Emma Takes to Facebook!

We reported earlier that Jo, from Emma Watson Official, is asking for suggestions for Emma’s site, or questions you would like to ask Emma. Today, Emma wrote a lovely little post on her Facebook. She posted,“I think when you take away all the premieres and press stuff and all the special effects, then you just come down to the fact that it’s all about acting, and I think that has been the best bit for me.” There were many requests for Emma to post more, and this may just be a sign that more is on it’s way!

Emma also included this picture:

A new photo from The Bling Ring set was posted today on the movies facebook page. And another photo of Emma and Israel Broussard taken by Sofia Coppola from about a month ago that we didn’t post before.

Selena Gomez facebook hacker gets a year in jail

Updated: Monday, May 21, 9:30 a.m. ET: Media reports say that the hacked Facebook account belonged to American actress and pop star Selena Gomez. Details at the end of this story.

A British man has been sentenced to 12 months behind bars for hacking into a Facebook account and illegally accessing the victim's emails.

Gareth Crosskey, 21, was jailed on Wednesday for an incident in January 2011, when he hacked into an unnamed American's Facebook profile, London's Metropolitan Police said in its press release.

Crosskey was arrested at his home in West Sussex, a coastal county in south of London. Law-enforcement agents removed computers and other storage devices from his home during the raid.

Following the breach, which was reported to the FBI, Crosskey was released on bail. The FBI traced Crosskey's Facebook hack to the U.K, and on Feb. 29, he was brought back to court, where he pleaded guilty to two counts of illegally accessing data, both violations of the Computer Misuse Act.

British police stressed that Crosskey's jail term should serve as a warning that authorities will take swift action, and levy strong penalties, against anyone who follows in his footsteps.

"Today's result should act as a deterrent to any individuals thinking of participating in this type of criminal activity," police wrote.

To help keep your Facebook profile secure and private, make sure you're running anti-virus software and anti-spyware software on your computer and your mobile phone. Follow this guide to set your smartphone's social privacy settings.

UPDATE: The Sun newspaper in England reported Monday that the Facebook account Crosskey broke into belonged to American actress and pop star Selena Gomez.

The Sun reported that Crosskey posed as Gomez's stepfather, the administrator of her Facebook page, and persuaded Facebook staffers to reset the administrative password on the account. The newspaper also reported that Crosskey wrote "Justin Bieber sucks!" on Gomez's page, prompting a deluge of angry comments from the Canadian pop star's fans.

Gomez and Bieber, who had begun dating, had not made their relationship public at the time.

A YouTube video detailing the account takeover was allegedly posted by Crosskey, using the hacker handle "PkinJ0r." The video shows someone gaining control of Gomez's Facebook page and entering text into various fields.

However, none of the new information is saved, and the maker of the video writes in one field as he films, "I won't actually be posting anything ... Due to it's her page and I'm not that much of a [jerk]."

After Justin Bieber's beer revelations, his girlfriend Selena Gomez makes her own controversial move by posting gun picture on Facebook

She's a squeaky clean, Justin-Bieber-dating, Disney star who's BFFs with angelic Taylor Swift. But we knew Selena Gomez wasn't THAT sweet all the time - and she's proved us right. As she's posted a picture of herself shooting a gun at a firing range in Bulgaria.

"Releasing some stress" she wrote after uploading the picture to Facebook and Twitter. We always thought she was more of a "write it down in her pink sparkly diary" girl than "fire a massive gun" person ...

However, she was bought up in Texas, and if TV isn't lying to us, EVERYONE in Texas has a gun. Because Dallas was an actual documentary, right?

Selena's target practice took place in Bulgaria - she's there to film new movie The Getaway with Ethan Hawke.

Selena, 19, is playing a mysterious character - called "Kid" - and Ethan Hawke is a "burnt-out racing driver whose wife is kidnapped". It also stars Angelina Jolie's dad Jon Voight. We're not really sold yet, sorry Selena ...

Facebook announces Skype video calling, group chats

Facebook announced its answer to Google+ Hangouts Wednesday afternoon in the form of a video calling feature powered by Skype. The social network's new offering will allow users to call online contacts directly through the chat tab, without leaving the site or having to launch the Skype client, all the users need to do is install a small plugin.

For now the feature is limited to one-to-one video calls, unlike Hangouts, which allows up to ten people to connect simultaneously. But with 750 million worldwide members and marching towards the 1 billion milestone, Facebook has access to a much broader audience than Google could hope for -- at least in the foreseeable future.

A roadmap for new features and further Facebook-Skype integration hasn't been announced, so group video calling may be some time off. As usual, Facebook will be rolling out the new Skype video calling feature gradually over the next few weeks, though if you are feeling impatient to try it out you can get it now by going to facebook.com/videocalling.

The new feature also deepens the company's co-operation with Microsoft, which owns 1.6 percent of Facebook and is in the process of buying Skype for a whopping $8.5 billion to build up its web presence.

In addition to Video Calling, Facebook also announced an update to its Chat feature that allows for ad-hoc group messaging with a new design that makes it easier to find buddies you frequently communicate with and the ones that are online. Friends can be added from the active chat window, and if any of the chat participants aren't available at the moment, they will be given a summary of the chat log when it's over in the Messages section.

When Mark Zuckerberg wants to hire you, he takes you to the woods

When Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg really wants to hire you, he takes you on a romantic woodland hike. The hiring practices for major technology giants are famous for being ridiculously rigorous, but this is the first time I hear of a company testing for physical endurance.

Okay, so that’s not exactly what Zuckerberg is doing. When he takes you for a stroll in the woods behind the company’s Palo Alto headquarters, he’s already decided that you’re a high-profile prospective hire. Zuckerberg is actually planning to give you a pitch like you’ve never had before, at the end of a trail that reaches a Silicon Valley lookout, according to The New York Times:

When the visitor arrived, he met Mr. Zuckerberg in his office, and was then immediately whisked away to the wooded trail. More than one potential employee who experienced the same encounter said the entire experience was “pretty disorienting.”

“Zuckerberg said money wasn’t an object and that if I wanted the job — and why wouldn’t I, he questioned — the paperwork was already ready to go back at the office,” said the person who ran a small start-up Mr. Zuckerberg was trying acquire. “The entire experience was totally surreal. I really felt like I was on a date.”

Another person who was taken on the same walk last year said that when they arrived at the end of the trail, they were confronted with an amazing view of Palo Alto. There, Mr. Zuckerberg stood and explained the technological history of the area.

“He pointed out Apple’s headquarters, then Hewlett-Packard and a number of other big tech companies,” the individual explained. “Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all.”

Two months ago, we learned that this year Zuckerberg had started only eating the meat of animals had killed himself. CNN reported it was part of a 2011 New Year’s resolution to fully appreciate the meat he eats. By May 2011, he had already killed a goat, pig, chicken and a lobster. His new diet means when he’s out, he only eats vegetarian. The initiative followed one in 2010, when Zuckerberg took up the challenge of learning Mandarin.

No matter which way you slice it (pun unintended), it looks like Zuckerberg is making a point to appreciate nature. Maybe that’s because Facebook is largely developed indoors, like most Computer Science projects, and the man in charge wants a little more variety in his life.

Facebook engineers bring Google+ Circles to Facebook

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. While Google+ has been criticized for being a clone of Facebook, it implements a few features better than its counterpart. A team of Facebook engineers have ported one such Google+ feature, called Circles, to Facebook.

Facebook engineers Vladimir Kolesnikov, Peng Fan, Zahan Malkani, and Brian Rosenthal wanted to be able to organize their Facebook friends in the same way you can organize them using Google+. Since it took a bit of hacking, the team of four has called it Circle Hack and described it as “A one-night experiment with JavaScript (not affiliated with Facebook).” I first heard about Circle Hack via a message from Facebook Platform Partner Engineer Simon Cross on Twitter:

Interesting that people think Google+Circles is new - seen Facebook Friend lists? This makes a good point: http://t.co/flxYts4

Google+ allows you to organize your friends in customized Circles, like friends, family, or colleagues. You can then control the privacy settings for each Circle and share content only in that Circle. To include a person in a particular Circle, you simply drag their picture into the appropriate category.

You can organize your friends on Facebook as well with a feature called Lists. Setting up a list is much more complicated on Facebook, however, than setting up a Circle is on Google+. First, you have to click on the Account menu in the top right-hand corner, select Edit Friends, and then click Create a List.

From there, you have to go through multiple steps to organize your friends into customized Lists, including typing in names individually and selecting friends one by one, all in a small little window. Google+ and Circle Hack have a much easier drag-and-drop format.

Like Circles, the Circle Hack webpage is divided into two parts. At the top, you have all your Facebook friends represented by their name and profile picture in a contact card format. At the bottom, you have an area for creating new Circles/Lists. Each section has its own scroll bar, and you can resize each one by clicking on the dividing line between the two areas. All you have to do is select friends at the top and drag them to the bottom.

Circle Hack requires that you log in to your Facebook account and authorize the site just like you would any other Facebook application. Once you have a circle organized, you can click on the “Create list” link that appears in the center of your new circle to name it. The next time you open Facebook, you’ll see the newly created list as an option in your Friends section and in your privacy settings.

Unfortunately, while Circle Hack lets you remove everyone from a newly created List, you cannot delete the actual List. To do that, you’ll have to open Facebook and edit your Lists there.

Since Google+ was built after Facebook, Google has a huge advantage of fixing structural social network mistakes from the ground-up. Facebook created Lists long after the site went live, and the feature is not a core part of the social network, unlike Circles is on Google+. Furthermore, since people are only getting started on Google+, they can slowly build out their Circles as they add new friends. On Facebook, however, most people have hundreds of friends and it’s simply a pain to organize them all. Even Circle Hack, which is a great attempt at simplifying the process, can only slightly reduce the effort required.

Although Circle Hack is not an official Facebook product, it does show that Facebook employees care about fixing certain aspects of the social network. The new website is a pretty good imitation of the Google+ Circles feature. I hope that Google+ and Circle Hack inspire Facebook to fix how Lists are created on the social network.

Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

Facebook Friend Exporter is a Chrome extension developed by Mohamed Mansour, an open source software engineer, that lets you grab all the information about your Facebook friends so you can import them elsewhere. Because it got popular recently, Facebook noticed and began to block the extension.

Mansour noticed, and posted the following message on the extension’s page:

CRITICAL UPDATE:

Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. It will no longer work for many people.

New version with a different design is currently deploying. You might have to do exports daily. It uses a different approach, and I will maintain this version. Just bear with me.

Facebook Friend Exporter wasn’t designed with Google+ in mind (version 1 was in fact released in November 2010), but it has exploded in the past week as Google+ beta users look for ways to port over all their Facebook friends to Google+. Facebook clearly noticed a spike in usage (the extension now has more than 17,000 users), and decided to block it.

Mansour says that Facebook removed emails from their mobile site, which were critical to the original design of his extension. He told me that the company had implemented a throttling mechanism: if you visit any friend page five times in a short period of time, the email field is removed.

“Facebook is actually hiding data (email) from you to see when your friends explicitly shared that to you,” Mansour told me in an e-mail. “Making it really hard to scrape because the only missing data is your emails, and that is your friends identity. Nothing else is.”

As CNET points out, Facebook Friend Exporter technically violates Facebook’s Terms of Service. Section 3.2 states the following:

You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.

Mansour doesn’t care about this, as he says in the extension’s description:

Get *your* data contact out of Facebook, whether they want you to or not. You gave them your friends and allowed them to store that data, and you have right to take it back out! Facebook doesn’t own my friends.

After he found out that Facebook was throttling the email field once his extension got popular, he wrote the following on his Google+ profile:

I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again. Seriously … more motivation to figure out a different approach.

The extension, which only works when Facebook is set to the English language, essentially extracts data for each of your Facebook friends that they have shared with you (name, emails, phone numbers, screen names, websites, address, and birthday). This process is rather time-consuming, especially if you have a slow connection and/or a large number of Facebook friends.

Even though Facebook is messing around with Facebook Friend Exporter’s functionality, here are the steps to using the extension (it may still work for you):

Make sure you are logged into m.facebook.com. After you log in, go back to facebook.com.

You must have the English version of Facebook (switch to it if you don’t have it on by default)

Do not enable SSL for Facebook: use HTTP not HTTPS.

Disable all other Facebook extensions that you may have downloaded, as many of them affect the page and the extension will not be able to grab your friends’ data properly.

Install the extension, and hit refresh. An Export button should appear on Facebook’s toolbar: click it.

Because it wasn’t specifically developed for Google+, the extension only makes your Facebook friends available as a spreadsheet (.CSV file) or imports them directly into your Gmail address book (will appear in a folder named Imported from Facebook). Even if you choose the latter, you still have to move them into Circles on Google+, which is a painful process if you have lots of Facebook friends.

Facebook does allow you to download all your information (Account => Account Settings => Download Your Information => Learn More => Download), including Wall posts, photos, and friend data. Unfortunately, it is all in one big chunk that is not exactly user-friendly.

Google+ users who want to import their Facebook friends should check out this alternative solution: Invite your entire Facebook graph into Google Plus. Facebook users who want to organize their friends the Google+ way should check out this substitute: Facebook engineers bring Google+ Circles to Facebook.

Google to kill off Blogger, Picasa brands in time for Google+ launch

Google intends to retire several non-Google name brands, such as Blogger and Picasa, in the next four to six weeks. The search giant plans to rename them as Google products, unifying the company's brand in time for the public launch of Google+, according to two sources familiar with the matter cited by Mashable.

Blogger and Picasa aren't going away – they are two very popular Google products after all – instead, Google intends to rename them as Google Photos and Google Blogs, respectively. Several other Google brands will also be likely affected by the move, but it's not yet clear which ones.

YouTube will not, however, be rebranded. The technology giant shut down Google Videos, Google's answer to YouTube before it gave up and bought the video sharing service, in May 2010.

This rebranding effort from Google is hardly the first time we're seeing such a move. Google acquired JotSpot in October 2006 and rebranded it as Google Sites in February 2008. In July 2007, Google acquired VOIP platform GrandCentral and relaunched it as Google Voice in March 2009.

Blogger and Picasa were also Google acquisitions, although both companies have owned by Google for far longer. Blogger was acquired in February 2003 and is one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world. Picasa was acquired in July 2004.

The rebranding will likely upset some existing customers, but Google wants to do it anyway so that it can completely integrate both services into Google+. The company launched the social network as a field trial last month, with an obvious attempt to take on Facebook and Twitter.

Social Wars! Google Unveils Facebook Competitor Google+

Has Google just launched its most ambitious project yet?

After years of rumors and hints, Google Tuesday launched a trial of its Facebook competitor, a social network called The Google+ Project.

And the company clearly isn't shy about it.

In a blog post announcing the launch of The Google+ Project, Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of Engineering for the company, argued that the subtlety of real world interactions are lost online due to the rigidity of today's tools. Google, he said, could succeed where other services have failed.

"Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it," Gundotra said. The service launched in a limited beta Tuesday afternoon. And getting it live was a massive, lengthy struggle, explained Wired's Steven Levy.

"Developed under the codename Emerald Sea, it is a result of a lengthy and urgent effort involving almost all of the company’s products," Levy wrote. "Hundreds of engineers were involved in the effort. It has been a key focus for new CEO Larry Page."

To set Google+ apart from Facebook, which some recent reports have pegged at 750 million users, Google is claiming to have a better approach to privacy, taking on the hot-button issue that has burned both companies before.

"For us, privacy isn't buried six panels deep," Google vice president of product management Bradley Horowitz told Reuters.

Google's social network revolves around Circles -- long rumored to be the project's name -- which helps you segment the people you know into, well, circles: friends, family, coworkers and so on. Create as many as you want, and then drag a picture of a person into one of them to add them.

"Not all relationships are created equal," Gundotra said, adding a not-so-subtle dig at Facebook: "Today’s online services turn friendship into fast food -- wrapping everyone in “friend” paper -- and sharing really suffers."

The Google+ service consists of several linked components: a continuous news feed similar to Facebook's called “the Stream” and a second, related component called “Sparks” that reveals posts related to one’s specified interests.

Other elements of the new service include Hangouts, a video chat; Huddle, for group chats; and Sparks, a personalized recommendation service. Once logged into the Google network, nearly all Google sites will feature a special toolbar that runs across the top of the page, reminding you that you're logged into Google+.

But will it be enough to get those hundreds of millions to switch? Gundotra told Reuters that wasn't necessarily the goal.

"People today use multiple tools. I think what we're offering here offers some very distinct advantages around some basic needs," he said.

Kim Hyun Joong's OFFICIAL Facebook Fan Page Already UP!

KEYEAST kinda lacks promotion on these one. 

Go there and LIKE the PAGE!

 KIM HYUN JOONG OFFICIAL FACEBOOK PAGE