5 Things You Need To Know About Chinese Social Media. Your Facebook Photo Is Shaped by National Culture. May 31, 2012 7:01am Two typical Facebook profile photos, one American (left), the other East Asian. Images provided by the Center for Vital Longevity/UT Dallas. Poke around Facebook and you’ll see your friends in all sorts of places: at the beach, at a party, at the ballpark, at home. Our profile pictures can be very different, but two social scientists noticed some patterns.
Compared with people in, say, Taiwan, we Americans show ourselves looming larger in the frame, and smiling more broadly. This matters, say Chih-Mao Huang of the University of Illinois and Denise Park of the University of Texas at Dallas. “These are not conscious choices,” Dr. Huang and Park say they did two studies of Facebook profile pictures, measuring how people in the U.S. and Taiwan chose to show themselves.
For the most part, they concluded, we all do the same thing: try to put the best foot (or face) forward. Similarly, Americans turn up the voltage for their shots. What does all this mean? Facebook And The China Problem. France’s Viadeo has ‘headstart’ on LinkedIn in China — European technology news. Dubai Police are Monitoring Facebook and Twitter 24 Hours a Day. Last week the Dubai Chief of Police called for legal action to be taken against Twitter users who criticize the UAE. It would seem that the Dubai Police are keeping a close eye on Twitter, as well as Facebook, to catch out ‘culprits’.
Emirates 24/7 reports that the Dubai Police is keeping a 24 hour watch on both social networking sites, according to statements made Major Salem Obaid Salmeen, Deputy Director of Anti-Electronic Crimes of Dubai Police’s Criminal Investigations Department. “These electronic patrols are detecting and tracking all topics and materials written and presented on these websites,” he said during an interview on a local radio station, adding that the monitoring was not a violation of public freedom, since the content is in a public space for all to see. For the most part, the US equivalent of what the FBI and Homeland Security have been doing is harmless, at least on the surface.
In the case of UAE citizens however, the risk if far greater. Why China's Weibos Work Better Than Twitter. China's Social Media Revolution [Infographic] 29 November '11, 11:02pm Follow In 2010, there were 1 million censored articles in China. But despite China’s iron fist on social media censorship, the influence of the Internet is undeniable in the country, as its digital consumers continue to find ways to embrace social networking platforms by creating their own domestic versions. While sites like Facebook, The Huffington Post, Google Docs, Twitter and Vimeo are blocked, dozens of copycat platforms have sprung up to keep the 500 million Chinese citizens that are online happily occupied.
Admittedly, I’m tired of infographics but this one is different. Infographics are meant to elucidate complicated situations, and China’s relationship with the Internet is as complicated as a situation can be. The infographic was created for www.gplus.com, Gerson Lehrman Group’s new online business Q&A platform. Why Facebook Is Winning The Great Tech War In India. In Fast Company's recent cover story, The Great Tech War Of 2012, Farhad Manjoo plotted the battle plans for the four U.S. tech titans: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. The four companies have dominated somewhat separate parts of the U.S. tech space in the past, but are speedily converging on each others’ turf. Their ongoing skirmishes are daily evidence of this overlap, which will lead up to an all-out tech war in 2012.
As Manjoo explains, each stands a chance at a big win. The four have, of course, been active in international markets, as well. Facebook Unlike Apple’s products or Amazon’s service, access to Facebook's product comes without economic or geographical barriers--anyone with Internet access can sign up for an account. And Facebook is getting serious about its Indian users. Meanwhile, India’s Internet connected population is growing too. But there’s one part of Facebook’s rise that will be slow to reach the subcontinent. Google Apple With the iPad, it's back to pricing.