Bozeman, Montana -- a city just 5 miles to the east of freakin' nowhere -- as part of a more thorough set of background checks, is asking job applicants to, "list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc."

Federal law states that you can't ask about religion or marital status when interviewing you for a job, but both of those things are conveniently available in most Facebook profiles. Added to which, giving a prospective employer all your logins and passwords gives them access to direct and private messages, and in the case of most social networks, indirect access to the information of other people who never granted the city access. The whole thing violates just about every social network's Terms of Service, and just generally feels slimy.

In an interview with local news, the city's attorney says it isn't "trying to find out all kinds of information about the person that we're not able to use or shouldn't use in the hiring process."

Current job listings for Bozeman include a Water/Sewer technician so, presumably, with a high school diploma and a clean Facebook record, you could get hired to dig around in something that smells almost as bad as this hiring policy.

[via BoingBoing]

Hot on the heels of Facebook's big username land-grab comes news that Facebook may be using the email addresses you import even after you choose not to add them as friends.

The issue occurs if and when you let Facebook search your email contacts for people to invite to become your Facebook friend. As part of this process Facebook will list every contact you have that is already on Facebook, and offer you the chance to "friend" them all at once. You can choose to uncheck the ones that you don't want to friend, essentially skipping them, or choose to skip all of them.

While Facebook makes it clear that they will not store the password for your email account, what they don't make so clear is that they will store the addresses of everyone it found in your email account and keep them associated with you, even the ones that you chose to skip.

So how does Facebook use this information? They present you as a possible contact to the people that you skipped - even if that person has never shown Facebook a connection of any kind to you. Nice, eh? Effectively, Facebook is ignoring your preference to not contact these people by going behind your back to ask them if they want to friend you.

Facebook plans to roll out an update to the way it assigns URLs for user profiles later this week. Up until now, when you signed up for a new Facebook profile you were assigned a random string of numbers for your profile ID. But starting Saturday June 13th at 12:01AM you'll be able to sign up for a profile with your actual name.

Users who already have Facebook accounts won't be left out in the cold. They'll be able to grab vanity URLs on a first come first served basis by visiting facebook.com/username. You'll only be able to get one username per profile, so odds are you're going to want to use either your real name, or whatever internet handle you use most often.

Once you pick a username you will not be able to change it. And if you've signed up for a new account recently, you might not be able to snag a username right away because Facebook is taking steps to prevent cybersquatters from rushing in, creating dozens of account names today and mucking up the system come Saturday.

How significant is this whole vanity URL thing? Well on the one hand, it definitely gives people a useful tool to maintain their online identities. On the other hand, seriously, it's June, 2009 and Facebook hasn't rolled out this feature until now? Twitter, MySpace, and even search engine Google already let you have URLs that match your profile names.

Grooveshark is my favorite quick way to listen to a particular song online. With an extensive library, easy sharing and embeddable widgets, it's a powerhouse in the music sharing arena. It's only getting better, too, with the recent addition of a Facebook application and a Wordpress plugin. The Facebook app lets you share songs directly to your wall, and the Wordpress plugin lets you quickly put together a playlist widget for your Wordpress blog.

The Facebook app, in particular, is the easiest way to share music on FB that I've run across so far. In addition to publishing a song to your profile, you can also select individual friends to share it with. With over 10 million songs in Grooveshark's database, it's likely you'll find whatever song you're looking for.

Facebook's FBFund is a $10mil initiative to provide funding for startups that are doing promising things in the Facebook app or Facebook Connect area. Recently, 18 startups were chosen to receive a whole bunch of money and attend Facebook's Rev09 incubator program this summer.

All 18 winners (and two non-profits, who can't get a cut of the money due to the structure of FBFund) are listed on Facebook's Developer Blog, but I want to highlight a few of the apps that look most likely to catch on in a big way. Nutshell Mail, which was featured on Download Squad back in February, consolidates all your social network subscription emails into one periodic digest, keeping your inbox clear. Sortuv finds local businesses that are "sortuv" like ones you already know and like. Gameyola is a platform for casual Flash games.

Do you think any of the FBFund projects will take off? Let us know which ones you love or hate in the comments.

In a video Town Hall last week, the folks at Digg announced they were going to take a new approach to sharing Digg stories. That change started with the removal of the "shout" feature, used to promote your Digg posts to friends on the site. Instead of shouts, Digg now has sharing options including email, Twitter and Facebook.

I see a few likely effects of this. First, Digg will be able to draw in more traffic from these other popular social sites, rather than just promoting stories to people who are already active Diggers. Second, becoming a power user won't be as much a matter of collecting contacts on Digg. This might go a long way toward making it a more Internet-wide enterprise, and spreading the power around on Digg. I think the main effect will come from adding Twitter and Facebook links, not from removing shouts, which weren't the most effective tool on the site to begin with.

[via Appscout]

If you use a lot of social networking sites, and different groups of your friends are scattered across all of them, it might be time to start a lifestream. AmpliFeeder is an open source platform that pulls in everything you share on other social sites and displays it in one convenient location. It works with tons of sites, including Twitter, Delicious, Upcoming, Last.fm and Facebook.

AmpliFeeder also has a handful of themes to choose from, and supports custom themes using XHTML and CSS. There are no hosted accounts, so you'll have to find a place to put it, but it's extremely easy to set up, once installed. Check out the video walkthrough on the documentation page for a step-by-step guide to getting AmpliFeeder up and running. If you need a solid, easy-to-use lifestreaming platform, this might be worth a look.

Flock is a web browser that's based on Mozilla. But what really makes it stand out is the integration with social networking services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube. Flock 2.5 is out today, and it adds enhanced features for Twitter and Facebook, including:

• Read Twitter replies (err... @mentions) in the Flock sidebar
• Save Twitter searches
• Take actions like replying or clicking on Twitter links from the sidebar
• Use Facebook chat from any web page
• Drag and drop web content into the Facebook chat box to share it

There's also a new feature called FlockCast so that when you post a tweet, set your MySpace status, write a blog post, or upload pictures to Flickr, you can click a button to automatically post those actions to Facebook as well.

Facebook has taken steps in the past to promote sharing identities across different social networks, with its own Facebook Connect and its membership on the OpenID board, and it just took one more big leap by allowing Facebook logins via OpenID. If you have an OpenID from a provider like Google, you can now login automatically to Facebook. You can also register for Facebook using a Gmail account, which Facebook is hoping will boost its membership numbers.

According to the Developer Blog, users who register with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. That means Facebook has every reason to support OpenID, even though it competes in some ways with Facebook Connect. The reason Facebook initially limited registration to workplaces and Universities was that those emails could fairly reliably verify a user's identity. It's nice to see that OpenID has achieved the same level of legitimacy.

After all of the issues with Facebook's terms of service and concerns over who owns user-created content on the site, it's interesting to see Creative Commons enter the Facebook arena with an app. Installing the Creative Commons app lets users display the CC badge of their choice on their profiles, indicating the licensing terms they want to use for their profile content. This could be a big step toward bringing Facebook up to speed with more legally progressive social networks like Flickr in terms of content ownership and licensing. It's just a shame that the idea didn't come from Facebook itself.

There are still a few limitations on the CC app at the moment. For example, you can't choose a license for each of your photos individually, like you can on Flickr -- the CC badge just applies to your whole profile. It will be interesting to see how Facebook responds to this development -- by introducing system-wide CC-licensing options, I hope -- and whether the app gains a strong foothold with users.

According to Facebook's Developer Blog, big changes are coming to the application directory, which will affect both developers and everyday users. With over 52,000 apps now available, the Facebook team, they're looking at new ways to highlight the best apps and help users discover the ones most relevant to them. This should deliver a much-needed image boost for Facebook, and help combat the impression that Facebook apps are all cheap pirates-vs-ninjas spam.

The plan includes verified apps, which developers can have vetted by Facebook for a fee. The ones that meet Facebook's standards will be bumped to the top of search results in the app directory. This looks like a win-win, where Facebook gets money, developers get more exposure, and users get better apps.

Also, users will now see an activity feed on the app directory page, showing which apps their friends have used lately, hopefully leading to more relevant results. The application categories are also getting their first reboot since '07, making finding the best apps that much easier.

If you don't want to wait for these changes to start finding the most useful apps on Facebook, you can always check out my top 10 list on Download Squad.

[via Webware]

For the seasoned Internet user, that headline is a no-brainer. Unless you're hoping to be spammed ad nauseum by everything from (ahem) stamina enhancers to mail order brides to bogus antivirus software, don't post your real email address anywhere.

Less security and privacy savvy users, however, might not be aware of the pitfalls yet, so here's some advice. If you are using a social site like Twitter or Facebook, don't be so quick to give your personal information away.

For an unsavory soul to harvest your address from Twitter is as simple as setting up a search for a topic like "email me at" - text which CNet found occurred nearly 300 times in a one-hour period. It's worth noting that a good portion of that volume actually comes from Twitter spammers trying to drum up business - but unwary users are doing it, too.

It's bad enough that these people are actively spamming trending topics on Twitter, so don't invite them into your inbox. If you must post an address for people to contact you via email, sign up for a dedicated public email address with service like GMail or Live/Hotmail. That way you don't need to give out your everyday family-and-friends address.

Another option is to familiarize yourself with some sites that provide disposable email addresses like the ones I wrote about a while back. They're a perfect way to let people contact you without the risk of polluting your inbox.

I'll say right off that I'm not a big Facebook user to start with, but there's nothing compelling in the newly-released Facebook Desktop client that is going to make me change my mind. If anything, it makes me more sure that I don't need to be spending time on the mammoth social networking site.

The app is built on Adobe Air, making it instantly available to nearly everyone as long as they've got the client installed.

Once I load the application, what I end up looking at is the middle column from Facebook's web site, and it's horrible. Quiz after quiz that I can't block with a Greasemonkey script and images that don't fit properly in the non-adjustable window.

No problem, I'll just resize the window. Wait, what? The arrows appear when I mouse over the side, but I can't expand it. I also can't change the typeface from Times Roman, which I wasn't aware was still a popular choice for apps like this. Heck, there aren't any personalization options of any kind.

It's also a ram hog, sucking down 165Mb after just a few minutes. That's twice as much as TweetDeck and 30Mb more than the Firefox instance I'm using to compose this post. Ouch.

If I was a frequent Facebook user, I can think of plenty of other ways I'd rather access my stream - like with Seesmic desktop, which is also mentioned in the official blog post. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh. After all, this is the first release so at least that means there's plenty of room for improvement, right?

Take it for a spin yourself and share your experience in the comments!

[ via Facebook Blog]

As you may have noticed if you've logged into Facebook over the past month or so, the social network site held a vote to democratically decide on its new terms of service, after a widely-reported backlash against changes to the way the site deals with ownership of users' content. Today, the results are in, and despite a low turnout, it looks like Facebook is going with the winning set of terms, the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

Of the roughly 600,000 users who voted, three quarters supported the new document over Facebook's existing TOS. Part of the reason the new document was so popular is that it included input from the Facebook user community, collected via Facebook itself. That input said that users mainly care about three things: limits to Facebook's use of their content, the option to opt-in to any changes in terms, and clear rules without legal jargon. The Principles tried to offer all three, which probably accounts for their success in the vote.

With only a small percentage of Facebook's 200 million users weighing in, the company will try to amend the rules to make the vote official, so the new terms should be in place soon.