Graeme Menzies is the director of online communications for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC), to be held from Feb. 12, 2010 to March 21, 2010. He works with a passionate team to extend the Olympic games experience through online media. In honor of the Olympic flame being lit in Greece this Thursday, Oct. 22, we've asked Graeme to discuss how VANOC is connecting people worldwide through online communications.


When Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympic movement over a century ago, he sought to create a moment where athletes and spectators could experience the positive and transformational effects of sport — values of friendships, respect and excellence. At the beginning of the 1900s that experience was a social experience, but one that was largely limited to those who had the resources and time to travel.

By the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan was already predicting that the evolution of electronic communication media would significantly reduce barriers of time and space. In effect, he said, the planet would be reduced to a "global village." Both visions now live side by side.

More than ever before, the most successful games are not only those that provide the most outstanding physical infrastructure for athletes and spectators, but also the most outstanding online experience for virtual fans and spectators.

The Torch Relay

This Thursday, the Olympic flame is being lit in Olympia, Greece. Canada's Olympic torch relay will be the longest ever held in one country, covering 45,000 km (or nearly 28,000 miles) on a 106-day journey by some 12,000 torchbearers carrying the torch through over 1,000 communities and landmarks across the country.

In the past, traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television, would record and tell the story of the relay. Now, citizens are telling the story themselves by sharing their photos, videos and thoughts on their Facebook profiles, their blogs and other social media. This new reality is what led the Vancouver 2010 team to reach out beyond its website and engage significantly in the social media space.

In Canada, where Facebook is already extremely popular, we've actively encouraged local Olympic torch relay celebration communities to use Facebook to build local engagement, enthusiasm and momentum. Communities such as Sydney, Nova Scotia, and Red Deer, Alberta, are using Facebook to communicate local torch relay news, stories and photos on Facebook Pages.

Anyone can follow the torch route as well. We've complemented our website with a Vancouver 2010 Olympics Page. It includes links to the interactive torch relay map, as well as a 2010 video that will give you a taste of the experience we're trying to build for the world.

Facebook Groups have long been a part of the Facebook experience as a way for people to organize and discuss particular issues of interest. However, until now, Group activities have been isolated to the group page and it was often difficult to find out what currently was going on within a group. We have received feedback from many of you saying that you want to know more about what is going on within your Facebook Groups, in the same way you know what is happening with your friends and other connections on the site — on your home page.

Starting today, we're transforming Groups to make it easier for you to communicate with other members and create a smoother experience as you browse through Facebook. If you don't see the new design just yet, you will soon. We're currently testing it with a small percentage of people on the site and will roll it out to everyone in the coming days.

First, we revamped the design for Groups so that they look similar to other parts of the site such as profiles and Pages. This means that groups will now have a Wall that summarizes all the recent activities of people within the group and a Publisher that enables members to share their content.

Second, group activities, which previously only appeared in the group, will now be delivered to your News Feed. To ensure that you get the most interesting and relevant content from groups you've joined, you only will see stories when one of your friends posts within a group rather than when all members post. For example, you now will see a story when your friend uploads photos from a recent party at your high school alumni group or when one of your friends posts a message on the Wall of your pick-up soccer group saying that there is a special game this week.

While only a small fraction of people on the site ever experience abuse such as bullying, harassment, unwanted contact or offensive behavior from others, we're constantly improving our processes to better respond if you do have a problem. By providing us with accurate and detailed information, you can help us locate and remove abuse on the site as quickly and efficiently as possible. That's why we recently made it possible for you to send us more specific and detailed reports of abuse as part of our efforts to make Facebook a safe and trusted environment.

Specifically, we created much more granular reporting categories for you to classify the issues you may come across including bullying or unwanted contact from other people on the site. We also added new fields where you can detail the location of abuse that occurs in videos or text. For example, if you want to report offensive content in a video, you now can tell us the specific time during the video when the abuse occurs. Or if you're reporting a note, you can copy and paste the offensive text directly from its source. The information you provide helps our international team of professional reviewers prioritize reports and know what they're looking for when reviewing the content.

Joe Green is the co-founder of Causes, a Facebook application that empowers anyone to mobilize their friends for social and political causes. Last week Causes began the second America Giving Challenge in partnership with the Case Foundation —
a nonprofit organization that encourages the use of technology in that sector — and Parade Magazine. For 30 days, causes compete to win cash prizes for their organization based on the number of donations they receive. We've asked Joe to share his perspective on how activism is evolving on the Internet.


People are adopting "Facebook Babies," but they aren't virtual infants with a penchant for online social networking. They are the nearly 30 orphans in China that have been given life-changing surgery and foster care by a nonprofit organization called Love Without Boundaries with money they raised through the Causes application on Facebook.

Amy Eldridge, who directs this U.S.-based nonprofit in Oklahoma, relies on volunteers to recruit, educate and mobilize supporters. When someone has a question, volunteers are ready to reach out and personally respond. When Amy shares the story of a baby who needs help, her supporters respond not just by donating but also by committing to raise money from their friends.

Amy's volunteer-focused approach is classic grassroots organizing — maximizing people's impact by empowering individuals. "Any smart nonprofit realizes that none of their work gets done without their supporters," Amy recently told me. "We now have 170 volunteers in 9 countries with a designated job."

When you learn how Amy runs her small nonprofit, it all sounds very logical and probably a bit unremarkable — but this is not how most nonprofits operate.

If you are one of the 75 percent of Americans who donated to a nonprofit last year, chances are you were solicited through direct mail or by a telemarketer. In addition to leaving individuals disengaged, top-down marketing tactics have high overhead costs that prevent smaller nonprofits from growing and driving innovation.

It was not always this way. Until the 1970s, typical involvement with nonprofits looked a lot more like Amy Eldridge and Love Without Boundaries. People joined local chapters of charitable organizations whose members were friends and whose leaders were volunteers. They worked through their social connections to do everything from cleaning parks to raising money, but this shifted after the 1970s. Nonprofits began focusing on top-down marketing tactics in response to a broad societal shift away from membership in voluntary associations of all types.

Now, the Internet — and social media specifically — is rebuilding the social infrastructure that has been crumbling underneath nonprofits for decades. As David Smith, director of the National Council on Citizenship, explains: "God, friends and Facebook provide a civic safety net." Facebook, with its representation of people's real identity and relationships, presents an unprecedented opportunity to bring the ideals and techniques of grassroots organizing to a massive number of people online. In doing so, the playing field has been leveled for individuals and organizations of all sizes.

A paradigm shift is under way in the nonprofit world. Through the Causes application alone in just over two years, 85 million people are now involved in more than 300,000 user-created causes that educate, advocate and fund nonprofit work.

Last year, in partnership with the Case Foundation, Causes started America's Giving Challenge to help nonprofits discover the potential of online organizing. The competition allows any U.S. based cause to enter and win cash awards for their nonprofit based on the number of different people that get involved through donating. We designed it so that the amount donated was irrelevant, instead focusing on the number of people who got engaged.

More than 26,000 people donated nearly $600,000 to mostly small grassroots organizations. Love Without Boundaries, the 2008 winner, was awarded the $50,000 grand prize and used the money to help 10 orphaned children with heart disease. More importantly, they were able to capitalize on the momentum of the Giving Challenge to continue to develop a vibrant organization of engaged supporters.

With this year's Giving Challenge in full swing, I want to encourage you to jump in. As grassroots organizing teaches us, an individual can have a large impact. There are so many ways you can make a difference — from donating any amount no matter how small to inviting your friends to participate or sharing information about the causes you support and joining discussions. Become a leader in your cause, and influence the people around you to do the same and discover what you can achieve when you organize.


Joe is addictively refreshing the Causes page to track the challenge leaders and to challenge you to get involved for your favorite cause.

Every day, through Facebook status updates, people share how they feel with those who matter most in their lives. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing. They're brief, to the point, and descriptive of what's going on this week, today or right now.

Grouped together, these updates are indicative of how we are collectively feeling. At Facebook, we're always looking for ways to help people better understand the world around them, and we're interested in how people express their emotions with one other and the world. So earlier this year, data scientists at Facebook started a project to measure the overall mood of people from the United States on Facebook, based on the sentiment expressed in status updates.

The result was an index that measures how happy people on Facebook are from day-to-day by looking at the number of positive and negative words they're using when updating their status. When people in their status updates use more positive words—or fewer negative words—then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual.

Though more countries or languages may be added later, the current result is notable since it is based on the updates of all English-speaking U.S. Facebook users. In this sense, it can count as an indicator of "Gross National Happiness," a metric only measured currently via Gallup polls and national surveys in countries such as France and Bhutan. To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.

For our Gross National Happiness index, we adapted a collection of positive and negative emotion words built by social psychologists. Examples of positive or happy words include "happy," "yay" and "awesome," while negative, or unhappy words, include "sad," "doubt" and "tragic." We also did a brief survey of some Facebook users, which showed that people who use more positive words, relative to the number of negative words, reported higher satisfaction with their lives.

Over time, we've seen spikes in the index for different days of the year. Some of the happiest days include U.S. national holidays like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, social holidays like Halloween and religious holidays including Christmas and Easter. Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008—when the U.S. was celebrating the election of President Barack Obama—was over twice as happy as the average Wednesday.

Most of the time when we stumble upon a Latin phrase, it's etched in stone: carved in the hallways of universities, chiseled on facades of government buildings or carefully imprinted in cathedral foyers and churchyards. The language seems almost immovable. Yet beginning today, Latin — the staid and reliable language — springs to life on Facebook.

Latin has joined the more than 70 languages we've made available on the site in the past two years, including some which have launched just today — Azeri, Faroese, Georgian and Nepali. Some of these are languages that millions of people speak across the globe. Others are dialects that specific communities use in select geographic areas. Still others are just for fun: "Pirate" may not appeal to everyone, but for those nostalgic for the days of Blackbeard and Captain Hook, it's there for you in Facebook's language drop-down menu.

To students of Latin, the availability of the language on Facebook may be just what's needed to narrow the distance between themselves and the venerable language. After all, the experience of studying Latin can frequently seem somewhat far and away. Even the readings prescribed by Latin teachers have an air of detachment about them: Cicero and Demosthenes, Caesar and Virgil. While students of "living languages" practice on subtitled films and in conversation groups, on vacations and with exchange students, Latin scholars soak in rare living breaths of their studied language, satisfying themselves with the occasional legal phrase, nursery plant, benediction or school motto. Recognizing verb stems and identifying vocabulary roots just somehow aren't quite the same as ordering off a menu or asking for directions.

Though Latin has been long out of use, for some of us, it never loses its intrigue. As a native English speaker, I enrolled in Latin to supplement my study of Romance languages. I still remember reading a translated copy of "Winnie the Pooh" in Latin, and gradually working my way through state speeches and philosophic commentary dating from the Roman Empire. When I joined Facebook a year ago, I chose a Latin phrase, "dictum meum pactum" ("my word is my bond"), as the phrase that currently appears on my Facebook business card.

The following is part of our series on different ways Facebook is used across the world. Read the previous blog post in this series here. If you have a story you'd like to share with us, please submit it here.


Many people share a dream of one day owning their own business. For Yann Boyer of France, that dream became a reality thanks to a friendship that was rekindled on Facebook.

In 2003, when Yann was about to graduate from an engineering school in Paris, he talked with his friend Gregory about starting their own company but they decided not to pursue the idea then. They instead were hired by two separate companies. Yann's job kept him in Paris, while Gregory moved to the south of France. By 2007, they had lost touch entirely.

Then in early 2008, Yann joined Facebook looking for old classmates.

The following is part of our series, Facebook Tips, which answers some of the most commonly asked questions about using Facebook. While we hope the tips we share on the blog will be informative, remember that we are unable to answer individual questions here. We'll always direct you to the Help Center for additional information about the topics we cover.


Last week, my mom called to ask me for help. She, like many of you, wanted to change her Profile picture to one that her old classmates would instantly recognize when they viewed her friend requests.

You can easily change your Profile picture by moving your cursor over the upper right-hand corner of your current photo and selecting the link, "Change Picture." From there, you can choose among uploading a new picture, taking a picture with your computer's webcam, choosing from an album, editing your current thumbnail or removing your current picture entirely.

If you want to use a photo in which you're already tagged, just navigate to the photo you want and select the "Make Profile Picture" link at the bottom right-hand corner of the photo. After selecting the photo, you'll also have the option to crop the picture and adjust its size.

If you are a new user and currently do not have a Profile picture, navigate to your Profile and click on either of the links located underneath the area dedicated for a Profile picture, "Upload a Picture" or "Take a Picture." From here you can either upload a picture or take one using your webcam.




Chengos Lim, who works on the verification team in user operations, hopes that it all makes sense to her mom now.

At Facebook, we take your security very seriously and have dedicated teams across the company that focus specifically on protecting people's accounts and fighting cybercrime. Recently we have noticed an increase in scams where people's login information is collected through phishing sites and then their accounts are accessed without permission to ask friends for money. While the total number of people who have been impacted is small, we take any threat to security seriously and are redoubling our efforts to combat the scam.

In this attack, commonly known as a 419 scam, fraudulent individuals access Facebook accounts and pose as the account owner, claiming to be stranded in a foreign country without access to money. Once they've logged in, the scammers send Facebook Inbox and Chat messages and may even post status updates to the person's profile asking friends to send money, usually through Western Union, a money transfer service.

We've posted the full transcript of a real chat conversation between a Facebook user and a scammer to the Facebook Security Page, along with tips to avoid being scammed and instructions on how to report a compromised account. We've also worked with Western Union to help educate consumers about this scam. Western Union has posted a warning about the scam on their website, and they continue to educate their employees on this and other scams.

On the technical side, we have improved a number of our automated systems to better handle this unique class of scam and are taking efforts to ensure that we adapt our response to the scam as it changes. At the same time, our security team is working with law enforcement and collaborating with email providers and other industry experts to identify and catch the criminals responsible. Western Union also is working closely with law enforcement on scams such as this one.

While only a small number of people have experienced this type of scam on Facebook, we are committed to constantly improving our systems and implementing additional measures to better respond. We need your help too. Educate yourself on this scam and others by becoming a fan of the Facebook Security Page, and report any suspicious activity you see using the report links on the site and the contact forms in our Help Center.


Alok, a software engineer on the site integrity team, builds systems to protect you and fight crime.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the Associate Dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance, a leading Jewish human rights organization with over 400,000 members. As a global activist for human rights for over 30 years, Rabbi Cooper is closely involved in producing exhibitions for the Center's acclaimed Museum of Tolerance and supervising its annual report on digital terrorism and hate. We've asked him to share his personal perspectives on freedom of expression and how people around the globe can leverage digital technologies to promote tolerance.


"Who knows," said Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, when he received the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature, "if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded — ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day." Considering that the courageous pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran were inspired and empowered by the social networking revolution, it seems appropriate to ask the more than 300 million people using Facebook whether the dramatic events in Iran make the French writer a prophet in his own time.

There's no denying that cyber-freedom is limitless. Just ask blogger Xeni Jardin, who visited a remote Guatemalan village without televisions or telephone landlines. Yet, at a nearby Internet café, a village elder absorbed the news of Barack Obama's victory and declared, "If a black man can enter the 'Casa Blanca,' maybe a Mayan person one day can become President of Guatemala."

Today, online activists have enacted many changes via social networking through tools like email petitions, virtual town meetings and online organizing — from Ukraine's cell phone driven "Orange Revolution" protesting corruption in the presidential election to South Korea's "mad cow" protests against tainted meat imports that were orchestrated by text-messaging teenagers.

Going back in history, it's possible to imagine digital technologies — from websites to cell phones to Facebook and Twitter — making a real difference. Imagine if these options were available to Soviet dissidents and refuseniks who, back in the 1970s, were limited to secretly communicating by one handwritten samizdat at a time. Maybe the "Iron Curtain" would have come down a decade earlier. Or perhaps the outcome would have been different in Tienanmen Square in 1989 had Chinese protesters been able to communicate and organize instantaneously.

Or maybe not. It remains to be seen whether real tanks or motorcycling shock troops such as Iranian President Ahmadinejad's Basij militia can be ultimately trumped by virtual protests. Would YouTube posts from inside the Munich beer hall where Hitler launched his abortive 1923 putsch have made the Nazis look ridiculous or, more likely, created a cult following among young people in search of a strong leader? Would smuggled cellphone videos from Auschwitz have horrified and mobilized the German public or world public opinion to stop the factory of death? Not likely, given that images of mass murder actually sent back home by Germany's "willing executioners" failed to change anything.

There's little reason to believe the Internet could have stopped genocide in 20th-century Europe any more than it has in 21st-century Africa.

In 2009, regimes such as Myanmar nip their potential Internet problem in the bud by outlawing the Web: no medium, no message. But China and Iran take a more sophisticated approach. The Chinese government has found hi-tech means to thwart Internet dissent. Tehran seems to be going further. Using technology bought from Nokia Siemens, Iranian authorities have identified dissenters who used technology during the recent street protests. And they are using Internet technologies to confuse tweeters with disinformation, a campaign that even denies the martyrdom of Neda, the symbol of people's civil outcry.

As Big Brother regimes manipulate the Internet, extremist movements strive to exploit it. In 1995, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center began tracking online hate, there was one hate website. Today, there are more than 10,000.

Let's face it: From the printing press to the telegraph, to radio and television and the Internet, innovation has always been a double-edged sword. Contrary to the technological Utopians, there is no such thing as an invention whose potential for good cannot be perverted for evil.

Scholar Marshall McLuhan's "global village" has arrived, but it's populated by the good, bad and ugly of humanity. Alas, Mr. Le Clezio, the Nobel laureate is wrong: Technology will never deliver us from evil. Only decent people can. We all must do our part to ensure that social media lands on the side of the good.


Rabbi Abraham Cooper would like to hear from people using Facebook on behalf of human rights.