Sadly, though, for many users, things are not quite as easy as just filling out this web form and waiting for the response. Not only do you need to know what law to cite in your request (something Facebook could easily figure out itself if it wanted to make things easy for its users), but as Schrems himself found out, even a meticulously prepared request doesn’t necessarily lead to an immediate response. As Germany news weekly Die Zeit reports, Facebook still didn’t want to give him his data. Only after an official complaint to the Irish data protection agency did the social network finally relent.

All Your Data Belongs to Us – Even the Deleted Kind…

Once Facebook sends the data over, it comes in the form of a CD with an unencrypted PDF document on it. Depending on your Facebook usage, that document can be between a few dozen and thousands of pages long (you canfind some examples here).

What’s in these documents? Mostly, it’s the kind of data you would expect (when you logged in, what’s in your “about me” section, credit card information if you use Facebook Credits, phone numbers, your likes and connections, what browser you used, location data, the messages you have sent and comments you have left, etc.). One interesting kink here is that quite a few users who requested this data also found some of their deleted posts in these documents.

How to Get Your Data

If you are in Europe, Schrems compiled a step-by-step guide for getting Facebook to give you your data. Just follow these instructions and be ready to respond to Facebook’s attempts to make you go away (chances are, says Schrem, Facebook will just tell you to log in to your account and see you data there – which, of course, doesn’t include all the metadata and deleted posts it also archives).

New From Facebook: Timeline, Music Apps, Lightweight Status Updates

As Zuckerberg noted at the beginning of his keynote, the early years of social networking were about getting people signed up and connecting them. According to him, the next era of social network is about social apps and other products that these connections make possible. To do so, Facebook introduced new ways to share more lightweight updates and also announced a completely redesigned profile page today. Instead of just “linking” content, Facebook is shifting more towards sharing everything you do. Apps can now automatically share everything you do in them automatically to Facebook – assuming you allow them to do so.

Judging from today’s announcements, Facebook really, really wants you to share everything you do – and by making more and more of these updates automatic (like the songs you listen to on Spotify), it will soon be aggregating far more information about its users than ever before. It remains to be seen how its users will react to this.

• Timeline: Timeline is, according to Zuckerberg, “the story of your life.” Timeline is basically a wider, more visual version of your old profile. It will give users access to all of their apps, stories and a better way to express “who you are.” Split into multiple columns, the timeline basically shows all of your updates in one place and on an endlessly scrolling page. Timeline will also be available for mobile devices. Timeline will be in beta for a while. Developers will get access today and everybody else can sign up for it today. Facebook hopes to roll it out to all users over the “next few weeks.”
  
  For Facebook, the timelines is all about giving people a way to tell “the story of their lives.” It’s somewhat similar to the old wall, but with a stronger focus on all the important things you did in the past. As you go back in time, Facebook will summarize more of your events, though it’s not quite clear how the company decides which events were really important to you in the past.More from Zuckerberg: “People feel an intense ownership over their profile. Millions of people have spent a ton of time telling the story of their life on their profile. Timeline is an important next step in telling the story of your life.”
• Reports: instead of just showing you everything you have done, these new reports will summarize how you use apps over time (think reports for your RunKeep updates).
• Next Version of OpenGraph and a New Class of Apps: “Connect to anything in any way you want.” With the new lightweight sharing feature, Facebook wants to give its users the ability to share more things without annoying their friends by putting all of these updates in their newsfeed. All your media, news and book updates from web and mobile apps will go into the recently launched ticker feature but not into the newsfeed. This new class of apps will also automatically share your updates to the ticker without prompting you to share things every time it does so.
  
• Music/Movies: Facebook has partnered with a number of music and online video companies to allow users to listen to music and watch movies together on Facebook. Among these are Hulu, Netflix, Spotify, Rhapsody, turntable.fm, MOG and others. Thanks to the new lightweight updates, you can now see what your friends are watching or listening to right now.
  The fundamental shift  these updates really show best is the move from just “liking” things to participating in events together.
• Social News Apps: besides these media companies, Facebook also partnered with publishers like the Guardian, digg, The Daily, Slate, TPM, Yahoo, Flipboard and others to allow their users to easily share everything they read in their respective Facebook apps. One interesting announcement here is that The Daily, which until now was an iPad-only publication, is bringing its app to Facebook.
• Social Games: Unsurprisingly, Facebook game developers will also be able to hook into these lightweight updates that will automatically push content to the ticker.
• Lifestyle Apps: Facebook worked with companies like AirBnB, Byliner, Color, Foodspotting and others to bring lifestyle updates to the ticker as well. This means you can now share every recipe you cooked from your favorite recipe app automatically to Facebook and then see everything you cooked in your Timeline and the new reports feature later on.

After all, many of us are more than happy to share some things publicly and there is no reason others would have to become our “friends” just to be able to easily follow these updates. Facebook obviously wants you to use this feature to follow journalists, celebrities and political figures – exactly the type of users who have taken to Twitter to post their updates because it’s easier for them to get followers there without the hassle of managing lists of friends or fan pages.

Facebook recommends that brands and businesses continue to use Facebook Pages to engage with their audiences. This makes sense, especially given that Pages comes with a number of tools – including stats – that users with personal profiles don’t have access to.

To turn this feature on, just click here and follow the instructions. It’s really just a one-click affair. Your friends who want to subscribe to your updates can then also choose if they want to see all of your updates, most of them or just the important ones (how Facebook then decides how to categorize your updates, I’m not sure about, to be honest).

Stemming the Tide

With its renewed focus on lists and now this subscribe feature, Facebook is clearly chasing Twitter and especially Google+. While it’s currently the market leader, the trend recently has been towards asymmetric following and away from the explicit “friends” model that Facebook imposed upon its users until today. Make no mistake, this may just look like a small feature, but it’s a major cultural shift for Facebook. This shift doesn’t just show that Facebook is worried about Google+ and Twitter, but it also shows that these competing networks are slowly changing the nature of what users expect from a social network.

Why is Anonymous so Upset? Facebook is Selling Data to Governments

The statement itself, which was published about 3 weeks ago but mostly remained unnoticed until today, has a very paranoid feel to it. The author (or authors), for example, argue that Facebook is selling personal data to “government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria.”

Is Anonymous Able to Bring Facebook Down?

The problem with this “press release,” which as is so often the case with Anonymous, comes in the form of a YouTube video, is that it is obviously unclear who is behind this attempt. It could just be the work of a single person with no institutional support behind it. It’s not clear then, if Anonymous will really launch this attack – or if this is just an elaborate hoax.

Then, of course, there is also the simple question whether an organization like Anonymous could actually bring Facebook to its knees. After all, it’s not like Facebook doesn’t know how to handle a lot of traffic. A simple denial of service attack then, isn’t likely to be very effective.

You can read the full text of the release below:

Facebook has been working on new messaging services for a while now, starting with the announcement of its new and enhanced messaging system last November. Earlier this year, Facebook also bought the group messaging app Beluga and it looks like that acquisition is now starting to pay dividends. Today, Facebook announced Messenger, its own, Facebook-branded messaging app for iOS and Android.

According to Beluga’s co-founder and now Facebook employee Lucy Zhang, “messaging should be easy” and you shouldn’t have to think whether you should email or text a person. Instead, says Facebook, “you should be able to write a message, click “Send” and know that you will reach the person right away.” Messenger tries to approximate this goal by delivering notifications and texts to your friends through whatever means you are connected to them.

There is nothing highly exciting about the messaging app as such. It’s not available in the iTunes store yet, so I can’t review it in detail. Judging from Facebook’s screenshots, though, it’s a capable group messaging app with some interesting location-sharing features built-in.

Why a Stand-Alone App?

Why did Facebook decide to create this as a stand-alone app, though, and didn’t integrate it into its existing apps? Facebook’s Lucy Zhang says that it’s meant to simplify the process, as you just have to click once and can start messaging right away. This seems like a pretty good reason, but it would still be nice if Facebook also offered the same functionality within its flagship app as well.

A +1 Surge

This obviously represents a major surge for Google’s +1 buttons, which is even more remarkable given that these buttons currently don’t actually do much. When users click on these widgets, the action is only reflected on their Google profiles and sometimes appear in other users’ search results. The fact that so many sites are now adopting this button, though, shows how much confidence most of these businesses have in Google’s ability to turn these buttons into something useful for them, both for SEO purposes as well as for social sharing.

Twitter’s Share and Instant Follow widgets lag behind Google, though they are also still quite new and are also growing quickly.

Most Sites Still Don’t Leverage Sharing Buttons

Overall, though, these numbers are also a good reminder that most brands are still not leveraging the power of social sharing. Facebook’s Like box may be dominant in comparison to the other buttons, but even the most ubiquitous of sharing widgets is only being used by about 11% of the Web’s 10,000 largest sites.

You can download the full report here.

What Vibes Could Look Like

When it comes to music lockers, there are two basic ways of getting your music into the cloud. The Google Music and Amazon CloudPlayer approach is to make users upload every single song from their library to the cloud. This takes a long time, but has also allowed these companies to argue that they don’t need a license to host the files, as they basically just replicate a hard drive. In return, though, these apps don’t feature any real social component, as sharing songs would obviously necessitate some kind of license.

The code, courtesy of Evolver.fm

Apple’s iTunes in the Cloud, on the other hand, doesn’t force you to upload all your songs. Thanks to having licensing agreements with all the major players, Apple can just look at what’s in your library and then replicate your catalog online (often by replacing your old, low bit rate MP3s with better quality files). Chances are, Facebook will go the same route as well, given that it would definitely want to add a social component to its software.

There have also been rumors that Facebook plans to partner with European music streaming service Spotify, which is about to launch in the U.S. soon. Spotify, conveniently, also has the ability to import your local music library. It still remains to be seen, though, if Facebook will actually partner with Spotify (or another music service) or if the company decides to start its own service.

Facebook’s Launch Season Just Started…

This, of course, is only speculation so far. Unless Facebook’s developers just put the code in there to taunt us, however, we’ll likely see Vibes sometime in the near future. At yesterday’s launch event with Skype, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that Facebook is now in its “launch season” for 2011. Maybe Vibes will be among the next features to launch?

Easy Install, Great Video Quality

I just gave the new service a try and it’s clear that Facebook made the right choice by partnering with Skype. The video and audio quality is excellent and the chromeless window that pops up when you start a chat allows you to focus on the conversation. When you start a call, you’ll hear a ring and a box pops up on your Facebook page. It really couldn’t be much easier than that.

One nifty feature is that you can also leave video messages when your contact isn’t around to answer your call.

Facebook/Skype vs. Google Hangouts

We didn’t try group chats yet, but this is obviously a feature that also got a lot of attention when Google launched Google+ with Hangouts. Quite a few pundits argued that this was a killer feature for Google’s new social networking service. Google’s Hangout feature is slightly more impressive, but Facebook has clearly managed to steal some thunder from Google’s announcement (though both of these announcements were obviously in the works for months already).

Skype, of course, has been adding more Facebook functionality to its service over the last few months as well – up to the point where you can use Skype as a basic Facebook client

Zuckerberg also took some time to talk about Facebook’s guiding philosophy for the coming years. According to Zuckerberg, the driving factor for social networking in the coming years will not be about connecting the world anymore (because that has already happened for the most part, said Zuckerberg, though he also said that he hopes to get a billion people on Facebook “soon”), but “what cool stuff are you going to be able to build now that you have this kind of social infrastructure in place.”

Speeders and tailgaters who get caught by these systems often argue that they weren’t actually behind the wheel at the time the picture was taken. In Germany, it’s not the car’s owner who is responsible for these tickets but whoever was driving the car. When somebody challenges one of these tickets, there is typically some costly detective work involved, including questioning neighbors or getting access to the driver’s passport pictures on file at the local town hall. Facebook makes this a lot easier for local law enforcement: just type in the suspect’s name and there’s the picture you were looking for.

Can’t Argue Against Your Own Facebook Picture

In a recent case in Hamburg, local law enforcement ticketed a driver who was following too closely and got caught by a mobile camera on a highway overpass. The driver argued that he wasn’t driving and refused to pay the roughly $600 fine (traffic tickets are rather costly in Germany). A Facebook search however revealed that he was indeed driving the car and his lawyers quickly withdrew their petition.

Given that Facebook’s profile images are publicly available on the Web, police and other law enforcement agencies are free to use them as they please.

For now, none of these systems used in Germany are automated. It’s hard not to wonder, though, if coupling these freely available pictures with the right algorithm couldn’t soon allow law enforcement to automate this process and use it for other tasks as well.

It is important to note that the Comments Box will support authentication mechanisms besides Facebook itself. At launch, only Yahoo IDs are an option, but the company says it is working with other providers. As TechCrunch’s MG Siegler notes, though, rumor has it that Facebook scrapped the implementation of Twitter and Google authentication just before today’s launch. That’s a shame, given that the system’s utility is directly dependent on how easy it is for readers to comment on a story.

On the other hand, though, even without support for Twitter and Google, Facebook commenting is very powerful. Given its millions of users, Facebook not only makes it easy for people to log in (indeed, if you are logged in to Facebook you don’t have to log in again to comment on third-party sites), but as your comments can optionally appear in your Facebook wall, your comments are seen by more people. At the same time, the publisher’s reach also expands as comments are syndicated more widely. Uses will also receive Facebook notifications when others comment on their posts, making them more interactive, which in turn should drive more comments back to a publisher’s posts.

No Import?

Installing the Comments Box only takes a few clicks and mostly consists of copying and pasting a single line of code into your code. For publishers, though, that is only one part of the equation. One feature that is sorely missing here is the ability to import older comments. If you are currently using Disqus, for example, you can’t just easily switch over to Facebook’s commenting system without losing your current comments or running them side-by-side on older posts.

Not a Threat Just Yet – But It has Potential

For the time being, dedicated commenting systems like Disqus still have the upper hand, with easy migration tools and the ability to log in with a wider variety of credentials. In the long run, though, this improved Comments Box is another sign of Facebook extending its reach far beyond its own properties. For many publishers, the potential of a wider reach on Facebook and a deeper integration with the world’s most popular social network could outweigh the negatives. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Facebook’s commenting system pop up on more sites in the near future.