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Facebook feeds chatter to news outlets

September 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Facebook has begun feeding select news outlets real-time social network chatter about hot topics to weave into story coverage, wading deeper into Twitter territory.

A pair of software tools, Public Feed and Keyword Insights, lets Facebook’s media partners tap into comments posted on the service.

‘Selected news organisations can begin to integrate Facebook conversations into their broadcasts or coverage by displaying public posts of real-time activity about any given topic,’ Facebook’s online operations vice president, Justin Osofsky, said in a blog post.

‘From favourite television shows to sporting events to the latest news; the conversations are happening on Facebook.’

Facebook listed its media partners as Buzzfeed, CNN, NBC’s Today Show, BSkyB, Slate and Mass Relevance.

For a while now, news outlets have turned to globally popular one-to-many messaging service Twitter for real-time insights, opinions, and perspectives for stories.

Osofsky said that Facebook is ‘committed to building features that improve the experience of discovering and participating in conversations about things happening in the world right now, including entertainment, sports, politics and news.’

Only public posts by Facebook members will be streamed to news outlets, according to the California-based social network.

The software tools also allow news outlets to report demographic breakdowns of those discussing topics online, as well as how often specific words have been mentioned.

Osofsky gave the example of NBC’s Today Show being able to ‘include how many people on Facebook talked about a popular subject, where it’s getting the most buzz, whether it’s most popular among males or females, and with which age groups.’

Story source: www.bigpond.com

Filed Under: News, Social Media Tagged With: Facebook, internet, marketing, news, Social Media

Facebook unveils global net access plan

August 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Facebook and other technology giants have launched an initiative designed to give the whole world access to the internet.

The project is entitled Internet.org and its goal is to extend internet access to five billion people by cutting the cost of smart phone-based internet services in developing countries.

"Everything Facebook has done has been about giving all people around the world the power to connect," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.

"There are huge barriers in developing countries to connecting and joining the knowledge economy," he said, adding that the project aimed to make it easier and cheaper to connecting to the web.

The other partners in the project are Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, Qualcomm, MediaTek and Opera, while Twitter and LinkedIn are also due to sign up.

Today some 2.7 billion people, just over a third of the world’s population, had access to the internet, and the number of new users was growing only slowly each year, a statement said.

"The goal of Internet.org is to make internet access available to the two-thirds of the world who are not yet connected, and to bring the same opportunities to everyone that the connected third of the world has today," the statement said.

The seven founding partners are going to develop joint projects, share knowledge and mobilise governments and industry to bring the world online.

Specifically, they want to simplify mobile apps to make them more efficient and improve telephone components and networks so they perform better while consuming less energy.

They also want to develop lower-cost, higher-quality smartphones and partnerships to more broadly deploy internet access in underserved communities.

Zuckerberg insisted in an interview with CNN that the project was not simply aimed at generating more customers.

"If we were just focused on making money, the first billion people we’ve connected have way more money than the rest of the next six billion combined. It’s not fair but it’s the way that it is," he said.

The partnership emulates one launched by Facebook in 2011 called Open Compute Project, which also aims to improve the materials used in call centres and make them less energy-hungry.

That project was originally met with scepticism but has gradually won over the major players in the computer industry.

The new thrust comes at a key time for tech groups. Mature markets are saturated and have little potential for significant growth, while poor regions like Africa, Latin America and some parts of Asia are pools of potential new customers.

Filed Under: News, Research, Social Media Tagged With: Facebook, internet, news, Research, Social Media

Facebook linked with unhappiness

August 15, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Facebook could be spreading unhappiness through society as well as keeping people connected, research has shown.

The number one social networking site is strongly associated with declines in well-being, psychologists claim.

Scientists found the more time people spent on Facebook over a two-week period, the worse they subsequently felt.

In contrast, talking to friends on the phone or meeting them in person led to greater levels of happiness.

‘On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection,’ said study leader Dr Ethan Kross, from the University of Michigan in the US.

‘But rather than enhance well-being, we found that Facebook use predicts the opposite result – it undermines it’.

The researchers recruited 82 young adults, all of whom had smartphones and Facebook accounts.

To assess their personal levels of well-being, participants were sent questions by text message at five random times each day for two weeks.

The ‘experience sampling’ technique is a recognised reliable way of measuring how people think, feel and behave in their day-to-day lives.

Participants were asked how they felt ‘right now’, how worried or lonely they were, and to what extent they had been using Facebook or interacting with other people directly.

Writing in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE, the researchers said higher levels of Facebook use correlated with greater loss of well-being.

Volunteers were also asked to rate their level of life satisfaction at the start and end of the study.

Over the two-week period, satisfaction ratings were found to decline the more people used Facebook.

‘This is a result of critical importance because it goes to the very heart of the influence that social networks may have on people’s lives,’ said University of Michigan neuroscientist and co-author Dr John Jonides.

There was no evidence that people were more likely to log into Facebook when they felt bad, said the researchers.

In addition, loneliness and Facebook both had an independent impact on happiness.

‘It was not the case that Facebook use served as a proxy for feeling bad or lonely,’ said Kross.

Further research is planned to look at the psychological reasons for the negative effect of Facebook on well-being.

Story source: www.bigpond.com

Filed Under: News, Research, Social Media, Technology Tagged With: Facebook, internet, news, Social Media

Rudd admits spam Twitter followers

August 13, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has never paid to boost his social media profiles.

But his office acknowledges some of his 1.4 million Twitter followers aren’t genuine.

‘Neither he (Mr Rudd), nor his office, has ever paid to boost the Prime Minister’s Twitter followers, Facebook friends or Facebook likes,’ a spokesman for Mr Rudd told AAP.

‘What spambots choose to do in their own time is a matter for them.’

Spambots are automated programs that create fake social and email accounts to flood users with spam and a number appear to follow Mr Rudd, who is easily one of the most popular Australians on the social media site.

Telltale signs of spambot Twitter accounts include those with little or no personal profile information combined with zero or few tweets and very few followers.

An analysis of Mr Rudd’s followers list shows a number of accounts fitting that description – though it remains unclear what proportion are genuine.

Most famous people on Twitter have spambot followers – and there’s little they can do about it apart from the report the accounts and hope they’re removed.

It comes after Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was bombarded by about 80,000 fake, paid-for followers over the weekend.

‘We are working with Twitter now to remove the fake accounts and investigate who was behind this,’ the Liberal Party wrote on Facebook.

‘The Liberal Party has not purchased or artificially sought to inflate any social media numbers.’

By Monday morning Mr Abbott reached 208,357 followers – up from just over 120,000 two months ago, with most of that increase occurring on Saturday and Sunday.

Shortly after 8.20am (AEST) on Monday, the opposition leader’s numbers plunged to just over 165,000 as the paid-for accounts were removed.

His numbers reached 168,725 by early afternoon.

It’s unclear who paid to boost Mr Abbott’s account.

One hundred thousand Twitter followers can easily be bought anonymously online, with marketing companies offering to supply 100,000 new followers for as little as $274.

Followers can be added at a pre-prescribed rate, such as five per day or one per hour.

Facebook likes’ can also be bought online for similar prices.

Queensland University of Technology’s Associate Professor Axel Bruns said Mr Rudd’s numbers were also boosted by about half a million in 2009 and 2010 when Twitter suggested new users follow him.

‘We actually looked at the follower growth over time and there are periods from mid-2009 to the start of 2010 when Twitter recommended Rudd to people who were signing up in Australia,’ Prof Bruns told AAP.

‘To the point where you almost had to follow him to complete the account set-up process.’

Prof Bruns said it’s unclear if a big, genuine Twitter following translates into increased popularity at the ballot box.

Story source: www.bigpond.com

Filed Under: News, Social Media Tagged With: election, krudd, news, Social Media, Twitter

Twitter unimpressed with leaders’ debate

August 13, 2013 By Leave a Comment

The television networks’ worms were split on who won the leaders’ debate, but the verdict from the blue birds of Twitter was unanimous: they were not impressed.

The commentary on social media was that the debate was boring, the leaders were evasive and the rhetoric was more of the same.

John Collins tweeted that the handshake was the most interesting bit.

Jeff Neale tweeted he didn’t think the leaders moved anybody from entrenched positions.

‘Only item to excite ppl was Rudd’s SSM commitment,’ he said of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s announcement Labor would move to legalise same-sex marriage with a conscience vote.

Twitter traffic peaked at 1,952 tweets per minute during the same-sex marriage discussion.

The announcement was largely greeted positively on social media.

Rauri Jayne wrote ‘KRudd, You just got my vote with that statement.’

But others questioned why Labor was waiting until after the election to move on the issue.

‘I just don’t think I can trust Labor on delivering marriage equality; you just played politics with it for too long,’ Stephen B Sander wrote.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott came under criticism for ducking the issue.

Many were unimpressed by his reference to his sister Christine Forster, including actress Magda Szubanski, who came out as gay last year.

She wrote she wished he would ‘stop trotting out his gay sister every time he is asked a direct question’ on marriage equality.

When it was over, Mr Abbott took to Twitter to say he was pleased with the debate.

‘If you want a new way, you’ve got to choose a new government,’ he wrote.

Mr Rudd also tweeted post-debate, but he did not comment on the outcome, preferring to reiterate there would be legislation for marriage equality with a full conscience vote.

‘I believe this is the right thing to do,’ he wrote.

Story source: www.bigpond.com

Filed Under: News, Research, Social Media Tagged With: debate, election, news, Social Media, Twitter

Facebook rolling out new search tool

July 8, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Users who may have grown frustrated with Facebook’s rudimentary search feature are getting an updated version designed to make it easier to find people, places and photos on the site.

Facebook unveiled its social search tool in January, but only made it available to a small fraction of its 1.1 billion users, as its engineers continued to tweak and test it.

Over the next few weeks, starting on Monday, the company is rolling out the social search tool, called ‘Graph Search,’ to everyone whose language is set to US English.

Unlike searches on Google, which are good for finding specific things like roasted kale recipes or Mizuno running shoes, Facebook’s tool is most useful in unearthing information about your social circles.

Graph Search lets you find friends who live in San Francisco who are vegan, friends of friends who live near you and like hiking, photos of your boyfriend taken before you met him in 2010. nearby restaurants that your friends like – and so on.

But soon after Facebook launched the tool, the internet had a field day with less innocuous and more embarrassing queries, showing just how much information people reveal about themselves on the site, intentionally or not. Care to find out which brand of condoms your friends prefer? Graph Search might tell you.

A blog called actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com posted a collection of searches ranging from ‘married people who like prostitutes’ to ‘current employers of people who like racism.’ Both yielded more than 100 people.

While it is possible that some of those Facebook users are fully aware that what they’ve shared is easily searchable, it is likely that some are not. It’s easy to click ‘like’ on a page and forget about it, and it’s even easier to assume that no one will search through your photos from party days years ago.

To avoid any unpleasantness, Facebook plans to notify users to check ‘who can see my stuff’ under their privacy settings.

‘The goal is to avoid bad surprises,’ said Nicky Jackson Colaco, privacy and safety manager at Facebook.

But there are advantages.

It’s easier, for example, to find a long-lost classmate with a common name, or to find common interests with friends of friends.

As Google has shown, it’s a lucrative business. Research firm eMarketer estimates that Google will take nearly 42 per cent of all US digital ad spending this year, well above Facebook’s share of less than 7 per cent.

Story source: www.bigpond.com

Filed Under: News, Research, Social Media Tagged With: Facebook, networks, news, Social Media, Technology

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