This falls in line with the finding that Facebook does not delete all cookies on a user system during sign out.

I reviewed several browser extensions and add-ons to deal with the privacy issue, Share Me Not for Firefox for instance is one of them.

Priv3 for Firefox uses a very similar concept to improve a user’s privacy on the Internet. The developers of the extension note that Priv3 “does not block third-party interactions completely”. It instead “selectively suppresses the inclusion of third-party web cookies” when the browser connects to the social networks.

Instead of blocking or removing the social scripts outright, it basically blocks their functionality until the user makes the decision to interact with them. With the add-on installed it is still possible to see the number of likes, Twitter messages or +1s a page has received.

When you start interacting with a social networking script on a site the extension starts to reload the session cookies to pass on the click to the social networking site so that the desired action can be completed (e.g. liking a page).

Priv3 in its current state supports the three top social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and Google+, as well as LinkedIn. The developers promise to add support for additional sites in future releases.

The extension works similar to Share Me Not which uses a similar technique to block privacy sensitive data to be transferred to one of the social networks. Firefox users can install Priv3 from the official Mozilla add-on repository.

One tool for this is the very powerful, open source Elgg. Elgg offers blogging, networking, community, news feed aggregation, and file sharing. And best of all, you can retain this such that only users inside your local LAN can log on and enjoy the site.

In this article you will learn how to install Elgg to create your own social networking site.

Preparation

For the sake of simplicity we will install this tool on a Ubuntu Server (building on our Ubuntu server articles) The first thing you will need to do is to download the Elgg tar file from the Elgg download page. Once you have this file downloaded move it to /var/www and then untar or unzip the file (depending upon which you download) with the command (issued from within the /var/www/ directory):

sudo tar xvzf elgg-XXX.tar.gz

Where XXX is the release number.

Now you will want to rename the directory to make it easier for your users. So issue the command:

sudo mv elgg-XXX elgg

Where XXX is the release number.

Now you are almost ready to begin the installation. But first a few small bits of housekeeping.

The first thing you need to do is to create a database for Elgg. I always suggest using PhpMyAdmin (see my article “Install PhpMyAdmin for easy MySQL administration“). Create the database “elgg” (no quotes).

The next step is to create a directory Elgg will use for files. This directory must be outside of the Elgg root directory, so create the files directory with the command:

sudo mkdir /var/www/files

Now you must give this new directory the proper permissions, so issue the command:

sudo chmod 777 /var/www/files

One other issue on permissions. During the actual installation Elgg will need to write to the elgg and the elgg/engine directory. If the installation process can not write to these directories it will then require you to create an .htaccess file and an engines/settings.php file. I suggest do this:

1. Take note of the current permissions of your elgg and elgg/engine directory (most likely drwxr-xr-x).
2. Issue the command sudo chmod 777 /var/www/elgg.
3. Issue the command sudo chmod 777 /var/www/elgg/engine.

Now you are finished with the preparation. You are ready to fire up your web browser and begin the installation.

The installation

Fire up your browser to the address http://ADDRESS_OF_SERVER/elgg which will open up a very easy installation wizard. Because of all of your preparation work, the installation will be painless. Once you are done with the installation you will want to go back and change back the permissions of the elgg and elgg/engine directories.

Figure 1

The first thing you will do, once installation is complete, is create an initial user. This initial user will be your administrator, so make sure you use a strong password. Once you have logged in as your administrator you can begin to add widgets for users profiles and/or dashboards (see Figure 1).

In order to add widgets you just drag them from the Gallery to either the Left, Middle, or Right section for either the user profile or dashboard. It’s very simple to set up.

Final thoughts

Elgg is an outstanding social tool that will allow you to create an intra (or even extra)  social network site. It’s easy to install and even easier to manage.

With ImageLoop, creating a slideshow is very easy. You can either upload a bunch of photos from your hard drive or import them from an online service that stores photos. The only requirement is that all photos must be in JPG format. Fancy a Flickr photo that isn’t yours? No problem, ImageLoop lets users import photos from Myspace and Flickr just by typing in the username, not just their own.

Once the photos are uploaded, you can customize the look and feel of your slideshow, and add descriptions to your photos as well. Once the slideshow is ready, you can email it to your family and friends or use one of the available embed codes to publish it on the internet. ImageLoop also allows you to decide just who can view your slideshow by changing the access levels. If you want to go back and change the accessibility, you can do that too.

ImageLoop is free to use but it does require registration. This is obvious otherwise users would not be able to edit their slideshows. Once registered, there are no limits on the number of slideshows a user can create.

As far as ease of use is concerned, the service ranks highly. The compatibility with social networks also scores well. Another bonus is the ability to use photos that do not belong to the user. However, this is a double-edged sword because if a user posts a slideshow with copyrighted pictures, he or she could get into trouble.

Overall, I think ImageLoop is a good service, especially for people always sharing pictures with their friends over social networks. What are your thoughts on ImageLoop and photo sharing? Let me know in the comments.

Commenter reactive pointed out ping.fm, a website which in fact I use. ping.fm allows you to update one site, through a variety of means, which will then pass those updates on to 32 other websites.

ping.fm amazingly allows updates to be textual or graphical (you can set ping.fm to upload images to Flickr etc.). The ability to send videos is going to be launched soon.

The site will ‘ping’ most major social networking sites updates: Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us and Jaiku. Smaller ones like Kwippy are also supported.

Updates can be sent through instant messaging (GTalk, MSN, Yahoo! or AIM), unlike Twitter at the moment, from iGoogle, Facebook, an iPhone, WAP or SpinVox (a service which allows a voice to be converted to text on a phone). This is in addition to email (and therefore MMS, and on some carriers SMS) and the web.

With ping.fm it’s just as quick to update all your social networks as it is one. It is only one way however, and other peoples’ updates will not be received using it. Another similar service, which is a little more complex is imified.

The major changes in this release are again memory optimizations claiming memory reduction by up to 75%. The default Digsby client is using a little bit more than 10 Megabytes of computer memory which is 5 Megabyte less than the last version according to Joshua’s screenshots of the last release.

Other notable changes include more than 3000 code revisions since the last release, performance increases, connectivity improvements, LinkedIn support and full newsfeeds.

• RAM Usage: We optimized from the ground up and fixed memory leaks to lower RAM usage by almost 75%. This has been the number one complaint since our launch and we are proud to introduce this massive improvement.
• Performance: User interface elements draw twice as fast for better performance. We have made changes to the architecture that will improve GUI responsiveness and CPU utilization across the board.
• Connectivity: Every IM protocol automatically tries multiple connection methods and ports to improve the odds of getting through restrictive firewalls and proxy servers.
• LinkedIn: Digsby now supports LinkedIn in addition to the other social networks. Functionality includes a full newsfeed, alerts when new messages arrive, and the ability to set status right from Digsby.
• Bug Fixes: We have fixed hundreds of bugs, making Digsby more stable than ever. There have been almost 3,000 revisions in our codebase since the last release so there are too many fixes to list in our changelog.

Given the growing number of social networks, chat addresses and email accounts I had I found it a brilliant solution to keeping it all under check. I also liked the simple but effective design and of course there was that warm early adopter glow of being there to support a growing service from the very beginning.

6 months later and I started to use Pidgin.

This wasn’t a deliberate choice at first, I started dual booting Ubuntu and of course Pidgin is the default chat client. I was immediately impressed by what I saw, it was fast, a lot faster then Digsby and supported a whole lot more chat networks while additionally having some great plugins available.

While Digsby is great in the way it keeps track of social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter the reality is I wasn’t actually using those features very much at all. When I did use them it was through Flock. It did have the very real advantage of Facebook Chat integration which I did use a lot, however I quickly discovered that Pidgin also had a plugin available to achieve this.

Also I found Pidgin had support for IRC Chat which is something I have begun to use a  fair bit lately.

The fact was I was using Digsby, a IM client which was way too resources heavy and susceptible to RAM spikes when Pidgin would do the job better.

I felt a little guilty, but I’m not writing Digsby off at all. I still think it’s great and I really like the direction it’s going in, but I just found a better alternative for my needs at this point in time. Digsby is still a very young client and has a lot of potential. A promised update is coming up to address lots of performance issues and hopefully introduce some new features and I’m looking forward to that.

For now however Pidgin is my stop-gap.

It’s still a beta product but significant changes have been made over the last few months including new features, optimisation and bug fixes. It’s not perfect but it’s very usable. If you’re a fan of MSN for all the ‘nudge’ and ‘wink’ type features then this isn’t for you. If you like the sparse chat style of Gtalk then this is, at the moment Digsby is pretty simple when it comes to chat features.

One great thing about Digsby is that you can chat to people on Facebook Chat through the client, a unique feature for Digsby till a few weeks ago when some other clients began to get it as well. Another great thing about Digsby is the ability to combine contacts different accounts all into one by merging and creating a alias, makes it much easier keeping track of people.It’s also very customizable and you can get various skins and change the layout around to how you like. By creating a Digsby account you can synchronize it across multiple locations and computers and keep all your settings. A very promising application and worth checking out!

I first read about Flock in a PC magazine a few years ago, and didn’t really comprehend what the whole thing was about. The words web 2.0 came up, as did visionary and I really had no idea what it meant. Web 2.0 was meaningless to me (in fact it is still debatably meaningless)

This was back in the days when Facebook was a college students only site and I really wasn’t much into the whole social networking thing. In fact it still doesn’t really appeal to me, sure I have a lot of accounts in various services but most of them I only use on the odd occasion.

I actually think this is where most people get the wrong idea about Flock. It’s marketed as the "social-network addicts" browser and understandably that’s not how many of you would wish to label yourself.

However you don’t have to be this sort of person in order for Flock to be an incredibly useful browser for you. Flock in fact has literally hundreds of features and integrated services which will make life a whole lot easier for you.

Your first reaction to this may be that any of this functionality could be simply added into Firefox with extensions, and that’s perfectly true. The reason I prefer Flock however is because everything is built in, optimised, secure and safe… it’s a lot faster then a Firefox browser the same features added in. You can actually still add any extensions into Flock because it’s built upon Firefox, it’s not recommended but it should work.

I won’t go into detail on every feature offered in Flock, but I will say that now is as good a time as any to give it a whirl. Seriously, try it out for a day or two… you may as well..

Flock beta 1.2 is here and it introduced AOL mail, Digg and Pownce integration.

If you’re a blogger Flock has a killer feature for you… Web Clipboard Sidebar… drag anything from a webpage onto it and it’ll stick around for later. It’s incredibly helpful for research and grabbing random scraps from round the net for an article later.

Hope you get converted too…