Recently, a livejournal user by the name of Jason Fortuny posted a deviant personal ad on craigslist with the malicious intent of luring in the personal information of interested men. After recieving hundreds of responses, he then posted their information and pictures for all to see (NSFW).

Indeed, what Jason did was entirely unethical and most likely illegal in the state of Washington. But, he did drive home the point that people are very vulnerable to privacy leaks on craigslist, where fraudulent posters abound. More importantly, he revealed how easy it is to get people to part with their personal information–addresses, full names, and phone numbers. Some of the victims included cheating husbands, religious men, and community leaders. All of their graphic pictures and information are now laid bare.

As the avenues for online publishing and replying get easier, we all have to remember one thing: common sense. Who knows how many craigslist personal postings are legitimate? And, even if they are legit, I wouldn’t even think about sending personal information until the other person had my trust.

I’ve also heard about thieves breaking into houses that had listed valuable items for sale on craigslist. Many times, the postings even revealed when the poster would not be at home. Things like this pretty much hand those high definition TVs over to the thugs.

The botton line is that you should treat the streets of the internet the same as the streets in the real world. With the online explosion of social media and user interaction comes the responsibility of the masses to keep their own identities and information secure.

Have you signed up for the two-day Future of Web Apps Summit yet? If not, go to their website to check it out. Speakers include Evan Williams formerly of Blogger and now of Odeo, Ted Rheingold of Dogster, Tantek Celik of Technorati, and Steve Olechowski of Feedburner. The conference is put on by UK based Carson Systems, a company focused on enterprise web applications that is led by Ryan and Gillian Carson.

It’s only $295 for two days, which is a great price to be able to hang with so many visionaries. If you desperately want to go but don’t have the funds, then contact us and we might be able to give you the 25% BuzzShout discount!

Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) has sent an open letter this morning stating that they’ve been coding non-stop in response to the privacy concerns involving the mini feeds. In the letter, he says

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about.

This is a good compromise, which allows people to pick and choose which types of status elements will appear on their feed. Hopefully, this will quell all the privacy concerns.

There’s been a lot of controversy over Facebook’s new mini-feed feature, which alerts all your friends of status updates.

I’ve already written that this feature is a step in the right direction, and Michael Arrington also agrees with me. The fact is that there simply isn’t any new information being leaked, just that the information is now being aggregated in one place.

Hundred of thousands of Facebook members have joined protest groups, some of which are “Facebook feeds…make them go away!!”, “Students against Facebook News Feed”, and “Mark Zuckerberg, Bring Back Our Old Facebook!” On the other hand, there are a few groups out there in favor of the feeds, one aptly named “Students against Students against Facebook News Feed.”

Personally, I am totally in support of the Facebook feeds. Facebook takes great pains to make sure privacy is enforced, only allowing certain groups of people tied to an educational or corporate account to view profiles. We all have to remember that Facebook is a free service, and you can elect to quit the service if you’re worried about privacy. The people who are worried about the feeds are probably the ones placing too personal of information on the service in the first place.

In essence, the mini-feeds will create a more vibrant social network, allowing people to see what others are doing in near real time. I just hope that all those privacy cry babies don’t ruin this feature for the rest of us.

Facebook unvealed a major update to their interface with news feeds and mini-feeds. Personally, I’ve been waiting a long time for this feature. Instead of checking dozens of your friend’s profiles to see what’s changed, Facebook now keeps track of the changes and reports them on each profile and also aggregates the information on the front page.

Each feed is called a “story”, and there are stories for networks, relationships, photos, and other status elements. Basically, anyone can easily keep up-to-date with any changes that their friends make to their profile. At the heart of it, users can now see the trail of updates that their friends make, which is really a compelling feature not seen in many other social networks.

Ironically, even though the new features are called feeds, there are no real RSS feeds to be seen. I would surely subscribe to an RSS feed that pings me everytime any of my friends make a change.

Certainly, the new feeds will keep me more in tune with what’s happening to my friends on Facebook. But, it will also mean I won’t be aimlessly surfing around Facebook as often looking for updates, which translates to less pageviews. It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s pageviews actually get lowered because of this feature.

Finally, there is the privacy issue. The personal stories and feeds harken the image of big brother looking over your shoulder as you change your profile. But as always, only your friends can see your profile and mini-feeds. Facebook has also placed little “x” marks beside each item that you can click on to hide it from other users.

Other smaller updates include the ability to collapse each element of a profile. Slowly, but surely, more AJAX is creeping into the Facebook interface.

I spent the entire long weekend moving–what a way to spend my free time. During the process, I heavily used craigslist to do everything from selling furniture to looking for roommates. I was literally living on the site, checking various sections for new items every hour and subscribing to a dozen RSS feeds.

No matter what the new wave of design and style that web 2.0-ites love to tout–from the rounded corners to the smooth gradients–craigslist does it right with its simple-to-use-and-lightning-fast-to-download-party-like-it’s-1995 web design. In terms of a redesign, I think that anything busier than the one done by a panel at SXSW would be too much. And even then, I would still stick with the old style.

But, in terms of functionality, I have a few items for the craigslist feature wish list. And, here they are:

• Add the ability to delete items that you don’t find useful, thereby uncluttering the list of posts as you dwindle down the choices (you can always undelete them for yourself later).
• Picture thumbnails beside each listed item, if available.
• Ability to message the poster directly using craigslist (no more opening up your email program a million times).
• Ability to manage a set of responses to posts that you can easily message to posters (this would have helped during my apartment hunt).
• Remembering your location when you login and post a new classified.

A lot of these features can be pretty easy to code up. But, testing it within the craigslist infrastructure is probably what is stopping them from implementing too many new features at once. Hopefully though, they are working on at least some of these.

Do you have any suggestions for new craigslist features? Leave some suggestions in the comments.

Wow, we’ve just blown through August haven’t we? We’d like to thank those of you who’ve already submitted blog entries for the Shoutblog blogger contest. Since very few write-ups were submitted, and because we’d like to have a larger pool to choose from, the contest will be extended to the end of October. If you’ve already submitted a write-up to us, don’t be discouraged. We’ve enjoyed reading your posts, and you will still be considered with the future entries that we receive. If you haven’t sent us anything yet, and you didn’t win the GigaOm contest, then send your entries to us now! 

To increase the amount of participants, we’ve decided to give away a prize to the winner with the best write-up. While we have some good prize ideas in mind, we’d like to hear what you think the winner should get. Keep in mind that we are a bootstrapping startup, and don’t have excessive amounts of money to spend. So we can afford a Porsche 911, just not the 911 turbo. Okay, I’m talking about a model Porsche; keep it at $100 or less (please, oh please, be less). 

Write your ideas for prizes in the comment section of this post, and send your blog entries for the contest to: feedback@buzzshout.com.

Here is the original post with some more contest information.