Here come the Google+ games. Google has announced a big move toward mainstream adoption today, integrating Web-based games within the brand new social network. “We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life,” the announcement says. Titles include Angry Birds, Bejeweled Blitz, Zynga Poker and Sudoku. Google has launched a new Google Plus Platform Blog to help encourage more.

Google seems a bit concerned about the distraction factor, though, and it wants to make sure these games don’t get in the way of your +1ing, sharing and other important Google Plus business. “Games in Google Plus are there when you want them and gone when you don’t,” the announcement says. “If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them.”

In every respect, from letting in members to developing mobile apps, the Google Plus project has been careful in its progress. A hasty implementation of games, or one that would cause a backlash, would be a major setback, and this announcement is worded to soothe that concern. But games have been expected since the launch of Google Plus (or earlier) and despite the company’s refusal to comment, multiple hints have been found in code and help documents.

As was reported last year, Google has quietly invested as much as $200 million in social game developer Zynga, maker of such illustrious titles as Farmville and Mafia Wars. Zynga’s business, while huge, has been almost entirely dependent on Facebook so far. As GigaOm’s Ryan Kim points out, Google Plus won’t have top Zynga titles like Cityville and Farmville because they’re exclusive to Facebook, but $200 million is sure to land Plus some fresh new titles of its own.

Games are an important feature for a social network that wants to compete with Facebook for users’ attention, not to mention its gaming business. “There is terrific potential for games on Google Plus,” Billy Pidgeon, a game analyst at M2 Research, told VentureBeat games specialist Dean Takahashi in a report on developer anticipation of games on Google Plus two weeks ago. “Opening up gaming on other social networks gives other publishers more opportunity to compete outside the Zynga-Facebook matrix, and can also help Zynga escape dependence on Facebook.” Takahashi wrote that he spoke to a number of game developers who were confident that Games on Plus would launch soon and that it “would change the game industry” when it does.

The battle for game developer attention is likely to be heated. Tricia Duryee reported late last month at All Things D that multiple sources told her Google would try to undercut Facebook by charging developers a lower fee for things like in-app sales.

This morning, Facebook launched a new feature called “login approvals,” which offers users the ability to further secure access to their Facebook account through the introduction of a second step to the login process. Once opted-in to this security feature, users enter in their email address and password as usual, but will then receive a second code sent to them on their mobile phone. This short, numeric code must also be entered before being able to access Facebook from that computer.

While an extra step may not be to everyone’s liking, for those looking for additional ways to secure access to their account, this feature will be welcomed.

This type of security feature is known as “two-factor authentication,” a term which refers to the two separate steps taken to ensure a user is who they say they are. A username (in this case, the email address registered with Facebook) and a password can easily become compromised, as anyone who’s had their Facebook account hacked can tell you. What’s less likely, however, is for anyone else to gain physical access to your mobile phone.

By requiring that this second code is sent to a device you have in your possession, you can easily keep unwanted third-parties from getting into your Facebook account.

To turn on login approvals, you’ll first need to confirm what computer you’ll be using, by entering in a security code sent via text message to your phone. Once you enter the code, you’ll be asked to save the device to your account, so you don’t see the message again when using that same computer.

After this initial setup is complete, if you ever login from an unrecognized device, you’ll be asked to enter in another security code sent to your phone.  You will also be notified of this change upon the following login to Facebook, and asked to verify the attempted account access.

If it wasn’t you who had attempted to sign in from the other device, you’ll be able to change your Facebook password to re-secure the account immediately. However, you can be assured that the person who attempted to hack into your account would not have been able to access it, as they did not have the code sent to your mobile phone at the time.

And if you ever lose your phone, you can return to any previously authorized device to log back into Facebook.

To enable this feature, go to the “Account Security” section of the Account settings page on Facebook, and look for the new “Login Approvals” option. You can access your Account settings by clicking on the “Account” link at the top-right of the Facebook homepage.

Many people have been pleased to hear that Facebook is now allowing users to choose full SSL/HTTPS encryption throughout their session to prevent their accounts from being compromised through unencrypted WiFi using tools like Firesheep.

After the announcement though, lots of people are confused and requested we provide better instructions on how to choose this more secure option. I was able to find a brief (only 1.5 minutes!) YouTube video on how to enable this feature.

As of the time of this article (January 28, 2011) only a fraction of all Facebook accounts have been enabled to use this option. I expect it to be available to all Facebook users in a short amount of time.

The myth that HTTPS sessions consume a large quantity of resource needs to be quashed. While encryption may seem to be a heavy duty task, modern algorithms are designed to create the maximum security for a minimum impact.

If you are a web master or IT administrator who is responsible for providing services to your customers, please look into securing your pages and following Facebook’s lead. If they can provide an extra layer of protection for more than 500 million users, surely you can provide the same protections to your users.

For Facebook users, in addition to selecting the new HTTPS option, take a look at this guide on how to secure your profile. I hope this can help some of the people out there, as of lately, there have been a lot of bad things going around on Facebook.

Facebook has added APIs for developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users, so FarmVille can see where, as well as who, you are. Permission to access such data must be given through the usual notification system, but with the vast majority of users simply agreeing with everything they’re asked, the new facility is attracting privacy concerns beyond those incurred by sharing one’s details with the developers of Bejeweled Blitz or similar.

Users almost always click “Allow” when faced with such decisions, as demonstrated by Microsoft’s Active X technology more than a decade ago and proven by the thriving malware ecosystem sustained by inattentive Facebook users today.

The alternative is pointed out by Sophos security, which suggests a more totalitarian approach: “Wouldn’t it better if only app developers who had been approved by Facebook were allowed to gather this information?” There are no Trojans on iOS or in the Mac App Store, so perhaps pre-approval is the way forward, restrictive as it is.

Sophos has said that the new APIs, applied on Friday, might be fodder for rogue application developers. Survey scams that form one of the mainstays of security threats on Facebook often attempt to hoodwink punters into supplying their mobile number and signing up to premium rate text messaging service of questionable utility.

The process of extracting mobile phone numbers of potential marks, which used to be a matter of social engineering trickery, might now be done much more easily. Users would still need to give permission for third-party Facebook applications to access this personal contact data but this has become a matter of fooling someone into clicking a dialogue box rather than the trickier process of hoodwinking them into typing in their mobile phone number.

Facebook recently beefed up its account recovery options to include messages sent to a designated mobile phone number as part of its account recovery procedure. This, and other factors, mean that the mobile phone number of many users will be held by the dominant social network.

Mobile phone numbers might even be held by the social network without users submitting them, in cases where their friends have recorded relevant phone numbers in their address book and make use of Facebook’s iPhone application. More details on this privacy exposure can be found in an article here.

Sophos is urging users to remove their addresses and phone numbers from Facebook, as a precaution. A guide on reviewing Facebook privacy settings, developed by Sophos, can be found here.

Facebook’s privacy dashboard can be found here.

The new APIs, launched at the weekend, also provide notification for developers if a user “unlikes” something: so next time you take a thumbs-up off a page, expect a phone call asking why, and perhaps a knock on the door from someone seeking a more detailed explanation.

UPDATE: Douglas Purdy, director of developer relations, just posted on the Facebook developer blog to explain that Facebook agrees with its critics that the feature could be better implemented and the company will be pulling it until changes are made.

“Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so. We’ll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks.”

It will be interesting to see what they decide to change when and if they re-release this new “feature” to the masses.

I was spending some time browsing around Facebook today (translation: wasting time), when I noticed that they have some shortcut keys for navigating around the site using the keyboard, so I put together a list for everybody.

Note: for each of these shortcut keys, if you’re using Firefox, you’ll need to use Shift+Alt instead of just Alt, and for Internet Explorer you’ll need to hit the Enter key after the shortcut to trigger it. If you’re using a Mac, you’ll need to use Ctrl+Opt instead of Alt. I would suggest sticking with Google Chrome as it seems to have the shortcuts working the easiest for now. As always though, the shortcuts could change or go away if facebook decides to switch them up.

• New Message: Alt + M
• Search Box: Alt + ?
• Home Page: Alt + 1
• Your Profile: Alt + 2
• Friend Requests: Alt + 3
• Messages: Alt + 4
• Notifications: Alt + 5

There’s a couple of other shortcut keys, for Alt+6 through 0 on the keyboard, which take you to the settings, privacy, about, terms, and help pages. If you find yourself having trouble remembering which shortcut does what, just note that for the most part, they take you to roughly left-to-right destinations on your Facebook page.

Facebook survey scams continue to be a big problem. Just this weekend security companies estimate that hundreds of thousands of Facebook users have been hit by a resurgence of the “Girl killed herself” scam. I can certainly believe them as my Facebook news feed has been littered with them all weekend.

After seeing all the different profiles sending out all kinds of junk to their friends from these scams, it is obvious that many people are struggling to clean up their accounts after they were tricked into allowing a third party application to post messages from their profile. Of course, these messages look to your online friends as though you posted them, so it’s really important that the problem gets resolved or the scam will just spread more and more virally.

Here’s a quick YouTube video where Sophos Security shows you how to clean up your Facebook account from such an attack:

So make it easy on yourself and just don’t click on this type of random stuff if you see it pop up on your news feed from a friend. If you are really curious, try messaging your friend to see if they really meant to post it first. The internet can be a scary place… so stay safe out there!

Google just announced it’s extending the drag-and-drop functionality in its online office suite, Google Docs. A few weeks ago, it introduced an image uploader for docs that worked the same way as the new feature does – you simply drag a file from your computer’s and it will immediately upload to “the cloud,” (the cloud, in this case being the Google Docs online service). Today’s upgrade now brings drag-and-drop to the file upload page, where it serves as an easier way to move your off your PC’s hard drive and into Google Docs.

The file uploader isn’t really a ground-breaking new feature – after all, plenty of sites today are offering drag-and-drop uploads – if anything, it’s a long overdue upgrade for the Google Docs service. However, it comes at an important time for Google as it continues to compete with Microsoft Office, one of Microsoft’s biggest cash cows to this day.

Google Docs Drag and Drop feature.

Microsoft arrived late to the Web Office game, introducing its own online suite in July. Microsoft is also deeply integrating its Office Web Apps into Facebook, and it will also be integrated with Facebook’s newly announced messaging platform. Facebook and Google, although seemingly dissimilar services, are actually two of the biggest rivals in the Internet industry today. Facebook has been poaching top Google engineers left-and-right and is attempting to “out-Google” Google by organizing the Internet through social relationships and “likes” instead of algorithms and analyzing links, as Google does. If successful, Facebook could not only cut deeply into Google’s advertising business, but could become people’s default search portal, too. Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is integrated with Facebook’s search. (Microsoft’s $240 million 2007 investment in Facebook doesn’t look so crazy now, does it?)

Two days ago, Google unveiled a counterattack against Microsoft’s stalwart suite. It launched a service called “Google Cloud Connect” that allows people still using Office to take advantage of Google Docs’ Web-based collaboration features within Office. The product arose from Google’s acquisition of DocVerse from earlier this year. With Cloud Connect, files created in Microsoft Office are synced to Google’s “cloud” but can still be used in Office for editing purposes.

The goal, of course, is not to improve life for Office users, necessarily, but to make the transition from the desktop to the cloud easier and less cumbersome.

Drag-and-drop is just another example of this ongoing push to get people to leave Office behind.

Google also announced another minor feature today which allows you to hide the title bar above the document editor by choosing either View -> Compact controls or pressing Ctrl Shift F (Cmd Shift F on Macs).

In an effort to promote its sustainability efforts, Facebook has officially launched the company’s “Green” page. The page, represented by what appears to be the merger of a restart button and an abstract pine tree, will showcase the company’s latest green achievements, pertinent articles and a bevy of fun facts.

Under the “programs” tab there’s an official list of Facebook’s recent achievements, highlights include the company’s construction of Haystack to more efficiently store photos (which led to energy savings of 20%), its green transportation system and yes, those AUTO/Dual flush toilets at its headquarters.

The Green page is just part of Facebook’s increasingly aggressive campaign to ratchet up its sustainability efforts— or at least broadcast its green agenda to the public. This Thursday morning, Facebook also announced that it has joined the Digital Energy Solutions Campaign (DESC), a consortium of NGOs, regulators and consumers that promotes energy efficiency in the information and communications technology sector. DESC will be the first co-administrator for Facebook’s Green page, which will eventually feature other environmental experts as co-administrators.

“Our on-going philosophy has been to improve the efficiency of our infrastructure and we continue to invest tremendous resources to improve our own operations,”Jonathan Heiliger, VP of Technical Operations at Facebook said in a statement. “By creating and sharing innovative technology solutions, we hope to help raise the visibility of the importance of environmental sustainability across all industries.”

Today’s two-for-one announcement also comes in the wake of Facebook’s recent partnership with the Alliance to Save Energy, a large coalition of environmental leaders and major corporations like Dell and AT&T. Last week, Facebook agreed to give the Alliance $500,000 in free advertising on its site, to promote the campaign and its new consumer-facing website, LivingEfficiently.org.

The initiatives come amid growing criticism from certain environmental groups, like Greenpeace, which have complained that Facebook has not done enough to promote sustainability and energy efficiency. This year, Greenpeace has pressed Facebook to make its data centers greener by using more renewable energy. The group took particular offense to Facebook’s new data center in Prineville, Oregon, which is powered by  Pacific Power, a utility firm that draws significant energy from coal plants.

The months-old saga hasn’t died down yet, on Wednesday, the NYTimes ran an article titled, “Facebook Under Pressure to Be Greener,” which detailed the tension between Greenpeace and Facebook and the social network’s ongoing challenge to be energy efficient as it scales up.

Facebook and Bing just announced a new search partnership during a joint event at Microsoft’s San Francisco offices. With this new partnership, Bing wants to take personalized search to the next level by tapping into the knowledge of your friends on Facebook. Microsoft looks at this as “the beginning of how search gets better because of your friends.” According to Microsoft, “search is not just about the connections between data but also about the connection between people.”

Among the new features that Microsoft will launch today are Facebook results for name queries (4% of all queries on Bing are name queries) and personalized results based on what your friends liked on Facebook. Thanks to this, you can now see what restaurants your friends liked on sites like OpenTable, for example, or if your friends liked a certain movie. Microsoft will roll these new feature out later today.

The new personalized search results are based on what your friends “liked” across the Web. These results will appear in a box on the search results page. Results for name queries will now highlight people in your social network in a separate box. Thanks to this, results for common names like “Bob Smith” will now highlight people in your social network or within your friends’ networks.

In the near future, Bing also hopes to be able to find topic experts among your friends and highlight relevant search results from sites and stories that they liked.

At the beginning of the event, Microsoft’s president of its Online Services Group Qi Lu noted that Bing wants to go beyond just the basic search experience that today’s Internet users are familiar with. With this new partnership, Bing will be able to offer better search results for name queries, for example. According to Lu, by being able to connect search to your social graph, Bing will be able take search to the next level. Today’s announcement, according to Lu, is only the beginning of this new partnership.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg called this announcement “one of the most interesting partnerships we have done recently.” Given that Facebook already had a partnership with Microsoft, Zuckerberg noted that Microsoft is a good partner for Facebook. Facebook likes to work with underdogs (like Bing) who want to innovate and “push new things.”

So far, these new capabilities in Bing look quite similar to Google Social, which also integrates results from your Twitter and Google Buzz friends on the search results page.

For those of you tirelessly campaigning for a dislike button, it looks like it’s arrived, at least in some format. Facebook has upgraded its comments plugin and now allows users to up- and down-vote other comments, finally giving us the ability to simply disagree, no ifs ands or buts about it.

While the company has been very careful, it seems, not to use the word “dislike”, clicking the “up” arrow is synonymous with “liking”, so we can only assume that clicking the “down” arrow would be a “dislike”.

In the new comment plugin, comments are not only threaded, meaning each user can reply directly to another user, but more information is shown on each person, including their job and company, or network, and their comment record. The system also allows for up- and down-voting, a la Reddit – actually, the whole comment system is very Reddit-esque.

New voting feature for facebook comments!

To see the new comment system in action, take a look at Facebook’s latest blog post. Each comment begins with one point and a vote up or down raises or lowers that rating by a point. Comments can go into the negative, but so far I haven’t seen any effect from these ratings – simply the indicator that others disagree with it in some way. If you reload the page over time, too, you’ll notice that your comment stays at the top, so you can manage your comment and conversation. I wonder if we’ll see highly rated comments float to the top and negatively rated comments disappear, as on Reddit.

For now, it looks like the upgraded plugin is only active on Facebook and not on third-party sites, but the move certainly encroaches on the territory of commenting systems like Disqus, Echo and Intense Debate.

Beyond third-party comment systems, however, I am really curious as to when this might hit the Facebook user stream. I have already noticed some interesting activity on the new Facebook groups feature, with more active posts rising to the top and negating the usual newest to oldest order. Allowing users to vote on posts and on individual comments could really alter the entire dynamic of Facebook. That sort of functionality is already in place, with the “Top News” view of your user stream, it just isn’t so blatant. Not to mention, I support threaded comments wherever they may be found – they just make sense.

For all the controversy they create with privacy issues, there’s no denying that Facebook has good ideas. The latest feature they’re starting to roll out today is very, very smart: one-time passwords.

We’ve likely all had the situation where we’ve logged into some account at an Internet cafe, library, or friend’s computer and worried that we forgot to log out and/or accidentally saved our passwords on that computer. Facebook’s new feature allows you to simply text “otp” to 32665 from your mobile phone (the one associated with your Facebook account) and you’ll immediately receive a temporary password that can only be used once and will expire in 20 minutes. Brilliant.

The only downside seems to be that you need to remember that texting shortcode, but perhaps they’ll put a link prominently on their mobile site and/or apps.

On top of one-time passwords, Facebook is finally rolling out the ability to sign out of your account remotely. This obviously also solves the problem of worrying you forgot to log out of your account on another machine. Google and other services have had this for a while, and it can be very useful.

Example of recent facebook account activity.

In your Account Settings page, Facebook also now shows you your period of last activity on the service, just in case you’re afraid someone has accessed your account. This is also similar to what Google does with Gmail, but it’s laid out in a much nicer way on Facebook — including the approximate location of the person and what device they were using to access the account (Google lists both of those things as well but in a much more computerized format).

Facebook also notes:

Lastly, when people log in to Facebook we will regularly prompt them to keep their security information updated. If you ever lose access to your account, having this information helps us verify who you are and get you back into your account quickly.

Speaking of Google, they’ve also been recently stepping up their game with regard to security. Last month, they started enabling two-step authentication which requires you enter a username, password, and secret code sent to the mobile phone associated with your Google account.

It’s finally here. Digg, the social link sharing site that has watched its once-meteoric rise to popularity level off over the last couple years, is relaunching today as it attempts to surge to greater heights — with an added focus on making the site better for publishers as well as users. Digg v4 will be rolling out over the next few hours, and brings some major changes that could totally change the dynamic of the site. Plenty of invites have been distributed over the last couple months, and many sites posted previews, but for most people this will be the first time they’ve experienced ‘New Digg’ for themselves.

The biggest change to come in Digg v4 is the increased emphasis on social. When you first sign in, you’ll be walked through a flow inviting you to begin following other users, both from a series of lists curated by Digg and from friends on your Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts (which you can easily connect with). Once you’ve done this, you’ll get to the real meat of Digg. Which, as it happens, looks a lot like the old Digg.

The new Digg.com!

As with the Digg you’re used to, you’ll see a stream of recent stories filling up most of the page, with ten top stories in a sidebar on the right. But there’s one key difference: each of these stories has been Dugg by one of your friends (or sponsored by an advertiser). Likewise, the stories on the right hand side of the screen represent the stories that have been dugg most by your friends over the last day or so.

But fear not, Digg diehards — the Digg you’ve come to know and love is still readily accessible at the top of the page, via the ‘Top News’ section. Clicking this tab will transition over to a version of Digg that’s much more like the current version, with recent news and Top News as submitted across all of Digg.

Other key changes include the link submission process, which is much more straightforward than it used to be. Before now if you wanted to submit a link to Digg, you had to provide an image and description to go along with it. Now these will be automatically added, the same way they are when you add a link to Facebook.

Another view of the new Digg.com!

Of course, there’s still one big question: will it work? At this point I’m skeptical, but it won’t be clear for some time. In order for this to lead to the resurgence Digg needs, user behavior will need to change, especially among casual users. The site has long been dominated by power users who account for many of the stories that hit the front page — now there’s much more emphasis on what your friends have shared. Which assumes, of course, that you friends are actually sharing things on Digg, which is hardly a given at this point.

This launch has been a long time coming — it was supposed to launch back in 2009. In April, Digg founder Kevin Rose took over as CEO, replacing Jay Adelson — at the time we were hearing that he was unsatisfied with the progress of New Digg, which had already been much delayed.

Yesterday Facebook rolled out a new feature called Places that lets you and your friends check in to locations, Foursquare-style. If you’d prefer to keep your location private, or at least stop your friends from posting it, here’s how.

If you’re not convinced that posting your location can be a bad thing, check out PleaseRobMe for some evidence. Of course, if you’re careful, check-ins aren’t inherently a bad thing. Whether or not you want to disable them is entirely up to you, but Facebook—yet again—has made the assumption that you want to take part in all of their privacy-eroding new features. If you don’t, or want a little more control over who can divulge your location, you can make this change pretty quickly through your privacy settings. Here is how you do it:

1) Log in to Facebook. From your Account menu, choose Privacy Settings. You’ll get something like the picture below. Click the Customize option (if it isn’t already selected) and then click the “Customize settings” link (it’s the one next to the pencil below the table depicting your current privacy settings).

Disabling Facebook Places: Step 1

2) Under the “Things I Share” heading, all the way at the bottom (of that section), there are two things you may want to change. By default “Places I check in” should be set to only be visible by your friends. If you want to limit it more or less, use the drop down menu to do so. You can set this setting to “Only Me,” which is as private as you’re going to get. Below that option is “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in.” It is enabled by default. This will let people know you’re at a particular location via the location’s page or in a search for people near you. Uncheck “Enable” if you don’t want this.

Disabling Facebook Places: Step 2

3) Lastly—and this is the important one—if you don’t want your friends to check you into Places, sharing your current location with a bunch of people you may or may not know, go down to the section called “Things Others Share” and find “Friends can check me in to Places.” Initially, it might not be set to anything at all so the default option could be either choice. Regardless, set this to “Disabled” if you don’t want your friends checking you in. Keep in mind that any friend could potentially check you in anywhere. You don’t actually have to be there. If you don’t want anyone playing a practical joke and checking you in to a strip club, for example, this is a good thing to turn off.

Disabling Facebook Places: Step 3

And that’s it! While it’s not so great that you’re opted-in to the new Places feature, fortunately it’s pretty easy to opt-out. Here is a quick video summing the process up!

A security feature implemented by Facebook in May requires some users to identify friends from photos in order to log in from an unfamiliar computer – tough for a bot or an imposter to fake. But it’s also a major annoyance for some who have been denied access to their accounts after failing to correctly identify photos of dogs, objects and acquaintances they don’t know well enough to recognize.

Facebook has already added a question to its FAQ specific to the issue: “I can’t access my account because I don’t recognize anyone in the photo security check.”

Facebook user Eleanor Herman was directed to the security check after trying to login from a laptop computer at the beach instead of the one she normally uses. She’s an author who is ‘friends’ with her readers, many of whom she does not know personally, and she has not been able to correctly identify the five out of seven photos required to access her account. Facebook makes her wait an hour before attempting the security check again.Here is an example of one of the photos causing her a lot of trouble:

Facebook photo security check.

It’s easy to see why this test is difficult for many Facebook users to pass, and difficult to understand how Facebook failed to realize this.

Facebook encourages us to ‘connect’ with as many people as possible, however marginal the relationship, so it’s not surprising that users can’t recognize every face in their growing ‘friend’ banks. Users upload and tag pictures of animals, food, objects, landscapes, abstract art and groups of people jammed together – the volume of photos mistagged as inside jokes is enough to invalidate this as a way to verify a user’s identity.

Facebook says it is relying on tagged pictures from friends with whom a user is likely to have a close connection, similar to the algorithm used to decide what to display in a user’s News Feed. But users are understandably getting frustrated:

Users complaining about the new security feature.

Facebook has responded to some sources to say only a small percentage of users have any problem with the photo security check. It’s found the method to be more effective than other kinds of security checks, a spokesman said, and Facebook is always working to improve its systems.

Screenshot of the "Ask Question" option.

Facebook’s worst-kept secret is finally ready for its closeup: the company is starting to roll out Facebook Questions, a Q&A service that allows users to poll all of Facebook. Facebook has been inviting users to apply to join a sneak peek of Questions for months now, so we’ve seen much of this before, but this marks the first time that it will begin rolling out to users who didn’t apply for the beta program. Facebook says that this is intiitally rolling out to 3-5 million users, with plans for a broader rollout down the line.

The motivations behind the launch are clear: millions of people already use Facebook status updates to poll their friends — it’s only natural that the site would offer a dedicated mechanism to do this (and it’s also likely to be a boon for page views, especially once Questions are syndicated to search engines). But If you were hoping the new product would incorporate Facebook’s extensive privacy settings, you’ll be disappointed: everything in Questions is shared with everyone else on Facebook, and every question you ask is tied to your real name; likewise, anyone who answers will have their response tied to their account.

Questions choice on the homepage.

Of course, having all questions set to public does have one nice side effect: you’ll be able to poll from Facebook’s massive audience of 500 million users. Facebook obviously isn’t going to ask your question to everyone else on Facebook; instead, its system is going to try to analyze a user’s interests to determine who would be best able to answer your question. The service will also show the question to some of your friends, so ideally you’ll receive answers from a healthy mix of friends and experts (we’ll see how well it actually works).

You’ll be able to ask a question from a few places: the Questions tab that appears in the site’s left navigation area, the publisher that appears at the top of the page (where you typically post things like status updates), and, most interestingly, the search box. When you start typing a question into Facebook’s search box, the site will start displaying a list of similar questions that have already been asked on the site. If yours doesn’t pop up, or you really want to re-ask the same thing, you can ask it directly from the search field.

This could be a big, big deal for the site. Given its size, it won’t take long for Facebook to build up a massive amount of data — if that data is consistently reliable, Questions could turn into a viable alternative to Google for many queries. Facebook will also be integrating Questions and their answers into the Community Pages it launched in April, which already include content from Wikipedia and Facebook user status updates.

The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year’s time, we were told today by John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist.

The main reason for the concern? There’s an explosion of data about to happen to the Web – thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

IPv4 countdown on Twitter - less than a year to go before IPv4 addresses run out...

Currently the Web largely uses IPv4, Internet Protocol version 4. Each IPv4 address is limited to a 32-bit number, which means there are a maximum of just over 4 billion unique addresses. IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol and uses a 128-bit address, so it supports a vastly larger number of unique addresses. Enough, in fact, to give every person on the planet over 4 billion addresses!

John Curran from ARIN, the non-profit responsible for managing the distribution of Internet addresses in the North American region, told ReadWriteWeb that of the approximately 4 billion IPv4 addresses available, all but 6% have already been allocated. Curran expects the final 6% to be allocated over the coming year.

This is largely an issue that ISP (Internet Service Providers) and telecoms carriers need to deal with. However content service providers, including large-scale Internet companies like Google and Facebook, also need to ensure that the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 takes place. Curran explained that a content company like Google (for example its YouTube operation) will need to work with its ISP to transport the content via IPv6 as well as IPv4.

This transition is happening “slowly,” says Curran. But he warns that “deployment is where we’re behind.”

John Curran told us that large carriers like Verizon and Comcast have announced trial IPv6 activity. Curran also noted that new Internet of Things initiatives that use sensor networks, power grids, RFID and similar technologies, are being directed to use IPv6 and not IPv4.

There is also solid support from the big Internet companies. Curran said that Google has already put the majority of its services onto IPv6. Declaring its support for IPv6 on a special webpage, Google states that “IPv6 is essential to the continued health and openness of the Internet [and] will enable innovation and allow the Internet’s continued growth.”

In June, Google held a Google IPv6 Implementors Conference. At that event, Facebook announced that it had begun to use IPv6.

In his opening remarks to the conference, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf urges ISPs to move to IPv6, so that a “black market” for Internet addresses won’t occur.

Critics view some of the push for IPv6 as Chicken Little ‘the sky is falling’ talk. Commented @ajbraun, a self-described technology leader at Sony Ericsson, via Twitter: “We should call this “IPv6: Y2K II.” An obvious issue for 10 years, we will panic at the end and finally much ado about nothing.”

Others see a technology called NAT (Network Address Translation) as a solution – it maps multiple addresses to a single IP address, thus reducing the amount of unique IP addresses required. However this is at best a temporary solution. Google argued back in 2008 that NAT and similar technologies “complicate the Internet’s architecture, pose barriers to the development of new applications, and run contrary to network openness principles.”

Whether or not there is Y2K-style fear mongering, the bottom line is that IPv6 is a much larger platform for the coming Internet of Things. So one way or another, the move will have to be made.

As an early adopter of an unknown service called “The Facebook” back in 2004, it is impressive to see the growth and change that has come to the site. When many of the earliest members joined, a university email address from a select list of institutions was required to sign up. Eventually, nearly every college was opened up, then came high-schools and after that – everyone. Today marks another significant milestone in the history of the Web’s most popular social network as Facebook has passed the 500 million user mark.

Company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement today on the official Facebook blog.

“To celebrate, we’ve put together a collection of stories you’ve shared with us about the impact Facebook and your friends have had on your lives,” writes Zuckerberg. “We’re launching a new application called Facebook Stories where you can share your own story and read hundreds of others, categorized by themes and locations around the world.”

Despite the company’s recent bumpy rides through themires of privacy disputes, over the last 6 and a half years, Facebook has redefined how we maintain relationships with our connections. We here at ReadWriteWeb even had the adventure of unknowingly confusing thousands of Facebook users who thought our homepage was a radical new redesign of their favorite social network.

500 million users later, distant families and long-lost friends are reconnecting and keeping abreast on one another’s lives. I moved away from my hometown at the age of 9, but I managed to find my childhood friends on Facebook. I also have relatives that I see maybe once a year at best, but with Facebook we can stay connected – and it’s only because the network is as large as it is. Certainly, there are other social Web solutions for staying connected, but the massive scale and acceptance by users young and old of Facebook makes it the best tool we have right now.

Children growing up today don’t remember a time before Facebook – and that’s both scary and fascinating. Future generations will be more and more accepting of sharing their lives on the Internet, which has its obvious pros and cons. At the other end of the spectrum, when my generation grows old and wants to look back on our lives, we won’t need an old crusty photo album. We will simply use whatever popular device at the time that lets us flip through our life’s history as aggregated from decades of social sharing. Facebook has been at the forefront of paving the way for that future.

It has taken 77 months for Facebook to go from 0 to 500 million and the company shows little sign of slowing, even with many leaving the network over privacy issues. The truth is, there is no viable alternative yet, but perhaps Google or those four students from N.Y.U. can change that.

I know some of you may be saddened by the news of Facebook closing down its Gift Shop, but I have just one thing to say – good riddance to virtual junk. Whether it’s a box of chocolates that you can’t actually taste or a teddy bear you can’t squeeze, you’ll have to satiate all of your virtual cravings over the coming weeks because, come August 1st, these imaginary offerings will be no more.

The one question everyone is asking, however, is why would Facebook close down a venture that sells imaginary, low-to-no overhead items for real-world money?

Facebook’s product manager for games and credits Jared Morgenstern wrote in a blog post that “Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of the people who have given millions of gifts, but we made the decision after careful thought about where we need to focus our product development efforts. We’ll be able to focus more on improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day, such as Photos, News Feed, Inbox, games, comments, the ‘Like’ button and the Wall.”

The Facebook Gift Shop

All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill suggests that Facebook is simply getting serious about the virtual goods market. Instead of fake teddy bears, however, the company is setting its sights on applications. O’Neill points to Facebook’s acquisition of NextStop as the company positioning itself in the mobile application provider space.

Inside Facebook’s Justin Smith comes to a similar conclusion, saying that we’re witnessing a symbolic moment when Facebook “decided that it doesn’t want to be in the business of creating virtual goods for users to buy” but instead the platform on which they sell those goods and the creator of the currency with which they sell them.

The question still lingers – could virtual gift cards and flowers really have taken that much in the way of “product development efforts”? I can’t imagine so, in relation to the nearly pure profit the gift shop must have offered. It did, however, give the impression that Facebook’s Credits were only for those who were into the idea of throwing away money at things that didn’t actually exist.

The closing down of the gift shop looks to us like a concerted effort to overhaul the image of Facebook Credits. Up until now, Credits have been used primarily for virtual gifts, with the recent addition of games and in-game items. I can’t imagine it will be long before Credits are used to purchase apps, real-world items like tickets to events and on-site advertising.

Speaker at the Facebook Conference

Facebook could face fines of tens of thousands of euros under privacy laws. The social networking firm confirmed it had received a letter about the action. ”We consider the saving of data from third parties, in this context, to be against data privacy laws,” said Johannes Caspar, head of Hamburg’s Data Protection Authority.

Mr Caspar said he had received a number of complaints from people who had not signed up to Facebook, but whose details had been added to the site by friends. He accused Facebook of saving private data of non-members without their permission, to be used for marketing purposes.

Switzerland is also reported to be concerned about the use of third-party data. Facebook has until August 11th to formally reply to the legal complaint against it. The California-based company told the BBC in an email that it was “currently reviewing (the complaint) and will readily respond to it within the given time frame”.

“Millions of Germans come to Facebook each day to find their friends, share information with them and connect to the world around them,” wrote spokesman Stefano Hessel.

Facebook has nearly 500 million users worldwide but according to figures by ComScore is only the fourth biggest social network in Germany.

This is not the first time the social networking site has landed in hot water with data protection officials. At the beginning of the year, Canada’s privacy commissioner launched an investigation into the site following complaints about privacy policies.

Facebook Mission Statement

And back in May, Facebook faced a storm of criticism for the way it handled members’ data after unveiling new privacy settings. A number of US senators made public calls at the time for the company to rethink its privacy safeguards. Consumer Watchdog said it was not surprised that Europe was driving this latest legal action against Facebook.

“There are much stronger privacy laws in Europe than here, where privacy is viewed as a consumer protection issue as opposed to a fundamental human right,” the group’s John Simpson told BBC News.

“We see that a number of Silicon Valley companies don’t really understand how seriously privacy issues are taken in Europe and they will continue to run afoul of data protection laws there. I also think there is a growing reaction in the US that we should beef up our privacy laws along the lines of those in Europe.”

Germany has some of the world’s most stringent data-protection laws, while the Hamburg Data Protection Authority has a reputation for taking possible privacy breaches by internet companies seriously.

Google Street View Car

It was the first to launch an investigation into search giant Google for intercepting personal data from unsecured wireless networks while gathering photos and data for its popular Street View project. That investigation is still going on, although last week Google said it was close to handing over the data it had collected to German officials.

A number of other countries have also launched investigations while more than 30 states in the US are considering pooling resources to investigate whether Google broke any laws.

Today YouTube has announced the launch of LeanBack, a TV-like viewing experience. Go to LeanBack and a full-screen feed, personalized for each viewer, begins playing. Using your enter and direction keys you can navigate the feed. No need for the mouse or for entering URLs.

Kuan Yong, Senior Product Manager for YouTube, explained how the feed is created.

“This feed is based on your YouTube settings and preferences, including content from your subscriptions and videos your friends are sharing on Facebook (assuming you’ve connected your YouTube account to your Facebook account).”

Two data sources – your YouTube info and your Facebook sharing – seem insufficient to get at an approximation of something as complex as a person’s taste. Here’s hoping they add in additional sources, such as Twitter accounts and feed readers.

Meanwhile on the handheld front, YouTube’s also pushed live a new mobile site. New touted features include a more touch-friendly UI, further incorporation of the main site’s elements such as favorites and ratings, and a generally speedier existence. YouTube also promises to work at bringing update parity across its desktop and portable kin, “unlike native apps which are not updated as frequently” (come on, tell us how you really feel, guys). Since the TV season is in a bit of a lull anyway, might as well grab your iPhone, Android device, HTPC remote, laptop, or whatever other screen you have and play catchup with your viral videos.