Posts tagged Facebook
Weekly Wrap-up: Not on Facebook, Google Drive and Path’s Privacy Issues
Feb 11th
Alicia Eler explores the “Not On Facebook” movement. Jon Mitchell explains why Google Drive won’t be a Dropbox clone. Path uploads your entire address book to their servers without permission. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.
After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.
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Now is the Time to Quit Facebook
The number of people quitting Facebook is still small, but they are a vocal minority. Alicia Eler explores why they are leaving, shares the farewell stories of a few and explains why they felt a need to band together. Read Now is the Time to Quit Facebook to learn more about the “not on Facebook” movement.
Fabled Google Drive Won’t Be Another Dropbox
Some may be expecting the fabled Google Drive to compare closely to Apple’s iCloud or Dropbox, but Jon Mitchell explains why he expects the long rumored product to be a very different beast. Check out
Fabled Google Drive Won’t Be Another Dropbox to learn more.
The Price of Free: Path Uploads Entire Address Book To Its Servers
Path has gotten a great deal of attention because it has a great user experience, but this week it got some bad press over a privacy issue. You might not expect the app to upload your entire address book to it’s servers, but that’s exactly what one smart hacker discovered. Path has since apologized but there is a great deal of damage done. Is the price of a free app worth the loss of privacy? Learn more about Path’s privacy issue in The Price of Free: Path Uploads Entire Address Book To Its Servers.
From the comments:
Alan Langford – “The open source community has long distinguished between free as in no cost, and free as in freedom. One can expect that anything in the commercial sphere that comes at no monetary cost will do so by restricting one or more freedoms.”
Tiago Sartor – “There’s saying that goes like this: if something is free, then you are the product.”
More Top Posts:
First Glimpses of Office 15 Are Minus the Ribbon
As Microsoft adopts a new usage model with elements gleaned from the “Metro” style, will Office be moving away from the ribbon? The first clips of the new Office in action deliberately obfuscate the answer. More
Since 2009, Mobile Internet Usage Has Doubled Every Year
The growth of the mobile Web is on a steady rise. While pundits throw around words like “explosive” and “outrageous” the more precise word is probably “consistent.” According to analytics firm StatCounter, users accessing the Web through mobile devices has almost doubled every year since 2009. In its latest report, StatCounter says that global Internet usage through mobile devices rose to 8.5%, nearly doubling the 2011 figure of 4.3%. More
New iPhone, iPad and Android Apps for January 2012
2012 started with a flourish of new apps across iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The holiday season is the busiest time of year for app publishers but the follow up in January was equally impressive. That is a testament to the growing app ecosystem and the number of developers starting to program for mobile platforms. We take a look at some of our favorite new apps from last month below. More
Q&A: Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley on What He’s Learning From Twitter and What’s Next
Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing. More
Iran Blocks HTTPS, Cutting Off Gmail, Yahoo and Other Major Sites
The Iranian government isn’t exactly known as a champion of free speech and access to information. Thus, it’s never shocking to hear about Internet censorship in the country, the state of which appears to be getting worse all the time.
Today, news surfaced that the country is blocking access to websites that use HTTPS. That means that a number of popular, secure websites like Google, Gmail, Yahoo and even online banking sites are inaccessible. More
![Microsoft Looks For Ways To Use Kinect In Business Applications [UPDATED]](http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/assets_c/2012/02/shutterstock_microsoft_kinect-thumb-150x100-38510.jpg)
Microsoft Looks For Ways To Use Kinect In Business Applications [UPDATED]
The company launched Kinect for Windows this month, which is the first Kinect sensor licensed for commercial use. Microsoft Dynamics, the company’s unit that develops enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications, is currently exploring business scenarios that could benefit from the use of Kinect technology. More
Facebook Bans Breast-Feeding Photos
Breasts. They’re complicated.
Facebook states that breast-feeding pictures are okie dokie, just as long as there’s no “exposed breast” that doesn’t feature the child actively nursing. In other words, if there’s no suckling, there’s no posting. Today breast-feeding activists are using Facebook to coordinate “nurse-ins” outside of of the company’s headquarters worldwide, including its homebase Menlo Park headquarters. More
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[STUDY] Your Facebook Friends Influence How You Feel
Feb 10th
“A cute baby dolphin for your weekend-viewing pleasure” a Facebook friend of mine writes. Under the text, I see a link to an imgur-hosted image of that amazingly adorable marine mammal. Suddenly, my day is feeling a lot better. Did I just catch a mood… on Facebook?
A new study by Facebook data scientists shows that Facebook users can spread emotions to their friends through messages, posts and status updates. It suggests that emotional contagion happens quite frequently on the world’s biggest social network. Facebook’s Chief Data Scientist Adam Kramer presented these findings at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on January 27, 2012.
“It’s time to rethink how emotional contagion works, since vocal cues and mimicry aren’t needed,” said Kramer.
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To test this out, Kramer used a program that identified words implying positive and negative emotions in Facebook status updates. Kramer looked at status update from one-million English-speaking users over a three-day period in 2010. Each Facebook user he studied had on average 150 friends, which means that this study included approximately 150 million people. The status updates that Kramer looked at were undirected, meaning they were not directed at a specific person.
He discovered that if a user’s status update had more positive than negative words, updates from the user’s friends averaged 7 percent more positive words and 1 percent fewer negative words. The inverse results were similar for negative words posted in a status update. The results were the same regardless of when during the week they were posted.
Did friends view a users’ updates from three days before? Or did they just randomly see stuff in the news feed? Kramer said that there was no way to know. But one thing is for sure.
“Facebook users’ emotions leaks into the emotional worlds of their friends,” Kramer said.
Here’s that cute baby dolphin for your weekend viewing pleasure.
Image courtesy Shutterstock.
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This App Tells You All About Your Facebook Friends, But Will It Make You Smarter?
Feb 10th
In the two weeks I have been using Wisdom, an iPad and iPhone app that gives you detailed demographic data about your Facebook friends, the number of users has gone from just over 4 million to just under 6 million. Part of that rapid growth is most likely attributable to an extensive advertising campaign on the iPad version of the New York Times (which is where I first heard about it).
Wisdom’s marketing slogan promises “Get Wisdom and Get Wiser,” and gives us the option of not only analyzing our own social network, but the entire Wisdom network (yes, to Get Wisdom you also need to give Wisdom your information, but they have a clear-cut, succinctly-explained and explicitly-presented privacy policy. I wishe every online company and social network would use that bit of wisdom from the makers of Wisdom). “Best of all, the more people who get Wisdom, the smarter the application gets – and the smarter you become!” the apps Web site promises.
Well, maybe. Depending on your definition of “smarter.”
For example, does it make me smarter to know that New Engald Patriots fans on the Wisdom network like Narragansett Beer and New York Giants fans prefer Hennessy? Or that fans of both teams prefer Dunkin Donuts? And why is Wisdom still teasing its analysis of Super Bowl fans nearly a full-week after the game?
The U.S. Election breakdown is slightly more telling. Based on “likes” of candidates on Facebook in the last 12 months, it shows a handsome U.S. map showing which states favor which candidates, then shows the demographic makeup of each candidates followers (in other words, the same information found in almost any decent political poll).
You can also drill down and look at your friends — you can see who has posted on Facebook the most in the past 30 days, the average number of words they used in each post and other trivia.I now know that in the past 30 days Maya Angelou and David Sedaris were the most popular authors among my friends, and U2 and Johnny Cash were the most popular musicians. Nine of my friends have made a combined 27 trips to Fenway Park, and one of my friends has been to the same hospital six times (whoever it is, I hope everything is okay).
I can also look at who I interact with most. There’s loads of other data, but not as much as you’d think: I can generally check every chart and figure on Wisdom within five or 10 minutes. And even as the network increases in size, not much changes on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis.
Among other things, Wisdom lets you check where your Facebook friends have been checking in to find places you may want to go to.
Wisdom gives you a chance to do some very limited number crunching of your own, but not much. The design is beautiful, and it seems somewhat addictive the first time you play around with it, but then you realize there’s not much you can do with the data aside from look at it.
And that’s the problem: Every time I finish scanning through Wisdom, I’m left with that “Now what?” feeling we get when we don’t really know what else to do with an app. The data is interesting, but there’s not much I can do with it: I can’t download it, I can’t even access it from my desktop, making it harder to crunch.
Wisdom has some recommendations of how to use the app, including finding places to go when traveling and find out what’s popular. I have loads of other apps that do all of the things Wisdom claims to be able to do, and, since their focused (finding the best place to eat, keeping me up-to-date on news and trends), the information in those apps comes off as being far more manageable than the artfully-presented glut I get in Wisdom.
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Zuck Voting for Mitt? How Facebook “Like” Makes Things Ambiguous
Feb 10th
Sometimes the “Like” button is not as clear cut as it seems. Even Zuck would agree.
ZDNet reports that a Facebook design flaw has accidentally convinced some readers that Zuckerberg is endorsing Republican Party presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
The awkward “Liking” took place earlier this week. Zuck “liked” a story by Salon.com’s Farhad Manjoo, who posted the following status along with a link to mittromney.com: “Try, just looking at the Romney logo without seeing the word MONEY.” When that image shows up on users’ news feeds, however, it appears as if Zuck “liked” the Mitt Romney link rather than Manjoo’s comment, coupled with a link to the Romney website. Whatever happened to the “Like” button making things simple?
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On Manjoo’s Facebook profile, however, it’s pretty clear that Zuckerberg “liked” his status update joke. Check it out. Facebook prominently displays Zuckerberg’s name as one of the 526 people who, as of right now, “like” this post.
Seeing this out of context in the main news feed might lead some to believe otherwise. It looks like Zuck is endorsing Romney. Here’s the screengrab of the news feed view that ZDNet posted:
This sort of screw-up is just a byproduct of Facebook’s annoying oversharing features that clutter up users’ news feed.
Do Facebook users really need to know what their friends “like” in as prominent a spot as the main news feed? The same goes for the news ticker, which brings a micro-view to what every single one of a user’s Facebook friends likes and comments on.
Just think: If Facebook tweaked both the news feed and the news ticker to show users content that has real value, rather than the mundane activities of other Facebook users, “like” ambiguities might happen a lot less.
But back to the whole Manjoo/Zuckerberg/Romney “like” thing.
On Manjoo’s side, the status update could have been clearer and more poignant if he just wrote that joke as a status update, and included an image of Romney’s name-as-logo. (Switch two letters around and Romney spells “money”!)
Still, the Zuckerberg “like” would have come up the same in the main news feed. It just would have looked like Zuck “liked” an image of Romney’s logo, which could also be misconstrued.
So to completely avoid any Facebook false endorsement snafus like this one, Manjoo should have posted this as a Twitter-like, witty one-liner status update. Of course, that would have been too simple, even by Facebook standards.
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
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When Facebook Defriending Ends in Murder
Feb 10th
Reuters reports that a Tennessee couple who “defended” Jenelle Potter on Facebook were murdered by her father and another man.
“This is just senseless,” said Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece told Reuters. “We’ve had murders, but nothing like this.”
Jenelle Potter, 30, is one of those types who you just don’t mess with. She is a Facebook fanatic who stays home with her parents and is constantly on Facebook.
“Once you’ve crossed her, you’ve crossed her father too,” Reece said.
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Marvin Enoch “Buddy” Potter Jr., 60, and Jamie Lynn Curd, 38, were each charged with two counts of first-degree murder on Wednesday in Mountain City, which is located in northeastern Tennessee. They were arrested on Tuesday.
Billy Clay Payne Jr. and Billie Jean Hayworth were the victims of this Facebook-induced crime, which occurred last month. The murderers sparred Hayworth’s eight-month-old baby, whom Hayworth was holding when she was killed. According to the Associated Press, Billy Payne Sr., who also lived with the couple, left the house at 5:30am for work, hours before the murderers occurred.
No charges have been filed against Jenelle Potter, the sheriff said.
Facebook “Caused” Domestic Violence in Texas
In October of last year, CNET reported that domestic violence erupted after a woman allegedly failed to “Like” her husband’s Facebook update.
Benito Apolinar of Pecos, Texas, stopped by his wife Dolores Apolinar’s house to drop off his two children. After 15 years of marriage, the two had recently decided to separate. Dolores would not let Benito into her home because she was on house arrest and did not want to get in trouble. Plus, Benito was drunk. They exchanged a few words, and then Benito came into the house anyway, pulled Dolores’ hair and punched her in the cheek.
Benito’s version of this story is quite different, and has everything to do with a Facebook status update.
According to Benito, the two had been staying together at the house for a week, and he was upset that Dolores did not click “Like” on a Facebook status update about the anniversary of his mother’s death. In his version, Dolores hit herself in the face, and then smacked him in the eyebrow area with her phone.
Benito Apolinar was arrested on battery charges.
Image courtesy Shutterstock.
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10 Companies Using Facebook To Grow Their Likes
Feb 10th
Growing the number of “Likes” on your company’s Facebook page isn’t just a matter of pride. In fact, the social proof generated by an active fan page can be incredibly powerful in building your brand’s authority and engagement. However, earning these votes of confidence isn’t as simple as just asking people to click “Like” on [...]
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Why You’re Seeing Games in the Facebook News Feed
Feb 9th
Last week Facebook IPO rumors swirled about the Internet. Few in the tech world were able to focus on anything else. Facebook’s estimated $75-$100 billion IPO had tech-meisters and analysts drooling. Finally, the world’s largest social network decided to put a price on everyones’ personal data.
But there was an official announcement that dropped just days before the IPO: Games would start appearing in the main news feed.
Only one month before, Facebook began including games in the mobile news feed. If you’re already feeling annoyed, remind yourself that this is nothing new. Remember when sponsored stories began appearing in the news feed?
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In Zynga’s IPO filing, it noted overreliance on Facebook. But it’s not a one-way street here. Facebook & Zynga are intertwined, and at times it’s nearly impossible to tell them apart.
In the risks section of Facebook’s S-1, it explained that Zynga is responsible for about 12% of Facebook’s revenue, and is also important in terms of direct advertising revenue and payments. Zynga is also the largest provider of Facebook games, accounting for 80% of Facebook Credits revenue.
Adding Zynga games to the Facebook news feed isn’t the only change that Facebook announced on Monday, January 30. Games will also appear as a Timeline unit so that you will be able to see your own and other peoples’ gaming achievements. There is now an app request on the main site, too. If you want to view game activity as its own news feed, you can do that to – just select the friend activity news feed under Apps and Games. Games.com’s Joe Osborne notes that this news feed is similar to the Google+ Games Stream, as the two continue competing for gamers’ eyeballs, time and money.
Facebook relies on Zynga apps for revenue. The Facebook news feed is one of the most heavily trafficked and viewed aspects of the entire social network. If Facebook wants to keep Zynga happy, why wouldn’t it include games in the main news feed? Besides, games are already popping up in the mobile news feed. It was only a matter of time before games began appearing on the main site news feed.
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Big Question (Answered): “Do You Have Too Many Facebook Friends?”
Feb 9th
Every day I jump onto Facebook for my work, but honestly, I never use it as it was intended. If you send me a message or like my status, I might engage, but I never reach out to folks. My stream is full of interesting content about people I don’t know enough to care about. I know that sounds rude, but there’s really only so much room in your life for connections. I have a little over 700 friends and I think that’s about 500 too many.
I’ve been considering paring down for some time, not because I think my connections aren’t cool, but because I’m missing out on things like my family’s birthday notifications and friends’ graduations. Not long ago I found out that one of my best friends had a son who was having brain surgery. Apparently he’d had a condition for some time, but I’d never seen her mention it because I have too many connections.
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Alicia Eler wrote about the overload of Facebook friends today, and she noted that many of us are seeing Facebook become something different than what it was intended to be. In some ways, the changes are quite interesting, but not helpful if you want to be able to see important items from close friends and family.
How Many Facebook Friends Do You Have? Are You Planning to Cut Back?
We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
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Facebook Deprecating 50+ Page Insights Metrics – Are You Ready?
Feb 8th
Some metrics will be completely eliminated; others are being replaced by metrics added to the Graph API. If you haven’t already stopped using the deprecated metrics, you probably have your work cut out for you to quickly get the updates in place.
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It’s True: You Have Too Many Facebook ‘Friends’
Feb 7th
Facebook can be whatever you want it to be. It’s a promotional tool, a way to keep in touch with family members, a space for lifestreaming your every move, or a community forum for meaningful discussion about a specific topic.
But sometimes, it all just gets too overwhelming to deal with. You have 1500 Facebook friends from all walks of life – why? Those social ties expired long ago. So what’s the point of holding onto that one last digital thread?
Last week Jenni Prokopy, a Chicago-based health care expert, freelance writer and founder of ChronicBabe.com, posted a status update that directly addressed this issue. With about 800 friends, Prokopy realized that her Facebook profile had become totally cluttered. “I started my Facebook a few years ago when there were no business pages,” Prokopy says. “People knew who I was online from ChronicBabe.com, so they started to friend me on Facebook. And I was just trying to build my online community so I said yes – and everyone was like yeah, build your online community! And so I did.”
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Before long, Prokopy’s Facebook profile had become almost useless. Checking it felt like a chore.
“I was going through tons of posts from people I didn’t know, and I don’t want to say that I didn’t care about them but I didn’t care to know the details of their lives,” she says. “But the thing that got me a couple of weeks ago is that I missed two important party invitations.” They had gotten lost in the flood of meaningless Faecbook marketing ‘events’ that were actually just invitations to ‘participate’ in various non-important mass events.”
Then there was that whole missing photos from family members thing.
“My sister would post photos of my niece, and I would miss those,” says Prokopy. “It felt like my Facebook news feed was Grand Central Station.”
A few days later, Prokopy spent 4-5 hours unfriending close to 800 people, decreasing her Facebook community to a mere 280 people. And since then, she’s been able to catch status updates from family members that matter to her. “I found out that my brother-in-law and niece, who live in New Orleans, were in a car accident recently. They were dealing with the details so didn’t call people individually – they just posted to Facebook. But I spoke with my sister the next day and got all the details.”
Russ Starke, VP of Experience Design at digital design agency ThinkBrownstone, had a similar experience with his Facebook profile.
“It was starting to become more of a promotional tool,” Starke says. “I wasn’t really checking what other people were doing, and I was only occasionally posting photos of kids. After seeing what Jenni was doing, I decided to try it, too.”
What really pushed him over the edge was the fact that metadata is tagged to an iPhone picture that a user uploads to Facebook. It’s easy to figure out where the user was when they posted the photo. “How is this going to affect my wife and I, and our daughter?” Starke asked himself. He also wanted to post about business trips, but then realized that there were people on his Facebook profile that he didn’t trust enough to do that. And then there were those expired ties.
“There are people on Facebookthat, when I look at our friendship history, I see that I’ve been Facebook friends with them for four years but haven’t interacted with them in that entire time. It doesn’t mean I don’t have fond memories of them, but I don’t need to be friends with them on Facebook.”
“It doesn’t mean I don’t have fond memories of them, but I don’t need to be friends with them on Facebook.”
When it comes to Facebook friends, Starke now requires a higher level of intimacy. If he wouldn’t allow you in his house, he is not going to be your friend on Facebook. It’s just that simple.
Instead of going through the painful one-by-one friend deletion process, Starke decided to shut down his account and start over in a month or so. For now, he’s enjoying the freedom that not being on Facebook is giving him.
Should You Be Reading Stories Posted by People You Don’t Know?
The Facebook news feed algorithm uses EdgeRank to detect which types of stories the user clicks the most, and surfaces those “highlighted” stories moreso than stories that users are less likely to clickthrough. Is it psychologically damaging to view posts from people who you have little to no connection to?
“While data has not shown that it’s unhealthy to perennially view posts from too many friends with whom people lack authentic connectivity, it has been demonstrated that those who do, may do so because they already have lower self-esteem,” says Dr. Ashwini Nadkarni, the author of the study “Why Do People Use Facebook?”
She also found that sometimes having more than 250 friends isn’t very healthy.
“It has been shown that those users with larger numbers of friends may actually be triggering negative impressions. A study conducted about 3 years ago showed that both profile owners with lower number of friends (about 102 friends) but also greater numbers of friends (about 300 friends) both created impressions of lower levels of social attractiveness.”
In other words, having more or less friends than the average Facebook user may affect how other users view you, and how you feel about yourself. Too many Facebook friends might indicate that you’re participating in a certain Facebook culture of adolescence hat focuses more on popularity (hello, junior high!) and less on authentic, trusting friendships.
“We need to be curating not only the information we take in but also the information we put out.”
But really, Facebook is about the information that you choose to share. “We need to be curating not only the information we take in but also the information we put out,” says Prokopy.
How many Facebook friends do you have? Are you planning to cut back or add more? Tell us in the comments.
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