0 Creative Uses of the New Facebook Profile [PICS]

Facebook users are showing off some serious creativity by taking advantage of the new profile page photo layout.
French artist Alexandre Oudin (below) has been identified as the creator of the craze, and more and more designs are now emerging. People have been playing around with their profile pics since Facebook first launched, but the new redesign allows for some inspired fun including clever animations, typography and photography magic.
Have a look through our gallery of 10 of the best new Facebook profile pic hacks and share any cool creations that you’ve seen in the comments below. And if you’ve been getting crafty with your profile, we want to see it!

Is OkCupid's Dating Data Safe With Match.com?

There are millions of fish in the sea and, it seems, nearly as many online dating sites. But few have captured users' hearts quite the way OkCupid has. Launched in 2004 by a quartet of Harvard mathematicians, OkCupid has attracted more than 7 million users thanks to its low-cost, social-media-savvy, statistically driven approach to dating.
Unlike most dating sites, OkCupid lets users set up profiles and contact other members without having to pay fees. (A $10-per-month "A List" version lets members cruise ad-free profiles and access additional features.) Members can set up their own blogs, take quizzes, and compose questions for other users to answer. The company's popular blog, OkTrends, mines site data for trends and offers tongue-in-cheek relationship advice.
As a result, OkCupid has garnered a younger, more technologically plugged-in audience than conventional dating sites. But geeks aren't the only ones attracted to OkCupid. Internet dating giant Match.com was so smitten that it bought the site for $50 million earlier this month. That transaction has some OkCupid users a little worried.
Jesse W., a graduate student in Southern California who's been active on OkCupid since shortly after it launched, says "my heart was broken when I heard the news. I immediately posted about it on Facebook and called and texted my friends, who sent me their condolences. I won't advocate for the bully of online dating like I did when OkCupid's owners cared about its members."
OkCupid's fans were not reassured by the immediate disappearance of an OkTrends blog entry from last April (you can find a cached copy here). Titled "Why you should never pay for online dating," the blog post by OkCupid cofounder Christian Rudder accused for-pay dating sites eHarmony and Match.com of misleading consumers with statistics that don't accurately represent their success rates.
OkCupid's CEO, Sam Yagan, says that he decided to remove the blog post on his own, deeming it to contain inaccurate assumptions about the other sites' data. "It was the common sense thing to do," he says. He also maintains that OkCupid will continue to operate separately from Match.com and be free for most users.
The question then becomes, what happens to the trove of personal data that OkCupid has amassed?
Whose Data Is It, Anyway?
Not surprisingly for a site founded by math geeks, OkCupid is extremely data driven.
The site's OkTrends blog employs sophisticated statistical analysis to offer advice on topics like how guys can tell whether their odds of scoring on a first date are better or worse than average (ask her if she likes the taste of beer), which digital cameras make people look the hottest (Panasonic's Micro4/3s), and what the biggest lies told by online daters are (how much money they make and how tall they are).
As on some competing sites, data is what feeds the algorithms that OkCupid uses to suggest good matches. Last June, for example, the site introduced a feature making it possible for people who are rated attractive by other members to receive suggestions only for similarly attractive members.
A lot of this data comes from aggregating clickstreams on the site, measuring which kinds of profiles or pictures elicit the greatest number of responses. Some of it also comes from OkCupid's unique Questions feature. While nearly all dating sites employ some kind of questionnaire--and some, like eHarmony's, are notoriously extensive--few can match the depth of personal information that OkCupid members reveal via their answers.
Largely created by the members themselves, the questions range from the mundane ("How do you feel about kids?") to queries about religion, politics, sexual practices, drug use, STDs, and more. For example: "What's your relationship with marijuana?" and "Would you rather a) be tied up during sex, b) do the tying, or c) avoid bondage altogether?"
Though you can mark your answers as private and thereby make them inaccessible to anyone else, by default they are public. When you view another member's profile, you can see which public questions they've answered and how their responses compare to yours. You can also change your answers later, make public answers private, or delete them entirely.
Answering publicly is what helps you find good matches, says Katherine L., who joined OkCupid a year ago.
"Whatever your 'thing' or 'kink' is, you want to find people who can enjoy it with you," she says. "It really is an awesome tool for finding a huge diversity of people, from the fundamentally religious to the really strange."
Now all of that data is in the hands of Match.com's parent company, InterActive Corp (IAC). In addition to Match.com, IAC owns more than 50 Web properties, including such popular sites as Ask.com, The Daily Beast, College Humor, and City Search. It also owns Mindspark, which markets a range of browser toolbars, cursors, emoticons, screensavers, avatars, and online sweepstakes sites.
According to Match.com's privacy policy, the company reserves the right to share personally identifiable information with "other IAC businesses" and "other businesses with which we partner or which we carefully select to offer you products, services, and promotions through our website or offline." Users can opt out of receiving promotional e-mail and phone calls via their account settings.
However, Yagan insists that OkCupid's privacy policy--which limits the amount of data it shares with third parties--will continue to govern the data that the site collects.
"We are not planning to share any personally identifiable information with anyone," he says. "Just because we were acquired doesn't mean we're handing over any user data. Can I sign in blood and tell you that our privacy terms will not change for all of eternity? No. Can I tell you we have no plans to do anything with any of that data? Absolutely."
Match.com declined our request for an interview, but offered the following statement via a spokesperson: "Post-acquisition, the OkCupid privacy policy will continue to apply to OkCupid user data, just as it did pre-acquisition. At this time, we have no current plans to change the policy."
As any Facebook user can tell you, however, privacy policies are hardly written in stone.
"The fatal flaw in privacy policies is the fact that they can be changed at any time," says Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. "If there's anyone who has concerns about information they've shared with a site, they'd be well advised to remove or change that information while they still have the opportunity."
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
Most OkCupid users contacted for this story said that they would consider leaving the site if it mined their personal data for marketing purposes. Others like Nikkie H. seemed resigned to the risks of sharing personal information online.
"I look at Facebook and how the online advertisers seem to know everything about me, given how they've customized the ads [and] I've almost become desensitized to it all," she says. "My way of thinking is, you should never assume anything you say online will be private even if they say it will be. It's just like you should never assume telling your best friend a secret will stay a secret. More than likely they have shared your secret to someone else within two hours."
Nicole G., a former user of Match.com who compares it to "a business school barbecue," was less sanguine.
"As soon as I heard the news, I e-mailed my boyfriend of three months, whom I met on OkC," she says. "We've had some ups and downs lately. My e-mail: 'Well, guess we should definitely stay together now, because Match.com just bought OkCupid.' "

How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web's Hottest Platform

He didn't have much choice but to sell. It was summer 2006, a little more than two years after Mark Zuckerberg had created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room as a way for him and his friends to better connect with schoolmates. In the intervening years, he'd raised $37.7 million from venture capitalists and transformed his modest Web site into a certified social phenomenon. College kids across the nation clamored for access, which Zuckerberg doled out, school by school. By mid-2006, about 7 million users, most of them college students, had a Facebook account.
But for all of Facebook's success, there were also signs of trouble. Zuckerberg wanted the site to be more than a campus thing. He wanted to supplant and surpass MySpace and make Facebook the largest social network on the planet. He wanted it to become the next Google, a site that people of all ages would find useful in their daily lives. But that hadn't happened. Facebook had cornered the market for college students, but its 11-month-old effort to capture the attention of high school students — and take users away from MySpace — was going nowhere. Indeed, Facebook's growth was leveling off, inching its way toward 8 million members, while MySpace's continued to surge, with 100 million members in August of 2006.

At the same time, suitors like Viacom and Microsoft had begun to take a serious look at Facebook, and they were tossing out numbers with lots of zeroes. Some investors and executives began wondering if it was time for Zuckerberg to sell. It was starting to look like Facebook had peaked.
Zuckerberg disagreed, but when Yahoo came calling with a bid of $1 billion in cash, the pressure became too much. He relented in July, verbally agreeing to sell Facebook to Yahoo. Strategically, it seemed like a good match. Yahoo had hundreds of millions of users, but its foray into social networking was struggling. Facebook had cool tools and was looking for a mass audience.
The timing, however, couldn't have been worse. In the days after Zuckerberg agreed to sell, Yahoo announced it was projecting slower sales and earnings growth, and that the launch of its new advertising platform would be delayed. Its stock price plunged 22 percent overnight. Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO at the time, reacted by cutting his offer from $1 billion to $800 million. Zuckerberg, who had been warned about Semel's reputation for last-minute renegotiations, walked away. Two months later, Semel reissued the original $1 billion bid, but by then Zuckerberg had convinced his board and executive team that Yahoo wasn't a serious partner and that Facebook would be worth more on its own. He rejected the offer and became famous as the cocky youngster who turned down $1 billion.
Today, Zuckerberg, 23, is famous for other reasons. For one thing, analysts think he could be the nation's richest man under 25, with a net worth estimated at $1.5 billion. But more important, he has transformed his company from second-tier social network to full-fledged platform that organizes the entire Internet. As a result, Facebook is the now most buzzed-about company in Silicon Valley, and Zuckerberg is constantly compared to visionaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Even some of the tech industry's most legendary figures are genuflecting before Zuckerberg. In an entry on his blog, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen called Facebook's transformation "an amazing achievement — one of the most significant milestones in the technology industry in this decade." Says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, "I'm in awe." (So am I. I have known one of Facebook's executives since childhood.)
As for those concerns that Facebook's membership had peaked? Well, now it's signing up nearly 1 million new users a week. By the end of August there were 36 million of them. And these aren't just the tweens or college kids you might suspect; the fastest-growing segment of Facebook users is over 35, a group that represents 11 percent of all site users. Total registrations have more than quadrupled over the previous year. The number of employees has tripled, as has revenue. And venture capitalists say that if Facebook were to go public today, investors would value it at more than $5 billion — five times what Yahoo had been prepared to pay.
But Zuckerberg's greatest contribution goes beyond Facebook's success. His company suggests a new model for how connection, communication, and commerce can work online — a radical and ambitious rethinking of the Internet's potential.

Zuckerberg's journey from snot-faced upstart to dotcom deity began in the summer of 2006, just after the demise of the first Yahoo bid. Zuckerberg won't speak directly about this time period, but associates and friends say that, for the first time in his career, the curly-haired tyro found himself facing immense external pressure. Sure, he'd retained control of his company for the time being, but he hadn't solved any of the problems that led him to consider a sale in the first place. Critics were accusing him of hubris and foolhardiness. He had something to prove.

Wow, Microsoft And Google Are Punching Each Other In The Face Right In Front Of Us!

By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard the news. Google set up a sting operation (how cool is that?) in an attempt to catch Microsoft red-handed stealing their search results. And according to them, they did just that — and made it known. Microsoft has seemingly both sidestepped and denied the claim — and then has sent accusations back Google’s way. The whole thing is amazing, and to be honest, I’m still trying to parse it all. But you can get the whole gist by reading what’s on Techmeme, starting with Danny Sullivan’s original post on the topic.
But what’s most interesting right now is that Google and Microsoft are engaged in a full-on war. Yes, they’ve more or less been at war for many years. But it’s mainly been a quiet war, that takes place behind the scenes and only occasionally includes quick jabs at the other one in public. But now they’re straight-up calling each other liars on Twitter, and their own very popular blogs!
After the news and subsequent fight first broke out this morning. Microsoft immediately put up a rebuttal on their Bing blog, entitled: Thoughts on search quality. That article directly addresses Sullivan’s post but doesn’t directly call out Google for much.

Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile

im Tobin is president of Ignite Social Media, where he works work with clients including Microsoft, Intel, Nature Made, The Body Shop, Disney and more implementing social media marketing strategies. He is also author of the book “Social Media is a Cocktail Party: Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing.”
“What’s next in social media?” It’s among the most popular questions out there. But while most folks currently answer with “location-based services” (i.e. Foursquare, Gowalla) or “group purchasing” (i.e. Groupon, Twongo, Living Social), the real battle may be between Facebook and Google.
The fight between these two Internet giants to become your default social profile has been brewing for a long time, and the prize is an enormous potential revenue stream. Let’s take a closer look.

Team Facebook? Team Google?
Suddenly, whether Facebook or Google becomes the default social profile around the web has billion-dollar ramifications. Just ask credit card companies how much can be made by taking just a small percentage of all of those transactions. And with billions at stake, it’s likely to be a real battle ahead.
The winners may be all of us, because to compel us to connect using their services, both companies will have to think about providing a lot of genuine utility. When they get creative, we get better web experiences.
Get it right, make it secure, and I’m there.
Which social network do you think will ultimately triumph and why? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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