Facebook Inititates 3 New Strategies

1. Temporary Passwords to Insure Mobile Security:

Moving to enhance online security, Facebook on Tuesday said that it will soon offer users the ability to receive one-time passwords on their mobile phones and that it has already enabled the ability to sign out of Facebook remotely.

“[W]e’re launching one-time passwords to make it safer to use public computers in places like hotels, cafes or airports,” said Facebook product manager Jake Brill in a blog post. “If you have any concerns about security of the computer you’re using while accessing Facebook, we can text you a one-time password to use instead of your regular password.”

According to a survey released on Tuesday by Internet security company Webroot there are inherent problems with passwords that most of us use every day:

The company found that 47% of Facebook users, among the over 2,500 people surveyed, use their Facebook password for other online sites and 62% of Facebook users never change their passwords. It also found that only 16% of respondents bother to create passwords longer than 10 characters and that 41% of respondents have shared passwords with at least one person over the past year.

Facebook’s decision to offer disposable passwords at least provides stronger security for those who want to make the effort. In a few weeks, as part of a gradual roll-out, Facebook users will be able to text “otp” to 32665 on a mobile phone and immediately receive a password that will work one time and will expire in 20 minutes.

Facebook is also providing users with an overview of recent login activity under the Account Security section of their Account Settings page. This recent login list offers a way to see whether one’s account has been accessed from an unexpected location. It also offers the ability to remotely close sessions that one may have forgotten to terminate, such as when one logs into Facebook through a friend’s phone.

Facebook is not alone in addressing cloud security concerns. Google provides users with Gmail session activity information and last month added two-step verification to Google Apps Premiere, Government, and Education edition users.

2. Facebook Teams With Bing

Facebook and Microsoft took their partnership a step further today by expanding Facebook’s integration with Bing. Why Microsoft rather than Google? Microsoft and Facebook have a preexisting relationship (Microsoft invested in Facebook, and the companies have previously worked together on search and ads), but Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said there’s a reason he likes working with Bing: It’s an underdog.

According to the site VentureBeat:
That’s actually a general rule with Facebook’s platform strategy, Zuckerberg said — when choosing its closest partners, Facebook prefers working with “really scrappy” underdogs. Those underdogs are more likely to understand the potential to “go deep” with Facebook’s social features. For example, much of the success on Facebook’s applications platform has come from games, and social gaming was led by startups like Zynga, not established game companies.

It’s strange to hear Microsoft described as scrappy, but in search it is indeed an underdog against Google. That’s not just a matter of marketshare, either — whenever I’ve spoken to Bing team members, they really do seem more humble and open to new ideas than other Microsoft employees.

3. Facebook Commenting with Votes

Facebook has made a number of upgrades to their comments plugin. The changes include a new voting feature, the inclusion of a user’s network (their work place or location), as well as the percentage of likes a comment gets on a thread, and most significantly: threaded comments.

Here is a description f each of the four core upgrades:

1. User network – While Facebook has technically removed the “networks” feature, comments will now display a user’s location, school they are attending, or company that they are a part of depending on what details they’ve entered in their profile.
2. Comment voting – Another significant feature is comment voting. While it doesn’t appear as though comments are prioritized, users can provide feedback and rate a comment as either positive or negative. That vote is then used to calculate the next feature.
3. Feedback rating & comment count – The feedback rating is the percentage of votes that were positive. If a comment received no feedback, there won’t be a rating. Unfortunately we have yet to determine whether or not this will become a global feedback rating as a mechanism for preventing spam, however it’s pretty obvious that having a higher feedback rating is a good thing. Additionally, a comment count will show how many comments a user has contributed to a thread
4. Threaded comments – This is huge! As far as we can remember, comments were previously displayed in a single thread, however now you reply to specific comments to create sub-conversations.