13May10
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Facebook gets a lot of grief for their privacy gaffes, and for the clumsy way of rolling out new features that impact privacy, but they are also an important model to understand for any social networking site dealing with their own privacy policies and privacy settings. This is obvious when you look at this great [...]
21Apr10
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As a follow-up to last week’s post about reputation-based filtering, there’s a entire book (and blog) on the subject of building reputation-based systems, including the pitfalls, best-practices, and more. Social networks have the benefit of built-in reputation: If someone’s a friend, there’s implicit trust. If they are a friend of a friend (in the LinkedIn [...]
26Jan10
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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 [...]
2Jan10
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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 [...]