Whether it was The Social Network movie or the website’s habitual line-stepping on privacy issues, something has turned off over 7 million people to Facebook.  Last month was not only the first in years that the social networking site didn’t get to enjoy an increase in active users, but was actually the first in years that saw a decline (7 million is the number that most sources have been coming out with).

Although CEO and de facto Princess of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is vehemently denying these numbers, they have yet to release their own “official” numbers, which is not doing much to help with their argument.  Regardless of whether Facebook is really following the paths of friendster and myspace or if this is all just speculation like they want us to believe, it begs the question: would the world be better off without the social networking giant?

Last year, identity theft cases increased over 12%, due much in part to online scams like spyware and phishing on social networking sites.  When you combine the facts that Facebook was the #1 most visited website in 2010, and has a constantly mutating privacy setting, there is no place better for scammers and hackers to “do business.”  Even if you are cognizant enough to avoid phishing attempts when you enter your login info, the information on your page alone may be enough to lose you substantial amounts of money.

Facebook’s “open” approach to your information doesn’t just put your spam folder at greater risk of receiving more “business proposals” fromNigeriathan usual, but actual burglaries as well.  Many burglars these days will create fake accounts and friend you (or simply read your page if you haven’t been keeping up with Facebook’s privacy setting A.D.D.) in order to find out your address, work schedule, when you’re leaving for vacation, etc.  If you’re thinking, “But what are the chances of that, I only accept friend requests from people I know,” you should keep in mind that a study done in 2009 found that out of 200 test subjects, more than 40% accepted a friend request from a person they didn’t know.  And yes, if you guessed that that random person was a 21 year old girl, then you guessed correctly.

So, what do you think?  Will Facebook’s demise precede worldwide drops in rates of identity theft, burglaries, and annoying crap filling up your spam folders, or will another social network (*cough* Google) step up to take its place?

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By now, just about everybody knows that using social plugins from Facebook and allowing Opengraph lets your data be mined and used.

On the one hand we have to accept that Facebook is a public platform and that privacy is a very subjective term. On the other hand, some people feel there are limits to everything – including the regular changes in Facebook’s privacy policy.

On a positive note:

• By being able to study your behavior, likes and dislikes advertisers are able to provide more targeted adverts – which are more likely to be something you may want. Your history is taken into account in order to provide less irrelevant ads. Quite the contrary in fact – you are likely to be served with tailored offers based on your unique behavior.
• The fact that the information is shared, allows you to see what your friends are interested in. To many people, this could be important – especially for someone who wants to buy an item, but has no clue about making a good choice, and needs to rely on the judgment of others.
• If you have already decided you like a product or company, you would probably welcome the benefits brought about by the targeted applications.

On the negative side:

• Knowing that your data is going to be used and possibly abused could create a psychological barrier. As human beings, we tend to be selective about what we share with whom. As such, knowing the potential consequences of allowing any application is likely to be a deterrent for many folks.
• Wherever any private information is being collected, there is always the possibility of abuse. Your information could be sold by unscrupulous companies – and you have no control over that. You may sign up for something which is taken over by another company with different views. Additionally, it is possible that you can be sent excessive information – it happened with email, and Facebook is just another medium open to abuse.
• Living in a bubble – while it might be nice to only see things you are interested in, could also cut you off from being exposed to new things that may be of interest to you. If your activities on Facebook do not include all your interests, you will undoubtedly not be served with ads relating to all of your interests.
• For some, the lack of privacy may really become an issue – not everybody wants everybody to know what they just bought or did (at least not all of the time).

How these will affect you is likely to be a matter of personal preference. For some it may be a problem, and for some it won’t. As the average user becomes better informed however, we may just very well see a reduction in the numbers of people allowing Opengraph.

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I think we all know that one of the most challenging places to reach on earth is Mount Everest. Standing at 8,848 meters it’s the tallest mountain in the world, it’s also one of the most dangerous and physically challenging things for a human to do. I’m fairly sure the last thing you would ever think of doing is going onto twitter as you’re scaling the final part of the climb to the summit?

Well as it turns out this was the one thing on English mountaineer Kenton Cool’s mind. He’s the very first person to make a tweet from the top of Mouth Everest as of yesterday. He also made the worlds first video call from the top of Mount Everest.

But how you’re all wondering? Surely there’s no signal up there? Well back in October Mount Everest – one of the most remote places on earth – got it’s very own 3G coverage ( I doubt that there’s much congestion on that section of the network) Kenton Cool made the tweet and video call off the new Samsung Galaxy S II. He made the tweet to @samsunguk who were making use of some very “cool” marketing.

It was Kenton’s 9th time to climb Mount Everest to the summit. That’s very impressive, especially when you consider that for every 10 successful summit, Mount Everest usual claims one life.

I wonder why he didn’t check in on Facebook while he was at it?

You can see the tweet here

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The announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death last night had everyone in a frenzy, and it would seem that everyone felt the need to tweet about it on Twitter. After the announcement of his death, the whole twittersphere went it chaos. At the peak of the event around 11pm EST there was 5,106 tweets per second.

That doesn’t claim the number one spot however, the all time record is still New Years Eve 2010 in Japan when there was a staggering 6,939 TPS at its peak. However it did manage to beat the Super Bowl 2011 which only reached 4,064 TPS.

According to Twitter, the event had the highest sustained rate of tweets ever. It had an average of 3,000 tweets per second between 10:45 and 2:20am. There was an incredible 38.7 million tweets in those 3 hours and 35 minutes. At it’s peak there was an average of 3,440 tweets per second from 10:45pm to 12:30pm EST. That’s an average of 12,4 million tweets an hour.

“Last night saw the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 – 2:20am ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second. At 11p.m. ET, there were 5,106 Tweets per second. At 11:45p.m. ET, when Pres. Obama finished his remarks, there were 5,008 TPS. Note: The TPS numbers we reported last night were incomplete”

To put all the events into a little perspective, here’s a list of some other notable events and their TPS records:

* The all-time record is still NYE 2010 in Japan, with 6,939 TPS at its peak

* On the day of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami (On March 11th) Twitter usage reached 5,530 TPS. (Passing the 5,000 TPS mark five times that day).

* The 2011 Super Bowl reached 4,064 TPS

* Japan’s victory over Denmark in the World Cup reached 3,283 TPS

* Final game of the 2010 NBA finals peaked at 3,085 TPS

* Last Friday’s Royal Wedding reached a peak of 3,966 TPS at 4pm London time

Were you one of those who tweeted?

Source:

Techcrunch

Twitter

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Two stories have made the round about Facebook this week. One involving the twins, Winklevosses, who were appealing an earlier legal ruling stating that the twins will have to accept their original settlement of $65 million in Facebook shares which are now valued at $100 million.  (I wonder if they’ll have enough money to go to McDonald’s and get a value meal.)  Apparently they suggested the idea of Facebook to Mark Zuckerberg while they were at Harvard. The original social network was to be called CONNECTU.  Zuckerberg took the idea and transformed it into Facebook. A lawsuit was filed in 2004, and a settlement was reached in 2008.  And the appeals court ruled this week in Zuckerberg’s favor. The settlement was legit.

But this week, a new story appeared that Zuckerberg had given half of his company to Paul Ceglia for a $1000 investment.

Who is Paul Ceglia?

For starters he is a convicted felon who is claiming that Mark Zuckerberg sold him half of Facebook in 2003 for $1,000, and he has the contract and emails to prove it. He later put in another $1,000 for a total investment of $2,000, but if he gets anywhere close to what he’s asking for (half of Zuckerberg’s share, which could be worth as much as $10 billion), he could go down as the best tech investor in history. But that story is taking some steam.

Mark Zuckerberg (Center) and the Winkelvoss Twins

Consider that there are some emails, which Facebook says are fake, look pretty convincing. (To read about the e-mails see The Business Insider. ) They paint a picture of  Zuckerberg playing Ceglia for some extra cash to help develop Facebook when it was only a dorm room project at Harvard. (Zuckerberg was doing work for hire for another Ceglia project, and got him to fund development of Facebook as well, at least according to Ceglia’s latest complaint).

So where does all of this stand? To early to tell, but there have been rebuttles coming on this story now.

To see a Facebook response about the story see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJLjD98QcZ4

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Medical information is easy to get now that so much of it is on the Internet. But how about getting medical information from a doctor, a real doctor, using FaceBook?

That is not happening yet but consider that if you do go on facebook, take a picture of some injury or bodily condition, what is to stop that picture from being used to contact a doctor who might make a diagnosis and even prescribe some medicine.

I don’t think it is far fetched but it does lead to some interesting views of medical information.  If so much of it is so readily available, why stop there; why not go the extra step and contact a physician who can speak with you and make a diagnosis? Clearly some elements must be addressed in order to go that far.

First is privacy. Do you really want all of your Facebook contacts to know about your medical conditions? Probably not. So there would have to be some specialized structure that allows you and your doctor to communicate privately. Second, will you be able to get a full or complete diagnosis? In some cases, sure, if you will only have an easy medical condition which can be diagnosed with two or three questions from the doctor. He/She may be able to make a prescription and call it in to a pharmacy.  But for more advanced conditions, a FaceBook or Internet medical meeting will not work very well. The doctor will probably say, “make an appointment to see me at my office, or go to the emergency room at a hospital.”

So in the end, the problem with Facebook medical diagnosis, is that it is good for small problems, but not for larger ones. In some ways, this may be good, because a doctor can see or talk to a patient and make medical recommendations. But I wonder how many doctors are going to make a prescription recommendation without having seen the patient personally.  There is the question of legal liability that doctors may be thinking about, and limit their involvement to just those patients that they have seen or know about or have treated before. Otherwise, the doctor will probably not  be inclined to make a diagnosis.

See also: ZDNet

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As social networks go, Facebook and Twitter are dominant. MySpace, which once was a dominant social network site, may be on the verge of collapsing.

Consider that in one month MySpace lost 10 million registered users. That right, 10 million. According to comScore figures, MySpace lost that number  between January and February of this year, going from 73 million to 63 million in a matter of four weeks. Facebook on the other hand now has 30 million registered users in the UK.

What is MySpace?

MySpace is a free online community composed of personal profiles aimed at young people. Well, instead of directly competing with FaceBook, MySpace executives decided to make a change about what the site was about. Instead of a social network, it became  a social entertainment destination site. The site is pinning its hopes of renewed success with a return to its music and content roots.

Originally MySpace was a social networking website with headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California. Its immediate owner, News Corp. Digital Media, is owned by News Corporation. However, over the course of the last two years, Facebook has grown and attracted many users, but MySpace failed to adjust to the competition.

So What Happened? A Troubling Survey

But the main problem may have been self induced and it involves a profile.  MySpace members may choose to fill out  an initial survey, which asks such questions as whether the member has ever had sex, skinny-dipped, smoked, drunk alcohol, or taken drugs. For some strange reason, the MySpace administrators readily believed the members who  post their profiles to MySpace expect them to be read only by kids their own age. Somehow, the often suggestive answers  are supposed to be typical of teenage bravado. But the  profiles provide a  hunting ground where potential predators can choose, stalk and befriend victims … sight unseen.  So with this plethora of personal information, a predator can easily manipulate the potential victim into a false sense of security and familiarity while misrepresenting himself entirely through his own false profile. Though forbidden by MySpace, you cannot prevent false profiles from being planted  within the framework. And unfortunately there have been reports of predators finding children.

So now, with this problem set, coupled with the growth of Facebook, people are reluctant to use MySpace as their social network vehicle. And News Corp is actively trying ways to cut costs, and sell MySpace.

Source: The Telegraph

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Why are movies a success? Because they are good? Because of the publicity? Because of the main actors? Nope it’s because of the word of mouth. If you like a movie, you tell your friends, and they tell their friends, and so on. That’s why movie studios don’t advertise a movie beyond the first week of its launch. Word of mouth takes over. So it  is no surprise that Steven Spielberg and Paramount Studios will be using Twitter to launch the publicity campaign for Super8, which will be released in June.

Super8 is a story of a catastrophe. After a terrible train crash, a group of kids who must endure the arrival of an unknown force wreaking havoc on their community.

Paramount says that this is the first time it has launched a trailer on Twitter. By the same  token it’s also the first time Twitter has been the original home to the first run of a theatrical preview. But what this says about the rise of the social media is that it can be influential in more ways than previously envisioned. Film studios are starting to realize that social media could play a central role in the popularity of movies from now on.

Just think, within moments of the end of a movie, your friends are twitting the outcome. “You gotta see the movie.” or “Steer Clear.” Even if it is not a four star movie, it can benefit from the twits making their way through the social network. This says that if this process is a success, then wait for Facebook or other networks to become players in the Hollywood delivery system.

It also means that Hollywood will start looking for different ways to advertise their upcoming movies. The standard ways are for the stars to go to Letterman, The Tonight Show, etc. But now there may be Interviews on Facebook, or short YouTube videos.

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While Superbowl 2011 has come and gone, along with it’s glitches and hickups, it did break a couple of records. 111 million people tuned into Fox to watch the game, breaking last years record audience of 106.5 million. And while it broke every single viewing record on TV, it also broke some records on Twitter too.

Fans who were watching the final few moments of the Super Bowl last weekend managed to set a new record for Tweets-per-second (TPS) for a sporting event: racking up an incredbile 4,064 Tweets which were sent at 10:07:16 p.m. EST.

This information was published in a blog post by Twitter and the below image gives a breakdown of how the tweets per second developed throughout the game.

The previous tweets per second record set for a sporting event was 3,283,  during Japan’s 3-1 win over Denmark during the World Cup soccer tournament last summer. However the Superbowl game was so popular that it managed to surpass the previous record 6 times throughout the game, especially during the half time show and with the early touchdowns.

Usher managed to grab the spot for the second highest peak when he made a surprise appears during the Black Eyed Peas Performance at half time. Usher in fact managed to grab the number one spot for being the most discussed person throughout the game, The Black Eyed Peas were next on the list of most-discussed people, followed by Slash, Eminem, and Christina Aguilera. Aaron Rodgers, the most mentioned player, was sixth.

However all this tweeting didn’t manage to set the incredible record of 6,939 TPS set in Japan just after New Years Eve.

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Let’s be honest, when it comes to personal data privacy, Facebook simply doesn’t get it!  The latest scandal to hit the social networking giant was the story a couple of days ago that it planned to allow external websites to view its users mobile phone numbers and home addresses.

Now the company has quickly u-turned on this decision after a public and press outcry.  They have put a “temporary hold” on any plans for further data sharing.

In a report by the BBC, a Facebook spokesperson said “Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so.”

This is only the very latest in a long line of privacy scandals to hit the company, and questions will very soon be asked by its user-base if it’s too risky to have any personal data on Facebook at all!?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckberg has previously made no secret of his desire to open up the relationship between the site’s 500 million users and the wider web.  “Having access to mobile phone numbers and physical addresses could have real benefits for users”, the firm said in its blog.  ”You could, for example, easily share your address and mobile phone with a shopping site to streamline the checkout process, or sign up for the up-to-the-minute alerts on special deals directly to your mobile phone.”

It’s not just making personal data available to third parties that’s unwelcome however.  Graham Cluley, a senior Analyst at security company Sophos has speculated it could be very easy for rogue app developers to jump on the bandwagon.  He told the BBC “You can imagine, for instance, that bad guys could set up a rogue app that collects mobile phone numbers and then uses that information for the purposes of SMS spamming or sells on the data to cold-calling companies.”

Suffice to say that every time we think Facebook has finally learnt its lesson on privacy it goes and proves to us once again that it hasn’t.  The debate on whether or not we should all still be on Facebook will no doubt start in earnest, and quite soon.

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Last Friday evening Facebook rolled out new permissions policy that gives applications access to individuals’ addresses and phone numbers. The upshot is that if you use any app, like a game, you get a window where you must click to allow it access to your profile (so you can use the game). So now the app gets more personal information about you than ever before. Also as part of the scheme, there is no way to opt-out. This means that all personal data is being treated as if it were of the same value.

This policy applies to all apps who decide to implement this new feature. It applies to developers, including ones that might be malicious, or are simply opportunistic app developers who try and grab as much personal data as possible to sell to third parties.

The problem with this is that is looks like the equivalent of handing your ID to an anonymous telemarketer somewhere in the world. It’s like if you order something online and had your address or phone number sold.

Facebook’s recent disclosure of it’s Wall Street value enterprise, going through the roof so to speak, and this means that they’re going to monetize your private and personal data. So if you’ve shared it with Facebook, your data is up for grabs.

One noticeable problem with this is that people have been accustomed to click through this screen. The window box now says that it’s sharing the information, but it does not really look any different than it did before. For people already overwhelmed by Facebook, any novice, it will be easy to miss. Many users will continue to think that this is normal, and that everyone must be doing it. Remember that with Facebook, people use their real names and real information. Those with little social network experience are likely to put their address and phone numbers into their profiles simply because the form fields are there.

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In a move that’s bound to prove popular, german company X-Pire is releasing a tool that will allow social networking websites such as Facebook and Flickr users to have an automatic expiration date for any photos they upload.

Effectively the tool allows users to encrypt their photos with an electronic key.  The user can then set the date on which that key expires.  When those photos are uploaded and viewed online they call X-Pire’s servers for the unlock code and this will only be issued if the key is still valid.

This is an extremely goo idea and a great tool to make sure that those drunken, but funny, photos are only visible for a short period and not forever.

One of the biggest problems with social networks is the availability of your photos that, perhaps you forget about, or that are open to everyone and search engines because the privacy settings are too complex.  This is an elegant solution to the problem.

The software will be available in a few days and, while it isn’t free, it’s very cheap at $2.6 per month.  There are a great many job hunters out there who will thank X-Pire most heartily for their efforts.

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Facebook has just exploded in the last 2-3 years and it was only a matter of time before it became to most visited website. That time has come, and for the year of 2010, Facebook was the most visited website in the United States, beating Google to the number one spot.

It’s amazing how quick the internet moves, back in 2007 MySpace was the No.1 most visited site but Google then took over the number 1 spot for 2008 and 2009. Now Facebook has claimed the throne with 8.9% of all US visits, easily beating Google which had 7.2% of visits.

Facebook was started back in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and a few classmates but has since changed the way we all use the internet today. But not only was Facebook the most visited site on the web, it was also ironically the most searched for website through Google as well. Facebook accounted for 2.11% of all searches, that’s 2.11% of every single search term that can be put into Google (ie.the whole English language)! What’s more the top 10 included 4 variations of Facebook like”facebook login” “facebook.com”

Facebook was the clear leader in the field, second was Google (7.2%), then Yahoo Mail (3.52%) and Yahoo (3.3%) and YouTube (2.65%) followed up the behind it.

It also looks like many media websites are seeing a significant rise in traffic from Facebook and other social networks referring them. Last year once the Washington Post integrated social network sharing tools into its site, it saw an increase of 280 percent in Facebook Traffic.

What’s more, Facebook recently raised $500 million in investment from Goldman Sachs and a Russian Investor to value the company at an incredible $50 billion!

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Facebook is a great online social network, it’s revolutionised the way we’ve used the internet, and even our smartphones and other personal devices. Nearly everyone is trying to build Facebook into their hardware and software these days, and with good reason, over 500 million people are now part of the social network.

While Facebook can be used by many in total innocence, there is always other people out there who are wrongly taking advantage of the information being made available to them. Yes your friends may mindlessly scan through your pictures and status updates, but unfortunately there are others who will take not partake in this seamlessly benign activity.

After conducting some research, The Daily Mail has discovered that crimes involving Facebook have increased by 700% in the last 3 years alone. Undoubtedly this is also due to the increase in the number of users on Facebook, but it’s also because criminals are getting smarter and taking advantage of the information being made available to them.

The Daily Mail reported on a story where by a family was posting information to keep their relatives up to date on the status of their ill child,  heartless thieves then took advantage of this information to rob their home twice.

Everyone was anxious to know how Kai was doing and it helped us to share what was happening day-by-day. We never dreamed for a minute that someone would read our messages, realise we weren’t at home and steal from us. It was utterly devastating.

Upon further investigation, it was discovered that over 100,000 incidents of crime were linked to Facebook in the last year, with 7,545 since January. In 2005, there were just 1,411.

Users need to be very careful about the information they share on Facebook, Michael Fraser, a reformed burglar who presents the BBC’s Beat The Burglar programme stated just how easy it is for burglars to take advantage of this information.

“One year, you might have a party and give out your address. A while later, you might tell everyone that it is your 30th birthday. So, if you’ve accepted me as a friend of a friend, I know your name, your address and your birth date.

“From that, I can go to 192.com and on there I can find out what you do for a ­living, how much your home is worth — and whether you’re likely to be worth burgling.

“I might have already made up my mind because you’ve posted party ­pictures on Facebook and I can see what kind of valuables you have in the house — and which rooms they’re in. Then you go and tell your Facebook friends how much you’re looking forward to going on holiday next Tuesday.

“I can go on to Google Street View and see actual photographs of your home. I can see if you have a burglar alarm, or whether there are any bushes in the garden to hide in. And I can see all the alleyways I can escape down. And, of course, I know you won’t be at home.”

So let that be a warning to you all, Facebook is great, but you must remember that there is always people out there looking to abuse the system

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Twitter has really taken off in the last two years or so, and with 25 Billion tweets so far this year, it doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. Twitter have announced the top trends from this year to give us an insight into what the whole twitter universe is “tweeting” about.

Twitters Jodi Olson said

“These trends indicated the things that are most meaningful in our lives,” Twitter’s Jodi Olson said in a blog post. “Each day on Twitter, people tweet about news, sports, entertainment, and cool new technology – and everything else in between. The list of 2010 Twitter Trends reflects what’s happening in our world, demonstrates the power of turning any event or story into a shared experience, and underscores Twitter’s value as a real-time information network.”

Twitter released not only the top trends overall, but also split up the top tweets into categories. These include news events, people, movies, television, technology, world cup, sports, and hashtags.

Twitter

So without further ado, here are the top tweets!

Top Tweets

1. Gulf Oil Spill

2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

News Events:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. Haiti Earthquake
3. Pakistan Floods
4. Koreas Conflict
5. Chilean Miners Rescue

People:
1. Justin Bieber
2. Dilma Rouseff
3. Lady Gaga
4. Julian Assange
5. Mel Gibson

Movies:
1. Inception
2. Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows
3. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
4. Despicable Me
5. Karate Kid

Television:
1. MTV Music Video Awards
2. Pretty Little Liars
3. True Blood
4. Walking Dead
5. Grammy Awards

Technology:
1. Apple iPad
2. Google Android
3. Apple iOS
4. Apple iPhone
5. Call of Duty Black Ops

World Cup:
1. FIFA World Cup
2. Vuvuzela
3. Pulpo Paul
4. Dunga
5. Diego Maradona

Sports:
1. Lebron James
2. Wimbledon
3. Manchester United
4. Brock Lesnar
5. Celtics

Hashtags:
1. #rememberwhen
2. #slapyourself
3. #confessiontime (Hashtag started by Usher)
4. #thingsimiss
5. #ohjustlikeme

There has been some people questioning why the likes of Wikileaks hasn’t managed to make the list, but Twitter have ruled out any censoring and say there is no bias in the way their trends are worked out.

“Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously,The Trends list is designed to help people discover the ‘most breaking’ breaking news from across the world, in real-time. The Trends list captures the hottest emerging topics, not just what’s most popular.”

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Could Facebook be on the way to launching its very own email service? Some reports and analysts are saying that Facebook is planning the “Gmail Killer” If Facebook were to launch they’re very own email service, they would automatically become the largest email provider around, since it would have immediate access to its 500 million customers.

The social network would surpass the Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail if it launched it’s very own email service. Currently Facebook only offers internal messaging to people on the site, and no external communication is possible.

However, Facebook launching an email service wouldn’t just place it at the top spot in terms of market share, but it could also revolutionise email as we know it. Imagine an email service which could prioritize mail in order of importance. If Facebook worked it right, they could develop a method where emails would be prioritised in order of who you are closest with or who you communicate with the most.

Apparently 90 percent of adults check their emails regularly while only 59 percent check their social networks and twitter accounts as often.

The irony of this all is that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all scrambling to build in social network support for the likes of Facebook into their email clients, and now Facebook is looking to jump straight ahead of them all.

Now we’re not certain that Facebook will in fact be announcing an email service, but things are looking that way at the moment. Facebook are holding a major press event on Monday morning and the invites that were sent out had a new message icon on it, hinting at email services.

However someone who is reportedly close to the on goings within Facebook said that only some of the rumors were true, adding more speculation to the plot.

All in all, we should find out what’s really happening on Monday.

What would you think of a Facebook email service? Would you use it over your current email?

Let us know in the comments

Source:

Mecrury News

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Twitter has gone from nothing to one of the worlds biggest websites and social networking platforms in just over a year, it’s quite impressive and fair play to them, it’s still going strong. At a recent NewTeeVee conference Robin Sloan of Twitter  talked about Twitter and also the role it’s playing with TV.

He started off by letting us know that Twitter get’s approximately 90 Million tweets per day, that’s an incredible 1000 + a second! And apparently many of them are TV related as well, he even called Twitter the new EPG (electronic program guide) Twitters peak times are happening during real-time broadcast TV events. He elaborates on this point

“We’ve been talking about ‘interactive TV’ for 20 years, waiting for the magic box or platform to finally emerge. But maybe Twitter is actually the platform for interactive TV? It’s simple, increasingly ubiquitous, works on any platform… and everybody’s already using it to talk about TV.”

He has a valid point, Twitter has become the chat platform for TV, the social side, no more do people actually have to text or call in to shows, they can just tweet there opinions. Sloan gave us some examples of how Twitter is being used now on TV.

Shows like “LIFE” on the Discovery Channel prompts people to go and tweet out their own discoveries using the #mydiscovery hashtag. He called this “Synchronous show tweeting” He also noted that the cast of Jersey Shore were also tweeting during the recent series which provides a running commentary for the shows.

Twitter also played a prominent part in this years VMA awards with Justin Bieber playing host for the online chat room mainly fueled by Twitter. As a result, this years twitter fueled VMA’s raked in an impressive 11 million viewers, MTV’s largest numbers since 2002.

So twitter is playing a huge part in our lives and seems to be part of everything now a days. I think it would be great if we started to see it integrated more and more into TV’s as well, enhancing the whole user experience.

Source:

Techcrunch

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A new virus called “is this your mom” is attacking Facebook users, according to Digitizor.  People are being infected when a friend of theirs appears to be sending them a chat message asking the question and providing a link through to an app for the popular social networking platform.

The app, which asks you to provide your Facebook username and password to log in, it a spam application and under no circumstances should you give it the information it asks for.

Should you be affected by the virus the two steps you should take are, firstly and most importantly to change your Facebook password (and perhaps for other websites such as your email, banking or shopping sites where you use the same username / password combination).  Secondly you should disallow access to your account to this app in your Facebook privacy settings.

There’s been no word as of yet whether Facebook have successfully or completely blocked this app, but we do urge you to be vigilant in the mean time.

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Yesterday I covered information about websites and Internet activity to avoid. Here are some more “watch out”  items.

Watch out for Fake Antivirus programs

Watch for sites that have fraudulent ads that will lead you to scams or malware.

While it is true that ads pay the bills, or fun websites, some ads are just scams. To avoid them, don’t click ads that will direct you to a commonly used and friendly website. If you get an ad to upload information to your bank account, go to the bank and look at their instructions there. The ad won’t be there at all.

Watch for Facebook Apps that look questionable.

While face book has a large following, and many apps appear there to make your social networking more pleasant, some are there to take advantage of your friendliness. Be selective about which Apps you add to your profile Check your privacy settings for Facebook Apps, and don’t add all Apps automatically.

Watch for sites that try to lure you in and sign up, then transfer your e-mail address for spam.

Be doubtful of the adds that promise you a free iPad or a free notebook! These sites are not dangerous by themselves, but personal information could be sold to other sites and businesses, who can then use it to sell stuff to you.

Watch for phishing on social networks that trick you into downloading malware or worse still giving your Facebook login information to others

Sites like Facebook give rise to new forms of phishing. For example, scammers might hijack a Facebook account, then use it to lure that person’s friends into clicking a friendly link but is not and going to spam sites, or even giving up their Facebook login information.

Finally, watch what you say and disclose.

After all, this is the Internet, and anything that you say or report about yourself can be read by anyone anywhere around the world. Let me put it this way, if you would not disclose certain things about yourself to your neighbors, then perhaps the same rule applies to the neighbors on the Web.

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Hundred’s of thousands of twitter users were hit Sunday with a Javascript code that redirects users to a site with a goat. Then it displays an obscene message.

The url and Javascript code is

http://pastehtml.com/view/1b7xk3b.html

var el1 = document.createElement(’iframe’);
var el2 = document.createElement(’iframe’);
el1.style.visibility =”hidden”;
el2.style.visibility =”hidden”;
el1.src =  “http://twitter.com/share/update?status=WTF:%20″ + window.location;
el2.src =  “http://twitter.com/share/update?status=i%20love%20anal%20sex%20with%20goats”;
document.getElementsByTagName(”body”)[0].appendChild(el1);
document.getElementsByTagName(”body”)[0].appendChild(el2);

The  code snippet above appears to affect only certain Windows-based browsers. Apparently  if you have Chrome on Linux you may not be affected.

The tweet starts with “WTF”. So avoid that link.

To See some of the remarks about this tweet go here. (Note: it is safe to view, but may be embarrassing. )

How it Works

That WTF link opens two iframes. But  It doesn’t technically hack your Twitter account. Instead it uses your logged in browser session to tweet.  From a security format,  this is  called  “cross-site request forgery”.

Cross-site request forgery,  is a type of malicious exploit of a website whereby unauthorized commands are transmitted from a user that the website trusts. This is unlike cross-site scripting (XSS), which exploits the trust that a user has for a particular site, CSRF exploits the trust that a site has in a user’s browser.

The exploit is actually easy – the main ingredients are:

• Twitter allowing updates through the API via IFRAMES and GET thus being vulnerable to CSRF attacks
• PasteHTML.com being vulnerable to render code without a secure site around it and executing it
• Clients or Twitter automatically applying the t.co link shortener

The code is nothing special.  You create two SCRIPT files that point to the twitter update API and send a request to do a post.Then as the user who clicked on the malicious link is authenticated with Twitter you can send them to the site on his behalf.  This is the same trick that worked for the “Don’t click this button”  exploit.

Source Social Media

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If you were trying to get into social networking site Facebook last night, you may have found yourself unable to do so.  A configuration error caused the website to go offline for several hours.

Robert Johnson, director of software engineering at the firm said ”This is the worth outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologise for it.”

The upshot of all this is that the website’s 500 Million users had to do something else such as interact with the real world while groups went unjoined and farms went untended.

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Social Networking and Microblogging have enjoyed tremendous success. As proof, Evan WIlliams, co-founder of Twitter revealed a number of statistics about the Twitter network. For example, Williams said Twitter is seeing on average 90 million Tweets per day. Plus 25% of tweets contain links to other sites. He also mentioned that since the beginning of the year Twitter users on mobile devices were up by 250%, with 16% of new users working the service on mobile devices. Furthermore, there is on average 370,000 new sign-ups per day.

Privacy

Well aware of the problems that Google is facing in the privacy Williams said that 90% of Tweets are available to the public. Apparently, the privacy issue is very different since users can be followers of others and have followers themselves. The point of the social networking experience is to let people know what you are doing.

Registered Users

Williams recently wrote in a blog post that Twitter now has over 145 million registered users with nearly 300,000 registered apps. Other big numbers thrown out there by Williams include:

 Mobile users have jumped 62% since mid-April

 16% of all new users to Twitter now start on mobile

 46% of active users use some sort of mobile Twitter experience

 78% of people who interact with Twitter use twitter.com

 m.twitter.com is the second most-used Twitter interface at 14%

 SMS and Twitter for iPhone are tied at 8%

What it means

The social revolution that is taking place on 140 characters seems odd. But, in a time when wordiness is questionable, Twitter somehow found the right approach. “If you have something to say, say it!” That seems to be their mantra and it has taught others that a shortened approach to communication can go a long way. Microblogging and texting get to the point immediately and that is what makes this approach so energetic. Now if we could just get Congress to react the same way, that would be great.

Source: Techcrunch

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Facebook is without doubt, the biggest social network out there. It’s unrivaled by the likes of linkedin, myspace and bebo in this day and age and is easily the most visited site on the web. It seems like it’s too big to take down, but that’s not going to deter some students from New York University.

Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy are the creators of Diaspora, the open-source social network that they are hoping will take down Facebook. They describe Diaspora as a “distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy.”

The recently announced in a blog post that Diaspora is set to hit the web on September 15th.

“We have been coding. We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15,”

So how is it different from Facebook? Well, the main difference is there will be a lot more privacy and you can control what gets shared with who and how much you want them to know about. All the information is stored on your machine, and not actually on a third party host or server. Your computer will be known as a “seed” and once it’s all set up, it will aggregate all of your information, like Facebook Profile, Tweets etc…. all in one place for you.

The main priority for the team is to make sure it’s as easy as possible for people to share only what they want and to maintain their privacy.

Diaspora has been completely funded by donations from individuals, and has managed to receive over $200,000 in funding to date, so some people must be interested in it.

We’ll see if it’s any good on Sept 15th anyway, and if you want to find out anything more about it, head over to join dispora

What are your first impressions of it, let us know in the comments

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Social Networking site Facebook has been heavily criticised in recent months for problems with privacy.  What’s more the site is annoying for many users because of its heavy emphasis on apps such as farmville and advertising.

Now though, those helpful people over at LifeHacker have published 10 top tips to get Facebook working the way you want it to.  You can read the tips here.

The tips include information on third-party Facebook clients (my personal favourite is TweetDeck) and how to back up your account.

One interesting thing they cover is what happens to your account after you die.  For many people Facebook is their online home of all their photographs and, essentially, their life.  With the number of physical printed photographs dwindling sharply, online repositories of our photographs could now be our only link to family and social history.  Fortunately, more and more companies are now planning services with this in mind.

The guide contains some extremely helpful tips on how to make sure your Facebook privacy settings are up to date, including how to use the new Geo-Location services to make sure your friends don’t accidentally reveal your location to others.  Finally there are also facebook security tools and some useful wigets.

You can read the tips here.

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Yesterday, Stumbleupon introduced Apps for the iPhone and Android mobile telephones. This puts the site’s signature Web stumbling program into a mobile and convenient size. Both platforms have a built-in frame bar that sits on top of, or beneath an embedded Web browser. This makes using the App easy.

The frame bar contains the usual suite of StumbleUpon buttons with the thumbs up and thumbs down icon that takes users to a random page. There’s also the toggle that allows you to share the pages that you’re on with cohorts both on StumbleUpon and with social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

One thing that is different from using the web version is that to use the App users need to be registered members of StumbleUpon, else they can’t use it; however, there’s a way to sign up even if you’re not, so that is not a game killer. The one upside to this is that the App carries over all your current StumbleUpon preferences, including favorites and topics of interest. These can be browsed like TV channels from inside the App.

Thumbnail Mode

A slow network connection is inevitable, but should be avoided if possible. So, one feature that’s been added to accommodate a potentially slow network connection is the thumbnail mode. This gives you a look inside preview of the page which the App wants to load up, as well as other information such as how many views it’s received, plus the likes and reviews from other StumbleUpon members.

Thumbnail mode can be turned on or off, though Android users will have an advantage since they can change that mode without leaving the App. iPhone users, on the other hand, will have to go to their system settings in order to make the switch. On the plus side, you can perform fast App switching, with StumbleUpon so you can return to it from any other App and not lose what you were viewing.

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According to comscore, which has release the July video matrix stats, the number of U.S. users watching online video content rose slightly to 178 million viewers compared to 177 million total viewers in June. Furthermore,  the July numbers indicate that each viewer watched close to 14.7 hours of online video.  The number of  total U.S. Internet audience  online video viewers reached 84.9 percent.

Google Sites,  where the viewer ship is driven mainly by video viewing at YouTube ranked at the top online video content property with 143.2 million unique viewers (compared to 144.5 million in June. This was followed by Yahoo Sites with 55.1 million viewers (up by close to 10 million from 44.9 million viewers in June). However,  the real news was in Facebook’s growth as a video destination. Facebook.com jumped into the third spot with 46.6 million viewers, compared to 43 million viewers in June, up by a little more than 3 million viewers.

Google Sites had an impressive number of overall viewing sessions reaching 1.9 billion and an average time spent per viewer at 283 minutes, which translates into about 4.7 hours. Hulu, the TV Program site, also had high viewer engagement with an average of 158 minutes (or 2.6 hours) per viewer.

Video Ads

comScore reported information on video ad metrics, which was a new feature that the company launched last month. Americans were inundated with ads and viewed nearly 3.6 billion ads in July.  Hulu generated the highest number of video ad connections reaching  783 million. Tremor Media Video Network ranked second overall (and highest among video ad networks) with 452 million ad views. This was followed by BrightRoll Video Network, which garnered 248 million. This was followed with Microsoft Sites  at 232 million.

Google sites came in behind Microsoft with 219 million ad impressions, however,  note that this metric does not include banner ads, and other types of advertising used on YouTube. Video ads reached 27 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 44.5 times during the month.

Source: comScore

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Facebook is taking advantage of it’s user base of 500 million people by launching into search with a trial of a new feature called Questions.

The service, which has been rolled out to a select number of testers goes head to head with other similar services such as Yahoo! Answers, Twitter and the search engine Ask.com which was designed and built around the concept.

The BBC reported that Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the blog Search Engine Land said…

“The core of search is a question, gor thousands of years we asked questions of people that we trusted.  Then around 15 years ago we underwent an incredible revolution with the arrival of search engines.”

Mr Sullivan said Questions was a return to this age of more personalised search.  “You can now put questions out there in a way we used to do before everyone was online,” he said.

The feature would allow people to click an “Ask Question” button and would allow you to pose the question to just your friends, networks or the wider internet.  “The questions you ask will be shown to people who have expressed interest in the particular topics you tag, as well as to your friends and friends of friends.”

Earlier in the year Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook said that his vision of the future of the web was one where your friends guide you online, this would be a step towards that.

Any search service by Facebook would not step on the toes of the giants Bing, Yahoo! and Google by any means, but it’s an extra feature to help keep the sites’ users base happy.  Without those users the company would very quickly go bust as was seen with Friends Reunited who were sold to UK television company ITV and then plummeted in value because the site didn’t keep up with the needs of its users.

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If you want a new social networking tool, try Tiny Chat.

Tinychat is a simple and free to use audio, video, and desktop chat system. It is  web based; it requires no downloads or plugins, aside from Flash,  and it is browser and OS  friendly working on all browsers and operating systems.

Tiny Chat - Home Page

You have video for groups available

You can do up to twelve shared broadcasts simultaneously.  Using video, text, and audio chat, your social network will expand  and your friends will connect and talk from any location in the world.

Connections Through other Channels

Tinychat is a browser-based flash client. It will allow you to share your camera and microphone broadcast. Anyone who joins your chat room will be able to see others and communicate with them.

Chat Rooms

Tiny Chat was founded in 2009 by Dan Blake. It’s growth is phenomenal with over 10,000 users accessing the system on a daily basis. This number is even more amazing when you consider that you don’t even need to register to use the service.

Because of the growth rate, which is about 11% per week, Blake adds that Tinychat, has over 50 servers in production to keep the service up and running 24/7.

Stats

One other new feature that is introduced is that if there are global users  in you chat room,  Tinychat is introducing a  real-time chat translation.  So basically it means that users can select the language they want to read messages, regardless the native tongue of their conversation partner(s). The feature was built using Google’s Translate API, which means that dozens of  world languages are supported.

Universal Chat? If the growth pace that Tiny Chat keeps up in, it could be the next Twitter or Face book. That is saying a lot, but it is also saying that innovations in the social networking arena are not finished.

Source: http://tinychat.com/

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Thinq is reporting that Hacker Ron Bowes of Skull Security has leaked a 2.8Gb torrent file containing the Facebook account details of approximately 100 million users, this makes it about 1 in 5 of the total user-base for the website.

The file contains details of all users who haven’t changed their privacy settings from “open to everyone” after the recent changes Facebook has been going through.

His directory contains 171 million entries relating to more than 100 million people and lists their account names, details such as addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers.  The profiles linked will also allow you to see their friends, even those who have made themselves non-searchable.

Because all of this information was readily available on the internet what’s been done isn’t illegal, but it does seriously call into question Facebook’s apparently cavalier attitude towards their users’ privacy.

Facebook haven’t yet commented on the leak.

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According to comsScore.com, a leader in measuring the digital world, YouTube.com “achieved record levels of viewing activity in May with an all-time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed and surpassing the threshold of 100 videos per viewer for the first time.”

This is quite an achievement in showing how the face of computing entertainment is changing the direction of consumer computers. The PC has acquired a new more traditional status, as an entertainment device. But it is a novel status at the same time since the way that it is acquiring a new dimension is by adding features that are old and well developed.

What features? Well YouTube is actually a television for the computer. Small short videos that would never make it to the big screen or to a regular television, find plenty of expression on the Internet. Just like writers that want to publish but can not get a book or story published, YouTube is a way for directors to make their videos and have them shown world wide. Such videos may make a Hollywood director at some point in time in the future. That remains to be seen.

But here are the numbers. In May, U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos. Google toped out taking the top spot with 14.6 billion videos. This was about 43 percent of all videos viewed online. ComScore says that YouTube accounted for the vast majority of videos viewed at the site. Hulu came in second with 1.2 billion videos, or 3.5 percent of all online videos viewed, a slight increase from April. Microsoft Sites ranked third with 642 million (1.9 percent), followed by Vevo with 430 million (1.3 percent) and Viacom Digital with 347 million (1.0 percent).

Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.

.

Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.

.

Source: comScore

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As if Limewire didn’t have enough troubles, now another organization the National Music Publishers’ Association has also filed a lawsuit against Limewire. The complaint is not that different than the one filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Last month, the latter organization won a summary judgement which ” found Lime Wire and (founder and CEO) Gorton liable for copyright infringement and inducing copyright infringement.”

The new suit is asking the court to issue an order to LimeWire to cease committing copyright violations. They have also asked for $150,000 in damages for each song that was infringed and $30,000 for other kinds of infringement.

LimeWire is still reeling from the first judgement. They are trying to get the Manhattan Federal District Court Judge to reconsider its findings. This new lawsuit doesn’t help their cause.

Why indeed is this new lawsuit happening now? Is it piling on? After all, when the RIAA won its suit, they had been in court for over four years. But now the National Music Publishers Association (NPMA) is  making its own case. The legal landscape has changed against LimeWire. So what is going on?

Presumably it is not a case of piling on. According to David Israelite, president and CEO of the NMPA, the organization which represents over 2,500 publishing companies and hundreds of thousands of individual songwriters and composers, this is an effort by the publishers to get the money that belongs to the those they represent. Apparently, the money damages that were awarded to RIAA were not going to satisfy the music publishers, music and song writers and composers.

For its part, LimeWire is trying to make good, at least insofar as creating a new Legal downloading site. This may be at the suggestion of their lawyers as a way to try to minimize the judgement, and prevent a total shutdown as has been recommended by RIAA which won the lawsuit.

Source: C-net

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Facebook is a great tool and social networking site, millions of people all over the world use it to communicate and keep in touch with each other. Over the past year or two, Facebook has grown significantly and along with it so have the complaints. Facebook has been banned in some countries because it allows people to express their opinions, others refuse to use it because of it’s privacy settings and many workplaces ban it because it distracts employees.

However at the end of the day, Facebook is a great social networking site, and for once some positive news has come out of it.

A California mother whose children were kidnapped 15 years ago has been reunited with them through Facebook. An unnamed San Bernardino woman lost her son and daughter in 1995 when her then-husband made off with the 2- and 3-year-old toddlers and said she would never see them again.

According to KCCI.com, the mother began searching for her teenage daughters on Facebook, and eventually she found them in Central Florida. She then added her daughter as a friend and they began messaging back and fort.

Once the mother was certain this was her daughter, she immediately contacted the San Bernardino Deputy,Attorney Kurt Rowley.

Utrera, the Father was then arrested and is now charged with two counts of kidnapping, and two counts of violating child custody orders. The children were then placed in the custody of the Department of Children and Families and since the father was in jail, the custody of the two teenagers was given to the Mother.

It just goes to show how much the internet has exploded in the last number of years, it has come from something that only geeks and nerds would use with there 56K modems to something that the whole world uses in every day life. And as we can see, social networking sites like Facebook can do more than just waste your time, but can actually reunite families.

Source:

MSNBC

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Former US President George ‘Dubya’ Bush has created himself an account on Facebook, as reported by the BBC, and  he was ‘liked’ by 20,000 fellow facebookers within the first few hours.

Some people though are calling on the real George W Bush to stand up, after his first post was written in the third-person.

"He has visited 20 states and 8 countries; given over 65 speeches; launched the George W Bush Presidential Center; participated in 4 policy conferences through The Bush Institute; finished the first draft of his memoir, "Decision Points"; and partnered with (former) President Clinton to establish the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund"

The post, detailing the things he’s been doing since leaving office, and obviously omitting riding horses, sleeping and playing golf read like an entry in Who’s Who rather than a blog post.

Within only a few hours groups had opened on the social networking site complaining, some entitled "This isn’t really you…" and "Change your profile pic, sir".

Ordinarily I would scoff at such events but one Facebook user summed it all up rather poignantly.

"I do wish that the REAL George W Bush would write something to the US people. I’m disappointed that everything is filtered through a media representative. Please connect with us."

Facebook is, after all a social networking site first and an advertising medium second.  Besides what, if anything, would the former President have to advertise now?  His charitable work has already had Facebook groups for some considerable time.

There’s no word yet on whether this is the real George W Bush, let’s wait for a few posts to see if his inimitable ‘style’ bleeds through.  He could yet as popular the the most genuine political leader in social networking, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who signed up to Twitter last month.

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The internet has become an integral part of how we communicate in such a short period of time. From the early days of BBS and email, through the era of IRC and web forums, to today where social networking has become a part of everyone’s life.

I am so connected I swear, somedays I fantasize about unplugging and moving to a remote cabin with a wood burning stove. If I am not on a computer, I am near one. If I am not on a computer, chances are pretty good there is a smartphone in my hand. The upside is that communication and information are free and fast. The downside is that, well maybe we don’t mind our manners when communicating on the internet.

Usenet was a fertile ground for communication in the nascent days of the web. It’s also the place where the terms “troll” and “flame” originated. Usenet soon devolved into a worldwide food fight where noise was the norm, and sooner or later everyone left.

I really felt that web forums and blogs did a much better, if extremely decentralized, job of providing platforms for discussion. The ability to moderate discussions, when used, eliminates the noise and removes the fun for those less socially developed. However, you can’t moderate to the point of censorship.

Social networking sites also provide a platform for communication with your friends and acquaintances. Facebook is a useful tool, as important as email really. It’s also an area where bad behavior is exhibited. Some people can not discuss a topic with someone on the other side of an issue, and Facebook is no different from any other platform. I have defriended people who displayed that they were incapable of intelligently carrying on a discussion. You don’t need to agree with me, but you do need to present your argument rationally, listen to the other side attentively, and then politely deconstruct those areas you disagree with. It’s a harsh enough world. I don’t need the aggravation of getting flamed on my own Facebook wall.

Is the problem people in general? Are some of us simply so incapable of empathy that we can’t even speak to each other?

Or is the problem the platform? Do people on the web feel a sense of imperviousness sitting safely behind their monitors? Is the lack of confrontation and consequences a license to be an ass? Is anonymity a shield for cowards.

I don’t know. I can relate to some degree. I know that sometimes you read something that is just so blatantly wrong or stupid that it feels great to say so. I do this all the time, crafting often witty and always cutting replies.

The difference is that as an adult and a responsible citizen of both my real and virtual communities I delete those replies after I have written them. It’s called taking the “high road”, and as an adult you are better off doing so. Maybe someday Gawker Media will figure that out.

We all know that employers are increasingly turning to the web to find out more about prospective employees. Do you communicate on the web using your actual identity, or an alias? If, like me, you use your actual identity, there is a document of everything you say out there. Think about what kind of person someone who doesn’t know you is going to think you are if they Google your name.

Most of all, take the high road. The web is such a more useful place when people talk like they would if you met them in person.

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If you have ever wondered how you could use your e-mail to send or receive tweets. A new application, Tweety Mail, lets you do just that.

TweetyMail is Twitter over email. Yes, it’s simple. You can even eliminate using the Twitter client. So how does it work? Well, its all about shooting off an e-mail. So if you want a Twitter list of the latest tweets from the people you follow, you just send an email. Soon you will get a reply with the tweets. Tweet yourself? Just shoot off another email. Or what if you want to follow someone new? That’s another email. Retweet? That’s another e-mail.

Tweety - e-mail

This operation works because every Twitter action has a different TweetyMail email address. If I want to send a Direct Message to a user, I would email that username to message@tweetymail.com. And if I want to unfollow a user, for example, I would simply email that username to unfollow@tweetymail.com. And so on.

How To Tweet

.

For this operation to work, you need to connect your email account to TweetyMail. When you have done that and verify the connection, the Tweety Mail becomes your address, you’re good to go. Yyou can also hook up multiple addresses if you want.

You can have improved follower and direct message notifications. TweetyMail gives you a special address that you have to enter as your main email address on Twitter.com. In TweetyMail’s new follower notification email system you will get things such as a one-click follow, a full biography, and the most recent tweets. It’s a better system than what Twitter itself gives you.

Follower Notification

You can set up alerts for tweets from a certain user, or mentions ,or search terms. These will all be sent to your email address until you deactivate them.

Source: Tweety Mail

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The internet phenomenon that is Twitter doesn’t seem to be letting up any time soon as it continues to grow and grow with more and more tweets every second. Up to now Twitter has been content to just let users tweet out their every meal,movement and emotion without ever looking for anything in return. Twitters venture capitalists just kept investing the money without any source of immediate return, but now it looks like Twitter has a couple of new tricks up it’s sleeve to make a bit of cash for itself.

Promoted Tweets

Twitter is looking towards “Promoted Tweets” as a means of making some money. At last weeks “Chirp” conference, Twitter announced this new feature that shouldn’t affect users too much. It’s fairly unintrusive compared to some other traditional ad units.

Businesses and the like can create a campaign of tweets which will be shown in search results. For example say you do a search for “iPod Touch” then in the search result of tweets, you may get a sponsored tweet from Apple with a link to buy an iPod Touch.

These tweets will more than likely appear at the top or towards the top of search results and will be judged by their resonance. It’s kind of like CTR but also includes favourites and retweets. If a tweet is found to have resonance, it will remain; if it doesn’t resonate, it will quickly fade away, to be replaced with another, even from another vendor in another campaign. “Resonance” is dictated by the number of times users interact with the ad, how often they’re retweeted, favorited, and interacted with, including coming up in topics and other metrics.

Mobile Apps

Twitter are also working on getting their very own Twitter apps out there. While there are a whole rake of third party applications out there for iPhone, Blackberry and Android, Twitter want to have their very own. They have just announced a Twitter app for Blackberry and they also have plans for an iPhone and Android one further down the road.

Geo-Tagging

Twitter have now also unveiled a new feature called “Places” which will allow users to better see where tweets are coming from. Twitter will keep a database of restaurants, bars, parks, stations and other public arenas and will then try and work out where a tweet is coming from. Users will also be able to tag the location of tweets.

Archives

Twitter has decided to sell it’s archive of tweets to the Library of Congress, making them searchable on Google. So that means that every single tweet you have ever “tweeted” will be available, you may learn to regret some of your tweets!

All public tweets, dating back to the very first one on March 21, 2006, are now hosted in the government’s Library of Congress.

Live Search

And finally, Tweets from twitter will now start showing up in Bing as live results which continually update, this feature has been available in Google for a while now as well.

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If you’ve been to Craigslist, you know that one of its best features is that different cities or states are identified so you can access goods or services in that region.  Now imagine Twitter, with it’s 140 character limit, and the hundreds or thousands of followers; all looking at each other or at least that is the theory. But what if you could break down your Twitter followers by region so that in some ways it was like Craigslist. Well that is what Anttenna is trying to do.

The Anttenna service, which is in limited locations like Seattle, San Diego, Las Vegas and Austin is a free iPhone app. It is like Craigslist, Foursquare, and Twitter all rolled into one. The business goal is to create a new form of classified advertising, something like “mobile microlistings” that are targeted to a user’s location.

Anttenna in Action

For example, if you are looking for tickets for a sporting event in your city, use the app to communicate with other local users of the app, to buy the tickets.

Like Twitter, the listings through Anttenna are limited to 140 characters. The company has designed the program service to follow Twitter. Complete strangers who are not following one another on the social networking site can interact with one another in order to facilitate a deal. This is called ”Anttweeting.”

Anttenna Examples

The company plans to make money through a premium subscription service in which “power sellers” are able to predetermine the times that they want listings to automatically appear in the Anttenna marketplace.

The basic plan is free, followed by a mid-tier offering of $15 per month, and a higher-tier set costing $25 per month. Other pay systems are being looked at like a system similar to eBay, or a paid listing service where users could pay an extra fee to highlight their listing within the app.

The small number of locations using the service is is few todate. The went live in San Diego a few weeks ago and launched in Seattle last week; the company is targeting a larger nationwide push in early May.

Source: Anttenna

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On Tuesday, if you were an apps developer for Facebook and also for iPhone, you suddenly found your credentials deleted by Facebook, without explanation. As reported on C-net developers, without warning, found that their apps credentials had been removed, so their apps on Facebook were no longer working.

The problem is with apps using the name “Facebook.” Facebook did not like that especially if tied to an iPhone app. Developers suddenly could not access their API’s leaving the apps in a non working condition.

Some developers  tried to contact Facebook. A few were told about the word problem but not given any time to fix it. Others were not given any time at all. Others changed the name of their app to comply with what they were told about the name issue. One developer changed the name of his app from Emoti for Facebook to Emoti.

The app was changed from Emoti for Facebook to Emoti

How the problem started

For the most part, Facebook simply took the position that it was acting to protect it’s own interests on the matter. Apparently this goes back to the day that the iPad was released.

“On day one of iPad there was some app called “Facebook” for $3 which wasn’t really the app from Facebook itself, but some dude making a quick buck. Apparently some big wig then issued instructions “clear up our name usage on iPad/iPhone” and someone else implemented it via:

SEND_TAKEDOWN_NOTICE(query(“SELECT * FROM apps WHERE name LIKE ‘%facebook%’”)).”

That got the ball rolling.

The real issue with this application is that people who went and downloaded the application might believe that they were getting an official Facebook application. But they were not. The problem was compounded in that it not only starts off with the Facebook name it also had a similar logo. Additionally, it did not specifically state that was not an official app. While Facebook may be considering the development of an iPad app, this one is certainly not it. Apparently a developer made money from selling this app since it was in the top 10 paid iPad applications for the past a day or so.

The Facebook logo on the App that caused the problem

Source: HackerNews

Source: AllFacebook

Source C-Net.com

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Today Microsoft held their very own ” Time to Share ” event today, while they didn’t receive much attention when they announced the event pretty much at the same moment Apple announced there’s, they have got a a fair bit of coverage today. They finally announced their much rumoured ” Project Pink ” mobile phones, which have been appearing in leaks all over the web.

First off the devices have been called Kin One and Kin Two, secondly Microsoft launched these two products in a nightclub, so I think you can figure out for yourselves who their target market is.

First off we have the short and rounded Kin One

And secondly we have the larger, Kin Two

These phones are destined for those who want to broadcast every single little thing they are doing throughout the day. Be it a Facebook status update, a simple quick tweet or uploading a photo, these phones are aimed at you, the “lifecasters” as Microsoft’s Robbie Bach called them.

While you can get social network features on many phones, on the Kin it’s different, it’s practically built around social networking. So much that sharing has it’s very own dedicated green button and the whole Kin experience is based around social networking. The target demographic is men and women between 15 and 30, said Bach, who runs Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices unit. No surprises there anyway.

The devices are made by Sharp and Verizon will be the carrier of these devices which are expected to land next month, however no date has been announced, either has pricing.

The two devices are somewhat similar spec wise, both are touchscreen sliders running the same software. The larger Kin Two has a better camera (8 mega pixels versus 5 mp), double the memory (8GB vs. 4GB), and a bigger screen. They both have WiFi and Bluetooth and sliding QWERTY keyboards. Microsoft have stressed that these aren’t a hit at the iPhone and they don’t plan on competing with it. They are planning on using Windows Phone 7 to make an impact on the iPhone and Apple instead.

Furthermore, these two devices don’t even have their own app store, but Microsoft and Verizon can push updates and add-ons over the air if they wish to add more to the applications.

So what is so great about these phones? Well they have the Zune service built into them. This means the phones can play Zune video and music that is loaded onto the device from a PC, and Kin owners can also stream music over the air while they’re on the go.

The browser has also had a facelift and is similar to that found on the Zune HD with support for Pinch to Zoom and search for local and web services is also built in with it’s own dedicated search button.

As I said Verizon are due to get the devices in May and Vodafone have signed up to be the European carrier for a launch sometime in the fall.

So there you go, Microsoft’s latest addition to the smartphone market, or are they just social networking phones?

Let us know what you think in the comments

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Social Engineering Networks are very popular today. Twitter, probably the best known, offers unique opportunity’s  for users to exchange information not only with each other, but also to resolve issues. Such is the case with Firefox trying an experiment in social networking.

Starting next week Firefox users will be able to receive technical support from Firefox through twitter. According to the SOMA blog FireFox intends to offer technical assistance. The origins of their concern comes when Firefox users experience a problem, they might post a tweet to express their frustration bypassing SUMO to getting help with their issue.  Firefox looks bad… there is a problem…users don’t find resolution… and users complain.

To that end Firefox intends a three stage process to eliminate the problem. First they hope to reach users who need help. If a snippet can solve their problem. They want to reach close to 100% of all users. Users can twitter their problem to Firefox, and they will respond, presumably, within a short period of time. Second they want to get a better understanding of the current public perception of Mozilla Firefox, and the biggest or most frequent problems users experience, and act upon that information. The old cliche about bad publicity not hurting doesn’t really apply to software products, or for that matter any consumer product. Finally, they want to prevent issues from spiraling out of control by intercepting and channeling those issues in the direction of SUMO if help is not possible through Twitter. In other words, if the 140 character twit cannot resove their problem they will be redirected to the SUMO blog page.

At present they want to start with objectives 1 and 3, since they are connected together and, moreover, can be handeled with a minimal use of tools. They are prepared to pursue a test run with a small Firefox team over the period of a week. The purpose is to gather information about collaboration in a social media setting.

Twitter is the launch point since it is the most open social network platform available, What they learn will determine how to continue the process. Other social network processes may be in the horizons, but for now, it is twitter.

Source SUMO Blog

Mozilla Wiki

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Facebook has become the social networking tool. MySpace may have led the way. Twitter has its own niche. Facebook hits on too many cylinders to go anywhere any time soon.

It’s a communication tool. Through Facebook you can keep tabs on your friends and acquaintances. You can reconnect with people you haven’t seen for a long time. You can share what you are doing and thinking through Facebook status updates. It’s blogging for everyman. That is why 400 million people have signed up.

Facebook is as private or public as YOU set it to be. However, you have no control what someone you have given permission to see your Facebook entries does with that information. Despite all the steps you have taken that your Facebook profile is viewable only by your Facebook friends, you can’t be 100% sure.

I think most Facebook users are unaware of the privacy settings Facebook offers. Every day we see new headlines on how some idiot lost their job or got arrested due to their Facebook activity. You can’t feel too sorry for someone who posts volatile or criminal material on a public Facebook profile, but at the same time how would you like something you said on Facebook to come back and haunt you, even after you had taken every precaution to make your Facebook activity private?

Employers are now looking at Facebook and Twitter accounts. Whether you’re a prospective or current employee, your online activities may be scrutinized. Of course, the only way to make sure that social networking has no negative impact on your professional life is to not use social networking sites. In today’s world, Facebook is almost as important as email, so that may no longer be a viable option for most.

I can’t give up my Facebook account. It is too important a communication tool for me. I can limit the number of friends I have on Facebook to people that actually are friends, eliminating coworkers and acquaintances that aren’t really necessary.

The most important thing to remember is that Facebook is the internet, whatever level of privacy you may think it offers. When communicating on the internet you should generally try to be somewhat discreet, the same as you would be when conducting any conversation in public. Ask yourself if certain topics are appropriate for Facebook and the answer is “No”.

Do I like the idea of my employer or a prospective employer trying to access my Facebook profile? Of course not. They have no business looking into my private life. Facebook is part of my social life and should have nothing to do with my professional life. At the same time I suppose that an employer needs to avail themselves of every tool possible so they don’t hire a screwball, or have employees that bring discredit to their name via their internet activity. It is what it is, and there isn’t anything you can do about it but live a transparent lifestyle that invites scrutiny.

Is the line between our social and professional lives becoming dangerously blurry?

How would you feel about being sat down by your boss, losing a job, or losing out on a job you really wanted because of Facebook?

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Facebook is rapidly growing, back in April 2009 they had 200 million users, now they have over 400 million active users. More than 50% of these users log on to their Facebook accounts every day and I’m sure there’s a large number of people who log on several times a day. Well it seems these figures are really starting to make an impact on web traffic trends.

For the first time in history, the world’s largest social networking site managed to surpass Google in terms of web traffic.

According to the research firm, Hitwise – Facebook accounted for 7.07 percent of visits in the week ended March 13, topping Google.com’s 7.03 percent.

Facebook has managed to triple the number of visits to its site compared to last year. Google on the other hand has only managed to see a 9% growth in its traffic figures.

Now bear in mind that Facebook hasn’t completely wiped Google off the number one spot because they have multiple other branches of their main site Google.com like Google.ca, Google.co.uk, Google.ie etc…. and if we look at the top 20 sites we see several of these are in there.

Facebook easily beats all the other social networks out there, with the nearest competitors being Twitter and My Space who just about make the top 20 sites.

Google obviously see Facebook as a threat since they recently announced Google Buzz to try and get in on the whole social networking scene but it doesn’t appear to have taken off too well. It’s now reported that Google are working on a separate version of Buzz that’s not incorporated into Gmail in another attempt to put a dent in Facebook.

But for now I don’t see that happening any time soon but it will be interesting to see how the next few months pan out and if Facebook can retain the number one spot or is this just a once off occurrence.

Hard to believe Facebook was founded by a university student back in 2004 when you look at how successful it is today.

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I need to vent some bile at the latest stupidity on Facebook to catch my attention: the proliferation of apps and groups that claim to give the user the ability to see who has been looking at their profile info.

First of all, Facebook is an important communication tool. It has become, for me, as important as my email and feeds. Aside from the obvious benefit of being able to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances, Facebook allows you to re-establish connections that have been severed over the years, and via Facebook chat you have another tool which makes it easy to get in touch with friends. Maybe your friends have never used AIM, ICQ or any of the other instant messaging apps, but everyone uses Facebook. I use Facebook chat all the time to talk to my wife. It’s faster than email, and I can usually find her on Facebook thanks to her Farmville addiction. I recently installed a patch for my phone’s operating system that adds Facebook chat functionality to my phone’s texting program.

So I don’t have an anti-Facebook bent. It’s a valuable social tool and I use it.

The Facebook phenomenon this week that is drawing my ire are the apps and groups that claim to give the user the ability to see who has been looking at their profile. Let me address this idiocy:

For God’s sake, I hope someone is looking at my profile information. That’s why I put it there. I have my Facebook permissions set so that only friends can see my info, my posts, my pictures, everything. Presumably I want the people I have friended to have access to all of these. Presumably all of my friends are smart enough to realize that they should have their privacy settings toggled to friends-only as well.

It’s a social networking site, stupid. If you are that worried about who is looking at your profile then perhaps you shouldn’t be on Facebook at all. Delete your account and sit in your house with the curtains drawn and don’t answer the phone.

Any questions?

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This is a big article, but for the time being I am just going to set this up and let you watch the video.

My friend Andrew posted the following link last night on Facebook. I watched it with my morning coffee, email, RSS and podcasts. Really good stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMLtwJGA4Wc

Who would have predicted the massive impact of Farmville, for Christ’s sake? These guys are printing their own money. It must shake game developers to the very core and make them question all their existing knowledge on game design.

Here’s the deal. I am 44, today in fact. Feel free to use the comments section to give me a great orgy of birthday wishes. Anyway, I grew up in a world where information came from print media. Computers barely did anything.

Everything has changed, and I am connected in ways that I could never have imagined 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even 5 years ago. The internet and technology is a bullet train that is not going to stop for me, you or anyone to figure it out, so you better be quick on your feet and you better be paying attention.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GaqoE_qLCs

I wouldn’t trade any of it. All of this does enrich my life in terms of access to information and connectivity with my friends and family.

BUT

…is it driving us away from the real world? Can all of this obscure our connection to the things in life we really need to be connected to? Yes, and I think we all need to be aware of how our electronic and analog lives intertwine and exercise great care that we don’t abandon the real for the electronic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lTprV-dRmY

If you have any interest at all in gaming, technology or social media, please take the time to sit down and watch these three videos. It’s Jason Schell, who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and it’s the most compelling presentation on the above topics that I’ve seen. Thought provoking doesn’t do it justice, just watch.

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If you’ve been following you know I bought into Palm last month when I chose a Palm Pre Plus over iPhone or Android. First of all, I have no regrets. I love this device. However, this week you’d be hard pressed to not feel that Palm is circling the toilet bowl. Media coverage has been pretty good regarding all the various investment houses and financial analysts downgrading Palm stock to “steaming pile of poo”.

Palm released their new Facebook app last night, and it is a massive improvement over their previous try. Fortunately for Palm users Facebook Mobile is about as good as mobile web design gets, because the previous Palm Facebook app displayed the News Feed, and that’s it. The new app has a fresh look, and gives you access to just about everything you need to do on Facebook minus Facebook Chat, accepting and sending requests from within the app (it launches a browser window) and the games. Nicely done.

Unfortunately for Palm it is going to take a lot more than a nice revision to the Facebook app to sway public perception. I hope they figure it out, because webOS is awesome and deserves success.

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Micrsoft’s next version of Outlook, Outlook 2010, will have social updates built right into it. This would enable the users to keep a tab on the social updates of their contacts. Whilst there have been multiple plugins for Outlook that tie Microsoft’s mail client to various social networks, this is going to be the first time for these features to be built into the application itself. This feature is called Social Connector and currently pulls information and updates from LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. Twitter is conspicuously missing but no conspiracy theories have been reported yet. It will just be added later in all likelihood.

There’s actually already a project like this in the market and it is one that Microsoft actually thought of buying at one point, some two years back. This is a social email project called Xobni and the funny part here is that this is also a plugin for Outlook and not an email client unto itself. With the latest social features taken into account, Outlook is thus actually starting to resemble one of its plugins.

The main purpose of such features inside an email client is to make it easier for the user. Email is as it is an old way of communicating that is just passé in today’s world of real time communication. And the mail client is pretty much a dead box of communiqués that are already old when they are downloaded to the computer. So by having an email client that is connected to the social networks, that dead old place can be made much more useful. Especially in situations when you are composing emails. If you knew your best-friend’s dog had passed away moments ago, you would’ve avoided emailing the cute doggie site you just found out about. And other such faux pas.

The bottom line here is that the web is going real time and social and communication applications like mail clients are especially burdened with keeping up with that trend. Besides, it also help people feel connected and find out relevant information. For example, hyper local news has never been the same after Twitter came on the the scene and that has actually helped out a lot of people. From avoiding traffic jams to being the first to break a major local story, social networks have completely changed the way we communicate.

Social Connector will (thankfully) be compatible with pat versions of Outlook, so those who do not want to upgrade don’t have to feel left behind. This is especially true for enterprise players — businesses are far too slow to administrate IT changes as major as browsers and mail clients. This can be really frustrating for major software vendors like Microsoft — you can’t not think of your biggest clients and yet to keep them in mind you have to slow down advancements. Sad situation really.

Currently, the beta version of the Social Connector features seems to crash prone. Several complaints from users all over the place make that part really clear. For some, Outlook actually stopped working altogether after Social Connector was installed.

The comparison between social connector and Xobni is actually hard to avoid because they do the exact same things. Whilst the logical reasoning would say that a built-in feature would render similar plugins redundant, Xobni might still have the upper hand at this point. Its has an extremely (extremely) loyal user base, it has a faster mail search function than Outlook’s own search and the dev team plans to eventually expand it to other mail clients. Xobni has so far been downloaded over 4 million times. However, the final release of Social Connector might change all of this. So we’ll just have to wait and see.

[read]

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For those of you in a hurry, I’ll just provide the money shot here to save you time: no.

One or two of you may have noticed that Google threw their hat in the social networking ring the other day when they announced Google Buzz.

Normally I pay serious attention when Google does something. They have a track record of doing (or buying) Great Stuff. How many of us are practically dependent on GMail, Reader, YouTube, Calendar, Picasa, Maps, etc.? They also make a pretty darn good web browser. Their smartphone operating system isn’t too shabby either (even if it isn’t as cool as Palm’s webOS). Oh, and I almost forgot, their search engine isn’t too bad either.

Google, like Apple, has done well and has a following because their products tend to be great. Where Apple usually falls into the revolutionary category, Google has masted the evolutionary. In other words, Google has made their bank executing existing ideas better than anyone else. Apple surprised us with iPad, which is an extremely reactionary product.

This is exactly the reason why Microsoft will never be anything but a shadow of their former self, even though the masses will continue to use their desktop os and office suite for the foreseeable future. Microsoft is incapable of creativity. Everything they do is reactionary. Windows. IE. Zune. Xbox. Their embrace of C++ and later C# and .NET. Silverlight. All been done before. They usually hit way off target as well, providing product which really and truly sucks compared to the competition. C’mon fanboy, before you blast me in the comments for saying it, what web browser are you reading this in?

So Google, who usually knows what they’re doing and who has a tendency of creating product that becomes a necessary part of our connected lives is interested in social networking now. Should we care? Should Facebook be scared?

No.

Why did Facebook take off they way it did? Why was Facebook able to knock off My Space?

My Space never attracted the kind of numbers we are seeing on Facebook. Enough people used My Space that it made everyone aware of social networking, but it didn’t execute the idea to the point where it made non-technical types comfortable with it. Facebook made sense to these people. Facebook made it easy to connect with people you knew. The basic design of Facebook is brilliant, because it doesn’t exclude anyone.

Why is going after a slice of that big, big pie a bad idea?

I can think of a few reasons. 400 million reasons actually. That is how many users Facebook is up to now. 400 million.

Why would there be a mass exodus from Facebook when so many people are using it? There won’t be. My Space was different. The people who initially embraced Facebook weren’t necessarily My Space users. Their My Space using friends were ultimately forced to join Facebook as it became apparent that is where the party was at.

400 million. My mom is on Facebook. Most of my friends are. My immediate family is. Most of my co-workers are. Most of the people I pass in the cereal aisle at Wal-Mart are.

It’s too much. Facebook is here to stay. Google can hope to knock off, oh I don’t know, maybe FriendFeed with Buzz, but Facebook is untouchable. In addition, not everyone is using GMail, so Google needs people to join just to use Buzz. Not gonna happen.

Bad try. Go back to the drawing board and come back with something useful Google. Here are some ideas:

• Make my GMail contacts sync with my Facebook friends info. Currently my phone does this better than any other solution. In fact, it blew my mind. My entire adult life as a computer user I have never once bothered populating my address book. Palm’s webOS Contacts populates itself from the accounts you add to it (GMail, Facebook) and it works exactly the way it should. I have a pretty complete address book for the first time, and I can sync it to GMail. Perfect. There is some poor excuse for a Facebook app that does this, but not really. How about just making it part of GMail?
• I know zero people that use Google Talk. Facebook chat is horrible, but again, it’s where your 400 million closest friends already are. I never bothered with ICQ or AIM, but if I see one of my friends on Facebook while I’m on I actually use Facebook chat sometimes. Integrate it in Talk. It’s a start.
• The whole idea behind Buzz is not a bad one. Make Buzz a feed for all of your social media. Integrate Twitter and Facebook like the 1000 other integrated solutions do, and keep the ability to add websites. Buzz could equal Facebook+Twitter+RSS+Instant Chat+Email+SMS+etc…Buzz could actually become a very useful social networking tool if it is refined properly. All of your social networking in one spot.
• Forget the above. Just quit screwing around and buy Facebook. Then you can integrate what Facebook does with your existing services and we will never have to have this discussion again.

Do you need to rush to populate your Buzz follow list lest you miss the social networking revolution? Uh, no. It will be interesting to see if Google can refine it into usefulness. I have a feeling they will figure out something, and you can be sure that Adsense and Adwords will play a role.

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According to the New York Times, Google are looking into getting into the social networking market in a big way with Gmail. Google hopes to ride on the wave surrounding social networking at the moment with the likes of Twitter and Facebook dominating these areas. Google is looking to use Gmail as it’s means for squeezing its way into this market.

Gmail is a very popular web based email service which is rapidly growing and it would be the perfect place for Google to try and establish some presence in the whole social network market. Later this week, Google are set to unveil some add-ons for Gmail which will let people post and view messages about their day-to-day activities, according to a source at Google briefed on its plans.

This minor little update will allow users to post their status updates within Gmail which is exactly what has driven the explosive growth of Twitter and Facebook over the last number of years. The main reason for there success is because people feel inclined to keep returning back over and over again to check if there’s any new status updates from their friends.

To date, all you can do is post a brief message about your status through the built in Gmail Chat system, but this doesn’t have the same effect . The new features would allow a more vibrant back-and-forth exchange among Gmail users.

However, it is not clear to date whether or not Google will add functionality and support for other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. I think if Google really want to get more and more people using Gmail, they need to give users a reason to move to it. I’m not currently aware of any major web based email service that has support for Facebook, Twitter etc…

I’m not so sure though as the whether or not I would like to see social networking come into my Gmail account. I use Gmail because it’s clean and uncluttered and isn’t filled with pointless status updates and notifications every time my friend does something. Gmail has less distractions and allows you to get things done without drifting off to check your friends status updates.

And that leads me onto another topic, are Google trying to take on more than they can handle? I think it’s great that they are diversifying themselves to other areas apart from search, but do they need to dominant in every field of the web? I don’t think so, I like a bit of variety with the services I use, but that’s an article for another time.

Do you think Google will make any impact on the social networking market with this move?

Let us know in the comments

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Please excuse the dreadful pun but it does reveal some truth. Facebook the worlds most popular social networking site with over 400 million users has begun rolling out a new version of it’s homepage to users since Thursday. The redesign was passed on to the first group of 80 million Facebook users on the 4th February, which was Facebooks 6th Birthday. The main goal of this update is to make it easier for users to access their favorite features without having to jump from pages to pages.

A guide to Facebook's new home page (Credit: Facebook)

The top menu of Facebook now makes it easier for users to see requests and notifications which you used to have to go digging through menus in the past to find. The icons now turn into convenient red bubbles to alert you whenever you have a notification, otherwise they remain as faded icons.

The middle search field is now also greatly improved. Type the name of a friend, for example, and you’ll find recent posts, photos, and other content for that person. Type the name of a subject, such as Haiti earthquake, and you’ll also find groups and pages devoted to that cause. On the left hand side of your homepage online chat contacts are displayed as well as games and your bookmarked applications.

But there’s more, Facebook are also reportedly working on their own webmail service which is said to rival the likes of Gmail and Hotmail. It’s known internally as Project Titan, and would see users rid of the rather bloated Facebook messaging service that’s currently available, and replace it with a full featured webmail service.

It’s is expected to include full search features and include the ability to import other email accounts into it. And according to other reports, Facebook are looking to take on full POP/IMAP support, meaning you’ll be able to access your account on your phone or through a service like Outlook Express or Entourage.

It sounds like it will attempt to take a direct hit at the likes of Gmail and Hotmail, and reports suggest that email accounts will be username@facebook.com. We are yet to hear of a date when this will be introduced.

We’ve also been told that the Facebook image uploader tool will be revamped as well.

The prototype image uploader was first announced in November of last year but Facebook are now saying that it’s on its way to users soon.

Unlike the current version of Facebook’s photo uploader, the new uploader requires the installation of a browser plug-in. However users can now leave Facebook while their photos continue to upload in the background. Currently you have to leave a window opening when uploading photos to Facebook.

They have also announced that more file formats will be supported, while we’ve yet to receive an official list, we know that .jpg, .gif, .bmp, and .png files will work.

Facebook currently gets 2.5 billion photo uploads per month. To put that in perspective, the company hit the 10 billion mark in October of 2008,  three years after first introducing the photo-sharing feature in 2005. So it seems that Facebook photo sharing features seem to be very popular, and no doubt this update will make it easier and more convenient for users to upload photos.

And if you want to try out this new feature for yourself before it’s officially introduced, you can turn it on at Facebook’s prototype page.

So what do you think of these new Facebook updates? Are you finding Facebook easier to use now, or are you completely lost now when you log onto your Facebook homepage?

What do you think of a new webmail service from Facebook? Would you use it?

Let us know in the comments.

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The Twitter revolution took off last year with millions of users tweeting their thoughts to the world, the majority of them complete rubbish. I really don’t care that you had cornflakes for breakfast or that your coffee was cold, I’ve a lot more things to worry about in life which are actually important. But Twitter continues to grow, maybe not as fast as it was but it still has millions of users and thats a big audience that you can promote yourself and your products to.

Everybody is trying to get as many followers as they possibly can on Twitter so they can market their product, website or blog. There are countless schemes out there that people try and actually spend money on in order to get a couple of thousand followers on Twitter. Desperate Twitters can spend hours following every random person in the hope that they get some follows back, and yes while this does increase your followers, they’re generally not your target audience.

But there is away to promote yourself on Twitter without having thousands of followers, and whats more you will be promoting yourself to your target audience.

It’s quite simple really just follow these steps:

On the Twitter homepage there is a search bar, it’s also on your twitter profile page.

So for example, say your trying to promote a page you have on a review of “Call Of Duty” or your trying to sell “Call Of Duty” merchandise. Simply type in ” Call Of Duty ” into the search bar ( you can add -http to prevent other links from showing up )

This search will bring up a list of people talking about your chosen topic, so obviously they have some interest in it, therefore they are your target market.

Stalicious1 for example is playing COD on the PS3,

Let’s just say I’m selling some PS3 headsets on my site, I simply reply to his tweet with the link to my site

And there you have it, it’s as easy as that, “Stalicious1″ will now see this reply on his twitter page, and so will everyone else who visits his page and the chances are you will get a few clicks and maybe even some sales.

Do this with multiple users, people are more likely to read and pay attention to their @ replies more than private messages that you send them, also everyone else can see their @ replies, giving you even more exposure. Even more you may get some extra followers as well.

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