For those of you who haven’t heard, all the current Facebook talk is centered on the new Timeline profile that will soon be rolled out to FB users.

Gone will be your single column profile page to be completely revamped with the new Timeline profile. Mark Zuckberg explained it as a way to “share the story of your life on a single page”. Aside from your profile picture, a huge panoramic photo will greet you and your friends, to be followed by compartmentalized areas of activities, likes, photos, places etc. that will resemble a giant, organized scrapbook.

Check out the official Timeline page or the introduction video below to get a better understanding of the new layout.

Much like any of FB changes, this will be met with mixed reviews. It’s all a matter of personal preference. The biggest drawback may be the ability to delve deep into past posts that you thought were lost to cyberspace. (Just remember, these can always be deleted.)

And on the other hand, you can also go back and add monumental moments to your timeline that you want to share with your friends (wedding, college graduation, child’s birth) that may have occurred before your days on FB.

Couple of facts you should know right now:

• The Timeline hasn’t begun rolling out to users yet.
• A few developers are using it but it cannot be seen my regular users as yet. Only other Timeline users can view each other’s owns.
• It goes into beta testing on September 30.

Facebook has truly thrown a lot of changes in the mix. The Facebook Insider will be working to try to cover all these changes soon. Please let us know in the comments if you need help with anything in particular.

The guide, which was announced via a note by Facebook Security, covers a range of topics such as how to protect your Facebook account, avoid scams and the correct usage of the security settings.

It was written by former Internet Safety Director at Symantec, Linda McCarthy, Purdue University security research engineer, Keith Watson and teacher, editor and mother of Facebook users, Denise Weldon-Siviy.

Click this link to view ‘Own Your Space: A Guide to Facebook Security’.

Today while perusing the happenings of Facebook, I came across an article of a British man who used information posted on his neighbors’ Facebook profiles to hack into their bank accounts via banking websites. He spent two years and several hours every day using this information and intercepting their mail to figure out the passwords to their bank accounts. By finding out their username and answering the personal questions asked by the ‘Forgot your Password’ feature, he managed to steal more than £35,000 (US$57,000). (Read the full article here)

The frequency of these FB horror stories is frightening. Once again, I was forced to question, ‘Do we share too much of our lives online?’. The limits seem to change so often that I came up with a few ‘Facebook Guidelines’ that will hopefully help with this problem.

1. Check your Privacy Settings closely. Make sure only your friends can see your profile. You do not need strangers knowing all your business. A good example of this is the website, OpenBook. It allows anyone to search status updates of Facebook users with unprotected profiles. Their names and profile pictures come up with the status updates. Creepy, right? Protect your profiles!
2. Stop friending strangers. For all those people you knew 20 years ago and really don’t know now, limit their access to your profile. Utilize the ‘Friends Lists’ Feature. It may be difficult, but it’s worth it to limit certain people’s access.
3. Never put your full birthday on your profile. It’s the first stop for identity theft.
4. Don’t tell the world that you’re going on vacation. It’s an invitation to rob your house. But on the other hand, if you were utilizing your friends list properly, you could simply tell your really good friends (then it just becomes bragging!).
5. Be careful of what you post for the world to see. Ask the young rioters who just got a 4 year sentence in England for ‘enticing a riot on Facebook’ (do note, no one actually rioted in their area. Makes that 4 years look a little harsher?). It’s never a good plan to post, tweet or upload pictures of illegal activities. Somebody will report you, and rightfully so.
6. Don’t announce private messages to all your friends. Use private messaging to have private conversations with your good friends. Especially invitations. When making a Facebook event, triple check that you are only sending it to certain people and not all of Facebook. Party crashers aren’t everybody’s idea of a great time, especially when the numbers reach in the 1000′s.
7. Choose a difficult password. And never use the same password for everything. It’s just asking for problems.

There’s also the never-ending debate about children’s photos on Facebook. Inevitable or avoidable?  The jury’s still out on this one. In the case of children, I think names, locations, and most definitely school uniforms should be left off the internet. But as usual, if you have strict privacy settings, do you really have to worry?

An interesting read for those who are curious about this topic is an article on the New York Times’ website called ‘Guardian of their Smiles’ .

Thoughts? Tell me what you think below or on our Facebook page.

In a press conference this afternoon, Facebook co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg announced the new Skype integration as well as a new chat interface and the ability to group chat.

The video calling feature, which you can set up through facebook.com/videocalling, is simple to use so that the least tech-savvy users can now face-to-face chat while on Facebook.

The setup includes a small plugin that needs to be downloaded.

Facebook video calling is currently only available on the web, and will not work on mobile phones.

These features have been long awaited on the world’s most popular social network, which promises more features to come in the next weeks to months.

The feature recognizes your face in (most) pictures then suggests tagging you in them when your friends’ upload an album. Regardless, you’re going to get tagged if your friends want to tag you. This just gives the option of tagging a group of pictures.

It’s important to note that you will always have the option to untag yourself. Also, these tagging suggestions appear to your friends only.

For those actually uploading the pictures, it makes tagging a lot easier.

If this doesn’t sound like something you’re interested in, here’s how to turn it off.

Go to Account > Privacy Settings.

Choose Customize settings.

Scroll to Things Others Share. Look for Suggest photos of me to friends. Click Edit Settings.

Now to choose Enable or Disable.

For those who may not see this option yet, it’s because it’s hasn’t reached you yet. Give it a few days and it’ll be there.

FaceNiff allows users to intercept user’s account credentials over public Wi-Fi connections (including WEP, WPA and WPA2). It does not work if the network is EAP encrypted.

The app works on the premise that once a user enters their username and password, the information is stored in a ‘cookie’ and then the cookie can be accessed over the public network. The biggest limitation being that the Android phone needs to be rooted. A process that allows the user full access to their phone so that they can modify the phone as much they please.

The makers maintain that the app is for educational purposes only, and stress that it is illegal to access other users’ information in certain countries.

Last year, there was a similar occurrence with Firesheep, a Firefox extension that allowed the same ability to steal user credentials. This caused social media sites to up their games and enable secure browsing.

I don’t explain this to assist in those looking to hack accounts (you can find that information anywhere). I would like to emphasize the need to keep your accounts secure. Be extremely wary of what you’re accessing on public Wi-Fi networks.

FaceNiff currently works for Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, YouTube and Nasza-Klasa on several different brand of Android phones.

Keep your secure browsing on while in public locations. Facebook’s own is set to default now, but users turn it off to use certain games and applications.

Read our Understanding Secure Browsing on Facebook post if you need help with this.

Recently we gave you an update on the new feature of ‘How to Hide Activities on Your Facebook Wall’. Here’s the equivalent for your news feed.

You should know that your News Feed is broken down into ‘Top News’ and ‘Most Recent’.

‘Most Recent’ consists of a dropdown menu which allows you to filter by categories Facebook suggests and by Friends Lists (read our post on creating Friends Lists and how they can help you). At the bottom, it gives you the ‘Edit Options’ settings.

This setting can also be found at the bottom of your news feed, in the bar that allows you to select ‘Older Posts’.

Within ‘Edit Options’, you can filter your News Feed by ‘Friends and pages you interact with the most’ or ‘All your friends and pages’. It also shows you whose posts you have chosen to hide.

Hiding these posts are done through the [x] on each post. You can hide a single post, hide all posts by a friend/application/page and Mark as Spam.

If you appreciate this information, let us know on Facebook or Twitter. Send us a message on what Facebook information you’d like to know about!

It’s no secret Facebook has had their issues with spam and malware.  Last week, Facebook announced new methods of battling these problems (read Facebook Security’s post) and in the meantime, spammers worked to be two steps ahead of the newest adjustments.

Recently, there has been several spam posts circulating, namely the ‘Dislike’ button, being tagged in a ‘Youtube’ video and the newest version of ‘Check out who Viewed Your Profile’.

Avoid scams looking like this!

While Facebook works diligently to remove these messages, it is urging users to be careful of what links they click.

The spam messages are working on the basis of directing users to an external website. There it urges users to fill out various surveys and copy javascript code into your browsers, which gives the spam access to your account and unleashes the message to all your friends.  It can also post spam messages in your Facebook chat.

Example of Javascript

Look out for these links in wall posts and chat messages.

Do not ever repost javascript. Legitimate sites, like Facebook, would never ask you to do this.

Remember to report these links as spam using the [x] and Report as Spam option on the post.

Please do not click anything looking like or similar to this.

If this does happen to you, remove the post by clicking the [x] and click ‘Report as Spam’. Then warn your friends not to click the ‘VERIFY MY ACCOUNT’ link.

If you happened to have clicked this link already, run your computer’s anti-virus software to ensure your system has not been affected by a virus.

Please share this alert with your friends.

According to a blog post by security software giant, Symantec Corporation, Facebook may have inadvertently allowed third party sites, mostly advertisers, access to users’ profile information, including pictures, chat, and even the ability to post messages to users’ walls.

These leaks were allowed through some of the millions of applications in use on Facebook. According to Symantec, they ‘estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage’. This leaves the grim possibility that over the past few years, millions of users’ information were accessible by third party sites.

As Symantec explains, these Facebook applications were unknowingly leaking access tokens or ‘spare keys’ to third party websites, such as advertisers and analytics.

Their hope is that most sites did not notice that they had to access to such information.

Of course, Facebook has now corrected the problem. For users worried about their information, changing your password invalidates these access tokens.