IT Buoy

Celebrity entrepreneurs are nothing new. But, in the 15-or-so years since the dot-com revolution, only a few famous faces have successfully ventured into the digital industry. And some of them might surprise you. Read the rest of this story

A patent granted to Facebook this week for the site’s “news feed” could have big implications for other social-networking companies. Facebook The patent, which was first reported on the All Facebook blog , is for “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.” Such feeds are crucial to many social-networking services — MySpace, Google Reader, Twitter and LinkedIn come to mind. But it wasn’t immediately clear whether the patent would apply to all of these sites. Facebook’s news feed has changed a number of times since the patent was filed in 2006, and some aspects of Facebook’s system might not be included. Nick O’Neill at All Facebook suggests that the patent does not cover the posting of status updates and that Twitter would thus not fall under its umbrella. Instead, he says, the patent covers a news feed based on “actions,” such as joining a group or adding a friend. But such a patent would still affect a number of sites. Much of the activity that occurs on LinkedIn, for example, is related to career actions, not status updates

Facebook held onto Web visitors for more than double the time that other big sites, including Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Wikipedia, did, according to Nielsen’s latest report . AFP/Getty Images The logo of social-networking Web site Facebook is displayed on a computer screen in London. The average U.S. visitor spent seven hours, one minute and 41 seconds on Facebook in January, compared with just over two hours each on Google and Yahoo, 25 minutes on Amazon and 16 minutes on Wikipedia. While Google and Yahoo still have a bigger audience than Facebook, the social-networking site outpaces the competition in how much time its users spend on its pages. Facebook was also the only site listed in Nielsen’s Top 10 to see an increase in time-per-month, growing 9.7% from December. In June, Nielsen said that the average U.S.

Less than a week after Google introduced a new social networking service, Google Buzz, the company is working feverishly to address user unease about the privacy of the product. Google Buzz lets users share posts and notes with people they are connected to or “follow,” a model similar to Twitter and Facebook. But unlike those services, it automatically signs users up to follow people they email and chat with the most through Gmail. It also makes that list of first followers public, by default. That decision has triggered a wave of complaints from users concerned the feature would inadvertently publicizing the names of people they frequently emailed with, like a spouse or ex-boyfriend. The critics say that Google doesn’t understand that some people don’t want their email contacts to become their social networking contacts, period. “Users’ are being enticed to accept Buzz without fully understanding that the email address book is becoming their friends list,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Rotenberg says EPIC plans to file a complaint Tuesday to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that by blending the two – namely, treating users’ email contacts as social networking contacts – Google is guilty of “unfair and deceptive trade practices.” Rotenberg called it a rare miscalculation for Google, which he said has been conscientious about giving users control over their privacy

Last week, someone who had been at MySpace for a while was telling me about what it was like working inside the social networking company, which had gone from supernova to also-ran in the course of a few years. Reflecting on the downward spiral that its owner News Corp. (NWS) had been trying to slow over the last year and how hard it was to do a turnaround of any kind, the exec also could not shake the idea that it could still be revived. “MySpace is kind of a hot mess,” said the exec, referring to its still-large audience and well-known brand. “It’s both impossible to save and hard to give up on.” Unfortunately for all those involved, that mess got even messier yesterday, after the ousting of CEO Owen Van Natta by News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller . While News Corp.