Facebook invites media to "come and see what we're building"

Facebook has circulated a rather mysterious invite amongst the media fraternity asking all to join the social network at its headquarters in Menlo Park, CA on Tuesday January 15 at 10 a.m. PT.

The invite that comes amidst the on-going CES event, has suddenly attracted attention due to the curiosity element leaving little to guess. It just reads, "Come and see what we're building."

Considering that the social networking giant doesn't host many events at its headquarters, this ought to be something big.

Could it be the new Facebook phone, rumours of which surfaced recently? In a set of HTC device codename leaks, the list mentioned the Opera_UL more commonly recognised as the Facebook Phone. Talks of this phone have been around since November 2011, though HTC and Facebook have collaborated earlier and launched the ChaCha and Salsa phones with a dedicated Facebook button and deep integration of the social network.

Further reports from The New York Times in May last year mentioned that the social networking giant has hired more than half a dozen Apple engineers who worked on the iPhone and iPad to build a Facebook smartphone. Then Bloomberg reported that the phone will debut in mid-2013. In that case, an announcement now would make sense.

So, if it is the Facebook phone, then we'd say it was already playing on our mind. Last time Facebook hosted such an event at its Palo Alto headquarters in California about a year and a half ago, where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had announced the company's partnership with Skype. 

Facebook ordered to remove paedophile monitoring page

A Facebook page set up to monitor paedophiles has been removed after a judge in Northern Ireland ruled Friday that it risked infringing the human rights of a convicted sex offender.
The man, who cannot be identified, started legal proceedings against the social networking site after discovering his photograph and threatening comments had been posted on the page.

High Court judge Bernard McCloskey ruled some content on the page amounted to prima facie harassment of the man, known only as XY.

The man had previously been given a six-year jail sentence for a string of child sex offences committed more than 20 years ago.

Judge McCloskey said "Society has dealt with the plaintiff in accordance with the rule of law.

"He has been punished by incarceration and he is subject to substantial daily restrictions on his lifestyle."

The judge in his ruling gave Facebook 72 hours to take the original page down.

A spokeswoman for Facebook said "We are considering our next steps in light of the court judgment and we have nothing further to add at this stage."

The page, called 'Keeping our kids safe from predators', was no longer visible at 20:00GMT but a new page entitled 'Keeping our kids safe from predators 2' had appeared, gaining over 2,400 likes in just a few hours.

It is not clear whether the creator of the new page is the same as the user that set up the original one.

However, the new page's administrator wrote in a posting at 15:30GMT "Thats (sic) the first page gone ( sad day."

More than 5,000 people had liked the original page before its removal.

Some of the latest posts were written after the judge made his ruling.

Facebook is understood to have removed the man's photo and comments made about him but his legal team insisted that the page should be shut down.