The leader of a youth movement that swept the world this past year by encouraging Web users to share bits of their lives with selected friends spoke on Wednesday of spreading his service across the Web, even while apologizing for past excesses.

Mark Zuckerberg, 24, told an audience of 1,000 industry executives, software makers, media — and his mother and father — at Facebook’s annual conference of how the company’s features will run on affiliated sites outside its own.

“Facebook Connect” will transform the social network from a private site where activity occurs entirely within a “walled garden” to a Web-wide phenomenon where software makers, with user permission, can tap member data for use on their sites.

“Facebook Connect is our version of Facebook for the rest of the Web,” Zuckerberg told the second annual F8 conference.

Facebook, begun in 2004 as a socializing site for students at Harvard University, has seen its growth zoom to 90 million members from 24 million a little over a year ago, overtaking rival MySpace to become the world’s largest social network.

It has lured 400,000 developers to build programs for it since opening up its site in May 2007. Now Facebook is letting designers build software on affiliated sites, for mobile phones or as services that tap desktop applications like Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail system. It said that in coming months it would let designers building software for Facebook simultaneously create versions for Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) iPhone.

“As time goes on, less of this movement is going to be about Facebook and the platform we have created and more about the applications other people have built,” Zuckerberg said. “This year, we are going to push for parity between applications on and off Facebook.”

Facebook thinks Tom Ham and I should be friends. But we’re not. In fact, I’m pretty sure he can’t stand me.

I ticked off the guy more than five years ago, and we haven’t spoken since then (more on that later). But he pops up with disquieting frequency on the “People You May Know” box at the right side of my Facebook page. Facebook compares your mutual friends to suggest connections with people you might not have thought to connect with. The program is called the Friend Finder.

But I call it the Foe Finder. Tom Ham appears there all the time. I don’t really blame Facebook for causing me brief moments of anguish each time it throws up its postage-stamp-sized reminder. Tom and I do have 69 “friends” in common, many related to the video game industry that we both cover. The program is saying, “Look! You like all the same people, so this guy has GOT to be your soul mate!”

This seems to be a common issue among members of Facebook and other social networking services that use computer algorithms to help connect people. For example, LinkedIn, a professional networking site, looks through your online resume to suggest people who worked at the same company while you were employed there. Never mind that it might be the boss who fired you for bringing plants to your cubicle.

When machines do the matchmaking, funny things happen. An acquaintance in San Francisco kept getting paired up with a landlord who evicted his family for refusing to pay an outrageous (and illegal) $1,000 raise in his rent.

Then there are the people …

… who are already on your friend list but turn out to be scheming snakes. One of my friends found out that a colleague had lied to him about a job opening. He’d gladly wipe this person from his Facebook page, but that would cause a minor scandal because the two have a zillion mutual colleagues.

Of course, you can also drop the nuclear Facebomb and ban individuals from seeing your profile. I did this once for an ex- whose very picture made me ill. But I’ve otherwise resisted pushing the red button just so I can see how this online social petri dish evolves.

Anyhow, back to Tom Ham and what I did to earn his disdain. A few years ago, I wrote a story for The Times about “playola” — the junkets and trinkets that video game critics were regularly showered with by companies hoping for a favorable review. Tom was among the top reviewers in the field at that time, and I featured him in the story. He stopped talking to me after it ran. I imagine that my profile picture keeps appearing on his Friend Finder, which can’t be much fun. I e-mailed him to ask him whether it does, and how he feels about it. Not too surprisingly, he didn’t respond.

But I can see some benefits to this Foe Finder thing. An ex-boyfriend I hadn’t talked to for more than 20 years found me on LinkedIn and asked to be in my network. I added him.

As one of my bona fide friends advised, “Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.”

– Alex Pham

The patented personal relationship management system offered in this Lot enables members of an online network to share and manage information among large groups of users. The system facilitates communication of select information between different members according to users’ individual preferences. Members of the online network may control which individuals may access any given piece of information they create and distribute, as well as what information may be presented to them by other users. “While online social networking sites have enabled people to establish and maintain multiple connections in a way not previously possible, other concerns arise as a result of the amount of information being made available as well as the growing number of users,” said Jason Hardebeck, Chief Executive Officer of WhoGlue, Inc. “Specifically, users will want much greater control over which individuals access their personal information and how it is shared with their contact network. In order to emulate the true nature of personal relationships and the various levels of trust between users, social networks must allow each user to fine-tune access to their profile data as they see fit. Ultimately, the online social networking sites that offer these privacy-management features will appeal to a much broader base of users.

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Many members of the so-called Web 2.0 generation of Internet companies, such as social-networking sites, blogs and other similar “social media,” have made little revenue, the Financial Times reported.Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures, told the FT there is going to be a “shakeout” in the industry in the next year or two, with many Web 2.0 companies disappearing.
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Social networking sites need more regulation in order to ensure that they won’t pose major security risks to users, according to the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). The agency issued a preliminary version of its General Report (PDF) covering online security this morning, pointing out that it views social networks as a “positive social phenomenon” that are not without their own set of security problems, and the organization has a set of recommendations meant to protect users online. ENISA said that some of the main threats identified so far through social networks involve digital dossiers, face recognition, and social engineering attacks on enterprises. Phishing attacks, reputation damage, ID theft, stalking, and cyberbullying are common as well. The organization says that, because of the human desire to connect and the growing popularity of social networks, it’s easy for users to let their guards down and not be aware of the size of the audience accessing their information. “Social Networking may be seen as a ‘digital cocktail party,’” read the report. “However, compared with a real-world cocktail party, [social networking service] members broadcast information much more widely and sometimes unadvisedly, either by choice or unwittingly.”

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