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Sociologist criticises Facebook quest for profit

Andre — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:00:44 +0000

Facebook has long hit the news for its controversial approach to online data privacy, with many people criticising the application for abusing users’ personal information. Earlier this month, Facebook came under fire by German officials, following claims that the social networking giants has gathered personal information from non-Facebook subscribers.

Data protection officials commenced legal proceedings against the company, in action that could result in thousands of Euros in fines being levied against them. Swiss officials are also considering action against them.

With 500 million users and an estimated value of well over 6 billion pounds, Facebook is the acknowledged king of social networking. Despite the popularity of the site, earlier this year over 40,000 people pledged to leave the site over privacy concerns. A sociologist from Lausanne University, Olivier Glassey, has issued a statement suggesting that Facebook’s popularity will continue to decline, unless the company does something radical to change their approach to users’ data and personal information.

Olivier Glassey stated: “We are providing a lot of information and we do not know how this information is used by them or even what kind of information Facebook is processing and how. So maybe a better balance between given and received information will be a point to work on in the future for the user and for Facebook.”

A second social expert has backed up the claims, stating: “People understood that their privacy was at risk and therefore they will falsify the information. It is what sociologists call projecting your life. You start to manipulate the data, you start to make things better, you start to put out only selected pictures of yourself, because you know that the pictures are going to circulate.”

“So what we see right now is that social networks are less and less a representation of our life as it really is. It is more what we want others to think our life is, which is a very, very big difference.”

With the growing concerns over Facebook’s use of data, the future could see a mass exodus of users to more secure sites, and the popular networking service diminishing in popularity over time.

Yahoo and Facebook push integration even further

James Oliver — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 11:36:59 +0000

Yahoo! is set to launch new features that will push the integration of Yahoo.com and Yahoo! Mail with Facebook, the main aim behind the new features will be to encourage users to post actions taken on Yahoo! sites and other associated services – such as photography favourite Flickr – onto their Facebook wall.

It has also been reported that Yahoo! will also be upgrading its Yahoo! Profiles service to include tabs that will take users to various social networks. Under an all new name ‘Yahoo! Pulse’, users will be able to switch between these networks and access updates from their Yahoo! or Facebook profiles without having to use the services separately.

These new features are slowly strengthening the extended partnership between Yahoo! and Facebook that has been growing since last December, as Yahoo! really pushes its goal of becoming a more social site in order to hold the attention of its visitors.

Although Yahoo! sites already currently receive hundreds of millions of visitors from around the world each month, studies have shown that many of them do not hang around after viewing news stories or checking their email – instead heading over to social networking sites such as Facebook to spend more time networking with friends.

In a statement, a Yahoo! spokesperson explained that its partnership with Facebook was an effort “to give people one simple, trusted place to share information and connect. We think this offers great benefit to people across the Web, and it’s key to helping Yahoo! extend our reach and increase engagement.”

Yahoo! is not the only side benefiting from the deal, however, as these new features will also aid Facebook in as they seek to encourage more sites to link to its services, achieving founder Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a more social web, extending user profiles across more major hubs and sites.

Director of the Facebook Developer Network, Ethan Beard, had this to say about the partnership:

“By integrating with Facebook on a global scale, Yahoo! is building upon an already valuable brand to give people easy ways to share the content they enjoy on Yahoo! with their friends on Facebook.”

Big rise in time spent online by UK web users

Matt Thomas — Thu, 27 May 2010 09:00:30 +0000

Due to the unprecedented rise of such social networking behemoths as Facebook and Twitter it has been revealed that web users in the UK now spend an average of one full 24 hour day per month online, this is a massive 65 per cent increase from three years ago.

This is according to a brand new survey published by the UK Online Measurement company (UKOM), they found that your average web user in the UK spends a total of 22 hours and 15 minutes on the internet every month.

Unsurprisingly the highest percentage of the time (22.7 per cent) is spent on blogs and social networking sites, which have majorly shifted focus away from other online habits since 2007 – particularly instant messaging, (MSN and AIM) which now only accounts for just 4.9 per cent of time spent online, compared to 14 per cent three years ago.

This drop in instant messaging shows just how popular social networking sites have become as millions of users seem to have stopped using the previously ubiquitous instant messaging programs. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter now hold a highly significant influence in many areas of contemporary life, they have even played a role in the recent General Election.

UKOM spokesperson Alex Burmaster stated that communication, networking and online games are still the most popular pastimes. “These are the pillars on which the internet is built,” he said.

E-mail was previously perceived as being an obvious victim to the rise of social networking but it has surprisingly grown from 6.5 per cent in 2007 to 7.2 per cent in 2010. Whilst online games take up 6.9 per cent of all time spent online in the UK, including on games consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox Live service.

“Social networking is like an organism, feeding off itself and getting bigger,” Burmaster explained. “People are plugging more and more of their lives into it.”

The study by UKOM also revealed that adult sites only account for a modest proportion of internet use, with people actually spending more time visiting news sites (2.8 per cent) than seeking out pornography (2.7 per cent).

“It is a bit of a digital myth that everyone online visits adult sites,” Burmaster said.

“We divide the internet into 85 different sections so the fact that adult content is in the top 10 shows it is still one of the most heavily used sectors.”

Partnership between Facebook and FarmVille under threat

Jenny Sanderson — Tue, 18 May 2010 09:00:08 +0000

Facebook, now officially the largest social networking site on the internet, and Zynga, the company behind the incredibly popular Facebook game FarmVille, have fallen out over money issues.

Facebook have recently decided to make changes to agreements held with companies who build different features for the site.

The Times have claimed that Facebook are intending to take a 30 percent commission on all financial transactions that are made through the site as they look to maximise profits.

Californian based company, Zynga, the group behind the ever-popular FarmVille game are reported to be upset by the plans set forth by Facebook and as a result are rumoured to have threatened to split from Facebook.

This is unlikely to be the desired outcome from Facebook as the end of their relationship with Zynga would mean that other games produced by Zynga such as FishVille, Café World and Mafia Wars would all be taken off of the site, along with FarmVille these games bring a lot of users to the site for long periods of time.

FarmVille is played by an incredible 83 million people a month. The main premise behind the game is that users build a farm and then maintain it, including tending to crops and rearing livestock.

Although FarmVille is free to play it does create money as players are able to buy virtual items for their farm with real money.

With 83 million users logging on to play FarmVille a month there is a fair amount of money to be made and it would seem logical for both Facebook and Zynga to come to an agreement that would benefit both companies and not take FarmVille away from its hoard of loyal fans.

Facebook respond to criticism by tightening security

Andy Russell — Mon, 17 May 2010 09:00:15 +0000

As is often the case when changes are made to Facebook, the social networking giant has come under a lot of criticism as of late due to their new ‘instant privacy’ feature and other changes that they made in privacy settings.

Users will now be notified if anyone attempts to hack into their Facebook account.

The new login notifications feature has been introduced in order to block and identify suspicious logins.

The new feature allows the user to approve devices commonly used for login and to choose to be notified if login is attempted on a device that had not been approved.

So if a user’s account is being accessed from a computer or device that they have not registered they will be notified via SMS or e-mail immediately.

The notification sent will contain steps to remove the unknown device and reset the password.

Facebook have also announced another feature to block suspicious logins even before they occur.

Under this new feature , the verification questions would be asked to the person attempting to access a Facebook account from a non-registered device.

Any detail of the user or even the security question on the account could be asked to the person trying to access that account, once their identity is confirmed Facebook will reveal the recent logins to the account and offer to reset the password just in-case the logins are not recognisable.

This seems a decent attempt at tightening security from Facebook as there has been a lot of concern swirling around the web over changes to privacy settings and accounts being hacked, these new features seem quite simple but should prove to be effective.

Microsoft announce social media aggregator Spindex

James Oliver — Thu, 06 May 2010 09:00:26 +0000

Microsoft seem to have come to the realisation that there is no competing with Social Networking giants Facebook and Twitter so they have instead announce a tool that is able to aggregate all of a users social media activity into one place.

Named Spindex the service works in a similar way to products such as FriendFeed and runs with the slogan “Make sense of your social overload.”

The main aim is to show users all activity across each of the Social Networking sites that they are registered with thus avoiding the annoying task of having to log into each of your accounts individually.

Lili Cheng, General Manager of Microsoft Fuse Labs wrote:

“Spindex, which we’re making available in early technical preview form, aggregates your social streams (Facebook, Twitter, Bing, etc.), making it simple for you to find what’s new, see personalized trending topics, and generally make the most of the time you spend being social on the Web.”

Microsoft’s Fuse Labs is the company’s short term centre for innovation having recently launched a Bing-Twitter mash up to enable users to see where their friends are tweeting. They have been busy of late having released a product for Microsoft Office 2010 that can integrate social media into outlook and a tool to integrate documents completely into Facebook.

It would seem that Microsoft are subscribing to the age old prophecy ‘if you can’t beat them join them’ as they habitually team with Facebook and Twitter rather than competing directly against them.

A trip to the Spindex website gives a little more information as to what exactly the service does:

“Allows you to access and interact with your social networks, see trends from your friends, and see related info from Bing on literally everything you click on. Spindex proactively finds useful articles and information based on your interest in your friends’ messages and comments.”

It is only available as a technical preview to those at the web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco but should be on general release later in the year.

Social web calling for Spotify

Andy Russell — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:30:18 +0000

In a bid to lure people away from Apples ever growing iTunes music service Spotify have entered the social networking sphere. The company announced that it would be integrating its online music service with Facebook and Twitter.

The service was launched earlier this week and can be used by both free and premium account users of Spotify, the new feature will allow users to access their Facebook accounts from the Spotify site, a trend that appears to be growing quite rapidly this year.

The link with Facebook will allow users to share music and playlists to be shared with friends over the social networking site. Twitter users will have a similar experience as they will be able to share music through direct Spotify links that will appear as Tweets.

This is a bold and decisive move by Spotify as they attempt to dent Apple’s dominance of the music sharing market. There should be no reason why the two cannot co-exist as the Spotify service is quite different from that of iTunes.

Whereas iTunes concentrates on selling the tracks to the user at a price, Spotify have concentrated more on the access model of allowing the user to listen to whatever song they choose but without being able to own it as an mp3. Both have their uses and each will suit the different ways that people listen to music.

This announcement has conveniently come just after Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg declared last week that Facebook are helping to push the web to move into an area of more social interaction.

Spotify’s new social feature hopes to add more premium users to the service. At present only 320,000 people pay the £9.99 subscription for the ad-free premium account, a figure that they hope will rise with the addition of Facebook and Twitter, never underestimate the power of social networking.

1 million users and counting for social network start-up Foursquare

Jenny Sanderson — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:14:32 +0000

Social network start-up Foursqaure are relative new comers to the scene but in an online world dominated by Facebook and Twitter they are doing surprisingly well.

The site is fairly well known in the US and has only recently raised eyebrows in the UK but they are already set to hit the milestone of 1 million users according to a Tweet posted by the company last week, not bad for a company that is just over a year old.

The service has proved extremely popular for those living in big cities around the US . It will track a users whereabouts via their mobile phone and is able to recognise when a user arrives or ‘checks in’ to a specific store, restaurant or attraction located in their city.

The user must be signed into Foursquare in order for it to track their movements via the GPS built into their phones. If the user visits a specific establishment enough they are awarded the ‘mayor’ status, which means that they are the individual with the most visits. Many businesses offer prizes and rewards for anyone that becomes a mayor, it works sort of like a high tech loyalty card that you are pretty much guaranteed to have on you at all times.

The service has only recently been introduced in the UK with London inevitably the first city to become part of the network. Debenhams and Dominos Pizza were among the first major companies to target users of the service in the UK and with the growing popularity of Foursquare there are likely to be many more over the coming months.

Google Maps goes social with help from Google Buzz

Andre — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:04:23 +0000

Google Buzz launched earlier this year to compete with Facebook and Twitter in a social networking war that, lets face it, they have never really had a chance of winning. As seemed fairly inevitable at the time Google Buzz is still some way behind the main two in terms of users but Google have given themselves a boost by integrating their popular Google Maps service with their new social networking platform.

Google Buzz went live in February of this year and has been met with much criticism as it does not appear to offer anything innovative or different from its rivals apart from its integration with G-mail, until now.

Google will hope that the new map feature changes the criticism into praise as it will also be made available to mobile phone users of Buzz.

It sounds as thought the integration between Maps and Buzz will work very well alongside Twitter posts and mobile uploads which will place the user at the location they were in when they submitted any updates or posts whilst logged into the service.

The service is primarily aimed at adding a new dimension to status updates as they will show other users your exact global location along with your status update, if that is something that at all appeals to you.

The user will also be able to go into Google maps, perform a location search (probably of the location that they are at or are planning to visit) and tick ‘Buzz’. This will then show that user who else is at that particular location.

Although it does sound like a unique service that will surely have its users it is also bound to have complaints from people seeking web privacy as the question will surely be asked: who wants everyone to know exactly where they are at all times? Google will hope that everyone does.

Facebook and Microsoft announce launch of Docs.com

Jenny Sanderson — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 12:51:51 +0000

In response to Google’s recent release of their updated “Google Docs” office suite program, Microsoft and Facebook have joint forces to create a rival online document- sharing service that suspiciously looks a lot like Google’s mew software.

The new site known as “Docs.com” went live this week at Facebook’s F8 conference in San Francisco along with the social networking sites announcement of their new social plug-ins as they attempt to connect with other third party internet sites.

The all new website will allow Facebook users to log in via their new ‘connect’ service; once in, they will be able to share, edit and create Microsoft Office documents including Word and Excel with any of their friends on Facebook.

New or edited documents will then show up in a users news feed in the same manor was pictures and status updates.

The service has not been perfected and is still in a beta testing stage at the moment.

The announcement comes as a bit of a surprise as rumours have been circulating on the web that Microsoft would be launching their own document sharing service later on in the year. However, Docs.com gives Microsoft a chance to test the technology that they are likely to use for their own service within Facebook’s walls.

This announcement may worry Google who have been working hard at pushing Google Apps and their new version of cloud computing to businesses both big and small. As seems to be the trend this year none of the big internet based companies are letting their rivals get too far ahead of them and this can only be good for the users.

Facebook to expand web presence

Andre — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:45:04 +0000

Big announcements were expected at Facebook’s F8 conference in San-Francisco this week and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the social networking site, did not disappoint.

Facebook will be replacing their ‘Facebook Connect’ platform with an all new set of ‘social plug-ins’ designed to dramatically increase their presence across the web.

Zuckerberg introduced the new tools as part of Facebook’s open graph strategy, the idea of creating more connectivity amongst different websites.

The service is primarily designed to allow Facebook to become more deeply embedded into different third party websites, meaning that even when a user chooses to go to another site they will not be able to escape the presence of Facebook.

The service is launching with 30 high profile partners which include several UK brands such as SKY and LoveFilm.

A Facebook user will have to be logged into their account (via the 3rd party website) in order to use the new service. The user will then be able to click the newly updated ‘Like’ button on photos, music, articles and the like, these will then be shared with their friends via Facebook.

They have also introduced new pop-up windows which will show friends what each other have been watching or reading on the different third party sites (if you really want them to know).

The information that a user ‘Likes’ on a site such as LoveFilm will then be logged and archived by Facebook and then given back to the original site enabling them to create a more personalised online experience for that user.

Zuckerberg stated that the changes are designed to put Facebook users at the centre of the web but it would seem that perhaps the billionaire owner of Facebook is looking to put himself and his company at the centre of the web too.

Facebook decides to shutdown Lite site

Andre — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:04:10 +0000

The site that Facebook designed for people with poor internet access has been shutdown.

Facebook Lite slipped under the radar of many users only 7 months ago; it was a stripped back, very basic version of the social networking site.

The full version of the site was proving to take far too long to load for some users that had very weak internet connections; the Lite site benefited these users as well as Facebook as it allowed them to still be a part of the community whilst ensuring that Facebook did not lose out on users.

The Lite version of the site allowed users to partake in most normal Facebook activities such as sharing and uploading photos, browsing profiles and writing on walls but it was not able to play online games or run any of the applications.

Facebook did not give a reason for closing the site but it is thought that they feel it dilutes the user’s experience as it takes a lot of the substance out of the site, particularly the monetisable parts making it not worth while for them to run, especially seen as they seem to be more concentrated on turning a profit now.

Users that try to access the Lite site will now be redirected to the normal Facebook homepage, this will be bad news for the users that relied on the Lite site to access Facebook and could result in the social networking site losing this group of users that still have slow connections.

Another major change imminent for Facebook

Jenny Sanderson — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:23:29 +0000

According to reports Facebook will be announcing another redesign of a major feature on the site that is sure to be met with the usual distain by anti-change users.

The social networking site will apparently be shutting down the option to ‘become a fan’, this feature allows a user to become part of a fan group dedicated usually to a celebrity or sports personality but also to companies and objects.

The company will instead be giving the ‘like’ button an all new design and purpose.
Facebook have not come out and officially announced this change but they are expected to do so at their F8 conference set to be held on April 21st.

Reports are suggesting that whilst the ‘like’ button will serve the same purpose as become a fan, the new changes will benefit online publishers, allowing them to add the ‘like’ feature to external websites.

Previously the ‘like’ button had only been used by users as a one-click method of showing what they may have thought about their friend’s picture or comment, it will now become a much more important part of the site.

“We’ve found that ‘Like’ is more global, easy to understand, and users are already comfortable and familiar with it, making the process of connecting with a Page more consistent with how they already interact with things on Facebook,” a representative of Facebook said.

“The core functionality of Pages will remain unchanged. Pages will still have distribution into News Feed, and the administrators of those Pages will still be able to call the people connected to their Page, ‘fans’,” the representative said.

The change does come with some privacy concerns, however, as Facebook will be keeping the history of all the pages that each user has ‘liked’ in their history, but surely this will be nothing compared to the amount of complaints and groups that are sure to arise in dispute of the changes.

Facebook status updates added to Yahoo mail

Andre — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:37:51 +0000

The injection of social networking services into their own products seems to be a common theme amongst the internet’s big players. The integration of these kinds of services has become more and more common this year as ‘the big three’ (Yahoo, Microsoft and Google) all look to reach out to the burgeoning social networking community.

As of this week Yahoo mail users will be able to update their Facebook status from their Yahoo mail-inbox (as opposed to just going to the Facebook site and doing it there). They will also have the privilege of logging into their Facebook account from the Yahoo mail homepage, this will allow them to click through to their profiles or those of their friends.

This latest update should prove to be beneficial both for Yahoo and Facebook. Yahoo mail is the most popular and widely used e-mail client on the internet according to statistics fanatics Comscore. Therefore all those people that cannot seem to get enough of Facebook will be able to access and keep an eye on it whilst checking their e-mails meaning more time spent on Yahoo and more click-through’s from Yahoo to Facebook.

Much like Microsoft, Yahoo had been pushing users to use their service as a platform for social networking but the popularity of Facebook has negated this and they are both now integrating external social networking companies into their services.

Social media is evidently a priority for Yahoo in 2010 and they have promised to unveil even more features later on in the year.