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Facebook and Twitter users started reporting en-masse of a Twitter takeover of their Facebook walls several hours ago Essentially, anyone with the Twitter or Friendfeed app installed on Facebook saw their posts being automatically pushed to their Facebook feeds. We also believe that it affected Facebook Beacon settings.

Now we can confirm that it was a glitch on the part of Facebook, and that it is now fixed. We first got a hint that there was an issue with Facebook application settings from Bret Taylor, FriendFeed’s co-founder (and creator of Gmail):

“We have received numerous reports of excessive FriendFeed posts showing up in Facebook this evening. While we are not 100% sure, it appears to be an issue on Facebook’s end due to ignoring application settings. We have disabled all FriendFeed updates to Facebook until we are sure the problem is resolved.”

However, final confirmation came in the form of a statement we received from the Facebook team:

“Earlier this evening, a small Facebook bug allowed a handful of apps to publish to the stream on behalf of users who had previously authorized the app. The situation has now been resolved, and all application settings will remain intact for users.”

All Facebook apps should be fine now, so you can unblock them if you did during the Twitter takeover. We’re glad that the bug was fixed so quickly; still, it’s interesting how the small bugs always seem to cause the most drama.

Reviews: Facebook, FriendFeed, Gmail, Twitter

Tags: facebook, friendfeed, twitter

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Alexandra Levit is a Wall Street Journal columnist and the author of They Don’t Teach Corporate in College, How’d You Score That Gig?, and Success for Hire. Read her blog or on Twitter @alevit.

As a career and workplace writer, I get asked all the time: “I feel like I’m on social network overload. I’m a member of so many different sites, and I’m not sure how I should differentiate my presence on each one. For example, should I be “friends” with the same colleagues on every network?”

It’s a great question. Figuring why you’re joining social networks and how best to use them is the first step in coping with social networking overload. Here is a four step plan for helping you figure out how to keep up with your social media universe and get over that overloaded feeling.

1. Ask Yourself Why

The first step is to ask yourself why you joined each site. Was it because everyone else was doing it? Was it because you heard about it on Mashable or from one of your social networking idols and felt compelled to have a presence? If you don’t have a genuine purpose for participating in the network, you might want to think about stopping your activity there. I learned the hard way that joining too many social networks means that you can’t concentrate properly on the ones that are truly important to you.

When you’re overloaded, people may try to engage with you, but you might ignore them simply because you can’t keep up from all the contact being generated by your diffuse presence. As my grandmother used to say, “the person who tries to please everyone pleases no one.”

2. Consider Your Purpose

Once you’ve narrowed down your top networks, consider what you value about each one. For instance, do you enjoy Facebook because it allows you to keep up with your niece and nephew who are growing up across the country? Do you like that you can use LinkedIn to research individuals working at the organizations with which you’d be most interested in working? Is Twitter the best way for you to communicate just-in-time information to your core audience?

In order to avoid duplicating your information on every network, think about your purpose for being on each one and limit your activity to that purpose.

3. Create Boundaries

A typical example is that many people I’ve chatted with recently have chosen to use Facebook for family and past and present friends, where they reserve LinkedIn for business contacts. Creating boundaries between social networks allows them to post personal information and photos without worrying that they’ve shared too much with managers or direct reports or even getting into trouble with HR (disclaimer: any information that you wouldn’t be comfortable showing your grandmother or religious officiant shouldn’t really be on any social network, because on most networks, you never truly know who might be able to gain access without your express knowledge). On the other hand, they can feel more comfortable promoting themselves and their achievements on LinkedIn and don’t have to be as concerned about coming across as a braggart to friends and family.

4. Communicate Your Plan

You don’t have to be “friends” with the world on every social network, and you don’t have to import status updates and news items to every network either. My recommendation is to simply make clear to your contacts what you are using the various networks for. If a colleague asks to be your Facebook friend but you are using Facebook exclusively to keep up with your college buddies, just tell her so politely and invite her to connect on LinkedIn.

Being honest upfront very well may save you from an awkward situation later. In terms of the networks you already have a widespread presence on, consider making good use of the privacy settings (Facebook and Twitter have fairly comprehensive offerings) so that you don’t accidentally overstep the boundaries you’ve worked so carefully to create.

More social media resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Make Firefox Your Productivity Machine

- 14 iPhone Apps With Push Notification for Productivity

- HOW TO: Live Inside Twitter and Still Stay Productive

- 7 Productivity Tips for Freelancers and Web Workers

- HOW TO: Simplify Your Social Media Routine

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, arekmalang

Reviews: Facebook, LinkedIn, Mashable, Twitter, iStockphoto

Tags: business, facebook, linkedin, social media, social networking, social networking overload, twitter

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Recent releases of the Firefox web browser have seen enormous download activity right out of the gate. Firefox 3.0 saw better than 8 million downloads in its first 24 hours, while the Firefox 3.5 update reached one million downloads hours after launch, and his since been downloaded a whopping 63 million times and counting.

Thus, it’s not too surprising that the Firefox browser – all versions combined – is about to pass an enormous milestone: one billion total downloads.

According to the Firefox Download Guesstimator, Firefox will pass one billion at some point on Friday. Mozilla, never one to shy away from touting its download numbers and encroachment on Microsoft’s browser dominance, plans to launch the site onebillionplusyou.com on Monday to celebrate.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to know what the future has in store for Mozilla, check out our recent coverage of the upcoming Firefox 4.0 browser.

Reviews: Firefox

Tags: Firefox, mozilla, web browsers

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You’re probably pretty familiar with the web series Harper’s Globe, Get Cookin‘, or lonelygirl15, but you’ve likely heard very little about EQAL the company behind the social shows and their web presence.

Today, they’re announcing at Twiistup that they’re branching out from hit web content and releasing Umbrella, their consumer platform product for social publishing and audience aggregation, into private beta. Umbrella is designed to bring dead simple publishing and social media distribution to larger than life online personalities, celebrities, entertainers, and independent content creators who want to create a Harper’s Globe of their own.

Umbrella’s hosted software as a service application is essentially a content management platform a là WordPress, with the simplicity of a Tumblr, and a powerful backend management panel that can pull in external data from integrated social properties. Umbrella also comes replete with OpenID support via Google, and forums for publishers to foster fan participation and interaction. The front-end will look and function like their existing properties, and the backend will bring their publishing platform to consumers.

Entertainers, online producers, and lifestreamers can combine content publishing with social media distribution, meaning they can link their Facebook Fan Page, YouTube Channel, and Twitter account to automatically publish, not just alert, on those platforms as well. So for Facebook and YouTube, full content from the original posts would be pushed out to those platforms as well, and still give publishers the ability to track content performance.

Essentially, Umbrella is a premium CMS targeted to users with a large online audience interested in not only maintaining ownership of their audience, but also connecting with them through distributed social channels. As such, Umbrella users will be able to tap into extensive user data and have access, depending on users’ privacy settings, to fan email addresses and demographics. The management panel will also pull in data from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to give users a full picture of their reach and penetration.

Though Umbrella is launching in private beta (and free for now), EQAL is actively seeking out interested parties who want to use their platform, and you can sign up here.

Reviews: Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube

Tags: CMS, entertainment, eqal, harpers globe, publishing platform, umbrella

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Redux is turning status updates and real-time feeds into an entertainment destination. Currently in private beta, the social entertainment site has already taken a page from Twitter and FriendFeed’s playbook, but now they’re introducing a TV Mode that creates an auto-generated full screen video playlist based on you and your friends’ activity.

Redux is very much like a cross between FriendFeed and Twitter, with a real-time stream of shared content flowing in from users and channels, which are akin to FriendFeed rooms for topic-based content. Streams of content are filtered for everyone, my network (just the people you follow), popular, and channels so you can toggle through different views of the photos, videos, and URLs being shared by everyone on site, just your friends, or just the channels you enjoy.

As a member, you share URLs and Redux includes the rich media content into the stream, so a YouTube URL would be watchable from the stream view. Other users can then add a comment, give props, or share an item with Twitter, Facebook, or via email and URLs (sounds a lot like FriendFreed, right?).

Redux does have a few tricks up their sleeve that make them unique. For each shared item, you can see the total number views, and there’s also a toolbar with comment, prop, and share options that opens when you click to an external site, giving you a way to continue conversations once you leave Redux (this may be a plus or minus, depending on how you feel about toolbars). The site is also extremely user-friendly and filled with content even though it’s only in private beta.

The site has also just added TV Mode, a way to watch videos in full-screen one right after the other, with a playlist that is created on the fly — in real-time — according to the tastes of members with similar interests. In TV Mode, you can skip to and from videos, and still add comments and props as usual. It’s a pretty unique way to discover video content from the web, and we find the entertainment value to be fantastic.

Eventually Redux plans to make the entertainment value their business model by bringing premium content to users for purchase. So, as an example, members will be able to buy access to view episodes of Entourage from a pay-per-month type channel. Depending on how the content is packaged, this could create an interesting subscription model where iTunes meets Hulu.

Should Redux get you in a social entertainment mood, you’ll have to wait until they open the site up to the public. Unless of course, you’re one of the first 500 readers to signup using this link.

Reviews: Facebook, FriendFeed, Hulu, Twitter

Tags: entertainment, feed, real-time, redux

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Earlier this week, it was reported that MySpace was soon to launch its own email system – MySpace Mail – that would allow users to create their own @myspace.com email address and use the social network as a webmail provider.

That point is now, as MySpace has just started rolling out the beta for their MySpace Mail program. It will come in waves, with all users having access within the next few weeks. Here’s the big question, though: who’s going to switch to MySpace Mail?

Social Email Features

MySpace is hoping that the combination of a MySpace domain and its social networking features will lure some of its millions of users to take the plunge and create a MySpace Mail account. We’ve been given the core feature list, which MySpace describes as follows:

1. New Mail center provides a snapshot of all your mail activities including messages, sent messages, requests, and notifications

2. Send and receive messages from inside or outside the MySpace network

3. Unlimited file storage

4. One click to embed photos directly from your profile or desktop

5. Send and receive file attachments including music and video

6. Search within Mail using our Google Gears implementation

7. Check out friends’ activities in real time via the new Mail Activity Stream module

8. Address book that automatically saves your contacts

Some of these features will interest MySpace users – one-click to embed photos, Google Gears integration, and the activity stream are all good social twists to MySpace email. Still, we ask the big question: who’s going to actually use one as opposed to their current Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or other email account? Let us know in the comments.

Reviews: Gmail, MySpace

Tags: myspace

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Yesterday, Yahoo and Microsoft finally announced the big deal that would transform their “search platforms into a market competitor.” Microsoft will power Yahoo Search, while Yahoo gets a revenue sharing agreement. How did Wall Street react? While Microsoft investors and shareholders had a mildly positive reaction to the deal, Yahoo shares sunk. By billions of dollars.

We were hoping that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer would have something interesting to say about the market’s reaction to the search deal. And once again, he does not fail us. At a meeting with industry analysts this morning, Microsoft’s leader described the negative reaction of Yahoo investors to the deal with three words:

“Nobody gets it.”

That’s probably an appropriate reaction when your partner’s stock drops two days in a row (Yahoo shares plummeted 12% on Wednesday alone). According to the New York Times, Ballmer was surprised at the market’s reaction to the deal. He tried to win over analysts by explaining how Yahoo receives a big, fat 88% revenue cut of all search ads sold on its properties. Disappointed investors preferred to get at least some cash up-front, and when they didn’t, the stock tanked.

Still, we don’t disagree with the assessment that the two companies are probably better off together than apart. And with a 10 year search deal where revenue is shared, both companies have incentive to make the partnership work in the long-term.

Will the Microsoft vs. Google battle play out any differently this time? All we know is that Yahoo investors clearly don’t think so:

Ouch.

Tags: Google, microsoft, Search, Steve Ballmer, Yahoo

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Since essentially the beginning of Facebook, it has been divided by networks: your school, your town, your company, etc. Facebook specifically launched regional networks back in 2006 as an attempt to branch out beyond its university roots.

We were surprised when we learned not long ago that Facebook intended to remove these regional networks in an attempt to make their platform more open – part of its Twitterification.

It looks like the dissipation of regional networks has already begun. Now, when you try to browse your list of friends (here’s a link), the ability to filter by geographic region is completely gone.

First spotted by All Facebook, the change removes location-based regions from the “Browse by” menu dropdown. For me, it just leaves me the ability to find friends by College, High School, and Work. There’s also no option (yet) to find friends by geographic region in the left-hand list area.

We hope Facebook either made this move only as a temporary measure or intends to have a replacement ready soon (likely using the hometown you’ve provided). Finding friends when you visit a place is a huge asset and is one of the best parts of being connected to a regional network.

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: facebook

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Hot or Not Live is just like the original Hot or Not – a service which lets you rate members’ “hotness” based on their pictures – only with video. It takes the streams from Justin.TV, and lets the user choose males, females or both. It also displays the top three “hot” streams, and if you click on a video, it takes you to the user’s channel on Justin.TV.

It sounds like a clever idea, and Hot or Not is a good concept to learn from; it’s one of those rare, very simple viral services that have remained quite popular for a longer period of time (its popularity is now slowly waning, but most other similar services have a far more steep fall after the initial popularity burst).

Now, as the author himself has said (in the now removed Hacker News thread), it’s just a little app that he had built in “about a day,” and he wants feedback. But the site immediately raises several concerns.

First of all, he’s using the trademarked “Hot or Not” phrase which won’t go well with the owners of the original service. Secondly, the original Hot or Not asks users for permission to use their pictures and explains other users will be able to vote with them; the users of Justin.TV probably have no idea that someone is voting on their video streams. And finally, as one commenter put it on the Hacker News thread, “Every video was an underage girl in her pajamas mumbling into the camera.” It’s pretty much true; the service needs an age filter badly, as most older users will feel like they’re browsing an underage escort service.

All that aside, the concept is interesting; if the author were able to solve all of the problems listed above, he could have a potential hit on his hands. I doubt it, though; I suspect the service will be removed very soon, so if you want to check it out, hurry up.

Reviews: Hacker News

Tags: Hot or Not Live

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Well, you win some, you lose some. A couple of days after Apple banned all Google Voice-related applications from its App Store, a Google Voice app has appeared for the Palm Pre.

Though this is an unofficial application, and – according to the thread on PreCentral, not without bugs – this is a double win for Palm. It sorely lacks applications, and now it’s gotten several in the span of a few days, one of them being unavailable on the iPhone. Baby steps, Palm, baby steps.

Reviews: Google Voice

Tags: App, applications, Google Voice, palm, Palm Pre

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