Social news & updates

Timeline is Live! Now What? Facebook’s Timeline for Pages has finally been released, and it appears that a few of our predictions have proven correct, while a few new exciting/concerning elements have unfolded.

But before we get into the critiques, let’s take a moment to go through the anatomy of this new interface. Mashable put together this short video describing the main features: After getting over the initial shell shock of the cluttered content, you will find some particularly interesting Timeline components, include Highlights, Messages, Friends’ Activity, and visual real estate. Highlights I am a big fan of this option from both a brand and consumer perspective. Messages For years, customers (and brands) have wanted to be able to connect with each other without divulging sensitive information–like email address or phone numbers–but were not given that option. What does that mean for you as a brand? Activity by Friends Visual Real Estate History. Twitter Just Fired A Cannonball At Facebook And Google+ Matt Rosoff Business Insider Twitter is revamping the service with personal Twitter profile pages, a new timeline that includes rich media and other related information embedded into tweets, and easier search for information based on @ symbols (usernames) and hash tags.

Talking at Twitter's unfinished new headquarters building in San Francisco, founder Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo explained that the changes are meant to make Twitter more accessible to everybody. PayPal Launches Facebook App for Sending Money to Friends [EXCLUSIVE] Social payments are taking a giant leap forward.

PayPal has unveiled a Facebook app that lets you send money to friends. The app, simply titled Send Money, is just as straightforward as its name. You have the choice to send either an ecard with money or just money with no card. You select a card, choose a friend to send it to and then select how much money to send. "The PayPal and Facebook infrastructure have now merged," PayPal's Anuj Nayar says.

While there are several ways to pay with PayPal via Facebook (Payvment comes to mind), this is the first app to enable peer-to-peer payments via Facebook and PayPal. "Sending money, person to person, is free," PayPal Senior Product Marketing Manager JB Coutinho said. And while the primary aspect of the Send Money app is its enablement of transactions across the world's largest social network, the ecard aspect is being emphasized as well. We can see the app really taking off. Facebook’s ticker privacy scare, and what you should do about it. Amongst the recent new changes to appear on Facebook, there is a "ticker" (a rolling real time list of what your friends are doing).

Not everyone has received it yet, because it's on a staggered rollout, but millions have already seen it. You'll find it on the right hand side of your Facebook page, in the collapsible chat bar. It's smashing if you want to keep fully up-to-date with your friends' activity, but there is a problem with it. The ticker makes it very simple for you to eavesdrop when one of your Facebook friends says something to someone you've never heard of - and even see what the stranger originally wrote too.

Testing shows that your privacy settings are working the same as they did before, providing you used them in the first place. The appalling enforced eavesdropping in the ticker (your friend said something to someone you've never heard of) is the result of the lax or non-existent settings of your friends, so here's the deal.. Facebook about to launch Actions, the final piece of its plan for frictionless sharing. Connect with leaders from the companies in this story, in real life: Come to the fourth annual VentureBeat Mobile Summit April 14-15 in Sausalito, Calif.

Request an invitation. Facebook’s ambitious plan to weave various actions we take across the web into the social network via “frictionless” sharing is finally ready to be deployed, VentureBeat has learned. The remaining pieces of Facebook’s new Open Graph are in the final stages of testing and are nearing release, a source familiar with the matter told VentureBeat. The social networking company is quickly working to validate partners and could turn on the latest element, Facebook Actions, any day now or, at the most, in a few weeks, the source said. The new Open Graph, unveiled at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in September, consists of three key elements: Timeline, Ticker and Actions. “We’re currently focused on the rollout of Timeline, which already features several apps in the news, music and video categories. Instagram photo sharing the latest social tool for Obama campaign. Obama campaign joins hipster photo site Instagram Instagram allows users to apply filters to, and instantly share, their photos Burnishing his credentials as a social media pioneer once again, President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign is has joined the up-and-coming Instagram photo-sharing service popular with young technology-savvy users.

Instagram allows users to easily apply quirky visual filters to photographs and then instantly share those photographs on social media sites. Microsoft launches its social network — but it’s not what you think. Microsoft’s anticipated social network So.cl has arrived, but don’t expect it to be the Google+ or Facebook challenger it was widely rumored to be — at least not yet.

So.cl, pronounced social, is being billed as a site for student collaboration and information gathering. For now, Microsoft is calling it just an “experimental research project” and only making it available to students studying information and design at the University of Washington, Syracuse University and New York University. So.cl is “designed to give students the ability to network with peers, share useful information quickly, and build their own pages that collect information from both inside and outside the classroom — in a sense, transforming the web and social networks into the new classroom,” Microsoft said in a blog post on the launch of the site.

How Social Media Is Ruining Your Mind. The Real Facebook IPO Winners? Sean Parker And Bono. The real winners in Facebook’s upcoming public offering will be its current owners.

Brian Barrett has a helpful pie chart illustrating just who these lucky few happen to be: Honestly, I had no idea that Bono had such a large investment in Facebook. We’ve all heard of Peter Thiel and Sean Parker’s investments in the social media giant, but Bono? Who knew?