Social Media Minute: Facebook Crowd-Sources Content Policing, Social Acquisitions Galore

By Jason Harris (@harrisja) Jan 6, 2010

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

Facebook Asks Users To Point Out Inappropriate Content
Seesmic Buys Ping.fm for Status Aggregation
Social Networking Sites Prime Targets for Cybercrimminals
Critical Path Buys Up Shozu

Facebook Asks Users To Point Out Inappropriate Content

With 350 million users, there is a lot of content that Facebook users upload and interact with on a constant basis. All those status updates, photos, links and such add up to a mountain of content to keep up with. Facebook tries to stay controversy free by actively policing content inside their staff, but the task is almost too large.

This is why Facebook has started the Facebook Community Council which consists of a Facebook app that will allow people to evaluate and flag inappropriate content for potential take down. This crowdsourcing-type approach makes it possible for Facebook users to apply one of eight phrases to content such as: Spam, Acceptable, Not English, Skip, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking and Violence. If the content is verfiably reckoned as inappropriate, it will be taken off the site immediately.

Using this type of approach is very smart as Facebook is wisely tapping in to the enormous power of their broad user base.

What do you think — are you willing to help police Facebook to keep it free of inappropriate content?

Seesmic Buys Ping.fm for Status Aggregation

Seesmic, the dynamic social networking utility, has started the year off with a bang. For those unaware, Seesmic gives you the ability to have Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook status updates all in one application. Earlier this week, Seesmic announced that they had acquired Ping.fm, a different social web accessory that will compliment Seesmic rather well.

Ping.fm allows you to quickly and easily update your current status on 40+ social networks including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and many more. Ping.fm is very easy to use — either via their website, IM and a few other ways. Ping.fm is a popular service, boasting more than 500,00 users posting about 200,000 status updates per day.

Seesmic's acquisition of Ping.fm continues a string of movements to become more prolific in the social web ecosystem. In 2008, the company acquired Twhirl and continue to offer this client in addition to their namesake application. Also, Seesmic Web is a feature heavy web version of their software.

Social Networking Sites Prime Targets for Cybercrimminals

A new research report from security solutions provider McAfee Labs says that 2010 will the year the cybercrimminals really jump on social networking sites and other new web platforms to wreak havoc.

According to the 2010 Threat Predictions report sites like Twitter and Facebook will become hubs for cybercrimminals. Particular focus is on the use of third party applications within these sites as a new tool. But the report also mentions Google Chrome and HTML5 as key pieces of technology that these cybercrimminals can take advantage of.