When is a hack not a hack? With all the brouhaha over privacy lately, no doubt Facebook users would be disturbed to know that their details might have surfaced on an internet file sharing site.



According to British site Thinq, the directory was compiled by hacker Ron Bowes of Skull Security using a web crawler program. The 2.8GB torrent reportedly contains 171 million entries, relating to 100 million individual users. Facebook claims a total user base of 500 million.

The file contains user account names and a URL for each user’s profile page, which could contain details such as addresses, dates of birth or phone numbers.

The problem is that Bowes didn’t have to use his hacking skills to break into the Facebook site to compile his directory - he simply harvested publicly available data from Facebook’s open access directory. The affected users all have one thing in common - they hadn’t changed their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines. However, visiting an user’s profile from this directory would also allow you to click through to their friends’ profiles, even if the friends had not made their profiles searchable.

Privacy has been a big issue for Facebook in the past, though the debate has quietened down since the last big tranche of privacy setting changes in May. The latest news is sure to raise the question about whether the default settings should be more protective of user data.

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Visit Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

Today we present our monthly look at Facebook’s language leaderboard and growth.

Facebook recently announced that it had reached an astonishing 500 million users around the world. However, the relevant question for developers, advertisers and marketers is not simply how large this total audience is, but how to reach more and more of these users through strategies including language localization.

While the overall ranking of the site’s top languages remains unchanged since June, with English-speaking users outnumbering the next group of language users by over 3:1, this hasn’t stopped many leading developers and marketing firms operating within the ecosystem from significant localization investment.

Such efforts are for good reason, too — among Facebook’s top languages, those that saw the greatest rate of growth were Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and French. (Stay tuned to see how this maps to country market growth — we’ll be presenting July total audience numbers in the upcoming Facebook Global Monitor).

Here’s a look at growth rates for Facebook’s Top 10 languages:

What you can see from the chart above is that some of Facebook’s fastest-growing languages aren’t yet even part of the site’s top 5 overall. This is unsurprising — any change to the leaderboard will likely be slow, if it happens at all. Nonetheless, major markets in North America and Western Europe are reaching, or have already achieved, Facebook saturation. Users in those markets are also correspondingly savvy in their attitudes and receptiveness towards ads, applications, and fan page marketing campaigns.

The full Facebook Global Language Report, and extensive audience demographic data for Facebook’s markets around the world, is only available to members of Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service. To learn more or join, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.

Yesterday Facebook employee Morin Cynthia Oluwole, uploaded a video that she took while Kanye West performed his new “Chain Too Heavy” song at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto. While many of the employees were slightly concerned that Kanye would jump off the table and drop his heavy chain on them, it looks like many were excited to have Kanye drop by the office. Nothing like an unexpected visit from a famous rap star, right? You can see a video of the event below.

With thousands of applications saturating the Apple App Store, its impossible to find all the games and apps that might suit your fancy. Granted, there are networks such as OpenFeint, Plus+, and Scoreloop, but these barely put a dent in the total, and even then one ends up searching these for what they might like. That’s where Toronto-based Kibboko comes into play with its Facebook Connect enabled application, Appblast, making recommendations to its users based on their own Facebook activity.

Using Kibboko’s “Bamboo personalization platform,” Appblast actually digs through everything the user has done, both recently and otherwise, on Facebook. People start out by selecting their device of preference — be it an iTouch, an iPhone, or an iPad — followed by a country of residence and Bamboo does the rest.

After digging through one’s Facebook activity, Appblast will make recommendations based on two elements: Your interests (“Liking” something) and recent activity. Digging back to when we “Liked” the Facebook game World at War months ago, it recommended any number of war-based games such as Call of Duty.

The second means of discovery, and also the most amusing, is based on recent activity; namely, status updates. It’s certainly a great idea, but as with any program that recognizes words, it usually can’t understand context. During our coverage of StarCraft II and Battle.net, we quoted the game: “Shields up, weapons online. Not equipped with shields? Well then, buckle up!” Appblast recognized “shields” and “buckle” and deduced that we might be interested in lifestyle apps about medieval shields and bucklers. However, one of the recommendations was about protection and held a bunch of fantasy quotes, so it wasn’t terribly far off.

Should users find something they do find interesting, Appblast has quick and convenient links that instantly bring up descriptions, screenshots, and any existing user reviews directly from within the app (no need to load up iTunes – unless you wish to buy it). Moreover, users can also mark each app as owned, if they have it, so that it does not pop up again.

This is actually where Appblast begins making use of Facebook’s social capabilities, as, if friends also use the app, they can see what their friends are buying and/or playing. That said, it is worth noting that while users can search for apps based on iDevice, the tab that houses all owned applications does not clearly state what device they are on. Also, the app does not appear to ever make recommendations based on the apps marked as owned.

Anyways, if your friends don’t own an iDevice, there’s little point for them to use Appblast, thus that discovery method goes out the window. Not to worry, though, as the application also includes a feed of best selling apps an what other Appblast users have been up to. In truth, it’s not nearly as effective as the recommendations (it’s basically the same as any of the App Store top selling lists), but it at least adds a small extra way to find apps.

In the end, Appblast is a pretty nifty little creation. It’s recommendation tools aren’t quite as sophisticated as one might think in that it appears to make most of its recommendation based on Facebook Likes, and it’s word recognition for status updates doesn’t always recognize context (though this can often be kind of fun). Overall, however, once players start adding in all the apps they own, Appblast does at least provide yet one more means of discovering something worthwhile for their devices.

Out of the last five startups that Facebook has bought, four of them have had something to do with sharing information in a social news feed interface or sharing location data, if not both. All of the sale prices have been relatively low, too, with the acquisitions largely intended to bring in talented developers. So it makes sense that Facebook may be buying Hot Potato, a startup that lets you create and share a stream of information about events, and anything else.

The acquisition is close to finalized, according to TechCrunch, and like Facebook’s other purchases, the main point may just be to scoop up talented people who have generally relevant product and engineering experience. The company has raised $1.4 million in funding from well-known angels, with the price being somewhere in the $10 million to $15 million range, according to MediaMemo.

But there are a few areas where the Hot Potato team, headed by veteran product leader Jake Schaffer, would be the most relevant.  Facebook is “supposedly looking to bulk up the projects under Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross, and on the mobile side of things,” TechCunch says. “This Hot Potato deal could fulfill either of those — or both.”

Location, a long-tested feature that, one way or another, would involve people sharing their locations into the news feed — probably from their phones — then talking about what they’re doing. That seems relevant to Hot Potato.

Another area is Facebook Questions, a product currently in private beta, that Ross has been working on directly. It lets users ask and answer questions in a threaded-comments format, somewhat like Yahoo Answers or Quora. Questions hasn’t fully launched yet, and it’s possible that the Hot Potato team could end up here.

Of course, Facebook’s news feed has been a key part of the site for years, the company has more experience designing (and redesigning) it at scale than anyone else in the world, and maybe it just wants more help here.

Most of the other startups that Facebook has bought recently have somehow been working on social sharing products. FriendFeed, which Facebook bought almost a year ago, had its own social activity stream service. Nextstop, acquired earlier this month, let travelers share their experiences with each other. ShareGrove, bought in May, focused on private conservations. The other two companies are less relevant: Octazen made an effective contact importer for social sites; Divvyshot made online photo products.

Hot Potato might go the way of FriendFeed, whose employees are now working in a variety of areas across the company, or it might emerge with a soon-to-be-launched Facebook product.

Do you need a few more ways to smile on Facebook? A few more ways to express yourself? Maybe you just want to add a cute smiling animal to your post. This round up of various Emoticons will have all your Facebook expression needs covered. Check them out and spice up your conversations a bit. Here are 10 Emoticon applications that will help you express yourself on Facebook.