Posts tagged Life
[STUDY] A Friend of a Friend in Real Life But Not on Facebook
Feb 3rd
Picture this: You’re at a party, and your good friend introduces you to one of their friends. You two hit it off, and boom – a new friend! You’ve just become friends with a friend of a friend. In real life, this is a common occurrence. On Facebook, a friend of a friend isn’t necessarily an actual friend.
A new study from Pew Internet discovered this and an array of other interesting facts about peoples’ Facebook friendships. The researchers found that most peoples’ friend lists were not very interconnected. In a friend list with a density of 1, everyone knows everyone. On Facebook the density is quite low at .12 with a maximum density of .42, which means that your chances of knowing a friend of a friend on Facebook fall between 12% and 42%. In its its S-1 filing on Wednesday, Facebook toted 100 billion friendships. What it probably meant to say was 100 billion connections, many of which are dormant.
Sponsor
To understand the friend ties idea, here’s an example. Say you have 10 friends; this means that the number of possible friendship ties among everyone in network is 45. The average Facebook user has 245 friends, which means there are 29,890 possible friendship ties in the network. With an average density of .12 and a total number of 245 friends, that means there are only 12% of 29,890 friendship linkages between “friends.” A 1992 study from Pew found that offline social ties had a density of .36, or three times the density size of Facebook’s.
“We suspect that Facebook networks are of lower density because of their ability to allow ties that might otherwise have gone dormant to remain persistent over time,” the study says. Those ties that should have gone dormant are the people who you’ve Facebook friended from grade school, middle school, high school and other pubescent times in life. These are the people whose friend requests you naïvely and curiously accepted. This is where the Facebook “drama” potentially begins. “Facebook is a giant emotional locker,” writes Andy Kessler on the Wall Street Journal.
“We expect that new Facebook users typically start with a core group of close, interconnected friends,” the study says.”But over time their friend list becomes larger and less intertwined, particularly as they discover (and are discovered by) more distant friends from different parts and different times in their lives.”
The study also reports a curious finding: People are more likely to be friends with people who have more friends than they do. They are less likely to become friends with people who have less friends than them. Hence, the popular kid syndrome: Everyone wants to be friends with the popular kid, and few willingly try to buddy up with the loner who sits alone at lunch.
Tagging friends in Facebook photos is the only activity that the study says is associated with having more close ties. These people tend to be friends who the user interacts with both online and offline. This does not account for those awkward photo taggings that happen on the fly, without a user’s permission. Lifehacker’s Jason Chen argues that no, you shouldn’t tag someone in a photo without their permission. For if someone is truly your friend on- and offline, they’ll show some rexpect by first asking if you’d like to be tagged in the photo they’re about to upload. When it comes to more innocuous taggings, such as a status update or photo, permission isn’t completely necessary, but it’s still quite welcome.
The study reinforces findings from past research, which suggest that heavy Facebook users are more trusting than others.
Images via Nikki Lynette’s Facebook page and Shutterstock.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Ethiopia Sentences U.S. Blogger to Life in Prison
Jan 27th
The Federal High Court in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa sentenced expatriate journalist and blogger Elias Kifle to life in prison yesterday. Kifle is the editor of the Washington D.C.-based blog, Ethiopian Review. He was sentenced in absentia.
It was originally reported that he could receive the death penalty, which is the maximum penalty for his alleged crime of “political terrorism” in the northeast African country.
Sponsor
He and several other defendants were found guilty on January 19th, according to the Ethiopian news website Walta Info, but were not sentenced until Thursday, January 26.
“The charges included conspiring to commit acts of terror, rendering support to terrorism, participating in a terrorist organization (Ginbot 7) and money laundering. Elias is also found guilty of masterminding and providing financial support to the other defendants who remained under police custody since June 2011.”
The other defendants, who were sentenced to 14 years in prison and given fines of 33,000 birrs ($1,500.00), were Reeyot Alemu, a columnist for the weekly newspaper Feteh, and Woubshet Taye, who was deputy editor of Awramba Times, which has since closed up shop.
Kifle’s higher profile, resulting from his U.S. residency, may have saved him from the death penalty. That may not be the case for another blogger, Eskinder Nega, who was arrested in September, also on “terrorism” charges.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, this is Kifle’s second life sentence, following a 2007 decision, also rendered in absentia. The first conviction was on charges of treason and was part of a 2006 crackdown on the press. He was targeted for his publication’s coverage of the Ethiopian government’s violent clampdown on protests that arose after the 2005 elections in the country.
Photo via CPJ | tip via Scott Baldauf
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Real Voters’ Disinterest In Anti-Piracy Legislation May Give SOPA New Life
Jan 24th
Interest in news about last week’s protest against anti-piracy legislation was highest among people under the age of 30, according to the latest weekly News Interest Index survey. The survey was conducted Jan. 19-22 among 1,002 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
While the Stop Online Piracy Act that was pending before the House and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act, are on indefinite hold after last week’s protests, the Pew poll shows little interest in the protests outside of those under 30. The Pew poll may have politicians rethinking their decision to take political cover in the immediate aftermath of the protest, which included a day-long shutdown of Wikipedia, as people under 30 traditionally have low voter turnout rates.
Sponsor
An aide to a House member that supports SOPA said it was too soon to tell how lawmakers would work to move anti-piracy legislation. The aide, who asked that he and his boss not be identified, had not seen the Pew report, which was released Tuesday.
“But I think, like anything else, if there’s not strong constituent opposition, it makes it easier for us to move forward on issues like this,” he said.
The poll, it should be noted, covers news interest for the four days following Wednesday’s protest, meaning interest may have been conceivably higher amongst all age groups on Jan. 18, the day news coverage was most exhaustive. The poll also asks respondents to rank the story they were most interested in, so lower ratings in older age groups does not necessarily mean people over 30 have no interest in anti-piracy legislation.
The 23% interest rate in Web protest stories for people between the ages of 18 and 29 was higher than interest in any other age group covered by the story, as well as interest by people between 18 and 29 in the presidential election (21%) and the Italian cruise ship accident (16%).
Across all age groups, only 7% of respondents listed the Web protest as the story they were most interested in for the four-day period. Overall, 26% of respondents said they were most interested in news about the cruise ship accident, followed by news about the elections (23%) and the economy (10%).
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Samsung Breathes Life Into Tizen By Merging With Bada
Jan 18th
The long evolution of Tizen continues and is about to get its biggest boost yet. Samsung is going to merge its Bada platform with the Tizen project, bringing the Linux-based operating system to more smartphones and developers across the world.
Tizen is the Linux smartphone operating system that was once called MeeGo that, in turn, was once the confluence of Maemo and Moblin from Nokia and Intel. Nothing tangible has ever really come out of the Tizen/MeeGo project except for a few demo phones and the Nokia N9 and N950. With Samsung throwing its manufacturing weight behind the Tizen development project, that may be about to change.
Sponsor
A Twisted Road For Tizen
The growth path of Tizen has been nothing if not amusing. First, Nokia and Intel got together to merge Linux platforms. MeeGo was born. Nokia then found itself with a serious problem of a “burning platform” and had to jump to Windows Phone and cut its ties with the MeeGo project. Intel was left to shop MeeGo around looking to gain some traction. It eventually found a home with the Linux Foundation, which subsumed the project under a consortium with a wide array of so-called supporters, Samsung included.
Samsung’s participation comes through the LiMo group. When we wrote about the purported “Death of MeeGo” last September and the rise of the LiMo group, we pointed out that Samsung would have a great opportunity to build a framework around Bada development with the backing of the Linux developer ecosystem. Near five months later, that is exactly what is happening.
According to a report from Forbes, the integration of Bada and Tizen will give developers the same tools to develop for each platform. That would make perfect sense. Call it “streamlining Linux mobile operating systems.” Basically, the entire project, from the very beginning, has been to absorb other Linux platforms. Overall, one would think that would give Tizen more functionality and a broader developer base, but that is not what has happened. Every time Tizen has absorbed and changed its name, the development timeline has been set back. Now that Samsung is bring Bada to the project, will this change?
Great For Tizen While Samsung Hedges Its Bets
The great thing for Tizen about the Bada integration is that Bada actually exists on smartphones across the world. Bada was built by Samsung to be a low-end smartphone operating system intended to go head-to-head with Nokia’s Symbian and S-series devices. Tizen and MeeGo were never really designed for low end devices. Bada integration could give Tizen a wider swath of the smartphone vertical with more apps and developers across smartphones of different hardware specifications.
The irony has the potential to be delicious. Nokia ditched MeeGo and is eventually putting Symbian to bed. MeeGo then turns to Intel and the Linux Foundation that turns to Samsung and Bada. All of a sudden the low-end smartphone market is flooded with Bada/Tizen smartphones from Samsung competing directly against Nokia.
By taking a broader role in Tizen, Samsung is giving itself more options. The company does not shy away from producing smartphone of varying sizes, costs and platforms making everything from flagship Android devices to Windows Phones and bottom of the market devices running both Android and Bada. Tizen and Bada give Samsung its own recourse against the potential Google/Motorola partnership and the rise of other dominant players in the Android ecosystem.
According to Forbes, there will be “at least one or two” Tizen devices from Samsung this year. Look for announcements to be made during the summer with release schedules for the end of the year.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Big Question (Answered): Will You Update Your Facebook Timeline with Past Life Events?
Jan 5th
We’re written about the Facebook Timeline extensively here at ReadWriteWeb, but we’ve never come out and asked you whether or not you will spend time editing yours. Facebook has attempted to catalog your life automatically, but if we want our Timeline to reflect all of our important life events, that means editing it. We wondered if you were prepared to do so.
Will You Update Your Facebook Timeline with Past Life Events?
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.
Sponsor
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
The Power Of Online Video Can Prove That There Is Life After Death – ReelSEO Online Video News
Jan 2nd
|
The Power Of Online Video Can Prove That There Is Life After Death
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… We had the privilege of speaking with Bruce Clay … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Technology in Real Life: In Praise of the “C” Word
Dec 25th
You should write more what you feel, I’ve been told. Be more open about yourself, Scott. If you want to engage people, to build a community, to get people talking in comments, and bring more people into your social circle, you need to be more open, more accessible, more of a personality. Show people your soft side, your heart. What do you really believe, Scott M. Fulton, III, besides your insistence on using Roman numerals in your name? You talk about issues that have six or seven sides to them, but you don’t tell people where you stand. How do you expect people to engage with you if you don’t engage with them?
Well, okay, if you insist. I am a Christian.
Sponsor
The first chance you get, you go there?
This is the most personally identifiable information in our portfolio that we don’t often share with one another, the part that some people say defines who they are, the part that classifies what it is we believe. To be fair, religion is the most divisive issue of our time. So perhaps the reason we tend to withdraw that element of ourselves from the public discourse is for fear that we may alienate ourselves from the rest of the world. We do want to be mindful of others’ feelings.
Another reason is because religion unto itself is too often cast as something foreign to rational thinking, as something antiquated, outmoded, unrelated to a society geared more towards technology, science, and the realm of evident fact. In a world of cause and effect, some say, there should be an inviolable bond between what we observe and what we know. If we have not observed it, Carl Sagan once explained, we should not claim to know it.
Put another way, all faith is silly. During NPR’s eulogy last week for the outspoken atheist Christopher Hitchens, the point was made that he could not be forced to believe in anything supernatural. The idea that everything can be made explicable, that it can be translated into something our minds can accept as rational, and that nothing supernatural exists, has become an ideal claimed by individuals who disclaim the existence of God – who say that fact denies faith.
This is the fundamental class division from which the whole discussion of reality tends to break down. It may be the entire reason so many of us refrain from wearing our religion on our sleeves. The thought of accepting something as real that we cannot explain, seems about as sane, sober, and rational as clapping to show you believe in fairies and making Tinker-bell glow.
And yet this is the fallacy about faith that I’m afraid Hitchens never came to realize as a fallacy: that faith is contrary to knowledge. Or, borrowing Douglas Adams’ beautiful treatise from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, if proof denies faith, then soon God disappears in a puff of logic. I have absolute faith that everything Christ has demonstrated, including what that does not appear to lend itself to an absolute cause, can, and eventually will, be explained in a manner that renders it undeniably natural. I too do not believe in the supernatural. I do believe in the unknown, but not the unknowable.
Well then, say some of my friends, you’re not really a Christian. My response to that is a little roundabout, so I beg your indulgence.
Faith is the new proof
Earlier this month, researchers at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland announced their progress toward the discovery, and eventual confirmation, of the existence of a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson – and which Web headlines characterize as the “God Particle.” Folks have lost track of how it got that nickname in the first place. The boson is the category of subatomic matter to which the photon (light) also belongs; and the idea that a boson of some sort exists with the properties of the theoretical Higgs (H0) was theorized before anyone came up with a theory for why it might exist in the first place. This was because the characteristics of particles that have been observed (or, more accurately, whose side-effects validate that only certain particles with these expected characteristics could be the cause) could be arranged on a chart with certain perfect symmetries. H0 would fit on this chart in a way that completes the symmetry.
The demonstrations revealed figures that were generally consistent with what scientists were expecting – evidence of interactions that could be attributed to the presence of H0, though possibly to something else. I watched this feed from CERN while keeping one eye on a running feed of tweets from observers. Many of these folks were shocked, and a few even openly disgusted, with the idea that researchers could appear so excited about the evidence they uncovered, while being unable to conclusively announce that H0 had been observed. What were these people smoking, one tweeter asked? How could anyone be so excited by mere side-effects in the absence of facts?
The answer, for me, is simple. The evolution of science has come full circle. Only to a very limited extent is it possible to state with scientific certainty that something exists or does not exist. Ever since quantum theory, and especially the contribution of Werner Heisenberg, we are only capable of making certain statements in terms of probability. And with respect to the causes of those things which are only probable rather than factual, we can only render as speculation.
And that speculation seems fanciful, whimsical, often bizarre. The Higgs boson theory speaks of an exclusive level of interaction between things that are neither particles nor waves, but whose by-products are mass, which we then attribute to things through a process that was once considered absolute association, but which may in reality be coincidence. No single explanation of what might be going on appears, on the surface, to sound anything less than supernatural.
Yet we know this cannot be truth – that at some level, at some eventual state we may inevitably discover, everything we see now can and will be explained. Science has come around, absorbing as an active ingredient that which some still claim to be a foreign object: Science has embraced faith.
Faith is the understanding that we can know what we cannot yet explain. And since physics will always be vital to how we empower our future generations, we will need to incorporate faith for us to incorporate what we perceive, without the words to define it yet, as knowledge. Faith takes many paths. But all paths have a common symmetry, something that gives them variety and yet leads them to the same point. While faith may be the thing that appears to divide us, it may yet bridge the gaps between us. And while there may never be a common starting point toward faith, I believe Christ has taught us that any starting point one chooses may lead to that greater goal.
My starting point begins like this: I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord. And like every other train of thought I get lost on, it goes on forever and ever.
Painting: “Kingdom of Christ” by Maria DeLaJuen, approx. 1986
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
The Life of Links: An Interview With the Maker of Kippt
Dec 19th
The word “bookmark,” referring to a saved Web link, is starting to sound old. “Bookmark” has this connotation of turn-of-the-century Web browsers, when there weren’t Web-based services for saving things. Your local bookmarks folder was where you kept links you wanted to go back to. These days, we’re browsing on multiple devices, and links aren’t necessarily “sites,” “pages” or “articles” anymore.
Links can point to all kinds of things. Most of the time, we’ll probably never need to visit a link again. But there are plenty of links we want to keep, even if it’s just to remember them. How do we keep track of saved links? Where do we put them? I talked to Jori Lallo, developer of Grove.io and a link-saving side project called Kippt, to learn about the future of the bookmark.
Sponsor
ReadWriteWeb: How did you decide on the features of Kippt, and how do you distinguish it from other bookmarking services?
Jori Lallo: “We didn’t actually plan to build a bookmarking service. We made our first prototype service about one and a half years ago over one or two days. It was a quick hack project for an app contest.
“We both bought iPads right when they came out, both me and [Kippt designer] Karri [Saarinen]. We were constantly emailing links to ourselves. So, we just wanted to build a really simple list of links where we could save stuff from the Web and from the iPad’s browser.
“It got pretty okay traction for a hack project. After that, we were thinking about how to evolve the service beyond that and how we use these kinds of services.”
Beyond the Chore of Tagging
“We both had been opposed to the traditional tagging. I find it to be pretty hard for a user in the sense that you have to create your own topology or map of the tags you use. Tagging is really good for hardcore users, but if you don’t [take] the time for tags… I think many Delicious users have been in the situation where you have more tags than you have links. So, we wanted to do things simpler.
“I’ve found that just plain folders actually work pretty well. That’s why we chose lists for the service. When we were building the new iteration of the service, we wanted to approach the problem from the workflow perspective.
“I think many Delicious users have been in the situation where you have more tags than you have links.”
“People are using Instapaper and Pinboard and other bookmarking services together, actually. So they first save stuff to Instapaper to read later, and then they save stuff from there to more permanent storage. And after they have saved, after they have read the stuff, they share the links to other people, just by emailing or IM, or whatever service they want to use. They have the links all over the place, pretty much.
“We wanted to build a medium between Instapaper and more heavy bookmarking services, and that’s why Kippt is pretty simple at the moment. We’re planning to add social sharing features later on, when we have more time. But right now, we’re just trying to get the base product right.”
What’s Wrong With Bookmarking
RWW: When you say “medium,” do you mean something between a temporary, time-shifting app like Instapaper and a big link taxonomy like the bookmarking services?
JL: “With ‘bookmarking,’ it’s kind of a disliked term. People have a habit of saving stuff that they don’t necessarily go back to anymore. I used to use Delicious quite a lot, but I rarely went back for my links. I guess that’s partly because of their tagging system. Also, their search wasn’t too good, at least some years ago. I don’t know what the situation is nowadays.
“But now, with Kippt, I have lists for projects, like Web development, design inspiration and so on, and I actually go to those lists way more often. I find it a little bit more accessible.”
RWW: Is Kippt’s ‘inbox’ meant to be a more temporary workspace, then?
“Inbox, for me, is where I save stuff I need to do later, or I need to process. I don’t want to think about the categorization now.
“My girlfriend actually uses Kippt in this way. At the start, she just saved everything in her inbox and just started thinking about the categorization after that, once she had more stuff there.”
Link Saving Vs. “Read Later”
RWW: What about the ‘Read Later’ section?
“We don’t want to build a full-featured reading experience within the app, but we still added the ‘Read Later’ list as a default, because it’s a nice place to just put in articles that you can read and from there drag and drop to more permanent lists later on. I find that works pretty well for my personal use cases.”
RWW: It seems like bookmarking services still have a niche appeal, while dedicated read-later services are catching on. Why do you think that is?
JL: “I think there has been a trend moving away from bookmarking stuff, probably because Google is pretty good nowadays for finding the things you need. When I’ve been talking about the app with people, it seems that some people are really into bookmarking, and some people just don’t get it at all anymore after the read-later services.
“I think that people have the tendency of wanting to keep their stuff, even though they wouldn’t use it, but they still like to keep it.”
“It’s not for everyone, but some people, at least, love bookmarking services a lot.”
RWW: What is it about those people?
JL: “I think it’s about attention span. Some people, who are really fast, especially entrepreneurs, seem to like the Instapaper kind of approach. This is just my personal stuff I have noticed. I still feel there’s a need for more permanent storage.
“Links are more than they used to be in the early 2000s. You have more information about them. And now we have this whole new generation of [richer Web] services.”
RWW: It’s not just static HTML documents anymore.
JL: Yeah.
Keeping Links Forever
RWW: Do you think that keeping Web links forever is something everyone should do? Does the Web work like a bookshelf in your house, where keeping things around, even just for nostalgic purposes, is something people are going to do?
JL: “I think they’re already doing it quite a lot. When we first launched Kippt, we didn’t have any kind of importing mechanism, and that was by far the most requested feature.”
“I think that people have the tendency of wanting to keep their stuff. I guess that’s the nature of human beings.”
RWW: And people freaked out about losing their bookmarks when Delicious was in trouble.
JL: “Yeah. I think that people have the tendency of wanting to keep their stuff, even though they wouldn’t use it, but they still like to keep it. That’s the same thing we’ve seen with [Lallo's other project, hosted IRC chat service] Grove.io. People are saving their IRC logs for years and years. I guess that’s the nature of human beings.
“We welcome people to use our service to save links forever, especially if other services don’t have good search, and we’re improving the search in Kippt. That’s one of my top priorities at the moment.
And we’re probably going to add some kind of tagging layer on top of the lists because people are asking for it. I think tagging might work pretty well in hashtag form, some kind of way that’s more modern. Especially on top of the lists and search, it wouldn’t be the main way of categorizing stuff.”
RWW: So lists are where the links live, but tags are just a way to quickly find them?
JL: “Yep.”
The Browser Vs. “Apps”
RWW: Do you think that the browser is a better place to work with links than separate, native apps like Instapaper or Evernote?
JL: “I actually agree on that, just by experience. We wanted to push Kippt out really quickly. That’s why it’s so simple. After the launch, we got tons of feedback and feature requests. They mapped out with our plans really well. But one thing I noticed was that no one was asking for the mobile [app] stuff. This kind of service is more important when it’s in your browser.
“[Native versus Web] depends on the situation. It’s the content that matters. I’m making [Kippt's mobile view] in Javascript, but it’s going to be a Web page mostly, not try to mimic native apps. Personally, I hate the mobile Web apps that try to look and feel like iOS apps. In almost every case, they fail pretty miserably.”
Play around with Kippt for a few minutes, and you’ll see. Bookmarking as a chore is only for hardcore Web librarians, but anyone who uses the Web wants to keep links around for one reason or another. Instapaper and the like are great dedicated reading services, but they’re designed around that use, not for storing and retrieving your favorite links.
Kippt just sits as a layer in your Web browser. It’s like a bookshelf for keeping and organizing the Web sites and apps you come across. Its two modes are the most useful part; you can save to the inbox for “I’ll get to that later,” or if you already know what shelf a link belongs on, you can save it straight there. Not everything is an “article” on the Web anymore. Websites are increasingly “stuff.” Don’t we all need a place to keep our stuff?
Check out Kippt at Kippt.com. You can follow @KipptApp and @JoriLallo on Twitter.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Grassroots SEO – Strategy, Process & Life Cycle – SEOmoz (blog)
Dec 19th
 Entrepreneur |
Grassroots SEO – Strategy, Process & Life Cycle
SEOmoz (blog) In this post, I'm going to give you a way to organize information you receive (and some of my own tactics) into what you will now and forever call an "SEO Strategy." There are rockstars who multi-task and play all the search channels at once, … Five Effective SEO Strategies to Optimize Your Business Blog The Division Within SEO: Google is our friend/enemy How One Company Fought a High-Ranking 'Scam' Search Result |
View full post on SEO – Google News
No Web Series For ABC Soaps One Life to Live and All My Children – ReelSEO Online Video News
Nov 28th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
No Web Series For ABC Soaps One Life to Live and All My Children
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… We had the privilege of speaking with Bruce Clay … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
