Social networks always had a hard time trying to protect your privacy while encouraging you to share as much with your online friends at the same time, to make for a more enjoyable social networking experience all around. Protecting your privacy has become more difficult now ever since real-time search entered the Facebook equation.Facebook has tried every kind of balance between privacy and openness, and still doesn’t seem to be quite comfortable.

The policy adopted by Tumblr, Twitter and Yelp over privacy when you are on these networks ask that you only put out anything on the services that you don’t mind having everyone hear about. Location-based apps like Foursquare and Loopt are services that have the luxury of not really needing a formal privacy policy. If you are on these, you’re supposed to want to share freely. Privacy is the currency these services use too; although there is really no need for it. You only get to look into others’ lives, as far as you let them into yours. And everyone is supposed to share freely. Indeed, Foursquare is set to become the Twitter of this year. Twitter got people addicted to sharing the banalities of their everyday lives. Foursquare gets people addicted sharing with everyone the places they’re going to all the time.

The only real guarantee to privacy is not in any policy anymore; it is about self-restraint in curiosity over other people’s private lives. You only need to share anything if you wish to look into other people’s lives yourself. But when the entire point of a service is the fun of giving up any semblance of privacy, why have a privacy policy at all? If it helps everyone save money?

When people in the 90s sat down for the first time to sign up to their first e-mail account, they would typically take the password part of the form either very seriously or completely casually. The very serious would dream up an impossible mish-mash of numbers and letters to keep safe from spies. The more regular types among us would treat the password as a joke – who would it even occur to, to want to hack into our worthless accounts? Why not pick 12345, we would wonder. As people got more and more inured to the dangers of poor security on the Internet, websites and e-mail services began to require that people used six characters at least, with at least one number. So now, Internet security has been raised immeasurably to the use of abc123.

A couple of months ago, a company called RockYou, that makes software for the social networking sites, made a mistake and allowed a hacker to copy and publish their entire database of tens of millions of passwords. It wasn’t online for very long before it was taken down, but lots of people interested in computer security, managed to download a copy. No one has ever had this kind of window into the password habits that people have. You have to be in law enforcement to have access to something like that. As for insight, students and computer antivirus experts pored over the lists – and they quickly found that of all those millions, one in 100 just used 123456 as password, and an equal number did 12345. Lots of people used their girlfriend’s first name, or a popular car model name. There was a collection of 5000 very common passwords that were used by one in five.

All that a hacker would need then is, an automated program that can try the 5000 passwords one by one, until something hits. If making more than three wrong guesses within three minutes locks them out of an account, they’ll have the program just make no more than two attempts at a time, and come back after three minutes. It’s not like they don’t have millions of accounts to try to break into while they’re waiting. People don’t really need to make the best and strongest passwords out there to stay safe; they only need to be somewhat better than people who choose elementary passwords. They only need to stay one step ahead of the simpletons. When there are so many of them to be caught, why would any hacker want to waste his time guessing a slightly more difficult password?

But Facebook is not done with tweaking its own ReTweeting feature. They’ve just released a Facebook feature called Via. It lets you repost something a friend shared with you, and it stamps the originator’s name on it with a Via attribution. It’s online already; you just need to pick up an item a friend has posted in your News Feed, and click on the Share button. You’ll get a Via option here with the name of the original friend stamped on it. When you finish sharing it, it will show up on your profile, with a link that goes to your friend’s profile too. Your friends will also find them on their News Feeds, and that is the closest thing to the ReTweet that you can imagine.

But Via Is only useful for links that someone’s posted. You can’t Via a status update, or your picture for instance. But it’s a first step, and it could evolve. They have the most useful kind of reposting feature up now with the link reposting ability, and that is what counts. Facebook will probably have a service like Tweet meme tracking how far a reposting of anything goes, and it could make Facebook really valuable in a world where instant real-time search is becoming deeply mainstream.

Google has been in the news (and when hasn’t it) this past week for holding its ground in taking the moral high road in not submitting to China’s demands in censorship. Google’s announced pullout from China has earned it quite a shine for its reputation. It’s dignified walkout in China has done more for its business than just earn it a good name though. China’s Baidu search engine is no longer just a Google copycat making do with scraps in the dark. Baidu happens to be bigger even than Bing, and will easily soon overtake Yahoo to be number two after Google. Baidu now has 20% of the search market worldwide, not just in China.

If you really want to tabulate search market shares, how can you do it when you ignore the soon-to-be number-two player? With China’s search market losing Google, the market share that is now up for grabs iss already being carved up by other local Chinese players in search. China’s Internet businesses seem set to become great competition to Google for everything on the Internet, valuable Internet company acquisitions included. The other American search companies hardly seem primed for aggressive market positioning anyway. The fear now is that,China could end up owning valuable Internet properties in the US, and that that would be a blow to Internet freedom.

Anyone at all can see your status updates too, because that is the default position you chose. And if you have certain search settings in place, anyone just searching on the Internet, can see all that information appear in their general search listings too. But to change this to something more sensible is not difficult. You just need to go to the “Profile Information” setting under the Settings menu, and make sure that the Posts by Me parameter is set to Only Friends.

How about getting your personal data off Google? When you bring up the Search Settings page on Facebook, you get a message that tells you that there has been a malicious rumor abroad that leads people to believe that Facebook information is all spilled out on Google. Facebook assures you that this is not true. Nothing could be more misleading. Because Facebook’s Public Search setting in the Search Settings page, lays down what exactly you’re putting out on Google. If you have Allow selected, all information you have on Facebook that you chose to share with “Everyone” goes out on Google. You will need un select Allow to to get a reasonable bit of privacy back.

The forums are on fire with how irresponsible of Facebook it was to throw your personal information so quickly to everyone with an Internet connection. No doubt, quite a few people found their marriages breaking up, and found themselves losing their jobs because information and pictures they thought was private on their Facebook pages, was suddenly all hung out for the world to see.

Certainly these are improvements, but most interesting about them is the fact that it gives us some clues as to how Bing is trying to outdo Google. Take the innovation at Bing that they call entity cards. Searching on subjects like celebrities, travel destinations, or disease
symptoms, little “entity card” boxes pop up with what Bing considers to be useful asides. If there are a lot of people around the world searching for the same thing, say the city of Paris, Bing will reckon that it must be some event in Paris, and try to offer a hotel and travel information, and listings of important events in those entity boxes. Or if you are looking for information on a pop music personality, Bing will fill those boxes with tour dates and ticket availability information.

All the major search engines have great integration with the important social networks; but Bing is looking for ways to take it higher. In Twitter, Microsoft allows you to sort tweets by celebrity, and look up the busiest Twitter celebs first. Bing’s Facebook plan is to lay your friends out on a grid and allow you to choose among the most active ones in lots of convenient ways. Bing isn’t about real revolution yet; it is about thoughtfulness, trying to think like the user, and plying them with lots of delightful little cosmetic touches. This seems to be working, in an age of short attention spans. We’ll get to see if it is a Google beater, not long from now.

But children on the whole seem to be in better and control of their dependencies than working adults. Businesses in America and the UK are increasingly finding that they need to block access to social networking sites at the company’s server, to keep this habit from lowering workplace productivity. And of course, employees are certainly not taking a hint at this; they and are finding workarounds, such as accessing Facebook through their e-mail. For the less-than-responsible, a service called MoDazzle lets you do this.. You just send an e-mail to MoDazzle, and it fetches you all your latest updates through your e-mail. You can do most of the stuff on MoDazzle that you would get to do on Facebook.

It isn’t just the matter of self-control that Facebook brings up at work and at home. In America, the state of Florida has ruled that lawyers and judges cannot be Facebook friends. There is the matter of being responsible, and then there is something like this that is clearly silly. Lawyers who are friends, are not suddenly going to turn strangers just because one of them got promoted to being a judge.

Businesses want to know if the fans you have on your Facebook, really do make you a minor celebrity in your circle. If they paid you for it, could you endorse a product for your social network fans, and make a difference to your sponsors? If your fans follow you on Twitter, will they follow your choice of restaurants, movies or soft drink? The idea has really taken off, and advertising promoters exist who work exclusively on product promotion on the social network scene. It is their job to convince advertisers of the effectiveness of product placement on Facebook and Twitter, and also to find influential members whose opinions and endorsements will matter.

A social network where you spend time with your friends is one of the last places you would expect to be pitched a product; that element of surprise is what the advertisers are looking for. Amazon even has a proper service in place for this, and they call it Amazon Associates. They’ll pay commissions to anyone who will refer buyers to the online retailer’s website. Friends on a regular tweet from someone they subscribe to, will, in the middle of it all, suddenly see a tweet like “Yo! Check out Bobby Crusoe’s latest track on Amazon.com – it rocks!”. Actually, a few minor television stars actually earn upward of $25,000 for a single commercial tweet. Regular people with sizable fan followings on Twitter, can make a couple of thousand dollars for a commercial tweet.

Twitter advertising companies like Izea first started placing advertisements with Twitter members with no specific warning at all. If there was a celebrity chef, and he was tapped to place an ad for a particular brand of butter, there was nothing that would tell his followers that it was not his personal opinion they were reading. Izea has made sure that that doesn’t happen anymore, after they received protests. With those initial teething problems over, social networking advertising is all set to becoming the next greatest thing in advertising.

Google Buzz is going to be an added feature on Gmail, and not an independent service. This gets it started on an excellent user base right on its first day. All of Gmail’s 176 million users, will automatically find themselves on Buzz, and their friends circle on Buzz will be their most frequently e-mails contacts. So what does someone do on Buzz? The same thing as any other standard Facebook clone – users post their status, they post their pictures from Picasa, their videos from YouTube, and of course, messages from Twitter. If you look at it, Buzz seems to look like it got a lot of inspiration from Facebook; and the real Facebook, certainly has a lot to worry about now.

Trying to out-Facebook Facebook may not really work at this stage though; Facebook has had a six-year headstart, and has 400 million users. How much banality can people share at one time? But Google actually feels that overloading people with banal information is the way it can become relevant. Google’s search and relevancy algorithms, they feel, are going to make Buzz so easy to use in a time when people have a superfluity of information to sift through; Google’s powerful search filters can pick the needle of interest out of the haystack of irrelevance so well that people will want to leave Facebook behind.

Facebook is trying to step into Google’s home turf too for its part – into instant messaging. Facebook plans to use the Jabber protocol to allow other instant message services, to integrate with Facebook’s own. AOL’s AIM will be the first. AIM users will log into Facebook right through their familiar AIM environment, and directly find out about which Facebook friends are available to message to. Facebook’s game, it is clear, is no longer to just be a website that people go to mess with friends on. They want to be Internet infrastructure; they want to be the behind-the scenes social networking foundation people end up using whenever they need to get in touch with their friends, no matter what website they go to.

There is an explanation for most of the issues that are experienced by Facebook users and this article tries to provide solutions to some of the problems that Facebook users can experience during logins.

It is important to assess the problem correctly before making any changes or trying to fix the problem. Probably the most common Facebook login problem is that the password is not accepted during login. There are two solutions for this: Use the password recovery option to retrieve the password or try to access the website at a later time. A password manager can help avoid that problem completely as it will remember the password for the user and even perform the login automatically.

Another common problem is that the Facebook login screen is not being displayed correctly. This can be either because of a temporary network problem, a problem on Facebook’s end or a caching issue. One fix is to clear the web browser’s temporary Internet files to make sure that the issue is not a local problem.

Facebook offers a help page that provides aid to the user when login problems are experienced.

Twitter has had a Suggested User list for several months now, the purpose of it being to help people see where the hottest action is to follow. Their list is about 400-strong, and its influence on Twitter followers seems pretty strong too – most of the companies on the list have more than a million followers. Companies that did not get to be on the list, pretty much have no chance of getting that kind of popularity; and it creates resentment among those that don’t make the cut. A business planning on getting on Twitter would have to wonder about being given the short shrift.

Twitter is a public thing, not private. Some companies forget that Twitter is not personal; they go ahead and carry out personal negotiations with their customers on Twitter, like it was a text message service. Many people balk at the idea that their personal communications are just broadcast to the whole world for no reason. Facebook on the other hand, can be personal. Your communications with a company’s fan page are mostly one-way only too.

Consider this: the most prominent companies on Facebook, happen to be food and beverage majors like Coca-Cola. And Twitter is filled with media and Internet majors like CNN. Media companies need to give their followers a heads up over major stories, and they use Twitter like an RSS feed. Followers look at the links, and head over to the main website, and this fuels advertising too. The food companies don’t need to regularly put out headlines; the more low key affair they have with their consumers, is served best on Facebook.

The multinationals seem to have the best take on how to use Twitter for now. So do major Internet properties like the New York Times. If this is how the big boys make their pick among Twitter and Facebook, perhaps the small business could take a hint.