E-Commerce Blog

Facebook’s new look is all about the Wall, the blank space on a profile page that the social network’s users can fill in with stories, photos, links and the ever-popular Status Updates. In turn, Facebook executives hope a less-cluttered Web site will eventually fill in their bank accounts with more advertising revenue. The second-ranked social network is slowly introducing its users to its redesign, keeping in mind the public relations disaster that was Beacon, Facebook’s controversial attempt to link customer data to advertisers.

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Facebook Repaints Wall in New Design

Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled “Jail Bird.” In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton’s drunken-driving case.

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Feckless MySpace Pix: A Prize for Prosecutors

The infamous Internet bully implicated in the suicide of a 13-year-old girl may get some comeuppance in a California courtroom, but it will probably not be enough to quell the fury of her many detractors. Lori Drew, the Minnesota woman accused of setting up a MySpace page to lure Megan Meier into revealing what she thought of Drew’s daughter, has pleaded not guilty to one count of conspiracy to cause emotional distress and three charges of accessing protected computers without authorization.

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US Law Aims to Catch Up With Tech - and Misses

The other night I was watching a clip from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” the iconic teen movie of my generation. It’s the scene where Ferris and Cameron are at the Cubs game and TV cameras pan Ferris catching a foul ball. Mr. Rooney, the obsessive high school principal who devotes his day to catching Ferris ditching, looks away from the TV just at that second. Ferris narrowly escapes. It was then I realized just how dated this movie has become. A kid cutting school these days has a whole range of ways, beyond the chance pan of a TV camera, to get caught.

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Getting Found Out, Web 2.0 Style

Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have become extremely fertile environments for product placement and branding. Marketers can reach consumers where they are spending significant amounts of time with compelling content that can potentially break through the marketing noise. Widgets are ideal for social networking venues because they pack a huge impact into a small size, providing a full-featured, sharable experience without the consumer’s having to go outside the social network.

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Widgets and Social Apps: The Rules of Engagement