If you are starting a social networking site, it can be tempting to take advantage of the power of third-party APIs to build your membership. That’s the approach taken by The Whuffie Bank, and intriguing effort to measure online reputation. Using publicly-available profiles from Twitter and Facebook, they track your public activity on social networks [...]

It’s crucial that you fully understand the software platform that you are using to host your social networking site, and never just assume it’s secure. For example, regardless of which platform you use to run your site, you need to be aware of a common security fault: User profiles stored in a database with plain [...]