Jennifer Porter is a little freaked out.The 17-year-old is hunkered over a sheaf of papers scattered across a spotty Tim Hortons table in Ajax, Ont., one hand flipping pages, the other twirling an oversized blue earring. She brushes an errant lock of sandy blonde hair away from her face, looks up and giggles nervously. “That’s kind of creepy,” she says.

Indeed.

What she’s looking at is quite the biography — everything from her cellphone number, home address and a map to her work (she’s a lifeguard). All of it has been furnished by the man sitting in front of her — a man she’s never met. full story

Before posting the latest photos of yourself chugging down beers or cutting up the dance floor on Facebook or MySpace, think again - your next employer could be watching.

That’s the message from the Victorian government, which today released a list of security tips to assist people to protect their privacy on online social networking sites.

Victorian Deputy Premier and Attorney-General Rob Hulls said in light of new research showing employers were using social networking sites to research candidates, people needed to step up their privacy settings.

“Social networking sites such as Facebook are a fast-growing phenomenon,” Mr Hulls said in a statement.

“Social network users need to realise that the information and photos they put into cyberspace in some cases can be seen by others and can leave a digital tattoo that can be difficult to erase.

“The latest research from the US suggests 44 per cent of employers are now using sites like MySpace and Facebook to research job candidates.”

Mr Hulls said anyone thinking of using a social networking site should plan ahead to help prevent privacy breaches.

He suggested asking someone who uses the site about their experience first and thinking about what information to include in your profile.

“As a general rule, it’s best not to publish information you would not want the world to know,” he said.

Mr Hulls said privacy settings should be adjusted and other people’s privacy respected by asking their permission before posting something relating to them.

Any attempts to threaten or harass someone through social networking sites should be reported to police, he said. The privacy tips will be published on the government’s Department of Justice website to coincide with Privacy Awareness Week, from August 24 to 30.

In its bid to go global, Facebook is facing off against itself.

Clones of the wunderkind social-networking Web site — some of which resemble Facebook right down to color, font and layout — have popped up in local languages around the world. These competitor sites offer identical core services, letting users post pictures, make groups and choose their friends.

All are complicating Facebook Inc.’s global campaign, which began in February and has since rolled out 18 foreign-language editions, including Norwegian and Czech, with plans for 54 more.

Facebook’s international challenges illustrate just some of the ways global expansion can bedevil major U.S. Web companies as they seek swarms of users and advertising dollars in new markets.

Facebook’s particular problem is winning over people who are already hooked on local-language sites hocking similar services with a similar look.

In Russia, for example, where Facebook launched last month, the entrenched social-networking engine online is Vkontakte, a Russian-language Facebook clone that boasts more than 14 million users.

Facebook officials predict they will eventually triumph, partly because they can spend more resources on improving their site than upstarts can. Facebook also has a strong network of outside programmers who write Web applications for the site, and the company said last week it would extend its translation tools to those developers, to make Facebook even more compelling for overseas markets.

Plus, its users can connect with friends from other countries, something local sites can’t offer.

“They can gain traction in individual countries but they are not going to be able to compete on a global scale,” Facebook spokeswoman Jaime Schopflin said.

But social-networking sites mirror real life, and many Russians dread moving to a neighborhood where they have no friends.

“All of my Russian friends are on Vkontakte,” said Moscow resident Galina Ryazanova, 21, a recent college graduate who uses both Web sites. “I don’t think they’ll switch to Facebook because everyone is already established on Vkontakte.”

Ryazanova visits Facebook about once a month to keep up with her non-Russian friends, she said, but uses Vkontakte three or four times a week. She criticized Facebook for adding too many distracting applications, and for allowing users to translate part of the site — producing what she called poor-quality Russian.

Facebook dominates the social-networking market in many English-language countries and is growing quickly elsewhere. It is the most popular social-networking site in Britain and one of the top three in France, tracking company comScore reported.

But in countries like Germany and Russia, where competitor sites have taken root, Facebook seems to be gaining ground more slowly. According to comScore, Germany’s StudiVZ and Russia’s Vkontakte are widely outdrawing Facebook.

Facebook software engineer Alex Moskalyuk said his company has no direct strategy to attract users from competitor sites.

“You can spend your time worrying about the competitors or you can spend your time innovating your product,” he said. “We chose to do the latter and not the former.”

That strategy apparently changed this month, when Facebook filed an intellectual-property lawsuit against German clone StudiVZ in a federal court in California.

Though Facebook claims StudiVZ unfairly copied its content, StudiVZ says Facebook is trying to stifle the competition as it pursues the global market. The faceoff has fueled speculation that a string of lawsuits against clone sites could begin.

The stakes are high. Microsoft snared 1.6 percent of Facebook for $240 million in 2007, valuing Facebook at roughly $15 billion. Investors poured $430 million this year into the parent company behind China’s Facebook-like Xiaonei. Der Spiegel reported that a publishing company bought StudiVZ for $132 million in 2007.

In Russia, Vkontakte dominates the market along with one other site, which is geared more toward adults.

“Vkontakte has already become like a habit,” Nikita Glushik, 19, said as he checked the site at a Moscow Internet cafe. He said he had never heard of Facebook.

With the sites looking so similar, Russia’s renewed sense of national pride might be enough to give Vkontakte an edge.

“Facebook is American and Vkontakte is Russian — that’s the main difference,” Ryazanova said. “It’s going to be tough for Facebook to displace Vkontakte.”

Social network users are much heavier consumers of digital content including SMS, mobile email, photos, music, games and mobile TV than mobile phone service subscribers.

The revelation comes from recent research published by industry analyst ABI Research which canvassed 1,000 mobile subscribers and just over 500 social network mobile subscribers in the US.

Three quarters of the latter group were aged between 18 and 30, and were twice as likely to own a smartphone as their non-networked equivalents.

“The fact that online social networkers consume more mobile content and media than mobile subscribers who are not into online networking may not be really surprising,” said principal analyst Nick Holland.

“However, what we have long suspected is confirmed by the numbers: for most kinds of mobile content, online social networkers consume about twice as much as their non-networked peers.”

The driving force behind online social networkers’ consumption of mobile media is that they are on average younger and more tech-savvy.

Also, many social networks are organised around a specific media-related interest such as photography or music.

“Advertising on social networks is not working particularly well, so promotion of mobile content on online social network sites should be a high priority for mobile operators, content distributors, media companies and advertisers,” said Holland.

Location-based mobile social networking is just getting started in the U.S., and there’s a lot of hype surrounding it. But will that hype turn into dollars?Research firm ABI Research predicts the nascent industry will turn into a $3.3 billion market worldwide by 2013. Where will that money come from? Location-based mobile advertising “holds a lot of promise,” notes ABI analyst Dominique Bonte, in a statement. But “the current reality” suggests licensing and subscription revenue-sharing — like Loopt’s recent deal with Verizon Wireless — the most likely near-term revenue streams.

It’s hard to put much weight in pie-in-the-sky predictions like this: It’s one thing to take an existing market and plot out a growth chart. Bit right now the industry is a goose egg, give or take a couple million. We’d hold off before predicting a huge boom.

More interesting to us: Whether today’s location-based mobile social networks — like Loopt, Whrrl, etc. — will be able to outlast more established social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and maybe LinkedIn, once location becomes a feature on those platforms.

When you already have several hundred friends on a social network, it’s a lot easier to add a feature like location than it is to add several hundred friends on a network whose main attraction is location.