Death of Facebook Deals Isn’t Just Good News for Groupon

After just four months, Facebook Deals, the social network’s answer to Groupon, is ending. Trying to save face (no pun intended), Zuck Co. have issued a statement about the shuttering of the feature, making it seem like it was always intended to just be a test-drive. And now they say they’ve gathered some good info about “how to best serve local businesses.” Pffft. Great. I’m so sure if this had actually made huge money for them taken off, Facebook would be singing a much different tune.

But as Vinicius Vacanti, co-founder of Yipit.com, a site that aggregates daily deals, said, “Facebook Deals had been an underwhelming product and experience.” And its death is proof that Internet giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter can’t jump on every single social networking phenomenon on the web and have success. Thank goodness!

Because it’s so incredibly annoying when they try to co-opt other sites/companies’ features. In other words, it’s time for Facebook to leave the little guy alone! Not that Groupon or LivingSocial is so little anymore, but that’s beside the point. They made themselves industry leaders by focusing exclusively on daily deals.

Hopefully, the death of Deals proves to Facebook that they can’t keep moving in such a commercially-driven direction. Remember when the site was all about FRIENDSHIPS? People who actually knew one another sharing photos and life updates through one-on-one communication? But in just the past couple of years, it has become awash in ads everywhere you click, companies from major corporations to local restaurants pleading for your attention. Vote for them! “Like” them! Follow them! Take this survey! Play this game! Uggggghhhhh! Noooo! I do not want Facebook to become a nonstop billboard-turned-TV commercial!!

Unfortunately, I doubt the commercial garbage will ever stop completely. But at least we don’t have to worry about having Facebook’s lame Groupon ripoff all up in our business anymore.

Are you happy to hear Facebook Deals is dead?

 

Image via lululemon athletica/Flickr

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Facebook pays for security holes

30 August 2011
Last updated at 05:54 ET

Facebook has paid $5000 to those who found the biggest security holes in its site

Facebook has spent $40,000 (£25,000) in the first 21 days of a program that rewards the discovery of security bugs.

The bug bounty program aims to encourage security researchers to help harden Facebook against attack.

One security researcher has been rewarded with more than $7,000 for finding six serious bugs in the social networking site.

The program runs alongside Facebook’s efforts to police the code it creates that keeps the social site running.

A blog post by Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan revealed some information about the early days of the bug bounty program.

He said the program had made Facebook more secure by introducing the networking site to “novel attack vectors, and helping us improve lots of corners in our code”.

The minimum amount paid for a bug is $500, said Mr Sullivan, up to a maximum of $5000 for the most serious loopholes. The maximum bounty has already been paid once, he said.

Many cyber criminals and vandals have targeted Facebook in many different ways to extract useful information from people, promote spam or fake goods.

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It’s hardly surprising that the service is riddled with rogue apps and viral scams”

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Graham Cluley
Sophos

Mr Sullivan said Facebook had internal bug-hunting teams, used external auditors to vet its code and ran “bug-a-thons” to hunt out mistakes but it regularly received reports about glitches from independent security researchers.

Facebook set up a system to handle these reports in 2010 which promised not to take legal action against those that find bugs and gave it chance to assess them.

Paying those that report problems was the logical next step for the disclosure system, he said.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said many other firms, including Google and Mozilla, run similar schemes that have proved useful in rooting out bugs.

However, he said, many criminally-minded bug spotters might get more for what they find if they sell the knowledge on an underground market.

He added that the bug bounty scheme might be missing the biggest source of security problems on Facebook.

“They’re specifically not going to reward people for identifying rogue third party Facebook apps, clickjacking scams and the like,” he said. “It’s those sorts of problems which are much more commonly encountered by Facebook users and have arguably impacted more people.”

Facebook should consider setting up a “walled garden” that only allowed vetted applications from approved developers to connect to the social networking site, he said.

“Facebook claims there are over one million developers on the Facebook platform, so it’s hardly surprising that the service is riddled with rogue apps and viral scams,” he said.

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