When you are well known and have some cash in the bank, you’re probably going to get sued at least once in your life. When you are Facebook and you have 250+ million users, increase the amount of lawsuits by a factor of 10 or so. Yes, Facebook has been sued once again, this time for allegedly misleading members on the use of their personal information and for violating California privacy laws.

The Orange County lawsuit was filed on behalf of five Facebook users, according to the AP – a photographer, an actress, two children under 13 (despite needing to be 13 or older to legally use Facebook) and a “user of the original Facebook.” It seeks monetary damages, attorney’s fees, and a trial by jury.

As you’d expect, Facebook believes that there is “no merit to this suit” and intends to fight it. We could go on and on about past Facebook lawsuits, many of them similar to this one. There was the lawsuit seeking $70.50 in damages, the text messaging lawsuit, the iKimbo patent, a class-action lawsuit for Facebook Beacon, the famous ConnectU debacle, and most recently, Power.com suing Facebook over data ownership. We’re pretty sure this list is nowhere near comprehensive.

Look: Facebook faces these types of suits all the time, and most of the time they are either dismissed or settled. Yes, Facebook’s had some thorny affairs with privacy, but recently they’ve been moving in the right direction with Facebook Democracy. Allowing users to vote on their own Terms of Service and letting them vote on changes is more than most sites offer. Besides, this lawsuit complains about common practices being illegal, such as changing the Terms of Service. It essentially rails against Facebook for 40 pages on practically every one of its featurse.

From the parts that we’ve read, we suspect that this California lawsuit doesn’t worry Facebook very much at all.

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There were unknown lifeforms, #moonfruit, Firefox 3.5, and the sale of The Pirate Bay making social media news this week. From the shocking $7.8 million sale of the web’s pirating hub to the release of Firefox 3.5 and its killer features, social media events kept rolling in.

There were also some insightful and useful resources that got people’s attention this week. If you’re interested in gorgeous Twitter visualizations or how to get retweeted on Twitter, social media provided the answer. Here are this week’s top 11 social media stories:

1. 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations – Stan Schroeder takes a close look at six of the most beautiful Twitter visualization apps around.

2. Sneak Peek: What’s On Tap for Firefox in 2010 – While Firefox 3.5 may have come out this week, Mozilla’s already hard at work on version 3.6. Josh Catone explores what’s coming for the popular browser.

3. The Pirate Bay Sold For $7.8 Million – Global Gaming Factory X AB shocked the technology world this week when it announced its acquisition of The Pirate Bay. Why did they sell? And what’s next for the controversial peer-to-peer website?

4. Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer: A Monstrous YouTube Hit – It’s the breakout YouTube hit of the week, and nobody’s quite sure what it is. What is this thing that has piqued the web’s curiosity?

5. Twitter Promotion Done Right: #moonfruit – There’s a new hashtag-based marketing campaign making buzz on Twitter. Learn how they got right what #squarespace got wrong.

6. HOW TO: Get Retweeted on Twitter – Pete Cashmore explores some interesting data on retweets, and how that can apply to getting retweeted more often.

7. Top 5 Killer Features in Firefox 3.5 – Firefox 3.5 is a huge upgrade over its predecessor. Find out what sets this new version apart as a browser.

8. Facebook Page Frenzy Due Today: URLs Available to All – While Facebook opened up vanity URLs for profiles earlier this month, it left smaller Facebook fan pages to wait until this week to claim their usernames. Pete Cashmore explains the details.

9. Twitter Increases API Limit – Twitter has upped the API call limit by 50% this week, making your favorite Twitter apps a lot more useful. Learn why this is important.

10. 10 Ways to Find People on Twitter – Josh Catone discusses 10 different ways to find new friends and people on Twitter.

11. Michael Jackson Died in 2007, Says Google – With the world turning to Google and the web for information on Michael Jackson, some information was a bit…off.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AndrewJohnson

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There are red faces in the UK today after it emerged that private details about the incoming head of MI6 were posted to Facebook by his wife. The details included information about John Sawers’ family, residence, vacations…and a photo of Sawers in a Speedo.

Specific details revealed, according to the BBC, included the location of the London flat where Sawers lives with his wife, plus the location of their children and John’s parents. The page’s privacy settings were not turned on, meaning that anyone in Facebook’s London network had access. Vacation photos, friendships and other details were also available on Shelley Sawers’ Facebook page, which has since been removed. The story originally broke in the Mail on Sunday. Sawers is currently the UK Ambassador to the United Nations and is due to take up his role as the head of MI6 in November.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband played down the issue today, saying on a morning talk show: “You know he wears Speedo…I mean, that’s not a state secret”.

Incidentally, the error comes just as Facebook attempts a transition from a private social network to being a more public, Twitter-like broadcast channel.

See also: FACEBOOK FAIL: How to Use Facebook Privacy Settings and Avoid Disaster

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Jeff Hobbs is Director of Engineering at ActiveState and works on Workspace and dynamic languages. He blogs occasionally at blogs.activestate.com.

One of the best web tools available to businesses for enabling teamwork and collaboration is the wiki. Few things speak more to staying in the flow of one’s work than just clicking “Edit This Page” where you see something that needs to be written or re-written. Though Wikis have been around since the 90s, their potential for business collaboration has made them more popular in the business world over the past few years.

While a wiki can let project documentation grow organically as a project unfolds, it is like any tool and needs to be used the right way to get the most out of it. If you’re thinking about using a wiki in your team’s toolkit for the first time, keeping a few points in mind will help everyone get up and running without tripping over the changes that the wiki way brings to project documentation.

A Culture Shift

Using a wiki isn’t just about learning new software — it’s also about learning a completely new way of approaching common problems. In order to make wikis work for your team, a culture shift may be needed. Explaining how wikis work is important, but equally so is making sure that people know what the wiki is for and that they have permission to write and re-write as needed. There can be a hesitancy to participate without a clear green light to do so in situations where documentation was previously done in a different way (or not at all).

Seed the Wiki

Before you set your team loose on the new wiki, prime the content. Seeding the wiki with some starter pages and some headings to suggest a structure for those pages can be a big help to people not used to looking at a fresh blank page and diving right in. Giving your team some hooks to start hanging their thoughts on will not only speed up the population of those starter pages, but will encourage new pages to be created with a consistent structure.

Capture Feedback

As the team begins to get comfortable in making the wiki part of their process, you can use the wiki itself as a point of review for how the change is working out. A great way to do this is to add a page specifically designed for capturing feedback and ideas for making the wiki work to fit your project’s needs.

Not only will you be able to capture important feedback in an open and collaborative way, but the use of a review page itself helps build the value of the wiki as a source of shared knowledge. Your wiki will no longer just be used as a place to collect project details, but it will also offer insight into how you and your team works.

Beware the Wiki-Wary

Your team is likely transitioning away another tool that has previously been used to organize some or all of the knowledge about a project. So in addition to learning the new wiki software and the cultural shift that comes with it, team members must also unlearn what they already know about how projects are documented and information is organized.

It’s human nature for people to fall back on old habits while trying to form new ones; they’ll need a wiki champion who can diplomatically redirect content into the wiki. Email is most often the channel that the wiki-wary fall back on during this kind of transition, and the most dangerous for locking knowledge into a recipient list. It’s crucial in the adoption phase to insist that errant emails are channeled into the wiki before they can be acted on in order to get long term and effective buy in from team members.

One way to get your team more excited about using the new wiki, is make using it something of a competition. For example, you can implement an online ‘cred’ system which rewards your team for participation, such as the SocialRewarding extension offered by MediaWiki. Offering points for wiki use gives your team an added incentive to use it instead of falling back on old habits.

Applying Wikis to User Communities

We’ve been talking about using wikis internally on development projects so far, but there’s also a compelling use for them in the right kinds of user communities. If your customers are comfortable with web-based communication technologies, adding a community wiki, adequately seeded with starter content, can provide a way for them to help each other by filling out documentation with their own insights, tips and tricks that showcase everything your product is honestly capable of. This may enrage or terrify your technical writing team, but don’t sweat it.

There are plenty of examples of user-powered wikis for documentation, but a couple of particularly robust one are the extensive wiki for Blender, a graphics animation and video production program, and the wiki for ReactOS, an open-source operating system based on Windows NT.

Just the Facts

Nearly all wikis dispense with advanced page and text formatting, instead embracing a “just the facts” approach to documentation, that can actually be refreshing. Some see that no nonsense style as a deficiency but it can really be a strength. Removing the ability to spend time formatting content removes the feeling that the content needs more than basic formatting. Where people aren’t spending time on formatting they’re likely to spend it on just writing and moving on.

Choosing the Right Wiki

When you’re ready to try a wiki for coordinating your project, you’ll want to start with two things: a set of small targets for wiki use, and a choice of wiki that fits the type of team you work in. For those early targets, the Adoption Curve blog offers some great suggestions: meeting minutes, agenda planning and brainstorming are all natural activities for a wiki, and easy for those new to the format to get their feet wet.

There are a huge number of different options to choose from when deciding on wiki software for your project. Each offers a different set of features and advantages. Wikipedia maintains a large list of wiki software, that could help you get acclimated to the wiki landscape. But what might be more helpful, is the Wikimatrix site, which allows you to compare wiki software features side-by-side. Mashable has also published two large round ups of available wiki software in the past year: 30+ Solutions to Start Your Own Wiki and 100+ More Wiki Tools and Resources.

When evaluating whether using a wiki has been right for you, remember that the best tools often don’t deliver their benefits in one giant step, but in the savings made across many small steps from day to day. Wikis are definitely in that category, and while getting team members to embrace a change can be hard, the results will almost certainly speak for themselves when it’s time to look back and weigh the benefits of the wiki way.

There are so many wiki solutions out there and so many different ways to use them. Which is your favorite? How is your company utilizing wikis? Let us know in the comments below.

More business resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Use Social Media for Enterprise Business
- Social Media for Business: The Dos & Don’ts of Sharing
- 8 Ways to Create Paperless Business Cards
- 30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook
- Why Big Brands Struggle With Social Media

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, furabalo

Tags: business, how to, MediaWiki, social media, wiki

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Facebook has just named 25 of the finalists for the latest round of fbFund, the social network’s joint program with Accel and Founders Fund meant to help foster quality applications on Facebook Platform. Today’s announcement represents only half of the finalists for this round, and the company says that the other 25 winners will be annouced soon. These 50 finalists will each be given $1,000 in Facebook advertising, but much more important, they will have a shot at taking part in Facebook’s incubator program this summer.

fbFund has evolved since its inception in 2007, shifting from a no-strings-attached grant to an incubator model led by Silicon Valley vet Dave McClure. Of the 50 finalists from this round, a select number of winners will be invited to the incubator program, where they can receive as much as $100,000 in equity investment along with training alongside Facebook executives and mentors. The program’s latest round has also shifted focus from solely applications built on Facebook Platform to include those using Facebook Connect both on the web and the iPhone.

Here’s a list of the winners:

Connect sites:
Frintro
GovIt
RunMyErrand
RentMineOnline
MyChurch.org
GreetBeatz
Workstir
NutshellMail
RunThere
DropPlay
Magellan (private beta),
Life360 (private beta)
Vittanna (private beta)

Platform apps:
Travel Brain
Networked Blogs
Gameyola
Photos I Like
Paradise Paintball 3D
Veechi Classes
BitStrips (private beta)
SamaSource

iPhone apps:
FriendFreak
Near+Now (Sortuv)
Paparazzi
CrazyMenu

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Windows Mobile users have long had to live without an official Facebook app. On Thursday, that all changes with the launch of Facebook for Windows Mobile 6. A test version of the app leaked in March, and now it goes on general release.

Although they’ve had to wait substantially longer than those with other handsets, Windows Mobile users do get one special feature: you can upload video straight to Facebook from the app, which Microsoft heralds as a first. Standard features listed by Microsoft include:

1. Send messages to any of the people in your Friends list.

2. Take pictures and videos on your phone, then upload them right to Facebook.

3. Send messages or call people in your Friends list.

4. Manage your profile and post anytime, anywhere.

Our lone Windows Mobile user at Mashable describes it as “a cross between the BlackBerry and the iPhone app”, but far less impressive than either – it’s harder to navigate, with small buttons and more clicks required. It’s nice, however, to have phone book integration on a Windows Mobile device: this provides easy access to all Facebook friends who listed a phone number on their Facebook profiles.

Having tested unofficial Facebook apps for Windows Mobile (see FriendMobilizer, for example), it’s fair to say there is little choice here: if you’re using Windows Mobile and want a Facebook app, here’s your solution.

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Plenty of celebrities have embraced social media over the past year, but perhaps none moreso than Jimmy Fallon, who has made tools like Twitter and Facebook an integral part of his late night television show. Fallon’s efforts have been acknowledged by The Webby Awards, who have bestowed their “Person of the Year” award upon the comedian.

Fallon, who recently took over Conan O’Brien’s 12:30am time slot on NBC, has a big presence across a multitude of social sites, including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. He also makes use of these tools during his show – for example, using Twitter to determine questions to ask his guests, and assigning fictional Facebook status updates to members of his studio audience during one of his skits. Recently, Fallon even had Diggnation co-hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht on the program (video below).

Some other notable individuals winning awards included Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who has been outspoken about technology issues and made one of his band’s albums available for free on the Web, and Seth MacFarlane, who won an award in Video and Film for his Web-exclusive release of “Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy.”

Ultimately, all three of these individuals did make significant contributions to the Web in 2008, so, we’re not surprised to see them taking home the hardware from the Webby’s, which is now in its 13th year. The prohibitive favorite for next year’s awards? That would have to be Ashton Kutcher.

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If Google had managed to acquire Facebook back when Yahoo failed to do so, Google would truly dominate the online referral business. But it appears that Google and Yahoo really missed the boat on the social end of the spectrum.

As MySpace crumbles, the decision of Google executives not to purchase the social network incredibly cheap in 2005 is looking better than it once did—though that $900 million search deal didn’t work out so well, either; Google spent three times as much money to deliver ads to MySpace than it would have cost to buy it earlier.

But Facebook is a different animal. Yahoo saw its potential early, offering a cool billion to a young CEO reluctant to sell (or attend early morning negotiations for that matter, according to some reports). It’s hard to know what price would have pushed Mark Zuckerberg over the mattress edge, but two years or so ago it would have been exponentially cheaper than now, with 200 million users to leverage.

But it’s not so much audience size that makes Facebook valuable (though that’s a huge part of it), and it’s certainly not the ease of monetization. It’s the social network’s innate ability to refer traffic, which is essentially at the heart of Google’s own power.

Perhaps few paid much attention when metrics firms reported Facebook drove more traffic to Perez Hilton’s celebrity website than Google, but what about a site like the Huffington Post? Ryan Spoon, web entrepreneur and former eBayer, reports Facebook directs 18.6 percent of HuffPo’s 13 million visitors. Google refers just 11.6 percent.

ryanspoon.com

Aside from one, the other top referrers are either search or social: Yahoo (5.16%), Digg (4.43%), and NyTimes.com (2.5%). Collectively, social sites drive almost a quarter of HuffPo’s traffic, compared to 16 percent for search engines. Obviously, search and social together approach half. If Google had ponied up early to get Facebook, Google would be sending close to a third of that traffic over, as Spoon points out, part algorithmically and part socially.

Perhaps it was the constant threat of antitrust action that kept Google at bay, perhaps it was simply a missed opportunity. Regardless, it gives webmasters a lot to think about, specifically, now that SEO is rather standard, how to leverage Facebook’s power as a traffic generator.

Spoon notes HuffPo creates viral content that encourages Facebookers to share. Creating something people want to share is an art in itself, and certainly HuffPo benefits from its newsy, political nature. But how could a different kind of business target this group that spans several demographics?

Obviously, the information Facebook has on its users is a goldmine the social network isn’t expressly permitted to mine for privacy reasons, though they can feasibly offer general demographic information. But we’re not talking advertising so much as we are content people appreciate enough to spread around.

There’s no one answer to this, but just as a general direction, people like quirky trivia. A blog post, or better maybe, a well-wrought press release to a news organization or popular blogger, could be just the ticket.

Say, for example, a shoe seller issues ten interesting facts about the history of shoes. Even better: Conduct a small experiment with a sample of people who agree to have their movements tracked and publish walking maps of where those shoes go, how many miles are walked, etc. That may be just the kind of thing people find interesting.

For marketers, the possibilities for social marketing are nearly limitless. For Google and what are now traditional search engines, the possibilities may be surprisingly full of limits.

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Woody Lewis is a Social Media Strategist and Web Architect. He authors a blog at woodylewis.com about social media strategy for newspapers.

Social media has infiltrated nearly every aspect of our public and private lives, from the White House providing access to its official photostream to a coffee shop that takes orders via Twitter. Businesses have been quick to respond, adopting new and sometimes radical processes while keeping an eye on earnings that reflect the poor economy.

As faltering brands look for new strategies, and the newspaper industry desperately searches for a way to keep a portion, if not all of its print business alive, traditional media companies are using social media to engage their audiences.

1. Widget TV

Verizon will soon push a software update to its FiOS service that will allow customers to connect their set-top boxes to the Web. The company has developed a software development kit (SDK) that its in-house engineers have used to build widgets integrating Facebook and Twitter into its legacy video product. These are base cases, where the viewer can send messages from her set-top box to her social network while she watches programs. Verizon will offer the SDK to third-party developers, and will encourage the creation of apps that tie tweets, for example, to the specific show being viewed.

The SDK, due this fall, will be written in LUA, a popular game programming language, and will support what the company says will be an open platform for shared widgets users can download to their set-tops.

2. Pitch the Editor-in-Chief

BusinessWeek.com may not be the first magazine site that comes to mind in a discussion of new journalism, but John Byrne, its Editor-in-chief, has taken the lead on an initiative that’s sure to spread. His Twitter handle maps to a page full of news bytes mixed with personal messages that include tweets congratulating Wired and Rolling Stone for winning at the National Magazine Awards. Not exactly what you’d expect from a conventional business magazine. Byrne’s profile links to “What’s Your News Story Idea,” a page where all submitted pitches will be reviewed by him and a community editor, with a commitment to assign at least one per week to a BusinessWeek journalist.

3. Newspapers on YouTube

Over a year ago, the Dallas Morning News and the St. Petersburg Times explained that YouTube was a natural extension of their efforts to reach current readers and to attract new ones. Old-school editors seem to have made the leap of faith with little fanfare. The New York Times YouTube channel currently features a piece called “Cracking the Whip in Pakistan,” the story of two brothers who built a successful business turning out leather goods for sexual fetishists. With nearly 12,000 subscribers, the Times’ channel is a growth opportunity. That point is not lost on other papers, such as the Washington Post, whose YouTube channel currently features country star Taylor Swift playing a Virginia high school. This trend of newspapers featuring videos of special interest stories shows that cross-media social marketing may become the rule.

4. Now playing at a Bookstore Near You

Not to be outdone, book publishers have been posting trailers on YouTube. Random House author Annie Burrows stars in a poignant piece about her best-seller, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. As she narrates the story of this World War II novel, we’re treated to a Ken Burns-style production: closeups of images mixed with stock footage, accompanied by an uplifting music score. When she informs us that her aunt and co-author Mary Ann Shaffer died before publication, we experience a real-life tearjerker moment that’s bound, intentionally or otherwise, to provide a model for the genre.

5. Literati as Twitterati

Last year saw the proliferation of Twitter novels, long-form works broken up into 140-word bytes to match the new medium. The initial efforts of individual writers convinced publishers to experiment in this space. We Tell Stories features “Digital Fiction from Penguin”: the serialized work of six authors published by this legacy imprint. Readers can follow the story of Slice, an adventurous British girl, in a blog written from the eponymous heroine’s point of view, and another from her parents’, with commentary from matching Twitter handles. Perhaps the Brits favor this area. The Booker prize-winning author Ben Okri recently published a poem exclusively on Twitter, one line a day, with the entire piece linked from his Facebook page.

Stateside, HarperStudio, has extended the Harper Collins brand into cyberspace, using this mission statement as proof of its commitment: “We believe traditional publishing models are broken and are experimenting with new ones. We believe in embracing technology. We believe the future is now.” The HarperStudio Twitter handle offers a light-hearted and refreshing take on literature.

North of the border, Erin Balser works by day in the marketing department of the University of Toronto press, and moonlights as the founder of Books in 140, a feed offering book reviews in tweet format. An example shows why this could be quite effective, particularly given the fate of many newspaper review pages: “BOOK OF DAVE/Self: Difficult, rewarding tale of post-apocalyptic UK. Rich in imagination, social commentary. UK detail tough for NA readers.”

These are just a few of the ways legacy media companies have embraced the new order. It’s an exciting time for content owners and distributors. When the economy recovers, those brands that have survived by innovating should benefit from the social media tools they’ve put in place.

More social media resources from Mashable:

- 10 Ways Newspapers Are Using Social Media to Save the Industry
- Finding Your Social Media Purple Cow
- Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy
- Why Big Brands Struggle With Social Media

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, blackred

Tags: journalism, legacy media, List, new media, newspaper industry, old media, publishing, social media

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