Displaying items by tag: Social Media

Hate is a powerful item and when it spills out it can be violent, rude and many other things. Because of the power of hate found in images, media, mems, etc., many have wondered why there are not more efforts to prevent the posting or sharing of such information. After all why would a media (social or other) want to allow hate speech or images posted on their pages. Facebook took this thought process and turned it into a policy that is designed to help stop hate speech from showing up. Now the system has inadvertently started censoring the wrong people.

Data collection, monitoring, storage, and mining are simply part of our online lives. If you connect to a site, it is going to collect some information about you. If nothing else it will collect the session information (IP address, time on site, pages read etc.), but will not use that for anything more than understanding traffic. Other sites will collect and maintain more information than that and in extreme cases you will get much more collected than that. However, no one seems to know what use this data is being put to and if there is any benefit to the collection at all.

Social Media can be a great thing if used properly. However, lately people tend to use it for… well let’s call it ranting. I cannot count the number of rants and tantrums I have seen on Twitter, Facebook and even Google+. It seems that some people feel that social media sites are their own personal forums to share every thought they have no matter how positive or negative it is. When you point this out to the ranters, you are likely to be told that it is their page and you do not have to read it. Well… that is the problem, you never really know just who might be reading your rant and what they might do about it.

Recently a comment from former Valve contractor, Fabian Giesen that VR is “bad news” brought up an interesting point. On the surface the technology has some interesting implications for making gaming, multi-media and even social networking more interactive and engaging. However, there is a much darker side to this technology that might escape the eye because of the flashy parts.

The dire warnings of manipulation through mass media are usually seen as the arena of the paranoid. Most will label anyone that claims we are being controlled in this manner as part of the tin foil hat club. Now that it we find that Facebook itself might have participated in an event designed to manipulate people’s emotions through their news feeds these claims do not sound too crazy any more.

In line with earlier announcements, on the Facebook's F8 conference in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled its new advertising service. It is a service called Audience Network, which serves to distribute ads in mobile applications from other manufacturers, all via Facebook.

LinkedIn has announced that they expects the revenue of the first quarter of this year to be at the level of $460 million, not $469 million as it was previously forecasted. Although a decline of 2%, the company's shares on the stock market sank by 15% after the announcement of these news.

In accordance with earlier forecasts, Twitter ended last business year with a loss of 645 million US dollars, despite revenue growth of 110%. Total annual income of 665 million was not nearly enough to cover the huge costs of the accumulated investment of the company in the sales force, research and marketing.

The world's largest online video service, Google's YouTube announced that it will introduce a control system which will monitor the number of hits for the videos posted there. This is the reaction to more frequent suspicion that certain users artificially inflate the number of visits to their videos - either through automatic redirection to another page or simply buying visits.

From this week, Google introduced a novelty on its social network Google+, which is on the other networks like Twitter or Facebook known for a long time. Specifically, (almost) all users will be able to choose your own unique URL that leads to their profile in the format http://plus.google.com/username.