The update to the reader’s software — version 2.5.4 — had been anticipated since April, about the time Apple’s iPad launched.

It has now arrived, and with it, the capability for readers to post favored passages from e-books to user accounts on the social networking sites.

For authors, this capability is akin to free advertising for their work.

Getting fans of a book to post these passages is the social networking equivalent of a mini Oprah Book Club endorsement.

Only the endorser isn’t quite so famous or influential.

While it might be the most popular U.S. website, consumers are saying they don’t much like the social networking giant, according to the 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report (it’s free for download).

Facebook grade: 64% on ACSI’s 100-point scale. At most schools, that would be a low D or D-.

This lousy score put satisfaction with the site below that of the ever-unpopular IRS. It places Facebook in the bottom 5% of all measured private sector companies and in the same range as airlines and cable companies, two perennially low-scoring industries with terrible customer satisfaction.

Of course, customer dissatisfaction doesn’t mean a company or organization doesn’t make boatloads of money off its business. Airlines and cable companies prove that.

Even the IRS rakes in plenty of cash despite its unpopularity. (Being able to threaten jail time might have something to do with that, however.)

Social media websites are measured for the first time by ACSI, which took a look at Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube.  Twitter wasn’t included in the category because many of its users access it through third-party apps other than Twitter.com.

Wikipedia leads the category at 77, followed by YouTube at 73, Facebook at 64 and MySpace at 63.

In the search engine category, there was also some surprising news about the ever-popular Google. The site Google plunged 7% this year. Still, it continues to lead the portals and search engines industry with a score of 80.

It’s also just the second time that Google hasn’t held the top spot, as the “all others” category of search engine competitors jumped 5% to 82.  Microsoft’s Bing search engine makes a strong first showing with a score of 77, trailed by Yahoo! (76), AOL (74), and Ask.com (73).

How does it work? The collector searches Facebook for their target and issues a “friend” request. Many folks automatically accept these requests and that gives the collector an inside track not only into contact information, but details about the debtors’ lives that could be useful.

Posts about new cars, jewelry or houses could be used by the collector to place liens on such property to recover the money owed.

There’s some debate about whether “friending” a stranger in order to track them down for debts violates the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act of 1978 which has strict guidelines about using deception in order to contact or communicate with a debtor.

But there was no Facebook — or other social media site — in 1978 when the Act was created. For now, it will be up to the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces the act, to decide if this tactic is legal.

Collectors no doubt love the practice. Debtors, not so much.

What do finance folks think?

Zuckerberg seems to have made a less-than-inspiring appearance at the Wall Street Journal’s “All Things Digital” conference, reigniting the furor over his site’s convoluted and confusing privacy controls.

This right after Facebook announced a revamp of those controls that attempted to streamline the process and make it more, well, intelligible. (Which was actually pretty easy, since the old controls were so totally unintelligible users often had trouble actually getting to them.)

So now the folks with a lot to gain by piling on Zuckerberg and Facebook have started to, well, pile on. Not that the CEO and his social networking site don’t deserve it. But make no mistake: There’s an ox to be gored here and a line’s forming for the entertainment.

In response to a discussion draft of a new privacy bill currently under consideration by the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, ten leading privacy and consumer organizations today called for much stronger provisions to protect consumer privacy both online and off.

Yes, that’s ten privacy and consumer groups. Didn’t know there were that many, but believe me, they’re coming out of the woodwork.

The groups, including the Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumer Watchdog, World Privacy Forum, Consumer Action, USPIRG, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Privacy Times, Privacy Lives, and the Center for Digital Democracy, raised their concerns in a letter to Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher and Ranking Member Cliff Stearns.

Recognizing that “consumers increasingly rely on the Internet and other digital services for a wide range of transactions and services, many of which involve their most sensitive affairs, including health, financial, and other personal matters,” the groups made a number of recommendations for strengthening the draft privacy bill, including the following items:

• The bill should incorporate the Fair Information Practice Principles that have long served as the bedrock of consumer privacy protection in the U.S., including the principle of not collecting more data than is necessary for the stated purposes, limits on how long data should be retained, and a right to access and correct one’s data
• The bill’s definitions of what constitutes “sensitive information” need to be expanded; for instance, to include health-related information beyond just “medical records.”
• The bill should require strict “opt-in” procedures for the collection and use of covered data and should prohibit the collection and use of any sensitive information except for the transactions for which consumers provided it.

Any chance any of this will happen? Stay tuned.

That’s because ignoring social media these days is a little like burying your technology head in the sand.

Or at the very least, believing it doesn’t matter.

Forrester folks think it does and that you’ve got to use it or lose the competitive game.

CIOs got a lesson in managing workers’ use of social media recently from a Forrester analyst who reports “Social [media] is like sex — fun to read about, fun to look at, but to really understand it, you have to do it.”

Nigel Fenwick, principal analyst at Forrester Research, ended his session on social media for the CIO at last week’s Forrester IT Forum with that audience-waking quote from Forrester CEO George Colony.

Fenwick’s point: If you’re going to manage people or sell to folks who use social networking for either personal or business purposes, you’d better know how the technology works and what makes it attractive to growing numbers of people.

Seems that Fenwick understands that many CIOs and CEOs have little use for or contact with the wide variety of social networks out there.

Beyond forbidding their use at work on company-issued equipment, many tech chiefs have little connection to this powerful new online force.

But workers do. And so do customers and clients. The failure to have an active and nimble social networking policy and strategy could leave many businesses so far out of the loop that their smaller, more tech-savvy competitors will steal the show.

The time for leadership to figure out these policies and strategies is now.

That’s the message that’s being spread far and wide these days by Web security experts who believe most users of the social networking site have no idea how their activities on the site are being used in the marketplace.

Each time Facebook “revamps” its features, you can believe it’s not just to make finding that old college classmate or long lost cousin easier.

The message from Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online, is that each time Facebook touts a re-design or a new format, you can bet your last nickel that it’s being done as an excuse to re-set your privacy controls to a Facebook-designated default that lets the site’s owners peddle your info and activities far and wide.

Goodchild discussed the social networking site’s various privacy traps on CBS’ “The Early Show on Saturday Morning” and her top five Facebook pitfalls are worth repeating here:

• Your information is being shared with third parties
Facebook wants to make money, and they can do this by sharing your information with advertisers who want to market their products to you.

• Privacy settings revert to a less safe default mode after each redesign
This means every time Facebook exclaims “Heads up, we’ve got a fresh look!” make sure to check your security settings and change them back to where you want them. Otherwise Facebook can share your info with advertisers — a primary function of their business model. And watch out for those cutesy  applications like Farmville or Which Jane Austen character are you? That application gets permission to access your info and could be sharing it with others without your knowledge.

• Facebook ads may contain malware
Basically Facebook is pretty sloppy about vetting their ads, says Goodchild, which could result in you clicking on an anti-virus software ad and downloading an actual virus.

• Your real friends unknowingly make you vulnerable
If one of your friends’ profiles gets hacked by a third party, that hacker can then see whatever info you’re putting out there to your pal. So if your friends aren’t making good decisions about what they share on the Web, you could be affected as well.

• Scammers are creating fake profiles
If the world knows the name of your mother, father, second-cousin and best friend from grade school, someone out there might just make a fake profile with one of their identities and beg you to say, wire $5,000 to them after they get mugged in a foreign country. Also, if you have like, a bajillion friends, the odds are that a few of those are scammers who aren’t who they say they are. Recommendation: Trim that “Friends” list down to a few trusted folks.

As Facebook grows in influence and power, it also seems to be finding plenty of trouble to get itself into.

Just last week, users discovered that a security hole made their private chats not so private — everyone on their contact list could listen in.

In addition, more than a dozen privacy and consumer protection organizations have now filed a complaint with the FCC claiming the site plays with privacy settings intentionally to make users’ personal info fair game for commercial use.

Remember the mantra I told you from the beginning? Repeat it. Now go check (or delete) your Facebook profile.

According to a new analysis by the managed security company Network Box, more business Internet traffic goes to Facebook than to any other site.

Analysis of 13 billion URLs used by businesses in the first quarter of 2010 showed that 6.8% of all business Web traffic goes to the popular social networking site — that’s up 1% from the last quarter of 2009.

But YouTube is the big bandwidth hog IT may be annoyed by, because the analysis also shows that more business bandwidth (as opposed to “hits”) is taken up with online videos than anything else.

The Network Box analysis found that 10%  of all corporate bandwidth is taken up watching YouTube videos, an increase of 2% since the last quarter of 2009.

This analysis comes shortly after the company researched 250 IT managers about their biggest security concerns over the coming year (research was conducted in April 2010).

The top answer was “employees using applications on social networks” while at work, with 43% of respondents saying this is a major concern.

In a separate question, 36% of respondents are concerned about malware passed via networks such as LinkedIn or Twitter, and employees trusting (and clicking on) links sent by contacts within their networks.

The top five Web sites visited by businesses in Q1 2010 were:

1. Facebook – 6.8% of all traffic
2. Google – 3.4% of all traffic
3. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.8% of all traffic
4. Yahoo! – 2.4% of all traffic
5. Doubleclick – 1.7% of all traffic

The top five bandwidth busting Web sites are:

1. YouTube – 10% of all bandwidth used
2. Facebook – 4.5% of all bandwidth used
3. Windows Update – 3.3 % of all bandwidth used
4. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.7% of all bandwidth used
5. Google – 2.5% of all bandwidth used

The big concerns for IT managers: The fact that employees may be downloading applications from social networks that are a security threat, and the amount of company bandwidth that’s likely being eaten up by video watching that’s not really work related.

That’s according to numbers tracked by the Web metrics firm NetApplications, which measures (among other things) operating system use by about 160 million individual users who visit a variety of sites that are routinely tracked.

The iPad, launched April 3 by Apple, is averaging a 0.03% share of the Web traffic market, close on the heels of the firmly established BlackBerry and Android systems, each with 0.04%.

Of course none of these gadgets comes close to the iPhone/iTouch share of 0.06%.

Keep in mind, this is only the iPad that uses WiFi to connect to the Internet. It’s reasonable to believe that most “power users” of the Internet who are interested in Apple’s new tablet will be waiting until later this month to buy the WiFi/3G model that’s due to be released then.

Meanwhile, Apple announced recently that it sold half a million iPad units in the first week of availability. Because of the high demand, the company’s pushed back international release of the new tablet until the end of May (as opposed to the end of April, as originally planned.)

Their “distress” at the surprisingly strong sales and postponement was evident in their short press release:

“Faced with this surprisingly strong US demand, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad by one month, until the end of May. We will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10. We know that many international customers waiting to buy an iPad will be disappointed by this news, but we hope they will be pleased to learn the reason — the iPad is a runaway success in the US thus far.”

Most analysts seem to believe the delay is mostly because even Apple didn’t anticipate their supply of the portable computer would be depleted so quickly.

I guess you can file that under “unintended consequences of success.”

Sales have likely been driven by the generally positive reviews the device has gotten and an extraordinary amount of pre-launch publicity — including a cover story in Time magazine.

While we haven’t reviewed the iPad yet here on FinanceTech (we’re waiting to get our hands on the WiFi/3G model later this month) there are three items of anecdotal interest:

1. A  longtime IT worker, firmly committed to the Windows OS platform and scornful of all things Mac, recently admitted to us that Apple actually “got the tablet right. It’s the right size, the right weight, the right speed and the right battery life. And the graphics display is amazing.”
2. A Facebook friend on the Acela train from New York to Philadelphia on April 9 posted this message: “ I feel so out of it! The two folks across from me on the train have iPads! Arrggh and so does the guy behind me!” and
3. A co-worker invited us to come have a look at his new iPad. He initially let us hold it — for about nine seconds. Then he took it back. We managed to pry it from him again, for about eight seconds before he reached for it and pulled it away. After a third try — this time we got to cradle the thing for no more than 4 seconds — we gave up and surrendered it to his grasping fingers. The 3G version can’t come to market too soon.
   

NetApplications is tracking daily iPad share numbers on their site. Check it out here.

Along with rickets, cancer, divorce and suicide, Facebook’s now being blamed for syphilis.

The claim’s coming from no-less a world renowned epidemiologist than the public health director for the thriving British metropolis of Teesside. Peter Kelly told the U.K. press that his staff has discovered a link between social networking sites and the spread of the bacteria that causes syphillis, especially among young women.

Says Kelly: “Social networking sites are making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex.”

In Teesside there were 30 recorded cases of syphilis last year.

Research revealed that young people in the region around Teesside were 25% more likely to log onto social networking sites than folks of the same age in the rest of Britain. Kelly reports that “there has been a fourfold increase in the number of syphilis cases detected with more young women being affected.”

Facebook’s owners, of course, deny any link between their site and the surge in syphillis cases.

And of course, Kelly’s claims don’t mention any controls in his “study” or other potential factors that could be responsible for the rise in cases of the sexually transmitted disease.

What about Twitter? What about MySpace? What about the profound boredom of living in a backwater village in a depressed economy?

The latest Retrevo Gedgetology study asked social media users about when, where and how much time they spend on sites and services like Facebook and Twitter.

Almost half the respondents say they check in on the social media scene in bed, during the night or a soon as they wake up in the morning.

Nearly half check social networking sites first thing in the morning to get their initial dose of daily news. This could bode ill for TV network morning shows and is likely contributing to sinking newspaper circulation rates.

The Retrevo study also found that iPhone users are more likely than others to participate in social networking than others, possibly because custom apps for the smartphone make it easy for owners to connect to their social networks from any location at any time.

While the majority of adults surveyed resent being interrupted (by social media or any other kind of technology), the same isn’t true of those younger than 25. In fact, while 62% of adults dislike being interrupted, only 33% of the young crowd mind. Overall, 40% of respondents said they didn’t mind being interrupted for a message.

And 32% said a meal wasn’t off limits. A small but committed segment of social networking fans — 7% — are even willing to check out a message during an “intimate moment.”

But perhaps the most dedicated social media users of all are the 24% of those younger than 25 who say they check out social media or update their status while using the bathroom.

Let’s just hope they don’t get too specific about what they’re up to.