Facebook Overhauls Privacy Options, Kills Check-ins on Mobile App

Facebook's decision to quietly shutter the foursquare-like "Places" function of its mobile app is getting lots of attention (its much-hated Beacon ad platform went less quietly in late 2009). But the news comes at the same time that Facebook has launched new privacy controls very similar to Google+ Circles and has made it easier to access several other privacy controls users had requested.

Like Circles, Facebook users can choose whether their posts and photos are public, shared with friends or with a custom group from a drop-down menu on the post itself. It's not clear whether the default is "public" or "friends."

The "profile edit" page also contains this menu so users can determine who sees what on their profile -- no more navigating to the settings page.

Also, when someone tags you in a photo or post, you receive...

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Code-Teaching Tool Codecademy Attracts 200K+ Users in First Week

WHAT: A web-based, interactive tool for learning JavaScript in eight courses. Users earn points and badges by completing exercises. Integration with Facebook shows users how they compare with their friends. Codecademy plans to offer exercises in other computer languages soon.

LAUNCHERS: Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski. Ryan graduated from Columbia in 2011 with a major in computer science.  Zach is a rising senior at Columbia majoring in political science and has worked in biz dev at NY startups.

WHEN/WHERE: Aug. 18 / Silicon Valley. Zach tells LAUNCH they started the project only a week and half before launching.

WHY: Learning to code is hard. Not many effective, cheap resources out there. Books are not interactive. Plenty of people learn programming on their own (DIY-ers).

BACKSTORY: Zach and Ryan originally started building building simple sites, or landing pages, for small businesses this summer, but Zach says, "The biggest roadblock was...

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On Twitter First: 5.9 Earthquake Hits Virginia, Felt in New York and Beyond

People started tweeting just before 2pm ET that they felt an earthquake in New York and Washington, D.C. As the U.S. Geological Survey reports, the 5.9 magnitude quake was centered in Virginia, 83 miles south-west of Washington, D.C. and 41 miles north-west of Virginia's capital Richmond. The U.S.G.S. page does not list any other earthquakes for this area.

Cell phone service is reportedly down in Washington, D.C. No reports of injuries or damages just yet (though we did find...

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Google+ Supports RSS Feeds for Public Posts

If you wanted to view someone's public Google+ stream in an RSS reader, you had to add it manually through a third-party RSS service. However, Google appears to have quietly launched its own support, Plus Feed, which we discovered when we added +MG Siegler (56K followers) to our reader -- and yes, as the image indicates, we were the first to subscribe.

To see if there's a Google+ supported feed for someone, search (in Google Reader) for the person's name in the box that appears after you hit the "add a subscription" button. A supported feed will be listed as "Name - Google+" via www.googleapis.com.

We're not sure how Google+ decides who's worthy of a supported feed and who's not -- but it's not just based on...

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Twitter Leads Social Media Wars for August, Google+ in Second and Facebook Falls to Third

Twitter isn't known for regularly pushing new features, but August has been a productive month: new username and activity tabs, the HTML5 version of twitter.com for iPad and galleries for images you've tweeted [ see above ], plus a broad rollout of the t.co shortened URL.

That's enough to beat Google for this edition even though Google+ added games like Angry Birds, debuted verified accounts and improved its integration with YouTube [ see our first social media wars story ].

Facebook, our winner from the late July edition of social media wars, fell to third place despite launching its marketing API and Facebok Messenger for the iPad and iPhone. Why? It lost too many points for things like...

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