Here’s the latest at Facebook… I’m David Lawrence.

Facebook has a new tool that helps you track what people are talking about on Facebook. Called Facebook Lexicon, it tracks trends on the public and semi-public forums (or Walls) across Facebook. It works by having computers count the number of occurrences of every term across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. You can compare up to five different words or two-word phrases and see how many people talked about that term each day.

Facebook has created and released a 28-page PDF on how to promote your business through Facebook Pages, including how to create and manage a page and the benefit of Facebook Ads. To get the PDF, there’s a link on our blog.

Read about this and everything else going on with Facebook at TheLatest.At/Facebook. For Christopher Hain (HINE), I am David Lawrence.

Here’s the latest at Facebook… I’m David Lawrence.

A Texas woman is suing Blockbuster for distributing her rental and sale records without her consent through Facebook’s Beacon advertising program. Beacon allowed Facebook to track users' activities on outside Web sites, including online purchases, and sometimes publish them as news feeds. But privacy advocates protested. This new lawsuit by Dallas resident Cathryn Elaine Harris argues that Blockbuster violated the Federal Videotape Privacy Protection Act by sharing Harris' information with Facebook. The lawsuit claims: "To this day, Facebook still receives personal identifiable information from participating Web sites … whether the Facebook member has chosen to distribute the information or not."

Facebook has changed its message when you remove mini-feed items. The message used to be: “Hiding will remove the story from your mini-feed and prevent anyone from seeing it.” Now it says: “Are you sure you want to hide this mini-feed story?”
Read about this and everything else going on with Facebook at TheLatest.At/Facebook. For Christopher Hain (HINE), I am David Lawrence.

Here’s the latest at Facebook… I’m David Lawrence.

Another former Harvard classmate of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is challenging Facebook. Aaron Greenspan, a 2004 Harvard grad, has petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to have the company’s trademark of the word “Facebook” cancelled. Greenspan argues that Zuckerberg had no right to trademark the Facebook name because the term had been used generically for decades at Harvard. And furthermore Greenspan claims he used the term “Face Book” as part of an online service called houseSYSTEM a few months before Zuckerberg unveiled his now-famous Facebook site in 2004. Greenspan has even written a book about his experience titled: Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era. Zuckerberg has already been sued by three former classmates -- Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, who claim that. Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook back in 2003.

Read about this and everything else going on with Facebook at TheLatest.At/Facebook. For Christopher Hain (HINE), I am David Lawrence.