Auschwitz launches Facebook site

By Raffi Berg BBC News

Auschwitz's Facebook page follows the launch of its channel on YouTube

The Polish authorities in charge of Auschwitz have launched an official site for the former Nazi death camp on the social networking website Facebook.

A spokesman said the move was aimed at reaching the younger generation and educating them about the Holocaust.

It follows the launch by Auschwitz - now a state museum - of a YouTube channel earlier this year.

More than a million people - 90% of them Jews - were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz during World War II.

"We're always trying for new ways of reaching people, and in today's world one of the most popular tools is the internet, and on the internet millions of people use Facebook," said Auschwitz Museum official Pawel Sawicki.

More than a million people have visited Auschwitz so far this year, the majority of them young people.

"If our mission is to educate the younger generation to be responsible in the contemporary world, what better tool can we use to reach them than the tools they use themselves?" said Mr Sawicki.

The Facebook page contains news and information about the museum, links to its YouTube channel and official website, and a discussion board. The first topic is about whether Auschwitz should have a presence on Facebook.

"The Facebook page will provide a place for discussion which is not available on the official website," said Mr Sawicki.

"We want it to be a place of discourse but of course we won't let anyone do anything that may abuse the memory of the victims and this place.

"So far, it's just an experiment. We'll see how people react," he said.

Same-name couple to wed after Facebook meeting

By SARAH LARIMER, Associated Press Writer

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

(07-21) 04:26 PDT MIAMI (AP) --

This October, Kelly Hildebrandt will vow to share her life with a man who already shares her name.

This is no joke. Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt, 20, and Kelly Carl Hildebrandt, 24, expect just over 100 guests at a ceremony at the Lighthouse Point Yacht & Racquet Club in South Florida, where they will become husband and wife.

"He is just everything that I've ever looked for," she said in an interview. "There's always been certain qualities that a guy has to have. And he has all the ones I could think of — and more."

Their modern romance was a match made in cyberspace. She was curious and bored one night last year, so she plugged her name into the popular social networking Web site Facebook just to see if anyone shared it.

At the time, Kelly Hildebrandt, of Lubbock, Texas, was the only match.

So she sent him a message.

"She said 'Hi. We had the same name. Thought it was cool,'" Kelly Carl Hildebrandt said. "I thought she was pretty cute."

But there were also concerns.

"I thought, man, we've got to be related or something," he said.

For the next three months the two exchanged e-mails. Before he knew it, occasional phone calls turned into daily chats, sometimes lasting hours. He visited her in Florida after a few months and "fell head over heels."

"I thought it was fun," he said of that first online encounter. "I had no idea that it would lead to this."

Months after Kelly Hildebrandt sent her first e-mail, she found a diamond engagement ring hidden in treasure box on a beach in December.

"I totally think that it's all God's timing," Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt said. "He planned it out just perfect."

She's a student at a local community college. He works in financial services. They plan to make their home in South Florida.

It hasn't been all smooth sailing. A trip on a cruise ship almost got canceled when the travel agent deleted one ticket from the system, thinking someone had plugged in the same information twice.

There was also some uncertainty about how to phrase their wedding invitations, so they decided to include their middle names. But any confusion likely won't carry on past the husband and wife. Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt said there are no plans to pass along the name to future children.

"No," she said. "We're definitely not going to name our kids Kelly."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/07/20/national/a120446D30.DTL

56 Percent of Facebook Users Want the Old ToS Back

by Adam Ostrow

… and 38 percent simply “don’t know” what they want, according to a poll being conducted by Facebook in selected user’s news feeds discovered by CNET.

The poll, which asks whether or not Facebook should return to its previous Terms of Service, follows yesterday’s blog post by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which the company’s founder defended the social network’s policy of keeping your content indefinitely, even after you delete your account.

The uproar began over the weekend, when it was discovered that Facebook had altered their terms of service, to among other things, grant the company an “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute [your content].”

Looking at the results of the poll so far – which is presumably being conducted with a representative sampling of Facebook users – just about no one likes the change, as only 6 percent have indicated that Facebook shouldn’t change the ToS back. And while “Don’t Know” makes up a sizeable portion of the poll result, it’s clear that the story has moved beyond technology blogs to become an issue at least a fairly significant portion of Facebook users are aware of.

[img courtesy of cnet]

Along those lines, the same type of protest we saw around the Facebook re-design is starting to transpire within the social network itself. The group “People Against the new terms of service” has swelled to more than 60,000 members and appears to be adding dozens every few seconds. And in perhaps an even more serious concern, The Electronic Privacy Information Center is set to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about Facebook’s ToS, according to PC World.

As with Facebook’s past transgressions, the problem seems to be less about the net result than the poor communication on the company’s part. While they blogged about changes to their terms of service back on February 4th, the changes to the part everyone is now furious about was omitted from that post. And once again, the company’s increasingly well-known CEO is hung out to dry, defending unpopular changes, as opposed to promoting all the exciting things going on at Facebook.