Social networking

Longtime Googler Tom Stocky is Facebook's newest director of product, AllThingsD has learned.

Stocky posted about the move on his online profiles and Facebook confirmed he'd been hired.

Facebook and Google's hiring wars are vicious, but seem to always end well for the employees in question, with considerable signing or retention agreements.

Stocky, who has multiple degrees from MIT, had helped start Google's developer products team and had recently been Google director of product management for search, client, and infrastructure products based in Zurich. He joined Google in January 2005, according to his LinkedIn profile, and … Read more

Twitter announced today that it has reached the 1 million apps milestone. Quick, how many of them can you name?

Okay, so maybe a more serious question is, how many Twitter apps do you use? And this milestone raises other questions, like how many of these 1 million apps still exist? And perhaps most importantly, will the installed base of third-party apps help Twitter hold its own in the face of Google+?

Twitter's announcement follows a flurry of activity in the social media space, highlighted by the Google+ launch, the sale of Myspace, and Facebook's addition of Skype-powered … Read more

Open-Xchange's tool for helping people reconstruct their Facebook contact list on Google+ has fallen victim to Facebook's revocation of its privileges.

Open-Xchange, a maker of open-source e-mail and collaboration software, last week launched a tool that used the company's Social OX technology to help people assemble a list of their friends. It used connections to a combination of services such as LinkedIn and e-mail accounts to create a single "magic address book."

The tool didn't actually copy e-mail addresses from Facebook--only first and last names. It then matched those names to other e-mail records in the user's accounts. But Facebook disabled the API (application programming interface) key that the software used to read the names, Open-Xchange Chief Executive Rafael Laguna said.

Facebook gave two reasons for the move and underscored the seriousness of its decision with a warning about the repercussions: … Read more

Apparently Google is feeling more confident about expanding the population of its social network, because the "invite people to Google+" button has been visible for well over a day.

The button had been appearing fleetingly since the Google+ launch on June 28, so Google's decision to leave it up carries the message that the company is less concerned now about a big growth spurt. Of course, the company can still throttle the rate at which it delivers those invitations or the rate it signs up the new members when they open their invitations, but the relative ease … Read more

Many users of Google's new Google+ social-networking service, which is still in beta and mostly closed to the public, have been tweeting this afternoon about getting the same e-mail notification multiple times--some as many as 40 times or more.

"I just got 29 emails telling me that [another user] is following me on google +. What a weird glitch," writes Twitter user Nolongermusing, whose post was typical of those still streaming in Saturday afternoon.

It's hard to know just how widespread the glitch is. Google did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the problem. And while … Read more

Ford Motor Co. has established a corporate presence on Google+, evidently securing a place in a test of how Google's social network site will extend beyond individuals.

The Ford Google+ site had 1,222 followers on Saturday morning and featured posts such as a photo caption contest, a question about what people would like to see out of Ford on Google+, and promotion of a live chat with Ford's director of marketing communications--with a Google+ video-chat hangout afterward.

As Twitter raises even more money, it's getting more serious about making money. The service is set to start showing ads in users' "timelines" within the next month, following through on plans it has talked about for more than a year.

Twitter is pushing a new ad product called "Promoted Tweets To Followers," set to launch by early August.

They will give marketers a chance to place their messages directly in front of users that follow particular brands, via ads that will show up when a user first logs on to Twitter.com.

Twitter has … Read more

Google Executive Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with reporters in Idaho this week and discussed some of the most buzz-worthy and pressing topics surrounding his company these days, including Google+, China, the FTC, and Facebook.

First, there's Google+, the Goog's effort at producing a major social-networking platform, which ties in with the growing competition with Facebook.

When speaking at his own company's press event on Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was a bit more stinging with his words. Though he didn't cite Google specifically, it's not too difficult to figure out which … Read more

Facebook scams and viruses grow by the day, so it's no surprise scammers are taking advantage of the new video calling feature.

Sophos' Naked Security blog reports that the newest Facebook scam makes Video Chat look like an application called Video Call, as seen in the screenshot below. That, in turn, tricks users to be "easily convinced to approve the application to have more liberal permissions."

However, there are a few more noticeable problems with the permissions request if one actually takes the time to read. After all, why would an app that comes directly from Facebook … Read more