Your social network profile on Facebook may remain long after you’re gone.

Facebook has announced that it will “memorialize” people’s profiles after they die, if their family and friends request the service.

Memorial profiles will differ from normal Facebook profiles.

Facebook will delete contact information from memorial profiles and block people from logging into the deceased person’s account. In addition, memorialized profiles will not appear in the “suggestions” part of the Facebook social network. Also, only the deceased person’s network of Facebook friends will be able to find them on a Facebook search.

Facebook has grown to become a go-to social network for more than 300 million people worldwide to stay in contact with family, friends, classmates and coworkers.

Source: Associated Press

Facebook People Search group now actively looking for members that are looking for a person that they have lost contact with or people who can help others find someone.

The Facebook People Search Group is open to people who want to post information on a person they are searching for or people who can help other people find someone they are looking for.

If you are trying to find someone from your past like a family member, friend, classmate, coworker or military buddy feel free to join our People Search Group on the Facebook social network and post any information that will help others locate them.

Likewise, if you are a skip tracer, investigative professional or a web search expert or amateur internet sleuth, feel free to join the Facebook People Search Group and help others find a person they are looking for.

The more people who join the People Search group the easier it will be for people to reunite with a person from their past.

Thanks.

Another criminal caught on Facebook.

Maxi Sopo was a fugitive on the run until he updated his Facebook profile and notified his social network of friends, including a former Justice Department official, that he was hiding out in Cancun, Mexico.

Maxi Sopo went on bragging to his Facebook friends about what a good time he was having living in paradise, ironically, one of his Facebook buddies happened to be a former Justice Department employee.

Sopo had been on the run from charges of bank fraud in Seattle, Washington, when he unknowingly gave himself up through updates on his Facebook profile.

Sopo came to the US around 2003 from Cameroon and initially made his living selling roses in Seattle bars and nightclubs before allegedly moving on to bank fraud. Sopo drove a rented car to Mexico in early 2009, after discovering that federal law enforcement agents were investigating his bank fraud scheme.

Investigators searched social networks like MySpace and Facebook couldn’t find Sopo were unable to locate his whereabouts in Mexico.

A few months later, a secret service agent searched Facebook again and found a profile listing for MaxiSopo. His profile picture showed him partying in front of logos of BMW and Courvoisier cognac, while wearing a black jacket decorated with a distinct white lion emblem.

Sopo’s profile was set to private, but his list of friends were not. The US agent then searched Sopo’s friend list only to find out that one of Sopo’s friends had listed an affiliation with the US Department of Justice. The agent then sent a message to the friend requesting a phone call.

The former Justice Department official said he had met Sopo in some Cancun’s nightclubs, but did not know Sopo well and had no idea that Sopo was a wanted fugitive.

The former Justice official later found out where Sopo was staying in Mexico gave that information to the US agent. As a result, Mexican authorities arrested Sopo in September and Sopo is waiting to be extradited to the US.

Source: Guardian UK.

A Tennessee woman has been arrested for “poking” someone on the Facebook social network.

Shannon D. Jackson was arrested on September 25th for allegedly violating a court order of protection.

Jackson is accused of using a virtual Facebook “poke” to communicate with a Hendersonville woman, which violates a court order of protection, that states “no telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating with the petitioner.”

Poking is a social networking feature that is unique to Facebook that allows one user to virtually “poke” another user on the popular social network.

Hendersonville, TN police have copies of the page that shows the alleged victim was “poked,” according to a filed affidavit.

If convicted, Shannon D. Jackson could get up to 11 months, 29 days in prison and fined up to $2,500.

Source: Tennessean.com

Facebook has mined user data from their social network and produced a graphical representation of the collective happiness of Facebook’s millions of U.S. users.

Facebook analyzed information from their database of user updates and scanned for words indicating a particular mood of happy or sad and correlated the updates to the day they were posted.

Analysis of the Facebook profile updates showed that holidays tend to make people feel happy and celebrity deaths make people sad.

Facebook noted that Thanksgiving and Christmas are some of the happiest days for profile updates, while the deaths of Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson ranked among the saddest for user updates.

Although these findings seem pretty obvious, Facebook’s collection and analysis of users’ “mood demographics” could become more useful with years of data mining — especially when this information is associated with economic indicators.

However, Facebook’s data mining of user updates makes some people wonder if it is a good idea for large social networks to use personal profile updates for demographic research.

If you publish personal data on the Facebook social network, no matter how private your profile settings are, Facebook.com can still save it, mine it, analyze it and use it for their own purposes.

Some people feel that Facebook’s so-called “Gross National Happiness” indicator is Orwellian and intrusive.

Mint, a personal finance site, also mines uers data and runs this type of information analysis. The company tracks and analyzes millions of bank and credit card accounts that its users input for personal finance purposes in order to rank the most frugal urban areas as well as geographic wealth distribution.

Regardless of privacy concerns, the trend among many social networks and web 2.0 sites will be to mine user data and analyze the information for business, social, market and maybe even political purposes.

Source: LA Times

Facebook upgraded its social search engine Monday. The new Facebook search will return better results for profile updates, shared links, pictures, personal videos, as well as posted notes.

Facebook beta tested their new social search engine with a selected group of users for about a month and decided to launch the new search upgrade based on the positive results from the testing.

Facebook users can now search the last 30 days of news feeds for status updates, pictures, web links, videos and notes shared by their network of friends and the Facebook pages of which they are a fan.

People who opt to make their Facebook content public will have their status updates searchable by the entire Facebook community, not just friends.

Facebook users can hide their content from the new social search by changing their profile’s privacy settings.

Source: PC Magazine

A recent decision by Facebook could make online people searches easier than ever.

Facebook announced that, as of this Saturday, they will start publishing URLs ( web addresses ) for user’s profiles, using people’s real names.

These new search engine friendly URLs will make finding past friends and family on Facebook through normal search engine searches easier than ever, further shrinking the degrees of separation in our virtual online world.

Kudos to Facebook for this decision.

Source: Facebook.com