Speaking at today’s Social Good Conference, Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg made another announcement surrounding the Facebook Gift Shop: charity gifts.

In a test starting next week, (RED), Kiva, Toms, and WWF will each offer 1-2 gifts at $5 or $10 each. Facebook users will be able to buy these gifts for friends, and the proceeds will go to the charity associated with the gift. This is essentially an extension of an increasingly popular offline concept – the idea of giving a gift to a recipient’s favorite charity as a present.

This isn’t the first time Facebook is experimenting with virtual gifts for charity – earlier this year, they launched a similar initiative upon hitting the 200 million member milestone. However, as Facebook moves further into gifts and payments, charity gifts may become a staple of the site.

According a company spokesperson, “this is an alpha initiative and is not available to other charities at this time, but we may open up the program to new partners in the future pending the results. It is our goal to give our users a way to support the causes and issues that are important to them on a global scale.”

Facebook has been facing some heat in Canada for violation of that country’s privacy laws, and tomorrow the Canadian privacy commissioner will announce what the social networking company will be doing to address those concerns.

The issue surrounds retention of customer data even after a user cancels his or her account, which the Canadian privacy commission claims violates the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

There are also apparently concerns regarding how Facebook shares user information with third parties, particularly the now almost one million software developers making use of the Facebook application platform.

Though there’s no word yet on what exactly Facebook will do to address the privacy concerns, what is revealed at tomorrow’s press conference could have wider implications for other social networks and services surrounding privacy standards and the usage of customer data. Tamir Israel of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic said he also expects those changes to extend beyond Canadian borders as well and to possibly be implemented Facebook-wide.

Facebook has also informed us they’ll be doing a follow-up after tomorrow’s announcements:

“We will be having a media call tomorrow following the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s press conference. The call will be tomorrow (August 27) at 11:30 AM EDT.”

Do you think keeping customer data after an account is terminated is a violation of privacy? What privacy standards do you think social networks should adopt? Share your comments below.

Wikipedia is one of the most prominent cases for world collaboration and social media in action. Unlike the standard encyclopedia, often written by experts and sourced from the same, Wikipedia articles are entirely community-built, often without restrictions. If you can create an account, you can write and edit Wikipedia articles. It is that feature that as made it into one of the world’s most popular websites.

Now a core feature, perhaps a core principal, of “the free encyclopedia anyone can edit” is about to become restricted. According to The New York Times, editing articles about living people on Wikipedia will require approval from an experienced editor first.

Is this a fundamental shift to the Wikipedia philosophy, or a necessary step to assure that quality reigns over misinformation?

Flagged Revisions

The lengthy New York Times piece goes into detail about this plan. Or, as Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales called it, a test:

“It is a test. We will be interested to see all the questions raised. How long will it take for something to be approved? Will it take a couple of minutes, days, weeks?”

The new restrictions are called flagged revisions. Before any newbie or novice updates the Wikipedia page of a living person, a senior editor has to sign off on the change before it goes live. This will occur to the English edition of Wikipedia in the next few weeks. It’s been in testing already, as the German-language version already has this restriction on all articles.

Why the change now though? Wikimedia chairman Michael Snow had this to say to the NYT:

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

Wikipedia Turns the Page

As Wikipedia’s influence has grown, so has the amount of reliance people have placed in the social media non-profit. People go to Wikipedia first for information on almost every topic. It has replaced the paper and binder encyclopedias of old, especially for the new generation.

However, adding misinformation and inaccurate edits is relatively easy, and those changes could stay up for hours, days, or even weeks in some cases. It’s been one of Wikipedia’s major drawbacks. The new flagged revisions feature is really the only effective way to address the issue of inaccuracy. We won’t be surprised if the change is imposed on all articles eventually.

Still, we can’t help but feel a bit sad that this change had to happen. Wikipedia was egalitarian in the spread and use of information, and it treated everyone as equal contributors of knowledge. While that may not necessarily be true in the real world, it still was the driving force behind the creation of 3 million articles, more than any other encyclopedia could ever hope to boast.

The move was necessary, but it does mark a new chapter in the Wikipedia information age and the end of an old one.

This is a bit of a shocker. Facebook, who has seemingly been in a race to emulate many of Twitter’s features, just announced that it’s launching the ability for Facebook Page admins to simultaneously update both their Page and Twitter.

Facebook explains how this will work in a blog post:

“If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them.

If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will only link Facebook Pages to Twitter, not your individual profile. It will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter”

While that makes a lot of sense from a convenience standpoint – many big time Twitter users also have popular Facebook Pages and vice versa – it’s surprising to see Facebook so openly acknowledge Twitter’s reach. That said, by giving users the ability to update both services via Facebook, they’re clearly hoping that the Facebook Page will become the first stop for admins.

That would mean lots of “via Facebook” messages showing up in tweets, and in fact, it’s not hard to imagine Facebook quickly becoming one of Twitter’s most popular clients. However, I wouldn’t expect this functionality to be extended to user profiles anytime soon, which would clearly be a bigger win for Twitter than Facebook.

While there are many unofficial Wikipedia iPhone apps on the market (some of which work really well), there’s never been an official one from Wikipedia itself. That changed today as the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, has launched an official iPhone application: Wikipedia Mobile [iTunes Link].

The free app does exactly what you’d expect it to do: access Wikipedia. The focus, according to the Foundation, is “on being very simple and very fast.” The entire thing is community-built and open-source, and in the nature of Wikipedia, they’re looking for more people to contribute.

The app itself is nothing to rave over; it is indeed simple, but unfortunately not particularly fast-loading. Still, it gets you the information you’re looking for, it loads images, and it is easy to read. What you can’t do is save favorite pages, edit pages, or even browse tables of contents – things other apps like Wikipanion [iTunes Link] can do too.

For now, it’s a more convenient mobile version of Wikipedia, but with community power, it should gain new features rather quickly. It’s worth the download, although you may want to keep using third-party Wikipedia apps for the time being.

Google keeps on adding and testing new features for its Chrome browser. Things like extensions and Chrome for Mac are still missing, although available if you are adventurous and install Chromium, the open-source project for Google Chrome. Chromium has beta and development features that Google is testing before adding to the Chrome browswer.

Chromium got a new feature, as it occassionally does, but this one definitely caught our eye. The Chromium team announced the addition of bookmark syncing in the developer’s build of Chromium. The new feature will let you keep the same set of bookmarks on multiple machines as well as store them in your Google Docs. This is not unlike the very popular Firefox extension Xmarks.

Here’s how Google explained the new addition, as well as how to implement it:

As of today’s dev channel build, we’re adding a brand new feature to Google Chrome: bookmark sync. Many users have several machines, one at home and one at work for example. This new feature makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on all your machines, and stores them alongside your Google Docs for easy web access.

To activate this feature, launch Google Chrome with the –enable-sync command-line flag. Once you set up sync from the Tools menu, Chrome will then upload and store your bookmarks in your Google Account. Anytime you add or change a bookmark, your changes will be sent to the cloud and immediately broadcast to all other computers for which you’ve activated bookmark sync (using the same XMPP technology as Google Talk).

A note: the Chromium Dev version is the least stable of the Chromium browsers. Windows can crash, new features can need tweaks, and we may never see bookmark syncing ever reach Google Chrome itself. However, this new feature still tickles our fancy, so if you’re brave, subscribe to the dev channel and get the update.

Beate Marie Eriksen (born 19 October 1960) is a Norwegian actress and film director. She acts in Hotel Cæsar, a popular Norwegian soap opera. The article about her on Wikipedia is the three millionth article there; another important milestone in the history of the people’s encyclopedia.

This latest milestone was announced on the front page of the English Wikipedia, but searching Wikipedia for itself reveals other interesting stats (for even more stats, read about the history of Wikipedia). It has about 10 million registered users and over 17 million pages. For comparison, the oldest English language encyclopedia, Britannica, has 40 million words on half a million topics. And yes, I also found that on Wikipedia.

Although the growth of Wikipedia has slowed down somewhat in recent years, it is, without question, one of the most important sources of knowledge today. The number of articles will never grow as explosively as it did in the early days, for obvious reasons: so many topics have already been covered.

It is important to note that Wikipedia actually has 13 million articles, if you count the versions in other languages, which still have tremendous room to grow. Therefore, I’m sure that the largest online encyclopedia hasn’t will reach many more milestones in the future.

Ever since a Financial Times article in July reported that an Apple Tablet would be launching before Christmas, the entire web’s been buzzing nonstop over the potential device. But with no information to feed the insatiable curiosity of tech enthusiasts, the rumor mill has exploded instead. Analysts claiming they tested it and rumored launch dates only scratch the surface. The rumors are getting out of control.

That’s why we think it’s time to get everybody on the same page on the Apple Tablet. We’ve taken the most common tablet rumors, analyzed them, and provide you with our assessment of each rumor. Be prepared for a reality check, though. We probably know more about extraterrestrial life than we do about the Apple Tablet.

Rumor 1: There Is an Apple Tablet

Status: Unconfirmed, but likely.

Analysis: With all of this talk about the Apple Tablet or the Apple iTablet, it’s easy to forget that there has been no announcement about it. Rumors about an Apple Tablet have swirled around since at least 2007.

However, our impression is that the tablet is real, and that it’s coming very soon. Most sources have said that the Tablet exists. Apple patents and reports from multiple reputable media organizations add to the credibility of the rumors.

Our take: It’s very likely that the Tablet exists.

Rumor 2: Apple Will Announce It During the Week of September 7th

Status: Possible, due to Apple’s history.

Analysis: AllThingsD put out a report a few days ago claiming that Apple is having a keynote on September 7th. We’ve heard these reports from other sources as well. This wouldn’t be surprising if true – apple has had a big keynote to launch new products (especially iPod lines) generally after Labor Day, Sept. 7th.

Whether Apple will actually announce the Apple Tablet is an entirely different story. While many believe that the Tablet will make its debut at this supposed keynote, Former MacWorld editor Jim Dalrymple says that it will not see the light of day until 2010, meaning an announcement wouldn’t come until then.

Our take: We’re fairly confident a keynote is coming. We’re not as sure about the Tablet, though. Still, there’s a decent chance.

Rumor 3: The Apple Tablet Doesn’t Arrive Until 2010

---

Status: Unknown.

Analysis: Some reports say it will arrive before the Christmas season (if it even exists). Some say not until early 2010. There’s nothing definitive that points to either time frame, although Mr. Dalrymple does have his sources within Apple. Really it depends on how far development has gone (and how many snags Apple has hit). Launching for the X-mas season is ideal.

Our take: If they announce it at the keynote, expect 2009. Otherwise, 2010.

Rumor 4: It Will Run iPhone Apps

Status: Well, it’s got to run an OS, right?

Analysis: The tablet will run one of three things: the iPhone 3.1 OS (or a variation thereof), the Mac OS X 10 (or a variation), or a brand new OS. Building another OS seems like a waste in time, so we’re focused on the first two possibilities. Out of those two, it’s more likely to run apps. Most rumors describe the table as a giant version of the iPod Touch or iPhone, meaning it should run apps on a big screen. It could even be the “iProd” found in the most recent iPhone OS configuration, though that’s more likely to be the new iPod Touch line.

Our take: More likely than not this thing runs apps.

Rumor 5: This Is the Apple Tablet:

Status: Pretty much debunked.

Analysis: Looks right, feels right, but as Engadget has already been tipped to, the “Welcome” graphic is easily found on Google Image search. Besides, having a button in the very middle just isn’t practical from a usability standpoint.

Our take: Can you say “Photoshop”?

Conclusion

There are a lot more rumors, but the point is that not a single thing about this Apple Tablet is confirmed. Not even its existence. The tablet could be announced in September. It could appear in 2010. It may not even exist. This is all speculation.

Until someone from Apple confirms its existence publicly, be wary of tablet rumors and pics. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Soon enough we’ll have the truth.

Aside from battling recent DDoS attacks, Twitter has also been hit with a variety of phishing, spam, and malware threats over the past few months. The latest involves something known as a botnet posting obfuscated code as tweets to spread viruses.

At this point, you might be curious what exactly “obfuscated code” and botnets might be. Symantec explained the threat on their blog, and shows what to be on the lookout for via an account that his since been suspended by Twitter:

“Obfuscated Twitter status messages are being used to send out new download links to malware that Symantec calls Downloader.Sninfs …

… Our investigation and analysis of Downloader.Sninfs is ongoing but has so far shown that it reads a specific Twitter.com RSS feed only once. The RSS feed is simply a text file similar to other RSS feeds found on other Internet sites. The RSS text file contains information as to where Downloader.Sninfs can find additional threats to download onto the compromised system. In this way the RSS file acts like a config file for the malware.”

Essentially, the idea seems to be when a user consumes tweets with the code, it could be used to cause additional harm (by way of downloading new malware unbeknownst to the user) to those that have already been infected with Downloader.Sninfs.

Thus, it would seem that the best way to protect against this is to avoid downloading the malware in the first place by being skeptical of short links with dubious claims and avoiding new Twitter apps that ask for your username and password instead of Twitter OAuth. Symantec also offers removal instructions if you think you’ve been infected.

Facebook’s been evolving right before our very eyes. It started back in March, when Facebook rolled out a new homepage design and redesigned Facebook Pages. At the same time, they started announcing changes to open up the platform: public profiles, profile fans, public status updates, real-time search, and earlier this morning, Facebook Lite. Facebook’s been busy.

All of this is part of a process we sometimes describe as Twitterification. Facebook is opening up in parts in order to combat Twitter – another reason why Facebook completed that blockbuster acquisition of FriendFeed. But since these privacy and profile changes have occurred in parts, they have created a lot of confusion.

That’s why we have written this guide to Facebook’s most recent changes to profiles, status updates, and privacy features. We highlight the big changes and explain what is likely to come next. Here’s how the new Facebook is set up:

Profiles

In terms of privacy, there have been two major changes. The first one, which occurred back in March, is that you can make your Facebook profile public. You can make all elements or just parts of your profile public: photos, details, videos, work information, etc. This can be managed in Facebook’s profile privacy settings.

The other major change to profiles, announced in June, is the ability to have profile fans. It’s just like Twitter followers: they will be able to see your updates and info without you friending them. This feature is not yet launched, but will be coming soon:

Status Updates

Status updates have also changed. In the past, only your friends could see your publish posts and status updates (you know, that big “What’s on your mind?” box at the top of the homepage). But as of June, you have the ability to post status updates not only to your friends, but to friends of friends, to your networks, and to everyone. You may need to activate it in your Facebook profile privacy settings.

You’ll also notice that there’s a custom setting. You can post status updates just to specific friend lists. For example, post a personal update just to your top 20 friends, or you can let everyone on Facebook find your update about your big tweetup next week.

The change brings it more in line with Twitter, which is public by default. Really though, this was the prelude to yesterday’s big Facebook Search launch.

Realtime Search

As we covered in-depth yesterday, Facebook is currently rolling out realtime search. While the old search only could find things like apps, groups, and people, the new search is like a beefed-up version of Twitter Search. The new search crawls the last 30 days of news feed activity – photos, notes, images, videos, links, and status updates – and lets users search them all by keyword. Want to learn more about the FriendFeed acquisition or chatter about Mashable on Facebook? The new search helps:

So where does Facebook privacy play into all of this? The search covers all of your friends, but on top of that, it searches all public profiles and public status updates. So if you want to be found in search, you better change your Facebook privacy settings. Remember though, what you say will be visible to everyone then, so don’t say anything you wouldn’t discuss on your public Twitter feed.

What’s Next?

Facebook’s many new features can all be described with one word: openness. It has seen Twitter steal the spotlight and the attention, especially when breaking news and world events occur. Facebook, with its hundreds of millions of users, should be able to do the same thing, but cannot due to the network restrictions that have existed since Facebook’s inception as a college social network.

Facebook will encourage all of its users to join in on the world conversation by opening up their profiles, making their status updates public, and promoting its new realtime search tool. It will also promote users having conversations around news items – a la FriendFeed. The acquisition provides Facebook with a lot of technology that focuses on realtime updates, public conversations, and in-depth discussions. You will see integration with the world’s largest social network very quickly. FriendFeed may even become the model for public discussions on Facebook.

Luckily, you have a choice in these matters. If you want to keep your Facebook profile private between you and your closest friends, you can – just adjust your privacy settings to your network of friends. However, as Facebook opens up more and more, the pressure to open up your profile will increase as well. So prepare yourself for a new Facebook, one that intends to take down Twitter and even give Google a run for its money.

Back in 2005 (a long time in the social media world), Yahoo acquired Delicious, the popular social bookmarking website. Both Yahoo and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter had big plans to change the way we share, remember, and discover information on the Internet. Yahoo even promised “to give Delicious the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community.”

So where is it now? Unfortunately, in the case of Delicious, nowhere. It’s been stagnant in terms of development and growth for years (at least until recently, when it started launching new features). Delicious has hit a perpetual ceiling, and understandably its founder is not happy about it. So he spoke out.

He made his comments during a conversation on Hacker News. Joshua responded to a comment claiming Yahoo was cool with “Since when is Yahoo cool?” Then he described Yahoo as a “sausage factory” before making the following statement:

I guess. I think the folks that pay Linus or whatever have done more for OS. Sun’s opensolaris, too. MySQL, etc too. Just by sheer weight of code.

The problem is that the number of cool projects is pretty minimal. They’re in duck and cover mode. They’ll get pushed to trim employees further and further to stretch the revenues out.

I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.

We cannot blame Joshua for his frustration. Delicious’s growth has stagnated for at least a year and has completely dropped in terms of relevance. Even a few years ago, it had huge prospects and strong potential. Joshua (who is now at Google) put his heart and his soul into the popular bookmarking service. What he got in return wasn’t the same commitment.

Does Yahoo have a chance to turn Delicious around? Yes. But Delicious could have been a lot more relevant and useful right now, and Joshua knows it. Knowing that has to be heartbreaking.

It’s no coincidence that Facebook launched a new real-time search engine on the same day that it bought FriendFeed and Google announced a new infrastructure project aimed at speeding up its indexing time. Make no mistake about it: people that know search believe that there’s gold in real-time and social data, and Facebook’s blockbuster acquisition of FriendFeed was a lob squarely across Google’s bow.

Facebook has always been in a position to take a lead in real-time and social search because of the sheer amount of data the site has collected about what people are doing, the things they’re interested in, and what their social graph looks like. About 15 months ago, Paul Buchheit, the founder of FriendFeed, actually wrote that the human link data at sites like Facebook “could ultimately be more valuable than the link data from the web” that Google’s search engine is based on – someone just needs to mine it. Now he may have his chance.

What Facebook Has

Here’s the bullet point list of what Facebook got by purchasing FriendFeed:

• A collection of very smart, ex-Google engineers that really know real-time search
• A social status platform that is arguably better than TwitterTwitterTwitter’s
• A powerful, ready-made real-time search product
• A small, but influential user base full of early adopters willing to try and evangelize new products

Some might think FriendFeed was a second choice acquisition for Facebook, since the company couldn’t land Twitter last year. But FriendFeed was probably the smarter choice. At just under $50 million it cost less than 1/10th as much as Twitter would have, and comes with arguably a better platform and a team that’s just as strong. Yes, Twitter has more than 20 times as many users, but the acquisition of FriendFeed was clearly about technology and engineering talent – one thing Facebook is not lacking, after all, is users.

Google Worry

Facebook has one major asset: users, lots of them. 250 million registered users, to be exact, 30 million of whom update their status at least once per day. What they don’t have is users who are used to sharing their status updates with the world, but they’re trying to change that.

Google still gets more than twice as many visitors as Facebook, but how might that change if Facebook and the new engineering additions from team FriendFeed figure out how to slice and dice that user data in real-time? No one has yet really cracked the real-time or social search egg, but if Facebook can do it, its approximately hundreds of millions of monthly visitors could become hundreds of millions of monthly searchers – and that’s very monetizable and very dangerous to Google’s core business.

And what of Microsoft? Let’s not forget that Microsoft’s BingBingBing powers web search results on Facebook, already. What if the two companies mash it all together and Facebook’s real-time, social web search results find their way out onto Yahoo! (which will soon serve Bing search results)? That’s a very plausible eventuality, and another that’s very dangerous to Google.

What should really worry Google, though, is Facebook’s track record. Facebook has a knack for taking the technologies geeks love and adapting them for mainstream audiences. They did it with the news feed (FriendFeed), photo tagging (Flickr), link sharing (Delicious), and even status updates, which Facebook had before Twitter, but only pushed to the forefront once Twitter got hot with early adopters.

Sometimes a vocal minority fights against these features when they are first introduced, but Facebook has proven that it has a knack for knowing when to tweak and change features and when to stand their ground to find that sweet spot for features that users eventually come to love and rely upon.

Given their past track record, it seems likely that Facebook will be able to get most of its tens of millions of active users to embrace whichever of FriendFeed’s features it co-opts and if they can then succeed in convincing those users to use its combination real-time/Bing-powered web search – look out Google, you have a new and very worthy competitor.

The announcement this weekend that Tr.im will shut down has deeply worrying implications for URL shorteners: when these services go away, tens of thousands of links on the web simply stop working. Some sites will lose hundreds of inbound links, and the traffic that comes with them.

After a recent decision by Digg to simply redirect their shortURLs to their own site, there’s a great deal of concern that other services will simply shut down and kill their links, or worse, redirect them to somewhere else entirely.

Now Bit.ly, the default URL shortener on Twitter, wants to save dying URL shorteners. About 4 months ago, bit.ly investor Betaworks began a project called 301works, an archive of URL mappings similar to the Way Back Machine for web pages. None of the other URL shorteners expressed interest at the time (not surprising, since Bit.ly is their biggest competitor).

Another option for Bit.ly might simply be to buy Tr.im for a small amount: the move would reassure critics who say that all URL shorteners are not to be trusted because they could close down at any time.

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, social news buttons, blogging, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere and special blog search engines.

Social Media optimization is considered an integral part of an online reputation management (ORM) or Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) strategy for organizations or individuals who care about their online presence.

Social Media Optimisation (SMO), is not limited to marketing and brand building. Increasingly smart businesses are integrating social media participation as part of their knowledge management strategy (ie. product/service development, recruiting, employee engagement and turnover, brand building, customer satisfaction and relations, business development and more).