Facebook faces fact that competition is only a click away
August 6, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
A screen shot of the Google Plus social network. REUTERS/Google/Handout
Facebook is feeling the breath of Google and MySpace on its neck. Growing competition to the social networking site is also coming from smaller rivals and from markets such as the Middle East.
Although only in its test phase, Google’s social networking service Google+, launched in late June, has already attracted 25 million users, according to the internet research company comScore. A growing number of software developers are also drawn to Google+. MySpace’s new owners have also vowed “to make MySpace cool again”.
Despite the market view of Facebook’s dominance of social networking being near impregnable, Google is more aware than any other internet company that, on the internet, competition is only a click away.
Google is determined to attract customers by dovetailing its new social networking service with existing services such as Google search, where it is already the market leader.
Two-thirds of respondents to a survey carried out last month by the software developer Appcelerator and the research company IDC said Google+ would catch up Facebook in terms of user popularity. Of the respondents, 68 per cent said that leveraging Google’s existing assets such as internet search, online video site YouTube and Google Maps would enable Google+ to quickly narrow Facebook’s market lead.
The study concludes, however, that, while Google+ may be the future, 83 per cent of the social networking developers who responded said they already used or were planning to use Facebook this year. Twitter came second at 73 per cent with Google+ following close after at 72 per cent. But some analysts believe that Google+ still has a lot more catching up to than these figures might suggest.
Adrian Drury, a principal analyst at the research company Ovum, says: “Any new market entrant has a mountain to climb, even if it has a large existing user asset such as Google, Apple or Microsoft … Growth of smartphones in emerging markets is also putting social communications in the hands of consumers in developing markets and this is bringing new audiences to the established platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.”
Tim Shepherd, a senior analyst with the research company Canalys, says Google+ has rocketed to about 25 million users globally in a short space of time, “but it must reach a critical mass and prove sustainably interesting and valuable to its users before it can be judged a success.
“That will require considerable further growth around the world over the coming months and years … Google+ occupies the same space as market leader Facebook with little to truly differentiate it.”
But all internet companies, even Facebook, are potentially vulnerable to the impact of new services.
“Facebook’s position cannot be considered impregnable in light of the way in which Facebook itself was able to topple former market leader MySpace,” says Mr Shepherd.
However, despite no longer being owned by News Corp and now under more nimble management, few analysts believe MySpace can wrest its former market lead from Facebook, which has 750 million users.
Analysts also say Facebook may have pulled ahead of rivals in the mobile social networking market. When they first appeared two years ago, location-based services such as foursquare and Gowalla were seen as a threat to Facebook.
But when Facebook Places, a similar service to foursquare that enables social networkers to let their friends know their whereabouts in real time, launched in the US a year ago, some analysts said Facebook had leapfrogged its new competitors. Nevertheless, foursquare’s customer base continues to grow.
“Foursquare continues to see respectable growth despite competition from Facebook’s location-based service. When Facebook Places launched, foursquare had three million users; today, it has more than 10 million,” says Mr Shepherd.
But the real threat to Facebook, and also to rivals such as Google+, may come from the world’s emerging markets, including the Middle East, which represent a huge potential market for internet-based social networking services.
“Social media in the Middle East is dominated by Twitter and Facebook,” says Mr Drury. “Now that commerce has woken up to the level of traction of these two platforms, there is a rush by marketeers to exploit them in the region.
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Facebook Offers Cash To ‘Bug Bounty Hunters’ At DefCon Hacker Conference
August 6, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
LAS VEGAS — At the DefCon hacker conference this weekend in Las Vegas, a team from Facebook has been making the rounds and delivering an unusual message: Please hack us. We’ll pay you for it.
The team, led by Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan, is promoting the company’s new “bug bounty program,” which pays researchers to report security flaws in the social-networking site of more than 750 million active users.
Facebook will pay a minimum of $500 for valuable information so long as the hacker agrees to not disclose the flaw until the company has fixed it. Since the program was announced last week, Facebook has already paid out one bounty of more than $3,000, Sullivan said.
“It mobilizes a lot of great security experts all over the world who are passionate about security,” Sullivan told The Huffington Post. “Hackers like to hack. We’re basically saying, ‘We want you to hack our site and we want you find things and we’re happy to pay you.’”
To get paid, hackers must be the first to report the security flaw and must reside in a country not under U.S. sanctions. They must also adhere to the company’s disclosure policy, which says researchers must make “a good faith effort” to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data and interrupting the site’s service during research to avoid being sued or investigated by law enforcement.
Facebook is not the only company looking to pay hackers for security help. Earlier this week, Microsoft said it would offer up to $200,000 to researchers who design new security technologies. Google also offers from $500 to more than $3,000 to researchers who find security flaws.
Joe Sullivan (left), Facebook’s chief security officer, and Ryan McGeehan, Facebook’s security manager for incident response, at the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas
Facebook has been on high alert to potential malware since the discovery more than two years ago of Koobface, a quickly-mutating computer worm that spread across the social networking site. The worm, which was created by criminal hackers, often disguised itself by inviting users to click on an entertaining video.
Sullivan said Facebook has a dedicated engineering team that builds tools to catch spammers on the site.
“It’s a little bit of whack-a-mole, but they’re so effective at it and that’s why the vast majority of Facebook users have much less spam in their Facebook inbox than their email inbox,” Sullivan said.
Earlier this week, Facebook celebrated a legal victory when Sanford Wallace, the self-proclaimed “Spam King,” turned himself in to face charges he compromised about 500,000 Facebook accounts by sending large numbers of spam messages through the company’s servers.
Facebook’s bug bounty program is not the first time the company has asked for help from hackers. In June, the company hired George Hotz, the young hacker who gained notoriety in 2007 for “jailbreaking” Apple’s iPhone, or getting around the phone’s software controls.
Sullivan said DefCon is fertile recruiting ground for Facebook because the company is looking to hire people who live and breathe security.
“We try to only hire people who, when they’re hanging out on Saturday night, are thinking about security,” he said. “That’s the people who are here right now and that’s why we want to be there.”
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