Facebook likes to push the mantra that it is making the world a more open and connected place through the medium of dance. Sorry, through the medium of social networking I mean. It also likes to let slip every now and then that the software it uses to build the site and service is pretty much all open source stuff.

Now Facebook has taken that final step into the lovey dovey world of openness and is releasing that code which it has developed into the wild, so that the open source community can do with it what it will. Well, apart from producing a Facebook clone one assumes.

The process gets under way immediately as Facebook releases the Scribe cold. This critical piece of infrastructure is used to collect large amounts of data from a large number of servers, data which is then used to do stuff like track database memory consumption when delivering relationship stories directly into the News Feed. Or, as Facebook puts it “Scribe is a server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers. It is designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine.”

Facebook ended up building its own system because all the open source, and proprietary ones for that matter, which it tried to perform the same task just could not cope with the massive amounts of data being generated by Facebook members. Massive as in tens of billions of pieces of information being moved around every single day.

The Scribe source can be found here.

Up until the 14th August all was calm in the land of the Brit Twitterer. Then Twitter announced it was pulling the free SMS alert for UK users. Now, a mere two weeks later, Twitterers are experiencing cold turkey withdrawal symptoms and looking for an alternative.

Which is where ISP and VoIP specialist Gradwell comes in with the newly announced Twittex service which promises to fill the void for text hungry Brit Twitterers.

Well, sort of. It ain’t free unfortunately. Instead it adopts a pre-pay service model. Gradwell MD Peter Gradwell (do you think that’s why he got the job, having the same name as the company?) explains what’s going on:

“At Gradwell, we had recently launched a new service, a news website, so that our customers can be kept informed of alerts and maintenance concerning our broadband, email, hosting and VoIP. This new service published updates to Twitter, so that our customers could use Twitter’s SMS alerts when away from their computers. With Twitter no longer sending out SMS alerts, we needed an alternative – so we built twittex!”

Good news if you really cannot manage without Twitter SMS updates I guess. However, some of us have realised that there is more to life (online) than Twitter and instead of going cold turkey have simply trotted away from the service altogether.

Facebook via your iPhone app anyone?

IDC would appear to think so, with new analysis that appeared in the Financial Times suggesting that as many as 36 percent of enterprise web sites are already turning to this technological strategy of using blogs, wikis and social networking to interface with customers and businesses alike. What’s more, the report also says that another 27 percent are looking to embrace Web 2.0 by this time next year.

So are you using Facebook, LinkedIn or a blog yet? In a business capacity that is? I am often accused of over hyping the business benefit of social networking, however within my own experience realm of the small business I have to say it works. My consultancy recently picked up a contract through a LinkedIn contact, which would simply not have been made any other way, which is potentially worth at least £20,000 per year. And that is not the first time that a LinkedIn or Facebook virtual introduction has paid very real world dividends. Over the last few years I imagine these contacts have accounted for around 10 percent of my annual turnover. Not a huge figure, I admit, but given the relatively immaturity of Web 2.0 and the amount of bad press social networking for business gets, not a bad one.

But how can enterprise level businesses get on board the bandwagon and actually profit from it?

“The B2B and B2C advantages of using Web 2.0 technology are well-documented, and can significantly raise the profile - as well as the revenues - of most companies,” says David Lavenda, WorkLight’s vice president of marketing and product strategy. “Moreover, engaging customers using social networking websites can have a positive impact on the way products and services are received.”

According to a poll conducted by Global Secure Systems and Infosecurity Europe 2008, the cost to UK corporations in terms of lost productivity as a result of staff being all sociable online is as high as £6.5 billion every year!

The poll asked questions of 776 office workers who admitted that they spent at least 30 minutes every day at social networking sites during working hours. Or put another way, 10 hours a month or an absolute minimum of 3 working weeks each year. The worse offenders, or the friendliest workers depending upon your viewpoint, clocked up 3 hours every day at social networking sites. Boy, I would say that whatever business they were working at needs to either get some new management in, or better still get some new work in so these guys have something better to do all day than poke people they have never met or exchange virtual gifts with a plumber from Deptford just because he calls himself Victoria and has an avatar that looks fit.

According to the press release that landed in my laptop this morning, a recent meeting held by Infosecurity Europe 2008 with 20 CISOs revealed that one of their biggest IT concerns for 2008 was how to manage social networking sites at work. Many apparently estimated that between 15% and 20% of their current bandwidth is being taken up with social networking sites and for many the best move forward is to ban these sites altogether.

Why not? I am a great fan of social networking, believe it or not, having been involved with virtual communities a whole decade or more before social networking was even thought of as a term. However, the workplace is the workplace and the same old acceptable use policy issues must apply when it comes to social networking as they do to viewing porn or downloading MP3s. Claire Sellick – Infosecurity Europe Event Director said “It would appear that most CISO and IT Directors loathe social networking sites and if they had their way would ban them completely, but what is also coming across loud and clear is that the HR departments actually welcome the use of these sites – so there is a lot of internal pushing and shoving going on between HR and IT over how best to manage these sites.”

One FTSE100 CISO claims they now block Facebook as it was consuming 30% of their bandwidth and they are looking to block both MySpace and e-bay as they consume 10% and 5% of the corporate Internet browsing bandwidth. According to David Hobson, the MD of GSS “Social networking sites are now integral to the way that many of the latest and youngest recruits into the workforce communicate and work, so for some sectors social networking sites may have a part to play in terms of competitive advantage or used for research or as a marketing tool. It comes down to a fine balancing act – and mostly a case of introducing a “reasonable use” policy.”

And enforcing it, of course. Which is where the problems often start. Unfortunately, unless they are enforced you end up in the position of being exposed to serious security implications as has been exampled by the introduction of worms and Trojan droppers to users of social networking sites in the last few months. A trend which is only likely to continue on an upward curve.

David Lacey, Member of the BCS Security Forum Strategic Panel would appear to agree “Organisations have a very long way to go in getting to grips with the risks presented by social networking. Lost productivity is the tip of the iceberg. The threat of social engineering to hijack sensitive information is real and growing. And current acceptable use policies are far from acceptable: they are poorly written, maintained, communicated and enforced. There are also some big, political issues that have to be addressed such as how far to police or trust staff, and how to maintain thought leadership across highly networked groups of staff.”

Given the popularity of Facebook applications, those annoying widgets which people in your network naturally assume you will be interested in (even though most are banal even by widget standards), it was only a matter of time before the trend was exploited by those with a less than social motive. And so it is that security threat researchers at Fortinet have uncovered a malicious widget which has already found its way onto the computers of 3% of Facebook users - or a million people if your prefer.

The Secret Crush application spreads by Facebook users getting a notification from someone in their network who has already installed the widget, which informs them that one of their friends has the hots for them. The wording is such that suggests it might be the friend who sent the invitation, but the only way to find out is to install the application itself. At this point the plot thickens, because using an escalation of commitment strategy Secret Crush the widget once installed will only reveal the identity of your secret admirer once you have invited another 5 of your friends to install it. According to Fortinet, even after inviting those 5 friends there is no revelation other than an invitation to download a ‘crush calculator’.

Fortinet has examined the page source of the advertising frame that is displayed and discovered it is hosted at zango.com, within the affiliates section. Downloading the application actually leads directly to a copy of Zango, the in famous adware/spyware that used to be known as 180Solutions. Download this and rather than a secret crush you will find yourself being courted by adverts.

Although there is no way of knowing the exact figures, the authors of Secret Crush are likely to be getting a few pence for every download, which multiplied by a million or two clicks soon adds up.

Fortinet CMO Richard Stiennon included “malicious Facebook widgets” in his list of security threat predictions for 2008, and it looks like he was right on the money. There seems to be no mechanism in place at Facebook to protect users from this kind of malicious application. Hackers could implement a similar scheme but replacing the Zango IFrame with a drive-by install engine instead.

“Keep in mind that, given the odds, people are likely developing Facebook “Platform Applications” for profit rather than just for fun. Now, this does not mean that all widgets are going to be malicious. As in every business frame, honest ways to generate profits surely exist on Facebook, in exchange for providing a service to users who subscribe to it. However, users must be aware of this, and resort to a blend of common sense and protection gear to avoid being scammed and abused” advises Fortinet EMEA Threat Response Team Manager Guillaume Lovet.

Talk about social networking sites and you probably think Facebook, MySpace and possibly LinkedIn. The chances are, unless you happen to be Brazilian, the Google social networking offering Orkut has managed to evade your radar altogether. Orkut is, however, hugely popular in Brazil and that’s why it was mostly Brazilians who were among the estimated 750,000 members to find themselves on the wrong end of a worm infection within the space of 24 hours.

According to McAfee Avert Labs the Orkut worm, which spread rapidly at the end of last week, was highly targeted towards that Brazilian community. It used the Orkut scrapbook facility, a method of sending messages between ‘friends’ in the network, to distribute text scraps in Portuguese which translated into such cobblers as “2008 is coming, I wish that it begins quite well for you.” It also made sure that an executable was downloaded which added users to an Orkut community group called “Infectados pelo Virus do Orkut” which translates to “Those Infected by the Orkut Virus.” The loop continues and the worm spreads by then sending more infected scraps to everyone within that persons network of friends.

It appears that all of this was made possible by a relatively new feature of an Orkut tool that allows its members to write message scraps containing HTML code, the new feature adding Flash and Javascript capability into the mix. Uh oh, the warning lights and sirens should have been going off when news of this ‘functionality’ was released.

It all meant that the only action needed to be taken for someone to get infected was to view their Orkut profile. Which seems to be the point, as the group description reveals that the worm was actually created and released to expose just how dangerous the system is.

Certainly the worm caught the attention of Google quickly enough, as it would seeing as it was spreading at the rate of 100 member infections every minute at one point and it would appear code filters have been put in place to prevent further exploitations.

“Google takes the security of our users very seriously. We worked quickly to implement a fix for the issue recently reported in Orkut. We also took steps to help prevent similar problems in the future. Service to Orkut was not disrupted during this time” a Google spokesperson said.

How many Facebook friends have you got in your collection? Less than 100? Pah! You are a lightweight my friend. Talking of which, do you want to be my Facebook friend as I am collecting them at the moment. Ever since Pokemon become passé I have been looking for a new hobby and now I have one, Facebook friends, gotta get them all.

It would seem that I am not alone in treating this particular social networking phenomena in this ego stroking, feelgood, gameplay manner. New research from the boffins at Sheffield Hallam University suggests that having tons of Facebook friends is no guarantee that you are not a Billy no mates in the real world.

Psychologist Will Reader has been studying social networking behaviours and arrived at the stunning conclusion that despite having massive numbers of friends on Facebook, our real world close friend count stays the same as it ever was. He also reckons 90 percent of online friends will be people met in real life first. Well he is wrong in my case because I am a social hermit and meet more people online than I ever do face to face. I don’t mind though, and if you are reading this Will you can still be my Facebook friend , you only have to ask. Just don’t invite yourself around for a cuppa, OK.

I have carefully arranged for my closest real world friend to live a few hundred miles away, on an island, and be scared of water which means he is unlikely to hit me with a surprise visit. I do, however, talk to him every day by email or Facebook.

There is a real big clue in the title of the genre as to what Social Networking is all about, and making some kind of distinction between real world and virtual friends is almost pointless in my opinion. A friend is a friend, wherever you meet, however you keep in touch.

Now, back to tending my collection…

It was interesting to see a press release today from comScore, the digital world metrics people, which showed that Facebook traffic had grown 89% in the course of a year to an astonishing 26.6 million unique visitors in just one month (May) and just in the US alone. That compares with an average monthly traffic volume of around 14 million prior to September 2006.

Perhaps not so surprising though when you factor in the small matter of Facebook having a total change of heart and opening up membership to grown-ups from any walk of life as from September 2006. I suspect it has taken a while for people who are not students, including grown up students who have stayed on within the world of academia and so maintained the relevant email domains to be eligible for membership before, to actually start realising that they can now participate.

Interestingly, the comScore figures also reveal that this new grown-up audience is viewing more pages and hanging around longer. Using the same May to May comparison, whereas 6.5 billion pages were viewed and the average minutes spent per visitor were 138 back in 2006, this year those numbers have climbed to 15.8 billion and 186 respectively. That’s a percentage change, May 2007 vs. May 2006, of 143% page views and 35% minutes spent viewing them.

My suspicion is that this is no coincidence, and that grown-ups tend to have a better online attention span than students. A suspicion confirmed, to some degree at least, by another metric from comScore: growth by age group. The 38% growth amongst 18-24 year olds was the lowest segment in the study, 25-34 year olds the highest at 181% increase and 98% for the over 35 year olds. Although a slight flea in my theory ointment is introduced by the 149% rise in 12-17 year olds joining Facebook, but I will pretend that never happened…

So what does all this prove? Well apart from the fact that when it comes to demographics for the most popular of unrestricted membership social networking sites, which tend to level out and maintain a balance that is broadly similar to the general population of the Internet, it proves that Facebook is actually relevant to grown-ups. While it is not designed to be a business network like LinkedIn, for example, what it does provide is somewhere for business folk to kick back and relax. And we all know that a lot of deals get done in the playground, at the end of the day.

You can join me there for a chat if you like, students included.