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Facebook Updates Photos: This Week in Social Media. Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Facebook Lets You Enlarge Photos: Facebook has redesigned the Photos section of the personal profile. You can now highlight your photos to make them appear much larger.

Plus, you’ll find your photos separated into different sections: albums, your photos and photos you were tagged in. "With your Facebook photos all in one section, it’s simple to show friends your favorites. Facebook Rolling Out Additional Page Post Targeting Options: Facebook page admins will soon be able to target posts by age, gender, interested in, relationship status, education information and workplace. This is the current target selection available on our Facebook page. Google+ Hangouts Comes to Gmail: Gmail has upgraded its chat feature to the Google+ Hangouts technology.

Search Realtime for trending topics. Facebook Is King, But Twitter Chasing As Dominant Social Network Around The World [INFOGRAPHIC] Vincenzo Cosenza has been updating his World Map Of Social Networks since June 2009, which tracks the dominant social networks on a country-by-country basis, according to data received from Alexa and Google. Cosenza has just published his latest infographic and, as you would expect, the social world is dominated by Facebook. In fact, it’s always been dominated by Facebook, so much so that the total number of social networks represented on the map has shrunk from 17 in June 2009 to just nine today.

And Twitter isn’t one of them. But it’s not all bad news for the bird, as additional data from Cosenza confirms that Twitter is now the number two social network on the planet. Here’s Cosenza’s first infographic from June 2009 (click to enlarge): Back then 17 social networks were dominant, including platforms familiar in the West such as Facebook, Orkut, and Friendster, and also some less well-known sites that are popular in Russia and Asia. (Source: Vincos.it. The Best and Worst Times to Share on Facebook, Twitter. Want your link to get the most traction on Twitter? Post it on a Monday between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. ET. Link shortening and tracking service bit.ly has released new data on the best and worst times to share links on popular social networks, from Facebook and Twitter to blogging site Tumblr. The company revealed that posting links to Twitter between the hours of 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.

ET (or 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. PT) will give you the highest click rank, especially on days earlier in the week. Meanwhile, sending a tweet with a link after 8:00 p.m. should be avoided — as should posting links after 3:00 p.m. on Fridays. The half-life of a link posted to Twitter is about 2.8 hours, according to bit.ly.

However, Facebook's optimal posting times are slightly different than Twitter. Links posted after 8:00 p.m. and before 8:00 a.m. on Facebook don't get the most clicks. Meanwhile, Tumblr has a much different usage pattern than Facebook and Twitter. How the U.S. Military Shares Its Rich History With Facebook Timeline. Many brands are energizing their social media presences with Facebook Timeline, and the U.S. military has taken this opportunity to present its extensive history in a unique and engaging way.

The Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines and Coast Guard have spent weeks preparing their individual Facebook Pages for the switch over to Timeline. Each branch has filled its Page with centuries worth of history, photos and interesting facts. The U.S. military has been especially proactive about social media after a policy lifted multiple bans in 2010, including the Marines' complete ban on social media. Today, the Marines are active on almost all social media platforms — including a blog, YouTube (its channel shares video stories of the Corps) and Flickr. "A huge part of our social media community hasn't had the Marine Corps experience. They don't know our history as well," says Greg Reeder, director of Marine Corps production.

"This year we are beginning the bicentennial commemoration of the War of 1812. Facebook Empowers Women With Connect Application. Facebook is doing its part to promote gender equality and women‘s empowerment with its launch of the Women Connect application Thursday. Women Connect features resources including details about the Millennium Development Goals, like buttons for pages that promote women’s causes, and a counter tracking new connections with related organizations and causes.

The social network announced the Women Connect application in a post on the Facebook + Journalists page: Today, Facebook is announcing the Women Connect app to raise awareness and empower women: facebook.com/womenconnect. Facebook is proud to play a part in helping to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by raising awareness around issues of gender equality and women’s empowerment. By building technology that allows people to easily connect and share, we are helping women’s organizations and causes connect with supporters around the world.

Are you connected to women’s causes and advocacy Pages? Readers: Will you try Women Connect? Dislike: How Facebook Can Hurt Your Credit | Life & Money | The Latest. Forget “you are what you eat.” When it comes to your trustworthiness as as borrower, you are who you know … online. Social networks are now being used by some lenders to evaluate whether you’re likely to pay them back. The New York Observer reports that, while this methodology is still a few years away from common use by major banks, smaller institutions such as microlender Lenddo already use an algorithm based on input from a person’s various social networks to determine her creditworthiness. And more are likely to adopt the practice in the future. Here’s the kicker: The information used by the algorithm isn’t just what you’ve made public—the banks are requiring your login information. Everything you can see, they can see.

And they could even potentially send messages to your contacts. From the perspective of the banks, “birds of a feather flock together.” What an Algorithm Can See So, What’s the Problem? Even seemingly innocuous social info can be damaging to customers. 1. 2. Here's How People Look at Your Facebook Profile -- Literally. When potential dates, employers and friends glance at your online social profiles, what do they see? EyeTrackShop , a startup that runs eye-tracking studies for advertisers, helped find out by applying its technology to the profile pages of popular social networks. The study used the webcams of 30 participants to record their eye movements as they were shown profile pages from Facebook , Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube , Klout, Reddit, Digg, Tumblr, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Pinterest at 10-second intervals. What participants looked at on each page and in what order is recorded in the images below. It’s not a perfect study.

Thirty is a small sample size, and what draws attention on a profile likely varies depending on the content displayed. But we’ve hazarded making a few observations: The site feature that attracted most attention on Klout, Facebook and StumbleUpon was the profile photo. In fact, it got more attention than anything else on the page. View As One Page » View As Slideshow » How Are Teachers & College Professors Using Facebook? Facebook Launches ‘Send’ Button For More Selective Sharing, Announces 50 Million ‘Groups’ Facebook’s increasingly ubiquitous ‘Like’ button is getting a new friend: the Send button. Click on a webpage that has the Send button integrated, and you’ll be prompted to share it with any of your Facebook Groups, your Facebook friends, or any standard email address.

In other words, where the Like button is designed to let you quickly share content with all of your Facebook friends, the Send button is for sharing with a subset of them. Site designers are groaning right now (they have yet another sharing widget to integrate), but it’s a logical step for Facebook — there are certainly times when you want to share links with a handful of friends instead of your News Feed, and this gives you one less reason to fire up your non-Facebook email account. 50 sites are launching with the feature. In addition to the new Send button, Facebook is adding a handful of features to its existing Groups product, which was overhauled last October. First is the introduction of photo albums for Groups.

Teachers and Facebook : How College Professors are Using Social Media. While academia has long been criticized for its failure to embrace modern technology, professors today are proving to be quite tech-savvy. In fact, a recent study by the Babson Survey Research Group and Pearson shows that more than 80 percent of faculty are incorporating some form of social media into their teaching. Who knew academics were so cutting edge? From YouTube to Wikis, social media is now widely accepted as a valuable teaching tool at colleges across the U.S. Below, browse a selection of some innovative ways college professors are using Facebook and other social media tools to teach. Presidential Levity Presidential Levity. "President’s Day at Macalaster College" is a 5-minute YouTube video featuring Macalaster president Brian Rosenberg. Playacting Playacting. Mindcasting Mindcasting. Facebook Psychology Facebook Psychology. Community Sharing Community Sharing. Holy Tweets Holy Tweets.

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