When I was trying to share a link this morning, that was posted on a group wall, i was surprised with the new sharing options that Facebook added to the popup window.. Facebook made it easier for you to share links, video or photo or normal content with friends, so you don't have to go to friend's profile or a group to share the link... Now you can do all this with One-Click !
Take a look at the images I took for the sharing window

As you can see, the design was modified to get two drop down lists at the top, one for "where to share" and one for "sharing visibility"

Here are the new option to share links:
  - On your own wall
  - On a friend's wall
  - In a group
  - In a private message

Here are the new security options for the visibility of the link:
  - Everyone
  - Friends of Friends and Networks
  - Friends and Networks
  - Friends of Friends
  - Friends Only
  - Customize

As you can see, now it's easier with full-options to share links. I would go vote for this new add, as I was frustrated with the last change they are making to old Groups.. What do you think ?

Facebook will begin archiving all groups created using the older format, in a push to get everyone onto the newer version of the feature.
Some group owners are seeing the following message at the top of the group admin page:

Over the next few months, Facebook will be archiving all groups created using the old groups format. Moving forward, you can create groups using the new groups format, which makes it easy to share with the important groups in your life.

Facebook offers pretty thorough guidance about the forthcoming archiving and upgrades in the site’s help section, fleshed out in three different questions.
The site explains that old groups that get archived will automatically also become available in the new group format. Most of the associated content will remain available in the upgraded version, with some notable exceptions.
The things that won’t make it over are:

- Recent news
- Group officer titles
- The information box under the old group picture
- The group network
- The members of your old group.

Yup, you’ll have to redo your membership list in the new group if you wait for Facebook to do the archive and upgrade for you. The archived version will include:

- Group photos and wall posts
- Group discussion threads, which become wall posts
- The group description, which can be found at the top of the page when you click “see all” members in the new group

Facebook recommends that save backups of their group content before the archiving. Plus, the site wants all businesses using groups to promote themselves to switch to pages instead.
At some point, a link saying “upgrade this group” may appear at the top of the owner’s admin screen — only for old groups, of course. Ones created in the new format won’t go through any of this. And groups that have less activity might not see an upgrade prompt at all.
For now, the messages that readers have said they are seeing come as friendly early alerts, which we appreciate. Putting the word out early seems like a wise move, based on how people reacted to recent upgrades of profiles and pages.
Readers, what do you think about the way Facebook is handling the eventual phasing out of the old groups format?

MEMPHIS, TN - (WMC TV) - It's amazing what a punk in his momma's basement can do with Photoshop.

E-mails are pouring in from folks who've received unsolicited Facebook postings promising exclusive access to alleged photos or videos of the raid and assassination of Osama Bin Laden.

Never mind that President Barack Obama announced the government will NOT release the photos or videos.

The postings contain breathless language about how the footage is "insane" or "crazy." One even includes an alleged picture of Bin Laden's lifeless face -- with the curveball that it came from the BBC, the British news agency.

They're all fake !! The real curveball is what will happen if you click on them or open any of their attachments.

"Just the act of clicking on it can download a virus to your computer and then who knows what they can do with a virus or some other sort of malware," said Randy Hutchinson, President/CEO of the Better Business Bureau of the Mid-South. "In some cases, they may be asking you to provide some sort of information on the web site you click to, and then they're going to use that to commit some sort of identity theft."

If one of these Bin Laden scams crosses your Facebook page, for goodness sake, do not click on it.

Destroy it -- like we did Bin Laden.

If you ever receive an unsolicited Facebook posting with photos or video allegedly from a news source, STOP & SEARCH THE NEWS SOURCE.

If it says it came from the BBC, don't take it at its word. Go to the BBC's site and search for the content. If you can't find it, you'll know why not.

NEVER CLICK ON UNSOLICITED LINKS, even if they appear to be sent by one of your Facebook or Twitter friends. Chances are, someone hijacked your friend's account to make it look like your friend sent the links.

BEWARE CELEBRATION INVITATIONS ON FACEBOOK OR TWITTER. Get Tweeted to attend a "Bin Laden is Dead" party? Don't reply! It's bait to unlock your account.

Unless your buddies are Woodward and Bernstein, they're not going to blow the lid off of the secret Bin Laden photos or video.

For more guidance on these types of scams, click here for the BBB's warning: http://www.bbb.org/us/article/bbb-warns-of-online-scams-in-the-wake-of-osamas-death-27130.

Copyright 2011 WMC-TV. All rights reserved.

As an Internet powerhouse, Facebook is now using its girth and influence to try to get a bite out of the daily deals market. With established leaders like Groupon and LivingSocial, Facebook faces fierce competition, but is aiming to provide a differentiated product offering that stays consistent with Facebook's core value of bringing people together. Unlike some of its competitors, who focus on deep discounts, Facebook Deals will focus on group activities that bring people together and the process of sharing them.

The difference between Facebook and other companies who are taking initiatives to establish this trend of "deals" is that Facebook has a much bigger membership base than its competitors. According to Mashable.com, LivingSocial has a membership base of 28 million plus users and Groupon reaches 70 million plus users.

Facebook Deals will begin testing in the San Diego, San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin and Dallas areas. After opting to receive deals, users in these locations will have a chance to see a list of discounts available in their communities via a link on the left side of their Facebook pages.

Emily C. White, director of local at Facebook, wrote in a recent company blog post that following the success of the trial in these five major cities, Facebook plans to expand Deals to other cities. Deals launched with discounts on wine tastings in Napa Valley, restaurants and children's sleepovers at the California Academy of Sciences.

While Groupon offers many popular individual pampering services, such as massages and yoga classes, White shared a different strategic edge that Facebook plans to take with Deals. "While many Deals on Facebook offer discounts," White said, "it's more important to us that you find interesting experiences around you to do with friends."

Benny Evangelista, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, shared his insight on Facebook's potential in this market. "With Deals on Facebook," Evangelista said, "the Palo Alto firm could further tap lucrative local advertising revenues using the hot trend popularized by firms like Groupon, which offer daily deals with often deep discount prices for everything from yogurt to wine country excursions."

Ever since Groupon allegedly rejected an offer from Google to buy the company for $6 billion, other websites have jumped into the market, smelling an opportunity for profit. Google even launched its own coupon website, Google Offers. There is now an abundance of websites trying to get a piece of the pie by offering a different kind of twist on the idea of "social shopping."

Because Facebook has so many users, competitors realize its potential to gain market share. The success of these daily deals sites relies on loyal clientele to share the discounts with their friends, a department in which Facebook has an edge with more than 600 million active users.

While daily deals websites rely on their members sharing deals with friends, Debra Aho Williamson, principal social media marketing analyst for the research firm eMarketer Inc., explained to the San Francisco Chronicle why she believes Facebook might have an edge in the deals market. "It weaves the sharing and buying of deals into its social networking platform," Williamson said.

Despite being such a large company, Facebook must find ways to tap into the local scene, and Deals may be the perfect way to do that. "What Facebook is tapping into is the power of friends' recommendations," Williamson said. "Facebook has been wanting to get more into the local markets. Local advertising is really tough to crack if you're a national company."

While Groupon forces members to log in to view a daily deal, Facebook can take advantage of the fact that they don't have to woo customers in; there's already significant traffic to the website regardless of what they choose to do with Deals. This means that the users who have opted in will be exposed to Deals offerings even when not seeking out the service. Facebook also has a competitive advantage with access to user information. User information can be used to direct deals to users their interests. As a marketing tool, this could be extremely effective.

Although Facebook has garnered a lot of attention by entering the daily deals market, its status as a powerhouse company doesn't necessarily equate to success. Twitter made an attempt to enter the daily deals market with its Earlybird Offers last year, but stopped it just two months after launching. Twitter's failed entry shows that no matter how much influence a company has in one market, this does not directly translate to success in other markets. One can't jump to conclusions like, "The early bird always gets the worm"; in Twitter's case, the Earlybird never took flight.

Social networking giant Facebook has removed dozens of profile pages of British activist groups prompting accusations of political interference.

Facebook denied that the Royal Wedding had anything to do with the removal of the profile pages, instead saying the pages were removed due to policy violations, chiefly profiles representing an organization rather than a personal.

The distinction is often the source of confusion with organizations instead expected to create 'pages' rather than 'profiles'. The social networking giant is, however, rammed with thousands of fake identities, whether they be parody pages or protest groups.

A Facebook spokesman said that the site's 'culture' gives rise to "accountability among everyone who uses the site and it is our most important safety and security mechanism," according to a New York Times blog.

Facebook said that they had already been on contact with the groups in order to tell them how to move the profiles to pages which are "designed to represent companies, groups or causes."

One of the reasons organizations prefer setting up profile pages is because 'friends' of profile pages receive regular updates.

We all know – or at least we should know – some important characteristics of the information we post on social networks. One, it’s public. Two, it’s public. And three, even your private information can be found if someone wants it badly enough (in other words, it’s public). I know this, and so should you. But while researching a paper on social networking sites for my information technology class (which is awesome, by the way), I came across some facts that reminded me once again of the publicity of Facebook.

I was researching the potential uses of Facebook by law enforcement personnel – the kind of stories we’ve all heard by now, about the police who track down dumb and not-so-dumb criminals through their Facebook post, photos, or status updates. But I also ran into some stories about average Facebook users who found their pages being used as evidence against them.

In some of those cases, the charges were criminal, as in a USA Today story about three individuals who in one case injured and in the others killed other people while driving drunk (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2008-07-19-facebook-trials_N.htm). In each case, prosecutors found Facebook photos of the defendants, taken after the crashes, in which they were drinking. One young man even posted a picture of himself wearing a prisoner costume at a party – a joking reference to the fact that he had a court case pending. For all three defendants, their Facebook information became character evidence that landed them with harsher sentences – more years in prison.

Other stories revolved around civil cases where, not surprisingly, Facebook evidence played a star role in divorce cases. According to a story in the ABA Journal, 81% of divorce lawyers reported an increase of evidence springing from social networking sites over the past five years. (http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/facebook_is_unrivaled_leader_for_online_divorce_evidence_survey_says/)

It’s sobering to think of the impulsiveness that characterizes so many Facebook decisions, especially when those decisions could be staring you in the face in court one day. The way to prevent that happening is obvious: don’t cheat on your spouse and don’t drink and drive. But sometimes the unexpected happens. If it does, the last thing you want to worry about is whether you incriminated yourself because you couldn’t think twice about the information you shared.

Ultimately, the use of social media as a source for legal evidence should remind us once again of the publicity and permanence of online information. Posting is like publishing. No matter how much you may think it is, it’s not the same as talking to a friend, unless you assume that all of your friends are bugged.

In a very real way, this is all very cool. We can record our most momentary thoughts permanently, give them the eternal life that information attains once it’s put online. We just have to remember that they can be seen by anyone with the right amount of know-how, or a warrant.

I’m going to try to drive this home to myself by saying “Hello, world,” after every post or upload. Eeeeeeevery single one. I’m serious (or at least kind of). Maybe it will remind me that it may not be read only by the friend who’s wall I’m posting on (and her friends, of course, and their friends, if she allows it, and so on) or seen by just the friends I tag, but by everyone – and their lawyer.

Within about two hours of reports first surfacing (and since confirmed by the President) that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, a Facebook Page titled “Osama Bin Laden is DEAD” has already accumulated more than 150,000 “likes.”

The page appears to be adding thousands of likes by the minute with users also sharing hundreds of comments and links to stories about the news.

Interestingly, the page itself appears to have been setup well prior to tonight as a way to advocate the theory that Bin Laden had actually died long ago.

The page description reads in part: “Osama Bin Laden has not been found and will never be found because he died a long time ago. This may be news to you because it wasn’t in the news. His death is critical to the CIA because they want you to believe in this so called ‘War on terror’ which has made the world a more dangerous place. If Osama Bin Laden was alive, he would’ve been found – just like Saddam Hussein.”

Nonetheless, the page is now serving as a real-time discussion board for the historic news.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters, May 2, 2011) - Facebook Inc's business is growing faster than forecast several months ago and the firm is on track to top $2 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in 2011, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook's growth is above the growth expectations that circulated when Goldman Sachs and Digital Sky Technologies invested in the closely held Internet company, the newspaper said in its online edition.

The newspaper did not say by how much Facebook may exceed expectations.

Goldman's and Digital Sky Technologies' investment was at a share price that implied a $50 billion valuation for Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal said Facebook's profits were now growing at a fast-enough rate to justify a valuation of $100 billion or more when it goes public.

Facebook is expected to go public early next year.

The company could not be immediately reached for comment.