Facebook and Windows Live Messenger Integration for Outlook

Here is another update regarding Microsoft Office Outlook Social Networking Connectors, now available for Windows Live Messenger and Facebook.

If you’re not familiar with the Microsoft Outlook Social Connector – it’s a free plug-in for Microsoft Outlook 2010 that allows you to keep track of your friends and colleagues activities on Social Networking sites such as LinkedIn and MySpace, from within Outlook itself. There’s a great blog article over at MSDN talking about the benefits of the Outlook Social Connector and how to set it up.
The Facebook connector (available for download here), once installed, adds the ability to see Facebook Status Updates for your contacts directly from within the Microsoft Outlook e-mail pane – you can expand or minimise the “More Information” panel from any e-mail as you like.
Although the installation process is straight and easy, here is a how to where Doug Thomas has the answers to all of your Outlook Social Connector questions! Check out this helpful video on configuring the OSC and if you still have questions afterward head over to the Office blog to post them: http://bit.ly/d4qkXp

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Authenticate ASP.Net application using Social Sites Credentials

James Senior's blog details the new social API Web Application Toolkit for .NET web developers. If you’re not familiar with Web Application Toolkits (WATs) then here’s a summary:

FREE Web App Toolkits help ASP.NET web developers complete common web development tasks and quickly add new features to your apps. Whether it’s Bing Maps integration or adding social capabilities to your site, there’s a toolkit for you. For the full list of Web Application Toolkits check out this website.

 Here is a summary of the work they've done in this release:

• Added a new Social API Web Application Toolkit
• Updated all the WATs to be compatible with Visual Studio 2010

The code examples can be found here.

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How To Permanently Delete Your Account on Popular Websites

Cameron Chapman is a professional Web and graphic designer with over 6 years of experience. She writes for a number of blogs, including her own, Cameron Chapman On Writing. She’s also the author of Internet Famous: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Online Celebrity. Today she is talking about how to delete your accounts on popular websites.

She has rated the difficulty level of removing your account on the scale of 1-5, five being the most difficult. According to her, removing your account from Wikipedia and WordPress is impossible, while the easiest one is PayPal. Facebook on the other hand is the most difficult one rated five, whereas, MySpace stands at four.

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Twitter what and how to do...

The other day I was talking with one of my senior colleague about web presence. We discussed the need of Twitting and thus I promised him to collect some resources about Twitter. Here are some links that discuss about Twitter, what and how to do...

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Facebook Clickjacking Attack Spreading Through ‘Likes’

A new clickjacking worm is spreading through Facebook via the ‘Like’ feature. The attack, which is said to have hit hundreds of thousands of users, uses a combination of social engineering and clickjacking exploit makes it appear as if a user has “liked” a link.

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Social networking using Outlook 2010

View existing friends' profiles and updates and add new connections without ever leaving Outlook

In the upcoming months, you will be able to view the activities of your friends and contacts from your favorite social networks directly in Microsoft Outlook 2010.
Choose your network
To get started, download and install social network add-ins for Outlook.  Currently, there are no social network add-ins available as of the beta release of Outlook 2010.  But in the months to come, this page will be updated with links to new partner networks as they become available. 

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Facebook disables 6 rogue phishing apps, but 5 more appear

Facebook on Thursday said it had disabled six rogue apps that were stealing Facebook users' log-in credentials and spamming people, and within hours more appeared.

Five more of the apps appeared on Thursday, called "Friends," "Friends Gifts," "Matching," "Pok," and "Your Photos," according to an updated blog post by Trend Micro researcher Rik Ferguson.

By that night those new ones were disabled too. Facebook "will continue to ensure that all applications on Facebook Platform comply with Facebook policies," a spokeswoman for the company said.

According to Ferguson's post: "The new rogue apps take the same format as previously but use different application icons, have slightly more credible notifications to your friends and also now feature bogus notifications to the profile owner, presumably in an effort to persuade the victim to install further apps and maximise the fraudsters' advertising returns."

He had discovered six rogue apps earlier in the week. One of those was disabled as of Wednesday, and later the other five from the first batch were disabled.

Before the apps were removed, victims had been receiving notifications that someone had commented on a post of theirs. The notifications contained links to a phishing site where users were prompted to provide their Facebook log-in credentials and then prompted to install one of the rogue apps, according to Ferguson. Once the app was installed, the victim's friends were spammed.

Updated at 10:44 p.m. PDT with Facebook disabling the five new apps and at 12:43 p.m. with discovery of five new rogue apps.

Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press.

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