Facebook Follow: The Twitter-Eater, The Preemptive Google Me-Killer Up until a few months ago, I was using Facebook the same way I was using Twitter. That is, I was allowing anyone to follow me. But it was different. With Twitter, anyone can follow me without my approval. On Facebook, everyone needs my approval. There was no single reason why I switched my Facebook habits, but I decided that I was going to start using the service the way Facebook made it seem it should be used: befriending only actual friends. With the launch of Facebook Places, there’s a lot of talk about it being creepy or a potential security nightmare. You see, Facebook really did used to be all about friends. Facebook wants us to share things more openly, but with Places, they have launched a feature that most people will want to keep close to the vest. Well, actually they can. Facebook needs to adopt a friend/follower system. What I mean by this is that there needs to be a two-tier system for Facebook. And it needs to be simple. Others actually have this sort of system in place.
Is a Facebook/Syphilis Connection 'Ridiculous'? Yesterday, the Telegraph ran an article about a study that seemed to have found a connection between the spread of syphilis and the popularity of Facebook. Today, the paper has run a follow-up story, wherein "Facebook has said that reports linking the site's rise to an increased incidence of the bacterial infection syphilis are 'ridiculous'". According to the article, a Facebook spokesman has said that the initial report ignores "the difference between correlation and causation", but is the idea so unbelievable? Are we falling into the trap of technological determinism in thinking that Facebook could actually aid in and cause the spread of STDs? Right off the bat, we have to say that Facebook has a decent argument, at least on a semantic and statistical level. But is it really Facebook's fault? In the end, we run into one of those "chicken or the egg" dilemmas.
Build Beautiful Apps with ShortStack’s New Themes | ShortStack.com Custom Facebook Pages We’ve added 25 new themes to our growing list of options that our users can take advantage of when building their custom apps. We wanted to provide some additional themes that not only add a variety of options but some cleaner looks, more professional themes for businesses, and specific templates that our designers could benefit from. You can find our new themes in the tab designer within ShortStack under Theme Selector in the live preview column. ShortStack adds new themes to design options If you’re interested in knowing which exact themes are new here’s the list of the 25 names to keep an eye out for: Baby Blue Beach Scene Block Out Business Dark Business Red Business Green Cappuccino Copper Tile Corporate Corporate Neutral Gargoyle Granola Grapeful Luxurious Margarita Night Rider Organic Serenity Slate Spotlight Spotlight Blue Terra Cotta Trendy red Tree Hugger Wasabi Check out the 25 new theme options within ShortStack for custom page tab apps Share Comments comments
The Inevitable March of Progress: Facebook Soon Will Have More Visitors Than Yahoo Yahoo thinks of itself as media company these days. (It finalized the handover of its search results in the U.S. to Bing today). But media companies are measured by the size of their audience and whether or not that audience is growing. Yahoo still commands the third biggest audience on the Internet after Google and Microsoft sites, with 622 million unique visitors worldwide in July. The gap between Yahoo and Facebook is only 50 million visitors, which has narrowed considerably since the end of 2009, when the gap was 125 million. In terms of pageviews, Facebook is already more than twice as large as Yahoo, with an estimated 250 billion pageviews a month, versus 96 billion for Yahoo (see chart below). In the U.S., Yahoo is in the stronger No. 2 position, and Microsoft is in the No. 3 spot, with only 20 million monthly uniques separating it from Facebook (165 million versus 145 million in July). It is not just Yahoo that is looking over its shoulders now, but also Google and Microsoft.
After 150, Facebook friends are meaningless (PhysOrg.com) -- According to Oxford University's professor of evolutionary anthropology, Robin Dunbar, after you have amassed 150 friends on Facebook, any more are meaningless because the human brain can only remember 150 meaningful relationships anyway. Professor Dunbar says this number applies to different societies and has remained unchanged throughout history. In the 1990s Professor Dunbar developed a theory that the volume of the neocortex, the part of the brain involved with language and conscious thought, can only manage active relationships with around 150 friends — Dunbar’s Number — regardless of how many friends a person has either online or offline. On sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, it is easy to collect 1,500 “friends” or more, but Dunbar said that when you examine the traffic, people maintain relationships only with an inner circle of no more than 150 people, as they do outside the online environment.
Inside Facebook Seattle [Pictures] A couple weeks ago, Facebook officially opened their new office in Seattle, WA. At the time, Facebook’s Ari Steinberg (the main engineer in charge up there) wrote a post and shared a few pictures of what it looks like. But those pictures sort of made it look like a dismal, dreary version of Office Space (I know Seattle is cloudy all the time, but come on). So we’ve got a few better ones that show actual signs of life. Just as when Facebook opened their new Bay Area office, and when Twitter opened their office, I think it’s sort of neat to see pictures inside these offices — to see where the sausage is made. We’ve been thinking about doing something like this for TechCrunch TV as well — think: Cribs for tech startups. Behold Facebook Seattle below. [photo credit: Andrew Bosworth]
Older Adults and Social Media | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project Findings: Older Adults and Social Media Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older has nearly doubled—from 22% to 42% over the past year. While social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, older users have been especially enthusiastic over the past year about embracing new networking tools. Although email continues to be the primary way that older users maintain contact with friends, families and colleagues, many users now rely on social network platforms to help manage their daily communications—sharing links, photos, videos, news and status updates with a growing network of contacts. Half (47%) of internet users ages 50-64 and one in four (26%) users age 65 and older now use social networking sites. Half of online adults ages 50-64 and one in four wired seniors now count themselves among the Facebooking and LinkedIn masses. By comparison, social networking sites have gained a much larger foothold in the lives of older Americans over time.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: A Facebook Bill Of Rights Facebook has come along way from being Mark Zuckerberg’s afterschool project. In fact “The Facebook Effect” author David Kirkpatrick implied at TechCrunch Disrupt that Facebook was so influential it should be governed by the United Nations, “They are too important to our culture to be left to a private corporation” he said. But, despite the fact that at 500 million users Facebook has just under twice the population of the United States, it is a business not a country. And while Google is currently the most visited site on the Internet with about 170 million or so uniques in July according to Comscore, the levels of interaction that we have with Facebook are more often and more intimate, which makes it the most important site on the Internet today. The amount of time we spend on Facebook underscores the fact that we no longer live in geopolitical countries but digital ones. 9) Opt In, Not Opt Out “Opt In” needs to be the default for everything privacy related.
Paul Gillin on Social Media and the Open Enterprise Update Nov. 21: Social Rebate’s PR agency took issue with my opinions below, stating: For a journalist of your caliber, I would have expected you to do more than just ‘scour the website pretty thoroughly.’ If you were interested in a story—even a story critical of Social Rebate—I would have expected you to reach out, interview a Social Rebate representative, and perhaps even interview some of the company’s small business clients. Perhaps your perspective would have changed, perhaps not. But, at the very least, you would have fairly, accurately, and properly REPORTED the story.” The company’s founder and CEO submitted a response, which I have appended, in its entirety, to the end of this post. The PR agency for a startup called Social Rebate has been asking bloggers to comment on the company’s somewhat novel approach to brand ambassadorship. I’m sure the folks at Social Rebate researched their concept exhaustively. Does full disclosure resolve the issue? Social Rebate responds: Paul, Best,
You Can Block Any Facebook User Except Mark Zuckerberg Facebook and the brutal economics of connection - How the World Works “Economics,” writes Edward Glaeser in the Tuesday New York Times, “should be seen as a discipline that has spent centuries chronicling the enormous gains that come from people connecting with each other.” There is much to unpack in Glaeser’s thesis, but before we do so, let’s also bring the antithesis into play via an article published in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by Elizabeth Bernstein: “How Facebook Can Ruin Friendships.” Too much exposure to the trivial or unnecessary details of our friends’ lives, says Bernstein, “can hurt our real-life relationships.” When people connect with each other, they suffer losses as well as gains. Glaeser’s piece is smart, while Bernstein’s is dumb — a classic example of the handwringing that accompanies any new tech phenomenon. But is that the point? Facebook, I realized instantly, was just like the Well, only with a slicker interface and far better integration with the Web.
Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website When Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 grew impatient with the creation of an official universal Harvard facebook, he decided to take matters into his own hands. After about a week of coding, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com last Wednesday afternoon. The website combines elements of a standard House face book with extensive profile features that allow students to search for others in their courses, social organizations and Houses. “Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg said. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered use thefacebook.com. “I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far,” he said. But Director of Residential Computing Kevin S. “There is a project internally with computer services to create a facebook,” Davis said. Lisa H. “There are pretty intensive privacy options,” he said.
The meaning of network culture - Kazys Varnelis Whereas in postmodernism, being was left in a free-floating fabric of emotional intensities, in contemporary culture the existence of the self is affirmed through the network. Kazys Varnelis discusses what this means for the democratic public sphere. Not all at once but rather slowly, in fits and starts, a new societal condition is emerging: network culture. If more subtle than the much-talked about economic collapse of fall 2008, this shift in society is real and far more radical, underscoring even the logic of that collapse. The collapse of the markets seems to have been sudden, but it was actually a long-term process, beginning with bad decisions made longer before the collapse. If it is difficult to realize the radical impact of the contemporary, this is in part due to the hype about the near-future impact of computing on society in the 1990s. Network culture extends the information age of digital computing. But today connection is more important than division.
Peter Thiel: Facebook Won’t IPO Until 2012 At The Earliest