The ultimate time-consuming game is joining forces with the ultimate online time-wasting tool. "Civilization" and Facebook will combine to make a new game for the social-networking site.

Creator Sid Meier announced on Facebook that Firaxis Games is working on a new game called "Civilization Network." Meier said he expects the full game to be available in 2010, but he is seeking beta testers to help work out the bugs.

"Civilization" is well known for its turn-based strategy as the player guides a civilization from infancy to world domination. Created in 1991, the PC-based game has undergone 13 different transformations (including expansion packs and spin-offs) with the latest, "Civilization Revolution," launched in 2008 for gaming consoles.

Meier said the game will offer everything you enjoy in Civ in a fully persistent environment – you can play as much as you like, whenever you like, and it’ll be free.

Reactions among gamers range from excitement - and promises of joining Facebook just to play the game - to frustration that Firaxis isn’t developing the next version of "Civilization" for consoles.

Players who want to get involved in the closed beta will need to join Sid Meier’s Civilization Network on Facebook for more details.

– Larry Frum

Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology students have developed a program they claim can accurately predict sexual orientation based on a person's Facebook friends.

"Project Gaydar" scanned the profiles of more than 1,500 Facebook users who identified themselves as gay, straight, or bisexual. Analysis revealed gay men had a higher proportion of homosexual friends than straight men.

The discovery that gay men have gay friends isn't a surprise. But, using this information, the Gaydar program was applied to 947 men who chose not to identify sexual orientation in their profiles. While the students could not confirm the accuracy of all 947 predictions, they personally knew 10 of the men were homosexuals and the program identified each of these men as gay.

Facebook spokesman Simon Axten addressed the study to the Boston Globe:

In general, it’s not too surprising that someone might make inferences about someone else without knowing that person based on who the person’s friends are. This isn’t specific to Facebook and is entirely possible in the real world as well.

However, the study highlights the power of data-mining social networks. Statistical analysis that would be impossible in the "real world" can reveal more than we choose to disclose in our online profiles.

Do you worry about the loss of privacy online? Or are you happy to reveal a little personal info if that's what it takes to keep using Facebook?

The role of online social networks in disaster situations is being called into question after two girls in Australia got lost in a storm drain and, instead of calling the police or their parents, posted a message on Facebook.

Things worked out OK for the girls, ages 10 and 12, since a friend saw the post, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But authorities are worried about the girls' preferred means of emergency communication. They should have called 000, Australia's version of 911, a fire official told the news service:

Glenn Benham from the [Metropolitan Fire Service in Adelaide, Australia] says it was fortunate a young friend was online at the time and was able to call for help for them.

"It is a worry for us because it causes a delay on us being able to rescue the girls," he said.

"If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000, so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway."

The incident, which was reported Monday, is weirdly timed with a new U.S. awareness campaign on the use of social networks in emergency situations. The Safe America Foundation, an Atlanta-based non-profit, reportedly is working with the U.S. government to promote alternative means of communication - Facebook, Twitter, text messages - for use in disasters and emergencies where other lines of communication might be cut.

As Mashable points out, this isn't the first time someone has used a social network to call for help. In May, an Atlanta city councilman was worried his mobile phone battery might die and posted to Twitter instead of calling the cops about a woman he found in distress. Mashable says he posted this message: “Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson st. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet”.

There also was a U.S. student arrested in Egypt last year who summoned help via Twitter. And, according to VentureBeat and the Industry Standard, there's been talk of an emergency broadcast service using that micro-blogging platform.

What do you think? Are social networks useful tools during an emergency?

Any baseball fan is familiar with MLB's frequent reminders not to rebroadcast a game without "the express written consent of Major League Baseball." But did you ever consider that your Facebook, Twitter or blog posts could be targeted by overzealous media regulations?

Can the SEC prohibit fans from sharing pictures similar to this iPhone shot of a Braves game I posted to my Facebook profile? Should they even bother trying?

According to current policy, Southeastern Conference (SEC) fans cannot "produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information."

Adam Ostrow, of Mashable.com, translates that to mean "no Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TwitPic, or any other service that could in any way compete with authorized media coverage of the event."

The SEC media-credential policy also states that violations may result in "ejection from the Event and prosecution for criminal trespass."

Conference spokesman Charles Bloom told the Charlotte Observer there are plans to loosen the restrictions, but the current policy forbids tweeting from the stands.

While speaking with CNN, Attorney Evan Brown questioned the legality of the SEC policy. Brown equates a ban on social media in state-sponsored schools to a violation of the First Amendment and a form of prior restraint.

Media-coverage rights to sporting events have always been expensive and, consequently, heavily policed (this year the U.S. Open banned all cameras and phones) but can social media possibly be restrained?

Could social media ever compete with authorized media coverage in a way that would threaten profits and rationalize SEC's media policy?

Bloggers Adam Ostrow, Evan Brown and Steve Raquel discussed the SEC policy today on CNN.com Live (Watch Video).

Update:

This afternoon the SEC released a revised version of its media policy (pdf). The revision provides exemptions for noncommercial updates and personal messages.

The new policy reads:

No Bearer may produce or disseminate in any form a “real-time” description or transmission of the Event (i) for commercial or business use, or (ii) in any manner that constitutes, or is intended to provide or is promoted or marketed as, a substitute for radio, television or video coverage of such Event. Personal messages and updates of scores or other brief descriptions of the competition throughout the Event are acceptable.

One lesson worth taking away from Thursday's social media shut-down is the fact that all of us can be complicit in cyber-attacks if we don't protect our computers.

The attack that shut down or caused glitches in several social media sites was aimed at a particular person. But whomever conducted the attacks used other peoples' computers to do so. These are ordinary people like you and me - and I'll bet many of them don't know they were part of the problem.

Twitter and Facebook say they were hit by a "denial of service" attack, which means a hacker or group of hackers infected a bunch of computers, got control of them, and then used them to overwhelm the sites.

It's hard for big sites like Twitter and Facebook to protect themselves from a denial of service attack.

But there are things you can do to make sure your computer doesn't turn into a hacker's pawn. Here are a few government links with helpful information:

Strengthen your password: Use different passwords for all of the sites you use (you can manage them with this service), and make them complicated so they're hard to crack.

Use anti-virus software: And be sure to keep it up to date.

Reduce spam: Before giving out your e-mail address online, look at the site's privacy policy.

I've gotten a bunch of questions lately about the security of user information on Twitter and Facebook. Both sites have e-mailed me statements saying that users' information was not compromised as part of Thursday's attacks.

But to protect yourself on social networks in general, here's another government site with some background and tips. The gist: don't give out information you wouldn't want everyone to see; and, again, use strong passwords.

At 12:00 a.m. Saturday, Facebook handily provided a second-by-second countdown for members waiting in anticipation to create a username. I know because I was signed in, of course. The social-networking giant had clearly anticipated that people like me would be standing by, worrying that someone else would beat us to our first choices. After all, more than 50,000 users indicated they "like" the announcement about the username feature.

As soon as the prompt popped up, I immediately typed in my choice (Hint: It's a variation on my name, containing the word "monster") and clicked the word "Available," hesitating briefly when Facebook informed me that this choice of username was irreversible. Was it available? YES! I went to sleep satisfied with my new identity, and with the knowledge that I had a unique URL pointing to my profile - almost like a personal Web site someone else had just designed for me.

Some people don't think usernames are so important, but as a relatively early participant in the online world I've put a lot of stock in them - so much that I have emotional attachments to certain names. In fact, since I first got an America Online account in 1996 (dial-up modem, pay per hour), I have created at least 16 different usernames for various online accounts.

At the end of the last century, I felt pretty secure with the usernames that I had created, as if they somehow belonged to me in a way that transcended the AOL welcome screen. These were my Internet identities and, in many cases, the only way that people out in the virtual world knew me. They were variations on my name or my interests, and no one else could send messages from them on AOL. My usernames defined me in several teenage and Jewish-themed chat rooms (not to mention the Star Trek role-playing chat room I got roped into joining a couple of times).

But today, AOL is no longer the dominant player in e-mail, and the same usernames I'd chosen for AOL weren't available anymore when I transitioned to other services such as Gmail. In fact, by the time I figured out that my cutesy screen names on AOL seemed less useful than firstname.lastname on Gmail, elizabeth.landau@gmail.com and liz.landau@gmail.com had been claimed by others. Unless you sign up with a popular e-mail or social media service early, you may find yourself at a loss of how to represent yourself, because the identity you've always known and loved belongs to someone else.

There is something disconcerting about knowing that, while early in online circles I've stood behind the name "Bizzie," I am NOT "Bizzie" on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, or even bizzie.com. In fact, I have no idea who those people are. Should I? Do we all have something in common? Is this yet another means of forging connections between total strangers around the world?

In any case, while the username feature on Facebook does open the doors to all kinds of bizarre monikers, drifting away from its traditional "real name" approach, the essential Facebook interface with all of your "real life" information is essentially the same. Plus, I like the bonus of having a personalized URL with a "monstrous" nickname that seems to keep reemerging partly because of social media.

What do you think about the Facebook username feature? Are you using your real name, or something totally different?

I love this map of social media around the world, posted at ReadWriteWeb this week.

The most interesting tidbit is the fact that QQ - not Facebook or MySpace or Twitter - is the largest online social network in the world. The site has 300 million users and is the biggest network in China.

Also of note: the site says Facebook officially has "colonized Europe," and MySpace has "lost its leadership everywhere (except Guam)." You can find some more background on MySpace's slip from the top of the social-media world with this CNN.com story.

The BBC has some good info on China's requirement that all computers have a screening software. I wonder what impact this will have on online discourse.

Check out some of the sites from around the world and let me know what you think. Any interesting ideas we should adopt in the U.S.?

Here's an update to yesterday's post about photos on social networks and blogs living online after you delete them. [For background: Cambridge did a study that found photos don't go away 30 days after you delete them from several sites, including Facebook, MySpace, hi5 and Bebo.]

I got a response from Facebook last night. Here it is, as e-mailed to CNN:

As stated in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, the governing document for the site, “when you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).“  We are working with our content delivery network (CDN) partner to significantly reduce the amount of time that backup copies persist.

What about the report (the CDN issue)?

It is possible that someone who previously had access to a photo and saved the direct URL from our content delivery network partner (this is different from the Facebook URL) could still access that photo.  We are working with our content delivery network (CDN) partner to significantly reduce the amount of time that these backup copies persist.

Thanks to those of you who responded to the post with comments. Several of you expressed concerns that photos might live online after you'd like them to be gone. Others said this is common sense by now: everyone should know not to post something on the Internet unless they would like it to live forever.

Here are a few of my favorite responses:

A user named "El Common Sense" wrote: "People don’t think about what they post online and one of these days, it will come up and bite them in the butt. I’m amazed at just how much personal info is shared and then people are afraid of ID theft, terrorists and whatever else?"

Nigel wrote that he'd noticed this problem on Facebook: "I was surprised to hear someone report seeing a posted photograph on Facebook a week or more after I had deleted it."

Jon raised another issue: What if someone else posts a photo of you?

Then there is the problem of OTHER people posting pictures of you online. There’s little you can do about those aside from removing the tag on Facebook or telling the poster to cease and desist. Easy blackmail, anyone?

On that point, here's a post from New York Times that explains how you can keep people from being able to search for photos of you on Facebook. The writer says you can't prevent people from tagging you in photos, though. Do you all think that feature should be added to the site?

[UPDATE at 3:18 p.m. ET: Smart point on untagging, from Noelle in the comments: "A note on the NY Times article. While Facebook does allow anyone to tag you in photos, you can remove the tag, and it can’t be re-tagged after you’ve removed it. Plus, all photos in which you’re tagged show up under your photos, so you can find them easily."]

The buzz online this morning is about a Cambridge University project that found photos posted to some social networks, blog and photo-sharing sites stick around after they're deleted by users.

Researchers tested several photo-sharing sites to see if photos still existed on the Internet 30 days after they were supposedly deleted by users. Seven of the 16 sites, including Facebook, failed the test. From a researcher's blog post:

Facebook alone hosts over 40 billion photos, over 200 per user, and receives over 25 million new photos each day. Hosting such a huge number of photos is an interesting engineering challenge. The dominant paradigm which has emerged is to host the main website from one server which handles user log-in and navigation, and host the images on separate special-purpose photo servers, usually on an external content-delivery network.

Sound confusing? Basically that means Facebook and other sites store photos in one place and their main Web page in another place. That makes it difficult to know where your photos actually live. And it apparently means there can be some major lag time between when you delete a photo and when it actually goes away.

The BBC says the problem comes from "shaky" business models for social networks:

What the Cambridge experiment has shown is that networks like Facebook and MySpace have decided that they just can't afford to give users as much privacy as they might like. And that means that entrusting your photos to the cloud can mean relinquishing control of the way you appear online.

A Facebook spokesman reportedly denies the study's findings: “When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook it is removed from our servers immediately."

The BBC repeats a familiar mantra: don't put anything up that you wouldn't want the world to see:

you're bonkers to put anything online that you don't want a future employer, partner or aged relative to see – because, if the experiment is to be believed, that embarrasing shot of you in fancy dress at a stag night will remain online even after you've deleted it.

Check out the list of which sites passed and failed the test, and also follow the conversation on Twitter. It's happening under a search for "Are you sure those."

Under pressure from activists, Facebook has disabled two of five pages dedicated to Holocaust-denial groups.

Barry Schnitt, a spokesman for the social-networking site, confirmed the removal in an e-mail to CNET's Technically Incorrect.

"Two of the groups have been disabled, but the other three remain," Schnitt wrote. "We are monitoring these groups and if the discussion among members degrades to the point of promoting hate or violence, despite whatever disclaimer the group description provides, we will take them down. This has happened in the past, especially when controversial groups are publicized."

One of the most vocal supporters for the pages' removal has been Brian Cuban, a Texas attorney and brother of Dallas Mavericks team owner Mark Cuban.

Brian Cuban and others have argued that the Holocaust-denial pages violate Facebook's terms of service, which prohibits content that is hateful.

While Cuban said it's great that two of the pages have been suspended, he said Facebook's actions do not go far enough. "It misses the crux of the dispute, which is a fundamental difference in the belief of what Holocasut Denial represents," he said.

"Facebook sees Holocaust Denial as an unpopular, even rupugnant history theory," Cuban wrote in an e-mail to CNN. "I see Holocaust Denial as a mantra of hate against Jews, and therefore no group should be tolerated. Facebook should not be picking and choosing who they think hates Jews and who does not. All the groups should go."
– Lisa Respers France, CNN.com writer