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According to recent reports, there have been significant privacy concerns at the Facebook HQ. It seems that Facebook employees get a great perk – spying on whomever they want. It seems that an employee can learn a lot about you, without you ever knowing it. Not only that, but they can see information on whose profile you’ve been looking at. Do you really want that information tracked?

Every time you sign up to play Texas Hold’em or hit your friends with rotten pumpkins (if someone makes this app), you’re giving away all of you personal information to these application providers. How often do you when you play games on yahoo, or MSN first give away all of your information? There are even more applications that exist solely to extract your personal data, and to be used for whatever they want.

Now, although not a surprise, the latest deal with Microsoft may make the internet a smaller place. Next time you’re searching on the internet and you find yourself being served advertisements for beer when you’re on a random florist website, it may be thanks to your Facebook cookie. When Facebook launches their new “SocialAds” platform on November 6th, it will unleash a network of sites with information not only on your browsing habits, but on all of your personal information.

“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”

Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.

Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being.

Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson's quest for personal liberation. The inventor's hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.

Sept. 27: What's in a Blog? (Kevin Champion) If such key phrases as "web 2.0" or the "democritization of the internet" are appropriate for our internet lexicon circa 2007, then blogging must be a part of the conversation that got us here. This talk explores the concept of the blog in real examples, from creating a blog, to basic blogging, to expanding the definition of what a blog is. From community portal, to dynamic database, to collaborative organizer, along the way we will find out that a blog is not just a "web log" anymore.

Oct. 4: Social Bookmarking (Adam Bohannon) Social bookmarking is used to collect and organize on-line research materials, allows groups to collectively gather Internet information, and is an easy way to keep and access your bookmarks on any Internet-connected computer. This presentation will show you the conveniences, benefits, features, and even how to create a social bookmark using tools such as Diigo, del.icio.us, and Digg.

Ultimately make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as "the" central graph owner.

A user should then be able to log into a social application (e.g. dopplr.com) for the first time, ideally but not necessarily with OpenID, and be presented with a dialog like, "Hey, we see from public information elsewhere that you already have 28 friends already using dopplr, shown below with rationale about why we're recommending them (what usernames they are on other sites). Which do you want to be friends with here? Or click 'select-all'."

Establish a non-profit and open source software (with copyrights held by the non-profit) which collects, merges, and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph.