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UK to Twitter, Facebook & RIM: We Won’t Ban Social Media

August 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment


In a meeting Thursday with representatives from Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry-maker RIM, British officials made it clear that they will not restrict social media use during times of chaos.

“This was a dialogue about working together to keep people safe rather than about imposing new restrictions on Internet services,” a Facebook representative said in a statement.

Prime Minister David Cameron gave a reason to fear otherwise when, following riots that swept through the UK earlier this month, he told Parliament that the government was examining whether to ban suspected troublemakers from social media.

In anticipation of the meeting between UK officials and representatives of Twitter, Facebook and RIM — all of which make tools that were used by some to coordinate violence during the riots — human rights groups wrote an open letter to the British Home Secretary regarding Cameron’s comments.

Although fears that the UK would create restrictions on social media were dispelled, there was some conversation about how law enforcement might gain more access to information shared on social networks and between BlackBerry devices.

Gordon Scobbie, a senior police officer who leads the force’s social media efforts and attended the meeting, told The New York Times that Twitter, for example, might consider compelling people to use their real names instead of anonymous handles and that RIM has already agreed to provide the police with information from BlackBerry Messenger under some circumstances.

“When people use a telephone, under certain circumstances, law enforcement has a means of intercepting that,” he told The Times. “Just because it’s different media, we shouldn’t stand back and say, ‘We don’t play in that space.’ ”

Image courtesy of Flickr, Steve Punter

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German State Bans Facebook’s “Like”

August 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment


The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has ordered state institutions to shut down their Facebook Pages and remove the “Like” button from their websites — or face fines.

Schleswig-Holstein’s data-protection commissioner, Thilo Wechert, says that an analysis from his office shows that Facebook builds profiles of both users and non-users with data collected by the Like button, reports the Associated Press. If true, this would violate German and European data protection laws.

In a statement, the data-protection organization urged Internet users “to keep their fingers from clicking on social plugins” like the Like button to avoid being profiled.

“We firmly reject any assertion that Facebook is not compliant with EU data protection standards,” a Facebook spokesperson said in another statement. “The Facebook Like button is such a popular feature because people have complete control over how their information is shared through it. For more than a year, the plugin has brought value to many businesses and individuals every day. We will review the materials produced by the ULD [the data protection agency], both on our own behalf and on the behalf of web users throughout Germany.”

According to Facebook, the only information that the company receives when a user who is not signed in hits the Like button is an IP address.

German regulators have clashed with Facebook before. Earlier this month, the data protection supervisor in Hamburg warned that Facebook’s new automatic photo-tagging feature could violate European privacy laws.

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Federal Judge: Students’ Raunchy Facebook Photos Are Protected by First Amendment

August 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment


A federal judge in Indiana has ruled that students who posted photos of themselves with penis-shaped lollipops on social networks should not have been punished by their school.

“Not much good takes place at slumber parties for high school kids, and this case proves the point,” begins the opinion by the Fort Wayne division of the U.S. District Court, which ultimately ruled that the photos were protected by the first amendment.

It was at several sleepovers where the students, two 10th-grade girls, took photos of themselves with the lollipops and in other fully clothed suggestive positions. They then posted those photos on Facebook, Myspace and Photobucket. When the principal of the high school was alerted to the photos by parents, he suspended both girls from the Volleyball team for violating the school’s extracurricular code of conduct.

The judge ruled on Thursday that the code, which broadly bans “bring[ing] discredit or dishonor upon yourself or your school,” is unconstitutionally vague and that the school violated the girls’ first amendment rights by suspending them.

“Ridiculousness and inappropriateness are often the very foundation of humor,” the opinion states. “The provocative context of these young girls horsing around with objects representing sex organs was intended to contribute to the humorous effect in the minds of the intended teenage audience.”

That court also addressed the somewhat trivial and silly nature of the incident.

“The case poses timely questions about the limits school officials can place on out of school speech by students in the information age where Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, texts, and the like rule the day,” it wrote. “…one could reasonably question the wisdom of making a federal case out of a 6-game suspension from a high school volleyball schedule. But for better or worse, that’s what this case is about and it is now ripe for disposition.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, Thomas Roche

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Facebook: We’re Not Giving Out Your Number

August 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment


Facebook has publicly responded to rumors that it is harvesting numbers from mobile phones and then making them public.

The source of the rumors is a misinterpretation of a feature called “Contacts.” When you download Facebook’s mobile app, this feature syncs your phone’s address book with your profile. From then on you can access all of the numbers in your phone from your Facebook profile.

What has made some users uneasy is this: Contacts uses your mobile phone contacts to match your friends’ Facebook profiles with their numbers. If a friend hasn’t included her number on her Facebook profile, it looks as though Facebook has just given you her number when in reality it came from your own phone.

The feature also uses the numbers in your phone’s contact list to search for potential friends on Facebook. If it finds somebody who has posted a number on Facebook that matches one in your phone book, it will suggest that you add them as a friend.

To see the feature in action on your own profile, go to the Accounts tab at the upper right-hand corner, select “edit friends,” and then choose “contacts” from the menu on the left.

A viral Facebook post warned users that Facebook also posts the numbers it finds on your phone to other users’ Contacts tabs. This is not the case, the company said in a post on its wall late Wednesday.

“Our Contacts list, formerly called Phonebook, has existed for a long time,” the statement says. “The phone numbers listed there were either added by your friends themselves and made visible to you, or you have previously synced your phone contacts with Facebook. Just like on your phone, only you can see these numbers.”

While Facebook says it is not sharing phone numbers collected from mobile phones, its ability to harvest them in this way is still disturbing to some users, who left a total of about 9,000 comments on the message.

“You should have to opt INTO this feature, rather than have it happen automatically and have to uninstall it,” wrote user Heather Hollowell.

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Facebook Reorganizes Your Chat List — Again

August 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment


Facebook‘s chat bar has gone through multiple iterations recently, and today you may have noticed a new format. Friends whose profiles you interact with most often are listed in one section at the top of your list, followed by a section of “more online friends” below.

The changes were implemented Thursday morning in response to user feedback from a redesign of chat in July, says a Facebook spokesperson. About 28,000 people had “liked” a Facebook Page entitled “I hate the new Facebook sidebar chat.”

The redesigned chat now stretches from the top of the browser to the bottom instead of being contained to its previous pop-up box, and until today it showed only a selection of friends instead of everyone who was online.

Prior to July, all online friends appeared in the same bar in alphabetical order. One of the major criticisms of the most recent iteration of the chat bar was that it didn’t show all friends who were online. Today’s update rectifies that by adding the “more online friends” category beneath the friends you interact with the most.

The Facebook spokesperson said this most recent change is not a test.

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Social Network Wars: How The Five Major Platforms Stack Up [INFOGRAPHIC]

August 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Most people don’t have the social steam to power a presence on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr. Sure, there are handy apps like Twitterfeed and Hootsuite that can help spread one post to all of your networks, but that ignores the individual strengths and weaknesses of each platform.

When it comes time to pick and choose where you post, this chart can help you decide what’s appropriate for you.


Infographic design by Emily Caufield.

More About: Google Plus, linkedin, social media, tumblr, twitter

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Facebook Study: Bad Students Chat, Good Ones RSVP [EXCLUSIVE]

August 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment


In the debate over whether social media has a positive or negative effect on education, a new study to be published in Computers & Education has made a refreshing suggestion: Neither. It depends how you use it.

The survey of 2,368 university students looked at how 14 specific behaviors on Facebook – commenting on content, playing games, posting photos — correlated with student engagement on campus and time spent studying. It found that specific behaviors on Facebook were stronger predictors of these types of academic outcomes than measurements like time spent on Facebook.

Playing games on Facebook, for instance, correlated with low scores on a 19-question version of the National Survey of Student Engagement, which measures both participation in campus activities and in the classroom. Creating or RSVPing to Facebook events, on the other hand, correlated with high scores on the same assessment. And although the study found no relationship between time spent on Facebook in general and time spent studying, it did find a negative correlation between Facebook chatting and time spent studying.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that banning Facebook chat will solve a student’s studying challenges.

“We can’t tell the direction of that correlation,” explains Reynol Junco, the author of the study. “Do [some Facebook activities] cause more involvement or does the involvement cause more Facebook?”

More clear is that how Facebook is used, rather than how much, is important in understanding its relationship to education.

“There are still a lot of faculty who feel students using Facebook is bad,” Junco says. “And there are clearly data that show that yes, there are some ways in which it is not good…[But faculty] should be thinking about ways, if not using Facebook in our classes, of helping students use Facebook in some ways that may be more beneficial to their academic outcomes.”

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New Facebook Analytics Tool Digs Deeper Than Insights

August 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment


A webpage owner has seemingly unlimited choice in products that slice and dice information about those who visit her page. Real time? Personal? With a heat map? No problem. Facebook page managers, however, don’t have it as easy.

The Google Analytics of Facebook is called “Insights,” and for someone who is dealing with the typical Facebook fan page, it’s a sufficient meat-and-potatoes analysis tool. PageLever, a Y Combinator startup that launched on Wednesday, is a more elaborate version of Insights for brands that want to get a bit deeper in their analysis — a group of users that so far includes YouTube, Microsoft, Mint and Kayak.

PageLever shows impressions (any time a story loads in a browser, whether on your page or not) for any date range, not just month or week. It separates unique impressions from repeat impressions so that you can see your true reach, and it shows when and where fans “unliked” your page. You can also look at what type of content — photos, video, text or flash — your audience responds to best.

Most of the data, says co-founder Jeff Widman, comes from Insights’ API but is not necessarily visible within the Insights dashboard. Services like Buddy Media and Webtrends already accomplish similar feats with public information and the Insights API, but none to Widman’s knowledge take advantage of the data collected by obtaining permissions from the page administrator using Facebook Connect. This means that the tool can’t be used to measure a competitor’s traffic, but also that PageLever has access to more data.

More data theoretically gives page managers a leg up in Facebook’s somewhat frustrating version of the SEO game.

“Essentially it helps find more eyeballs for your content,” Widman says.

Check out the screenshots below and let us know if you’d find PageLever useful.

























More About: analytics, data, facebook insights, Page lever

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New Facebook Analytics Tool Digs Deeper Than Insights

August 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment


A webpage owner has seemingly unlimited choice in products that slice and dice information about those who visit her page. Real time? Personal? With a heat map? No problem. Facebook page managers, however, don’t have it as easy.

The Google Analytics of Facebook is called “Insights,” and for someone who is dealing with the typical Facebook fan page, it’s a sufficient meat-and-potatoes analysis tool. PageLever, a Y Combinator startup that launched on Wednesday, is a more elaborate version of Insights for brands that want to get a bit deeper in their analysis — a group of users that so far includes YouTube, Microsoft, Mint and Kayak.

PageLever shows impressions (any time a story loads in a browser, whether on your page or not) for any date range, not just month or week. It separates unique impressions from repeat impressions so that you can see your true reach, and it shows when and where fans “unliked” your page. You can also look at what type of content — photos, video, text or flash — your audience responds to best.

Most of the data, says co-founder Jeff Widman, comes from Insights’ API but is not necessarily visible within the Insights dashboard. Services like Buddy Media and Webtrends already accomplish similar feats with public information and the Insights API, but none to Widman’s knowledge take advantage of the data collected by obtaining permissions from the page administrator using Facebook Connect. This means that the tool can’t be used to measure a competitor’s traffic, but also that PageLever has access to more data.

More data theoretically gives page managers a leg up in Facebook’s somewhat frustrating version of the SEO game.

“Essentially it helps find more eyeballs for your content,” Widman says.

Check out the screenshots below and let us know if you’d find PageLever useful.

























More About: analytics, data, facebook insights, Page lever

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Want To See Who Is Viewing Your Facebook Profile?

July 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment


The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: WhoIsLive

Quick Pitch: WhoIsLive lets you see who is viewing the same webpage as you and start conversations with them.

Genius Idea: Making every web page instantly social, with or without the participation of its publisher

What if every web page you visited became an instant chat room? Startup WhoIsLive is launching a browser plugin Tuesday that could become one way to find out.

The Internet Explorer and Firefox plugin creates a browser sidebar that shows you other users who are looking at the same web page. Using the sidebar, you can set a status message that everyone else on the page can see, or you can chat with people individually.

Theoretically, the tool can show you who is viewing your Facebook profile, allow you to ask for guidance from other shoppers on an ecommerce site or be used as a real-time discussion tool on blogs and news sites. The websites’ publishers don’t need to install anything for the plugin chat room to work on their sites.

But there is one rather huge caveat: Users can only see each other, not web browsers who haven’t installed the plugin — which means that a critical mass of users needs to be reached before the tool is useful. And before you can see who is viewing your Facebook profile, you’ll need to make yourself visible to people who might be monitoring their profiles with the same tool.

“It’s like anything else that is related to social,” explains co-founder Elad Natanson. “It’s a give and take. ”

The idea behind WhoIsLive is a great one. Companies like Marginize have long been aiming to build a social layer on the web that is based on what you care about instead of who you know, and enabling people on the same page to connect is a smart way to do it. If the tool gains widespread adoption, then Natanson’s prediction that WhoIsLive will “change the way that people use the Internet” isn’t unreasonable.

Getting to that critical mass, however, is the startup’s biggest hurdle. If it pulls it off, Natanson says WhoIsLive will sell a premium product to site owners that designates them as such in the chat list. Many services like WebsiteAlive and Livezilla offer similar live-chat customer service tools, but site visitors can only chat with the site owner. The premium product would also offer site owners personalized analytics.

“You always see the numbers,” Natanson says. “But in this case you can actually see who your visitors are … You can connect with them.”

Photo courtesy of istockphoto, ChristopherBernard

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: chat, marginize, startup, whoislive

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