Posts tagged Facebook

Rupert Murdoch, offering advice to Facebook, via Twitter. Murdoch’s News Corp (in)famously bought Myspace in 2005 for $580 million and sold it in 2011 to Specific Media for $35 million. During a 2011 annual meeting, he admitted that News Corp managed to “mismanage it in every possible way.”

Rupert Murdoch, offering advice to Facebook, via Twitter.

Murdoch’s News Corp (in)famously bought Myspace in 2005 for $580 million and sold it in 2011 to Specific Media for $35 million. During a 2011 annual meeting, he admitted that News Corp managed to “mismanage it in every possible way.”

Do Social Media Sites Like Tumblr Need Their Own News Publications? We learned last week that Tumblr is shutting down Storyboard — the news blog responsible for reporting on creative and noteworthy posts by Tumblr users. Tumblr’s cofounder, David Karp, posted his explanation for Storyboard’s closing on the site’s staff blog, saying: “What we’ve accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on.” Karp mentions that Storyboard partnered with the likes of WNYC, Mashable, Time, etc. and was even nominated for a James Beard Award (to name a few accomplishments). So, why is it best to “move on” when the project has been so successful?  The consensus (here, here, and here) seems to be that Tumblr needs to downsize to turn a profit this year. However, in an interview with The New York Times, Charlie Warzel, deputy technology editor at Buzzfeed, suggested Storyboard is closing because there’s no point in writing about what you can just go and see for yourself. He said: It is always peculiar when a social network branches out into publishing, it just seems odd to bring on even excellent editorial talent to cover what is already going on organically. And he’s not the only one who shares the sentiment.  The New York Times calls attention to Dan Fletcher (a journalism school graduate) who quit his “amorphous” job as managing editor of Facebook in 2012. His position required him to write about FaceBook trends. He said that reporters aren’t needed on FaceBook and that articles detract from user activity that is “inherently more interesting” than the articles themselves. FJP:  Why is it “peculiar” that an excellent editorial staff would be reporting on the “organic” events of social media communities? Isn’t that what journalists do? Just because social media communities exist in the cyber-verse doesn’t make them less newsworthy. Admittedly, Storyboard and other social media news blogs (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) aren’t exactly watchdog reporters (they want to talk about the posts that make themselves look good, after all), and that should make us question whether these publications can really be “journalistic.” But social media news is in its larval stage. Maybe, in the future, social communities will be publishing articles about juveniles who break copyright laws, and sites will be locking people’s profiles in cyber-jail-blocks for weeks due to hazing. Surely, social sites are gonna need some objective, guardian watchdogs for that, right? Eh? — Krissy Image: Screenshot from Storyboard.

Do Social Media Sites Like Tumblr Need Their Own News Publications?

We learned last week that Tumblr is shutting down Storyboard — the news blog responsible for reporting on creative and noteworthy posts by Tumblr users. Tumblr’s cofounder, David Karp, posted his explanation for Storyboard’s closing on the site’s staff blog, saying: “What we’ve accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on.”

Karp mentions that Storyboard partnered with the likes of WNYC, Mashable, Time, etc. and was even nominated for a James Beard Award (to name a few accomplishments). So, why is it best to “move on” when the project has been so successful? 

The consensus (here, here, and here) seems to be that Tumblr needs to downsize to turn a profit this year. However, in an interview with The New York Times, Charlie Warzel, deputy technology editor at Buzzfeed, suggested Storyboard is closing because there’s no point in writing about what you can just go and see for yourself. He said:

It is always peculiar when a social network branches out into publishing, it just seems odd to bring on even excellent editorial talent to cover what is already going on organically.

And he’s not the only one who shares the sentiment. 

The New York Times calls attention to Dan Fletcher (a journalism school graduate) who quit his “amorphous” job as managing editor of Facebook in 2012. His position required him to write about FaceBook trends. He said that reporters aren’t needed on FaceBook and that articles detract from user activity that is “inherently more interesting” than the articles themselves.

FJP:  Why is it “peculiar” that an excellent editorial staff would be reporting on the “organic” events of social media communities? Isn’t that what journalists do? Just because social media communities exist in the cyber-verse doesn’t make them less newsworthy.

Admittedly, Storyboard and other social media news blogs (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) aren’t exactly watchdog reporters (they want to talk about the posts that make themselves look good, after all), and that should make us question whether these publications can really be “journalistic.” But social media news is in its larval stage. Maybe, in the future, social communities will be publishing articles about juveniles who break copyright laws, and sites will be locking people’s profiles in cyber-jail-blocks for weeks due to hazing. Surely, social sites are gonna need some objective, guardian watchdogs for that, right? Eh? — Krissy

Image: Screenshot from Storyboard.

New World Order calls out Facebook’s “Corrupt Agenda”

The New World Order is a group of anonymous people who claim Facebook (among several other sites and organizations) is corrupt and dangerous. The video cautions against using Facebook due to qualms with freedom and privacy.

Check out The New World Order’s Facebook page?

If You Drink and are Anxious, You’re on Facebook. Stoned? Not so Much Via ReadWrite: For his master’s thesis, Missouri University doctoral student Russell Clayton surveyed 229 college freshmen students living in dorms. He asked them to rank their perceived levels of loneliness, anxiety, alchohol use and marijuana use, then measured their “connectedness” to Facebook. Clayton found that students who reported higher levels of anxiousness and alcohol use “appeared to be more emotionally connected with Facebook.” What’s more, “people who perceive themselves to be anxious (in general) are more likely to want to meet and connect with people online, as opposed to a more social, public setting.” Clayton’s study also shows the power of persuasion: viewing status update photos of people drinking made individuals “more motivated” to drink themselves. Back to ReadWrite: According to the research, marijuana use “predicted the opposite: a lack of emotional connectedness with Facebook.” According to Clayton, “Marijuana use was negatively related to emotional connectedness to Facebook and unrelated to Facebook connection strategies. This indicates that the more a participant engages in marijuana use the less emotionally connected they feel toward Facebook.” FJP: We let you draw your own conclusions, just don’t Facebook drunk. Image: A beer, at a bar, by Michael.

If You Drink and are Anxious, You’re on Facebook. Stoned? Not so Much

Via ReadWrite:

For his master’s thesis, Missouri University doctoral student Russell Clayton surveyed 229 college freshmen students living in dorms. He asked them to rank their perceived levels of loneliness, anxiety, alchohol use and marijuana use, then measured their “connectedness” to Facebook.

Clayton found that students who reported higher levels of anxiousness and alcohol use “appeared to be more emotionally connected with Facebook.” What’s more, “people who perceive themselves to be anxious (in general) are more likely to want to meet and connect with people online, as opposed to a more social, public setting.”

Clayton’s study also shows the power of persuasion: viewing status update photos of people drinking made individuals “more motivated” to drink themselves.

Back to ReadWrite:

According to the research, marijuana use “predicted the opposite: a lack of emotional connectedness with Facebook.” According to Clayton, “Marijuana use was negatively related to emotional connectedness to Facebook and unrelated to Facebook connection strategies. This indicates that the more a participant engages in marijuana use the less emotionally connected they feel toward Facebook.”

FJP: We let you draw your own conclusions, just don’t Facebook drunk.

Image: A beer, at a bar, by Michael.

Let’s Say Your Name is Mark Zuckerberg

Via MakeUseOf:

Since the rise of Facebook, and the thrusting of the founder into the public eye, Mark S. Zuckerberg has found him being confused for his socially awkward, sweatshirt donning namesake on a daily basis. He cringes whenever he hears the all-too-familiar phrase ‘are you that guy’?

“Whenever I call my credit card company and they ask for my name, they hang up because they think I’m playing a prank… I was taking a flight and I went through security, and I had to show them my ID and the guy looks at me and says ‘Oh my God!’, he goes ‘Are you him?’, and I’m like ‘Do you think I’d be flying Southwest Airlines if I was him?’”

Mark S. Zuckerberg has completely lost his identity…

…[G]etting a Facebook account was by no means a trivial task. On the basis of him sharing a name with the founder, he had to send off copies of his birth certificate, driver’s license and even his Indiana bar association certificate just to even open an account. The process dragged on so long and was so tedious, he even had to go as far as to threaten legal action.

MakeUseOf, Banned: What Happens When Facebook Doesn’t Like You.

So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.

This future is going to happen – and it is too late to debate. However, the problem is that Facebook is going to use all this data — not to improve our lives — but to target better marketing and advertising messages at us. Zuckerberg made no bones about the fact that Facebook will be pushing ads on Home.

Om Malik, GigaOm. Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy.

FJP: Note that these concerns can be applied to Google, Apple and the rest. Our phones, after all, are surveillance units. Just ask Malte Spitz. But the concerns Om raises here are important to understand if you’re thinking about installing Facebook Home on your phone.

Visualizing George Takei Photo Sharing

When George Takei posts an image on Facebook it generally generates a lot of shares. For example, this image of Marvin the Martian, which Takei cleverly posted as “The first image has now been received from Curiosity on Mars,” has seen over 311,000 shares.

Stamen Design has looked at a few of Takei’s photo posts and visualized how they spread through the social network:

Called “Photo-sharing Explosions,” these visualizations look at the different ways that photos shared on George Takei’s Facebook page go viral once he’s posted them.

Each visualization is made up of a series of branches, starting from George. As each branch grows, re-shares split off onto their own arcs. Sometimes, these re-shares spawn a new generation of re-shares, and sometimes they explode in short-lived bursts of activity. The two different colors show gender, and each successive generation becomes lighter as time goes by. And the curves are just for snazz.

Visit Facebook Stories to see Stamen’s other Takei visualizations.

Personal Analytics for Facebook If you ever wonder about your posting history, commenting history, rate at which you do either, what time of day you’re active, who your friends are, how you interact with each other, where they’re located throughout the world, how they’re connected with each other, what type of relationships they’re in, what type of connections they have both in and outside of your network, and you’d like all this presented to you visually, do visit Wolfram Alpha and give their Personal Analytics for Facebook a spin. 

Personal Analytics for Facebook

If you ever wonder about your posting history, commenting history, rate at which you do either, what time of day you’re active, who your friends are, how you interact with each other, where they’re located throughout the world, how they’re connected with each other, what type of relationships they’re in, what type of connections they have both in and outside of your network, and you’d like all this presented to you visually, do visit Wolfram Alpha and give their Personal Analytics for Facebook a spin. 

If Websites Were People

Here’s a video from Cracked.com that personifies popular websites.

Facebook officials are now acknowledging that the social media giant has been able to create a running log of the web pages that each of its 800 million or so members has visited during the previous 90 days. Facebook also keeps close track of where millions more non-members of the social network go on the Web, after they visit a Facebook web page for any reason.
Facebook finally admits to tracking non-users | Firstpost (via new-aesthetic)

firstpost.com

Scientific Study Says You Are What You Like… On Facebook Via This: The National Academy of Science just published a study that shows what your Facebook ‘Likes’ reveal about your behaviours and personal life. The study released March 11 explains: “We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.” So, how precise are these predictions?  Via arsTechnica: The end result was a score that reflected a simple test of accuracy: given two random members of the group that are on opposite sides of a score (say, gay and straight), how well could the algorithm do at predicting both correctly? For the gay or straight question, remarkably well — 88 percent of the time, it would get them right (it did worse with lesbians). That’s about the same as its prediction of political persuasion (Democrat vs. Republican) and religious persuasion (they only compared Christianity and Islam). The statistics got gender right 93% of the time, and they picked Caucasians and African Americans with 95 percent accuracy. From there, things dropped a bit; cigarette and alcohol use were down to around 70 percent accuracy, while the study got drug use and “being in a relationship” correct only about two-thirds of the time. Note: The study suggests that if you like Sarah Palin, Jesus Christ, and/or Stewie Griffin, then you’re satisfied with your life. Make of this, what you will. FJP: Some FaceBook Personality enthusiasts created an app inspired by the study: The One Click Personality Test. I took it. Based on my results, I’ve determined that the test is much more accurate than The Walking Dead Personality Test, but it’s still no Myers Briggs. Give it time. Apparently, our best scientists are working on it. Great? - Krissy Image: Screenshot of YouAreWhatYouLike

Scientific Study Says You Are What You Like… On Facebook

Via This:

The National Academy of Science just published a study that shows what your Facebook ‘Likes’ reveal about your behaviours and personal life. The study released March 11 explains:

“We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.”

So, how precise are these predictions? 

Via arsTechnica:

The end result was a score that reflected a simple test of accuracy: given two random members of the group that are on opposite sides of a score (say, gay and straight), how well could the algorithm do at predicting both correctly?

For the gay or straight question, remarkably well — 88 percent of the time, it would get them right (it did worse with lesbians). That’s about the same as its prediction of political persuasion (Democrat vs. Republican) and religious persuasion (they only compared Christianity and Islam). The statistics got gender right 93% of the time, and they picked Caucasians and African Americans with 95 percent accuracy. From there, things dropped a bit; cigarette and alcohol use were down to around 70 percent accuracy, while the study got drug use and “being in a relationship” correct only about two-thirds of the time.

Note: The study suggests that if you like Sarah Palin, Jesus Christ, and/or Stewie Griffin, then you’re satisfied with your life. Make of this, what you will.

FJP: Some FaceBook Personality enthusiasts created an app inspired by the study: The One Click Personality Test. I took it. Based on my results, I’ve determined that the test is much more accurate than The Walking Dead Personality Test, but it’s still no Myers Briggs. Give it time. Apparently, our best scientists are working on it. Great? - Krissy

Image: Screenshot of YouAreWhatYouLike

A Guide to Facebook’s Privacy Options The Wall Street Journal attempts to make sense of it all. As the Journal points out, Facebook offers many privacy options, but the “trick is knowing how to use them.” I’d also suggest, where to find them. — Michael Image: Via the Wall Street Journal. Select to embiggen.

A Guide to Facebook’s Privacy Options

The Wall Street Journal attempts to make sense of it all.

As the Journal points out, Facebook offers many privacy options, but the “trick is knowing how to use them.”

I’d also suggest, where to find them. — Michael

Image: Via the Wall Street Journal. Select to embiggen.

Facebook is the Most Stressful Social Media Site

But also the most positive. Call it a love-hate relationship.

Via VentureBeat:

Leading VOIP and cheap call provider Rebtel asked 1,632 American adults what effects social networks had on them. In a classic can’t-live-with-it, can’t-live-without-it scenario, almost 20 percent of American adults said Facebook was the social network that has the “most negative effect” on their mood, and another 20 percent said it caused them the most stress. However, Facebook is also the site that almost half of Americans said was the most positive.

In other words, Facebook is such a big part of our lives that our experience of the site pretty much mirrors our experience of life: sometimes our friends piss us off, sometimes they make us sad, but more often, they make us happy.

One thing that’s almost guaranteed to drive your friends nuts? Including them in status updates and location check-ins. 45 percent of us don’t like it when we appear in social media updates that others create, and 70 percent say that’s because they don’t like to broadcast their location.

User experience with Instagram and Pinterest is the most positive of the sites surveyed.

Survey via Rebtel.

Related: How To Backup Your Facebook Data In 5 Easy Steps.

How to Hack Your Way to True Love Brain Pickings features the story of Amy Webb, a journalist and digital strategist who, after a series of bad dates and heartbreak, turned to data to figure out just what she wants in a man, and reverse-engineered a profile that would attract the type of man she was looking for. This allowed her to create a “super profile,” her very own custom “algorithm” of love. Once she looked at her data and set up a real profile for herself, it was a matter of time until she met Brian, fell in love, got married, and started a family — your ordinary happily-ever-after fairy tale ending, with an extraordinary side of quantitative and qualitative magic. Read on. She wrote a book about it all: see here.And a gave a TED Talk: see here. Image: Cover of Webb’s book.

How to Hack Your Way to True Love

Brain Pickings features the story of Amy Webb, a journalist and digital strategist who, after a series of bad dates and heartbreak, turned to data to figure out just what she wants in a man, and reverse-engineered a profile that would attract the type of man she was looking for.

This allowed her to create a “super profile,” her very own custom “algorithm” of love. Once she looked at her data and set up a real profile for herself, it was a matter of time until she met Brian, fell in love, got married, and started a family — your ordinary happily-ever-after fairy tale ending, with an extraordinary side of quantitative and qualitative magic. Read on.

She wrote a book about it all: see here.
And a gave a TED Talk: see here.

Image: Cover of Webb’s book.