Social Networking, Internet Lifestyle And Security News
Passionate about net neutrality? Facebook privacy issues freaking you out? Want to know more about the latest security breach? Here we'll cover the headlines that matter in our ever evolving digitally-connected lives and lifestyles around the world.
There's a big kerfuffle brewing over on Facebook over the posting of photos showing moms breastfeeding their babies. Apparently, Facebook has not only pulled some of these photos, but it has also sent warnings to some users who posted the photos; and even terminated the account of at least one user. Facebook claims that the pictures it pulled...
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As a company, Google has never really been one to sit back and just watch what the other guys are doing; instead, the company is continuously venturing into new areas. Now, they’re looking to get in on the social networking action by going head-to-head with Facebook’s newly launched Connect. Similarly named, Google’s new Friend Connect makes...
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Social-networking giant Facebook is continuing to grow like mad. In fact, the company grew its active membership total from 90 million users in early July to 120 million now, according to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer. While speaking at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference, Sandberg also noted, “We got more (members)...
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Besides being a low-ranking Marvel Comics super-villain, Trapster is a free application that went live on the App Store last Friday, allowing users to share information real-time on speed traps.Besides the iPhone (naturally the highest-profile device in the bunch), the app runs on GPS devices like Garmin and TomTom, as well as on smartphones...
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Before you post photos of your night of drunken debauchery to your Facebook profile, you might want to consider what kind of impression it might make on prospective employers. And lest you think that baby-boomer-generation hiring managers wouldn't know Facebook if they tripped over it, think again: 22 percent of hiring managers say they research...
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Social music networks are like college. You all meet up there for a while, make friends, maybe a few enemies, share all sorts of things, and then scatter to other places and make new friends. The overriding constant is that nobody has any money in either place. Social.FM, which until recently was known as Mercora, was launched in 2005, and...
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Triple word score! Hasbro can now stop worry about a server overload on its Facebook Scrabble application: only two days after disappearing from Facebook, Scrabulous is back, but with a new name (Wordscraper), and minor tweaks to hopefully eliminate any copyright issues. Obviously the name is a good start in terms of deflecting lawsuits. Besides...
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Facebook and MySpace perform important functions for their users. But when you get right down to it, they exist and are popular because they are amusements. Serious business is not discussed on a page with glitter fonts and Linkin Park music videos that auto-play. There is a social site that's all business --LinkedIn-- and it's received an...
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Don't worry, Rupert (Murdoch); MySpace still outdraws Facebook in terms of unique U.S. visitors. But in terms of worldwide visitors: second place.comScore statistics indicate that Facebook drew even with MySpace in April. At that point, the networks interested about 115 million users each. If we're allowed mentally to extend the...
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Facebook has 70 million members, so if the owners change something about it the users don't like, the angry virtual mob that appears outside the window with digital pitchforks and torches is something to behold. Facebook's attempt to share information about user's purchases through a utility they called Beacon didn't go down too well, ...
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YouTube may rule supreme in the melded world of online video and social networking, but Microsoft has a new trick up its sleeve that it hopes might steal some eyeballs away from the competition. Launching today in 20 countries and 12 languages is Microsoft's Messenger TV service, integrating online video directly into Microsoft's Live Messenger...
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A tweet deal for Twitter? Well why not, as they've managed to snag another round of financing.A source familiar with the negotiations tells me that Twitter signed a term sheet for "either $15 million or $20 million" last week. We're still trying to find out who is in, but the word is that it's largely an inside round of funding with one outsider...
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Why give them the opportunity to get used to an ad-free experience? Twitter Japan is launching, but unlike the U.S.-based version, with ads from Day One.In a conversation Tuesday evening, Joi Ito of Digital Garage, the Japanese company Twitter tasked with some of the Japanese localization, told me that Twitter decided to launch in Japan...
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Anyone ever watch the movie The Cheyenne Social Club? Well, this ain't that kind of social club. Thursday Rockstar Games announced the Rockstar Social Club, scheduled to launch (drum roll) on the same day as Grand Theft Auto IV, April 29th (go figure).Today Rockstar announced a new website called the Rockstar Social Club. Essentially a high...
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Facebook has been garnering all sorts of bad press lately about the iffy security and privacy of their users' information. Today's version of Whoops! for Facebook is a security lapse that allowed unauthorized strangers to see personal photographs posted in areas on Facebook that were supposed to be private. And I wasn't just making a cheap...
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You may recall that Chris Avenir, a first-year chemical engineering student at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, faced expulsion after it came to light that he had created a Facebook-based chemistry study group. The horror, the horror!Chris Avenir's apparent exhortation to fellow Ryerson University engineering students to "input...
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In a somewhat surprising move, AOL has shelled out $850 million dollars to acquire social networking site Bebo. If you add Bebo's 40 million users worldwide to AOL's customer base for AIM and ICQ, AOL can now boast 80 million unique users. And AOL can show those 80 million users advertising while they're on their service. I imagine it's a...
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Lance Ulanoff can't help noticing that the social networking site Facebook has more than a passing resemblance to AOL just before it went down like the Titanic: disgruntled users, ill-advised and unsuccessful attempts to monetize traffic, and inflated user rolls kept artificially high by the difficulty of removing your account from the service....
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Well, although there's likely a security hole there somewhere, the WSJ Online has accepted Facebook's friend request with the "Seen This?" feature.Hoping to tap into the growing buzz of online social networks, the Journal is adding a feature to its Web site that will allow readers to see which Journal stories are popular among that user's...
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Everyone keeps telling me how smart Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook is, but I'm beginning to have my doubts. Fresh on the heels of his disastrous foray into datamining with Facebook's Beacon service, he seems to be unclear on the concept of copyright infringement. Hasbro and Mattel, owners of the copyright for the Scrabble word game,...
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Phishing scams grow more sophisticated every day. And as sites like banks and credit card companies become hardened against attack, crafty information thieves find ways to steal information further out in the digital landscape. Facebook users reported a phishing attack on Wednesday that is disguised as a message left for them from a trusted...
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Facebook has gotten all the bad publicity anybody could ever want over their intrusive "Beacon" marketing/advertising/information gathering widget. On top of everything else, researchers have discovered that despite Facebook's modification of their permission settings, Facebook is still collecting information about all your purchases...
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