Following the newest Facebook on Yahoo update, Yahoo-owned Flickr has introduced an interesting new way to link your Flickr photos with your Facebook account. With the help of Facebook News Feed and Yahoo’s updated platform, you can have the thumbnails of your Flickr photos along with title and description appear on your Facebook page.

Microsoft has planned to introduce today a new social section that indexes Facebook. Bing’s Senior Vice President, Yusuf Mehdi, revealed today bing.com/social – “the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose with non-pages content.” With this new effort, Bing has turned to be the perfect destination for those that look for real time news via social web outlets. Bing Social isn’t operational yet, but the infrastructure seems to be in the final stages of development.  

Yahoo has once again integrated Facebook features for its users. As we have mentioned earlier Yahoo is leaving no stone unturned to further connect to the social web. Initially it allowed web surfers to update Facebook contact information, and then came the announcement of updating Facebook status and viewing friends' profile pictures. The latest addition was further integrated Facebook’s Like action, commenting, and News Feed.

Facebook is working towards easing users’ concerns about information sharing. The social media site has been making update after update. Facebook has mentioned in its blog that “privacy settings themselves have not changed with this update; we've simply added ways to control what you share with fewer steps.”  In other words, users still have to go through the whole rigmarole of opt out instead of opt in. Although in yet another update, Facebook has now launched a new “Facebook and Privacy” Page to complement its existing privacy guide. The new page is interactive in nature and will feature regular updates. Facebook is also planning to post updates about new materials, tips on how to control sharing, and links to relevant news stories and viewpoints.

Controversies and backlashes are nothing new to Facebook. Ever since its inception, Facebook has been under fire for its blatant disregard for users’ privacy concerns. However, Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg tried to placate the concerns and presented his company’s point of view during his appearance at D8. The CEO reiterated his stance that maintaining users’ privacy is of utmost importance to his company. However, he evaded answering a question about the automatically enabled connections and gave a circuitous reply that Facebook users are familiar with the controls and therefore can choose desired settings on their own. He sounded defiant while stating that Facebook had always been built around networks, not individuals, and that this shows that people actually want to share their information. 

The world’s largest social networking site Facebook is still going through some tough times on the issue of privacy. Yesterday was the first of two Quit Facebook days that popped up on our radar. In all a little under 35,000 committed to quit. Even without Quit Facebook Days, many users are still expected to quit. A poll from Mashable found roughly 25% of respondents planned on quitting Facebook, while another poll from Sophos  found 30% of its respondents were highly likely to quit.

Following Mark Zuckerberg’s post on new privacy controls, Ana Yang Muller of Facebook has written a blog post on “Understanding Your Privacy Controls on Facebook.” She has promised that Facebook is sure to launch the redesigned privacy settings page to users across the globe within the next few weeks. Muller writes, “We agreed and have revamped the privacy settings, starting with a new main page where, in a couple clicks, you can set all of the content you share to everyone, friends of your friends or just your friends. This new single setting, though, is just one of the new ways to control what you share.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a lengthy blog post Wednesday on Facebook’s blog in response to raising privacy concerns. Zuckerberg said, “Over the past few weeks, the number one thing we've heard is that many users want a simpler way to control their information. Today we're starting to roll out changes that will make our controls simpler and easier.” He introduced some changes to Facebook’s privacy settings by offering a “one-click” mechanism that allows users to have full control over their shared information. The CEO said that the new security aspect enable users to know how much of their personal information is publicly available on the web.

Yahoo has been constantly adding more Facebook features to Yahoo Mail. As the first step, Yahoo enabled Y! Mail users to import contacts from their Facebook account. Yahoo then allowed its users to update Facebook status from Y Mail along with the ability to see photos of their Facebook friends when they email them. Well yesterday Yahoo announced in its Yahoo Mail Blog yet another feature of Facebook available with Y Mail. Now Yahoo users can view, comment and like their Facebook news feed items directly from Yahoo Mail. The activities of friends at Facebook will now show up in the Updates section, in addition to friends’ activity on Yahoo, Twitter, Flickr, etc.

For the past month or two, the growing issues surrounding Facebook, and the group account deletions and boycotts because of them.  At the opening of the second day of Disrupt, Vice President of Facebook Chris Cox (among others) spoke a bit about addressing those issues, particularly privacy.  Whether privacy is really the key issue, or it’s just been blown up by the tech media, it’s what the folks over at Facebook are working the hardest on.  According to Cox, within the next day or two, Facebook will be releasing an updated and “simplified” security settings interface to try and solve what they believe to be their biggest issue.  Depending on how this interface change is implemented, it may or may not be a good thing. If implemented wrong, it could be disastrous.

Another important and informative event at Disrupt today was the conversant with eComerce prospector and tech investor John Doerr.  The man has been investing in the tech game for two decades now, as well as personally knowing most of the industry leaders.  If anyone is qualified to be a tech oracle, it’s him; and that’s just what interviewer Charlie Rose asked the man to do.  His predictions essentially consisted of the following. 

Facebook is constantly introducing new features. The company announced yesterday that that it has launched an exclusive mobile version of the site: 0.facebook.com. The brand new mobile site is absolutely free, super fast and has been made accessible for more than 50 mobile operators in 45 countries, said Sid Murlidhar, product marketing team, Facebook Mobile. This mobile version is said to include most of the features that users are used to seeing on the site.

Irony and nostalgia abound when looking at the relationship between consumers, Facebook, and good old Myspace.  Most people who left Myspace en-masse to join Facebook, did so because of an alarming increase in adds, fake accounts, malware, privacy, and other such security issues.  Now, however, with all of the Facebook boycotts being organized as of late, it seems as though Facebook has fallen prey to the very same faults that chased people towards it in the first place.  The people are concerned with a lack of privacy and an unhealthy obsession with advertisers.  What’s even more ironic is that Myspace looks like it may be gearing up to “pull a Facebook” as it were: re-vamping their privacy interface in the wake of their rival’s privacy issues.

Apparently the folks over at “Quit Facebook Day” aren’t the only ones who are frustrated with the recent changes to the world’s most popular social network, in-fact they aren’t even the only ones who are planning a unified Facebook Exodus.  Facebook Protest was created to organize a similar protest on June 6th. While one site devoted to such a maneuver should be worrying, two such sites ought to have Facebook at least a little scared.  This may be a sign that the critical mass of discontent necessary to end a major eBuisness player has finally come to play.

Samsung announced this week that its ST5500 camera will come equipped with Wi-Fi radio and access to Boingo software that allows users to immediately share their photos on Facebook, Picasa, YouTube, and SamsungImaging.com. Samsung is even offering three months of free access to the software, a great marketing ploy, considering users probably won't want to cancel after seeing how easy it is to not have to take the intermediate step of uploading pictures to their computers.