Published by rwatstein July 26th, 2008
in social networking and Facebook.
Facebook rolled out a major redesign of its social networking site late July 20 featuring a cleaner interface that links feed technology with user forums. Company officials said the updated site will give users more control and ownership over their profiles. The new version, now in limited use, will be rolled out gradually to Facebook’s 80 million users. The new look is all about the Wall, the blank space on a profile page that users can fill in with stories, photos, links, and the ever-popular Status Updates.
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Published by rwatstein July 12th, 2008
in Facebook and gaming.
As Facebook has blossomed into a hot Internet hangout, its users have passed countless hours playing Scrabble with friends — or at least, an unauthorized version of the word game that Scrabble’s owners have tried to shut down. Now a video game maker will try to legitimize the activity.
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Published by rwatstein March 23rd, 2008
in education and Facebook.
A chemical engineering student in Toronto faces expulsion from his school for running an online study group through Facebook. Chris Avenir, a first-year student at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, said he joined the social networking group in fall 2007 to get help with the homework in one of his chemistry classes. Eventually, he became the administrator for the network, which grew to include 146 students. The homework questions counted for 10 percent of the grade in the class. When an administrator discovered the group and informed the professor, Avenir received an F and was charged with academic misconduct, punishable by expulsion. An appeal filed last week was to be settled this week by the campus.
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Published by rwatstein March 23rd, 2008
in social networking, Facebook and MySpace.
In the two-horse race of social networking in the United States, it doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. A recent study of Americans between the ages of 13 and 42 found that 62 percent have accounts on both Facebook and MySpace, and most don’t plan on giving up one site for the other any time soon. The study was commissioned by Fuser, the Web communications aggregator that launched to the public last June, with the stated mission to simplify people’s digital lives. With a new social networking widget, Fuser believes it’s doing just that.
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Published by rwatstein March 23rd, 2008
in social networking, privacy and Facebook.
Facebook Inc. is tweaking the privacy settings on its popular online hangout to let users exert greater control over which of their friends are allowed to see personal details they post. The Palo Alto-based company said it would add features that will give its 67 million active users the option of selecting individual users who can or can’t access certain parts of their pages.
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All those hours spent watching videos about cats with 1000 faces have obviously paid off, with YouTube now the most popular social networking site in Britain, knocking Wikipedia off the prestigious perch. During the month of January, YouTube had a 56% increase in traffic compared to January 2007, with 10.4 million unique users from the UK, and Wikipedia managing to attract a paltry 9.6 million. Nielsen Online claims that Facebook had 8.5 million from the UK, as well.
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in social networking and Facebook.
When Mark Zuckerberg was 19 and a student at Harvard University, he wanted to find a way for his fellow Harvard colleagues to connect with each other. Today, the social networking site has more than 60 million active members, roughly the same population as the U.K. These users can now upload photos, have group discussions, and even play games on their individual profiles; they can also add one another as “friends” and connect with users who share similar interests, regardless of where they are in the world. Nowadays, more businesses and corporate folks are joining Facebook too, adding their pages to the Facebook network. Advertisers are even turning their attention to this growing market for good reason—there is strength in numbers. So what should you know about Facebook? Here are 10 things for starters.
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in social networking and Facebook.
A French-language Facebook site went recently hot on the heels of German and Spanish versions of the Internet social networking giant. US-based Facebook produced the site with the help of 4,000 French users, who suggested ways to translate the network’s jargon and voted for the best choice.
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Published by rwatstein March 3rd, 2008
in social networking and Facebook.
Facebook has a new look and this year it seems tabs are all the rage, with the social network rolling out its redesign over the next few weeks. According to Facebook, the redesign was prompted by a need to better organize the fast-growing explosion of information now available on the site. “As more and more information is available on Facebook — more photo albums, more applications and more history — we’ve realized that profiles have become cluttered and slow as a result,” a Facebook statement read. “We’re trying to make profiles more simple and relevant, while still giving you control over your profile and how you express yourself.”
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College students still can’t get enough of Facebook. According to Youth Trends’ February 2008 “Top Ten List Report,” Facebook was students’ favorite Web site for the seventh straight quarter.
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The idea of a social graph–a representation of a person’s network of friends, family, and acquaintances–gained currency last year as the popularity of online social networks grew: Facebook, for example, claims to have more than 64 million active users, with 250,000 more signing up each day. It and other sites have tried to commercialize these social connections by allowing outside developers to build applications that access users’ networks. Facebook also advertises to a user’s contacts in accordance with the user’s online buying habits. The push to understand the nature and potential value of links between people online has led to imaginative ways to represent such networks. Here, we look at some of them.
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Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008
in social networking and Facebook.
Barbara Fister writes, “My corner of the Internet has been abuzz over a muckraking article that recently appeared in The Guardian on the subject of Facebook. Tom Hodgkinson, the highly principled slacker behind The Idler and author of How to Be Free, makes some familiar complaints: online friends are a pale imitation of face-to-face relationships, Facebook encourages high-schoolish obsession with popularity, it prompts its members to reveal too much about themselves, and it uses that information for commercial gain. But the article goes further. Facebook is not just an American-owned company with global ambitions. According to Hodgkinson, it’s highly influenced by a “neocon activist” board member and funded by a venture capital firm that has ties to the CIA. Their ultimate aim: “an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodities on sale to giant global brands.” Ironically, The Guardian helpfully provides a “share” link so you can send the article to all of your Facebook friends.
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From politicians to film stars, anyone who was anyone had a Facebook profile. But the social networking phenomenon may have peaked now that the number of British users of the site has fallen for the first time. Analysts are speaking of “Facebook fatigue” after figures showed a 5 per cent decline from 8.9 million unique visitors to the website in December to 8.5 million last month. The fall could be a seasonal dip - Facebook’s audience is still 712 per cent higher than it was a year ago and 9 per cent higher than three months ago.
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Published by rwatstein February 9th, 2008
in Facebook.
Facebook recently unveiled a Spanish version of its hot social-networking website and promised French and German language editions by spring. A software application made freely available lets people opt for Spanish instructions, alerts, news feeds and other information provided by Facebook as part of the user interface.”The beauty of the system is that it can extend to every language possible,” Facebook vice president of strategy and operations Matt Cohler told AFP. Facebook users have always been able to post profiles, messages or other content in their native languages, but the framework for the website was only in English.
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Social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, have been around for less than five years, but they are already very much part of the Web 2.0 revolution taking place right now. Not only are they changing the way people socialize, they are also making traditional businesses sit up and take notice. It is estimated that about 194 million people around the world are managing at least one profile on a social networking site. And with 800 million internet users still not registered with such sites, the potential for growth is overwhelming.
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In the end, the web is about connections. Websites link to resources, resources recommend articles, articles refer to experts. Without links, websites are invisible. Social networks create links between people, forming connections based on interests, expertise, past employment or education, and friendships. Law librarians, while remaining aware of their pitfalls, can use social networks such as LinkedIn, Ning, Facebook, and even MySpace to promote useful websites and legal resources as well their own expertise and interests. Social networks provide law librarians with new avenues for libraries to reach users.
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Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won’t catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site. “…I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?…”
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Published by rwatstein January 12th, 2008
in Facebook.
It sounded like a good idea at first: let Internet users be part of, virtually speaking, the Democratic and Republican presidential debates on Saturday evening by posting comments on a special Facebook message board. But it turned out to be one of those ideas that may be better in theory than in practice. During the East coast broadcast of the debates, Facebook users posted around 35,000 “Soundboard” messages, meaning that at perhaps 50 characters each, that’s some 1.75 million characters to read during an approximately three-hour period. All of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, by contrast, is only 700,000 characters. To read all those messages, at 20 per page, you’d have to refresh your browser’s screen 1,750 times. That’s not even counting comments posted by west coast Facebook users
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Published by rwatstein January 5th, 2008
in Facebook.
Predictions include: 1. Facebook will break the 125 Million User Watermark” and 2. “There will be over 37,000 Different Facebook Applications.”
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Published by rwatstein January 5th, 2008
in Facebook and Canada.
Canadians are the second largest contingent on Facebook, numbering less than the Americans but more than the Brits and the French, according to data from the popular social networking Internet site. Of the 60 million Facebook users around the world, nearly eight million are located in Canada — about a quarter of Canada’s overall population of 33 million, a ratio much higher than that of the United States. Facebook is so popular that authorities in Ontario province, where Toronto is located, have blocked the site for government employees during work hours.
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Published by rwatstein December 29th, 2007
in Facebook and gaming.
Dear Scrabble Word Finder: We have to break up. It’s not you, it’s me. Well, FWIW (sorry, I know you hate it when I use abbreviations), it’s the way we are together. Back when I first added Scrabulous — Scrabble plus fabulous, get it? — to my Facebook page, I didn’t even know you existed. It was one of the most popular applications on Facebook, and I was just one of hundreds of thousands of people playing social-network Scrabble.
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Published by rwatstein December 22nd, 2007
in social networking, Facebook and Canada.
The power of social networking struck the federal government with unmistakable force in December. Industry Minister Jim Prentice had intended to introduce new copyright legislation before Parliament’s holiday break. Professor Michael Geist of Ottawa University believed that Canadians did not know enough about the issue so he launched a Facebook group, Fair Copyright for Canada, on the first of December with, as he wrote, limited expectations. The next two weeks, he wrote, demonstrated that Facebook is “…an incredibly effective and efficient tool that can be used to educate and galvanize grassroots advocacy, placing unprecedented power into the hands of individuals.” An exercise in distance education quickly grew. From a ’seed’ of about 100 invitations, it attracted 10,000 members in a week, 25,000 in two weeks and, Geist wrote, at one point a Canadian was joining every 30 seconds.
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Mention online social networks and the two that readily come to most people’s minds are LinkedIn and Facebook. Why do people prefer Facebook to LinkedIn and vice versa? The NextStage CRO explains.
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MySpace is taking a page from rival Facebook and launching its own version of one of the social network’s most popular services: news feeds that alert users to what their friends are doing. “The concept of a news feed is something we are very focused on, and we’ll be well down the path in the next 30 to 45 days,” FIM chief Peter Levinsohn said at the Reuters Media Summit.
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On October 30th, an association of social network companies headed by Google strategize to begin introducing a common set of standards that shall allow software developers around the world to write programs for Google’s highly popular social network webiste, Orkut, as well as others websites, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning. The approach is aimed at giving boost to development of third party softwares that are a level more than the existing softwares available with Facebook, which last year released its service to outside developers. From the time then, more than 5,000 mini or micro programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and many of which have been adopted by millions of the site’s users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a news feed that alerts Facebook users about the different acts of their friends on Facebook.
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In a world where anyone can collect hundreds of virtual ‘friends’ on websites such as Facebook, the humble dog was in danger of being left behind. But now a social networking site has been set up just for Man’s best friend – and has already attracted tens of thousands of users. Animal-lovers have posted profiles of more than 27,000 pets on DoggySnaps, which fans have cheekily dubbed Facebark
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It’s the Golden Rule of business: it’s not so much what you know, but also who you know. But do you know them on LinkedIn? Friendster? Facebook? MySpace? All of them? Networking is an integral part of doing business, but online networking has changed the rules. Instead of spending (wasting?) hours shmoozing in smoke-filled lounges and cocktail parties, networking is as simple as a search and click to “link” with people.
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Published by rwatstein September 29th, 2007
in social sites, children and Facebook.
Facebook, the second-largest social-networking site, must respond within “a few weeks” to requests by state attorneys general that it do more to protect kids from sexual predators, says Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. “If Facebook slams the door, we would consider legal options,” says Blumenthal, who has negotiated with Facebook. He says the company must verify users’ ages, among other things, and he expects a response within a month.
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Published by rwatstein September 29th, 2007
in social sites, search and Facebook.
Social networking site Facebook, which signs up more than a million new fans every month, has changed tack and begun to publicly list members’ profiles on search engines such as Google and Yahoo! “This move transforms Facebook from being a social network to being quasi-White Pages of the web,” said IT expert Om Malik.
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The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) is pleased to announce Banned Books Week activities for librarians and the general public in virtual worlds Second Life, Teen Second Life and on social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. ALA is working with other library partners to provide an interactive experience centered on Banned Books Week, September 29-October 6, 2007, to help librarians and others to feel comfortable in social networking spaces and to reach out to new audiences. Partners include Alliance Library System, Alliance Second Life Library, TAP Information Services and the new ALA membership group Virtual Communities and Libraries.
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Published by rwatstein September 22nd, 2007
in social sites, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace.
Yahoo Inc. has started testing a social-networking service called Mash, in a challenge to Facebook Inc. and News Corp.’s MySpace. Mash users can add photos and information about themselves to their pages and accept contributions from others, Will Aldrich, who runs Mash, said in a recent blog entry on Yahoo’s Web site. For now, an invitation from a friend is needed to join the system
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