebook has been saying so far, that may be at least a couple of years from now.

The reason why Facebook is not jumping ahead and filing for an IPO is that, while the company is growing fast, its revenue is still not spectacular.

Facebook could bring in close to USD 1.5 billion or as much as USD 2 billion in revenue this year, depending on who's doing the estimates.

Facebook's users have increased by more than two-thirds since September 2009, when it had 300 million members.

In March, the company surpassed Google as the most visited Web site in the US, according to research firm Hitwise.