Facebook Dislike button spreads fast, but is a fake – watch out!

Image via CrunchBase

Don’t be too quick to click on links claiming to “Enable Dislike Button” on Facebook, as a fast-spreading scam has caused problems for social networking users this weekend.

Messages claiming to offer the opposite to a like button have been appearing on many Facebook users’ walls:

Facebook now has a dislike button! Click 'Enable Dislike Button' to turn on the new feature!

Like the “Preventing Spam / Verify my account” scam which went before it, the scammers have managed to waltz past Facebook’s security to replace the standard “Share” option with a link labelled “Enable Dislike Button”.

The fact that the “Enable Dislike Button” link does not appear in the main part of the message, but lower down alongside “Link” and “Comment”, is likely to fool some users into believing that it is genuine.

Clicking on the link, however, will not only forward the fake message about the so-called “Fakebook Dislike button” to all of your online friends by posting it to your profile, but also run obfuscated Javascript on your computer.

The potential for malice should be obvious.

As we’ve explained before, there is no official dislike button provided by Facebook and there isn’t ever likely to be. But it remains something that many Facebook users would like, and so scammers have often used the offer of a “Dislike button” as bait for the unwary.

Here’s another example that is spreading, attempting to trick you into pasting JavaScript into your browser’s address bar, before leading you to a survey scam:

If you use Facebook and want to learn more about spam, malware, scams and other threats, you should join the Sophos Facebook page where we have a thriving community of over 80,000 people.

Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com

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Facebook Launches ‘Send’ Button For More Selective Sharing, Announces 50 Million ‘Groups’

Facebook’s increasingly ubiquitous ‘Like’ button is getting a new friend: the Send button. Click on a webpage that has the Send button integrated, and you’ll be prompted to share it with any of your Facebook Groups, your Facebook friends, or any standard email address. In other words, where the Like button is designed to let you quickly share content with all of your Facebook friends, the Send button is for sharing with a subset of them.

Site designers are groaning right now (they have yet another sharing widget to integrate), but it’s a logical step for Facebook — there are certainly times when you want to share links with a handful of friends instead of your News Feed, and this gives you one less reason to fire up your non-Facebook email account. 50 sites are launching with the feature.

In addition to the new Send button, Facebook is adding a handful of features to its existing Groups product, which was overhauled last October. First is the introduction of photo albums for Groups. Before now it’s been possible to upload a single photo to a group, and now you’ll be able to upload a whole set. These photo albums are unusual because they’re walled within the Group — only other group members will be able to see them (even tagged photos aren’t visible to people on the outside).

The second addition is integration with Facebook Questions, which re-launched last month. Now you can pose a question that’s contained within the group.

Finally, and most important, is a new setting that will require Group administrators to approve any new members who have been invited to join the group. Up until now anyone within a Facebook Group was able to invite any of their friends (the idea was that you’d be violating the ‘social contract’ if you started inviting people who didn’t belong). But now Facebook recognizes that there are some groups that should be more private, so you can require admin approval.

Provided it gets broad distribution (which seems a given), the Send button will probably lead to a boost in Groups usage. It’s always been easy to share links within Groups, but this lowers the bar even further because you don’t have to leave the page you’re reading — you can imagine people using the button to share book reviews with their book club, close friends sharing new ideas for travel destinations, and so on.

And while ‘Send’ may not sound especially exciting given how long other sharing widgets have been around, this is yet another step in Facebook’s mission to reinvent email with their own “modern messaging system“, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it. One by one, they’re integrating easy ways to complete tasks that have traditionally been done over email. Today’s launch — sending links to friends — is obviously a huge one, and you can be sure they have others in the works. One other email-replacing feature I’ve heard about (though I’m not sure they’re still working on it): a way to send a structured poll to a subset of your friends.

Facebook says that there are now 50 million Facebook groups, and while not all of these are active, it says that the majority of them are.

Source :- http://techcrunch.com

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Facebook’s Like Button Celebrates Its First Birthday

Exactly one year after its launch, the Facebook Like Button has become ubiquitous across the web and is still installed on thousands of new websites every day.

Facebook first introduced the Like Button at its F8 developer’s conference, along with Facebook Open Graph and instant personalization. Through the “Like”, Facebook spread its social footprint across the web. 50,000 websites installed the Like Button in its first week, and that number rose to 100,000 in less than a month.

That number hasn’t stopped rising since. Facebook said on Thursday that 10,000+ websites add the Like Button every day — identical to what COO Sheryl Sandberg said in October last year. In other words, the growth of the Like button hasn’t slowed down in the last six months. The social network says more than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook so far, including over 80% of the U.S. top 100 websites.

Facebook’s success hasn’t gone without notice. Google recently launched +1, its answer to Facebook’s Like Button, and a study last month by Eventbrite concluded that a “Like” is more profitable than a tweet.

What do you think of the Like Button? How has it changed your habits on the web? Let us know in the comments.

( Source) – mashableblog

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Google’s +1 Button takes on Facebook’s Like

+1 Button helps populate recommended websites in relevant searches of your Google contacts

With everything on the Internet going social, Google has given a social spin to its search engine as well. Google has announced the +1 button, which is much similar to Facebook‘s Like button. Just like its Facebook counterpart, the +1 button lets you recommend search results to your contacts across Google’s own network, and also receive recommendations from the same. But unlike Facebook’s Like button, the recommendations will be served to the user in a more elegant and relevant fashion.

The +1 button is placed on the right side of a search result link and right next to the magnifying glass icon of the Google’s Instant Previews feature. If you think the website you’ve visited is worthy of being shared, you may use the +1 Button to share it with your Google contacts. The recommended website will then show up in your friends’ Google search results when they search for something relevant to it. Your Google contacts will be able to see that you have recommended that particular website for them and vice-versa.  Google says that the +1 button can be easily added to websites, so you can expect it to be commonplace on the Internet, enabling you to share them with your friends; pretty much like you use the Like button.

For example, if your friend recommends a particular website, about say a certain mobile phone, by clicking on the +1 button, you will find the same website recommended by your friend in your search results, the next time you hunt for a mobile phone upgrade in Google search. In a world where web search results are rife with SEO optimised pages of little relevance, it’s good to have websites recommended by someone you know and trust, and not just a by product clever optimisations designed to fool the Google algorithm.

Google product manager Rob Spiro sums that up in his blog post that explains, “Our goal at Google is to get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible. But relevance is about relationships as well as words on webpages. That’s why we recently started to include more information from people you know — stuff they’ve shared on Twitter, Flickr and other sites — in Google search results. Today we’re taking that a step further, enabling you to share recommendations with the world right in Google’s search results.”

The +1 button hasn’t been released to the public yet, but Google claims that it is been being beta tested on a controlled number of test audience. Soon enough, users will be able to sample this feature by opting in for it through Google’s experimental search site. It seems like Google is just about to break Facebook’s monopoly on recommendations, but is Google’s own social network comprising of Google contacts large enough to have any relevance over Facebook’s massive network, which makes incorporating the Like button attractive for websites? Even then, the relevance of the implementation of the +1 button into Google searches may make it more successful.

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Facebook Like to get Share button feature

Tests are being conducted including very limited number of Facebook users

Popular social network Facebook s Like button has given birth to thousands of serial likers (Yes, I just made it up). Apparently to live up to the true motive of liking and sharing user-generated or uploaded content, Facebook had introduced new Share button last year. Till date, you could like almost everything on Facebook but can t share the same in your News Feed with your connections. Mashable reports that the Like button is soon getting Share functionality and thereby you can share the posted content with others.

Upcoming features at Facebook always keep showing up during the testing phase. Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich informed that Facebook will continue to carry the Share button on the website. Lucich said, We re always testing new products that incorporate developer feedback as we work to improve the Platform experience, and have no details to share at this time.

Basically any post, photo, video, or link you Like on Facebook would get the Share functionality as well so that you can share it with others. In a way, it s just going to increase the noise by duplication of same post. To Like something on Facebook is very different from sharing it with others.  Marketers and publishers would certainly admire the new Share functionality of the Like button since the audience will be anticipated to like and share the content.

The new feature has its own set of merits and demerits. The merit lies in the fact that users can share whatever they like with others after hitting Like button. But the demerit lies in the fact that just because one hits Like button doesn t mean user wants to share it with his/her friends. In fact just like several complain about certain users hitting Like button for everything and everywhere possible, it just becomes difficult to judge accurately whether the purpose was served or not.

The share functionality for Like button would be visible mostly on the Facebook web interface and mobile interface only. It won’t impact the individual Like and Share plugins available as part of Social Plugins. However, we do not underestimate the Facebook users for several know what each feature stands for. Hence I hope if and when this new feature rolls out, users will make use of it judiciously.

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