Privacy Problems Part 3

Even though Facebook appears to have conducted the change to it's privacy settings in a bit of an underhanded way, at least we can appreciate that the internet is the biggest, and indeed the most profitable platform for making money today.

It was ironic then that on the 5^th of May, TechCrunch posted an article on how Facebook’s privacy options could be manipulated so you could see your friend’s chats. TechCrunch alerted the people at Facebook who promptly changed it so that by the time I tried it at around 2pm, chat was down and they had fixed it within a couple of hours.

SA Businesses ignore Facebook

2.6 million South Africans use Facebook, and study released by MWeb early in 2010 shows that social networking has become conventional in South Africa. Despite South Africa’s growing love affair with sites like Facebook, businesses are not yet taking advantage of the new platforms.  

Friendship 2.0 looked at sites like Facebook and MySpace as well as applications like MSN Messenger and found a reasonably large number of South Africans are quite well versed in using these sites. So, local business are then missing out on a captive audience. Although 84% use the internet for work related activities, only 16% use social platforms to promote their businesses. This is remarkably low considering how well business and social networks go together in countries like the states.