February 2012
83 posts
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Companies See More Opportunities, Work With... →
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FBI Searches Social Media for Insider Trading →
The FBI launched Perfect Hedge Investigations, an effort to root out insider trading that includes monitoring of social networks.
The emphasis on social media and online communications platforms like Skype accents how complex law enforcement is becoming in the connected era: a simple phone tap or document subpoena is no longer enough to catch Gordon Gecko-like figures in an age where people have...
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What Words Are Homeland Security Looking For When... →
What do the terms “dirty bomb” and “pork” and “gas” have in common?
They’re all on a list of words that raise red flags with the government when you use them in a tweet or a Facebook status update. Hubze has released the complete list of terms the Department of Homeland Security is looking for when it monitors your social media activity.
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For Sale: Your Old Tweets →
Twitter is the latest social network to turn a buck with content you created.
The company sold two years worth of old tweets to Datasift, a marketing data firm. Datasift will make the tweets and other data, including the locations of where people were when they used Twitter, available to its clients. Datasift is the first of what is believed to be more than 1,000 companies on a waiting list to...
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Everything Pinterest and Tumblr Users Need To Know... →
It’s hard to write a story or post about Pinterest and copyright law without at least one reader leaving a comment along the lines of “What about Tumblr?”
Indeed, comparisons between the two sites are fairly obvious: while Tumblr is more of a blog platform and Pinterest is more of a link-sharing site, both are set up to allow users to easily share content they find on the...
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Did Yahoo Tip The Press To Force Facebook's Hand... →
Yahoo is playing the press while trying to force Facebook into license between 10 and 20 of its patents.
Yahoo is making fairly standard claims in Web tech circles: that a hotter, younger company is infringing on patents Yahoo registered years ago and now needs to cut the former Web behemoth in on some of the action. But how Yahoo is going about its fight reads more like the script from a...
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Facebook's Mobile Push Aims To Cut Apple Out As... →
We’ve been piling loads of criticism on Facebook for not having a clearly articulated mobile strategy as it pushes towards its initial public offering. Today, the company took the first step towards allaying those fears.
Bret Taylor, Facebook’s chief technology officer, wowed the Mobile World Congress Tuesday, uneviling a series of moves that are aimed at positioning Facebook as a...
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How To Measure (And Increase) Your Pinfluence On... →
We figured it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a Klout-like service to measure how influential (or how inconsequential) you are on Pinterest. With a few clicks, PinClout measures how many followers you have, how many you follow and how many likes you have and gives you a score of one to 100.
As noted by SpiderWorking’s Amanda Webb, it’s unclear how accurate of a...
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Attorney Says Pinterest Needs To Change Its... →
Questions continue to mount about Pinterest’s uneasy relationship with copyright law, with one attorney (and avid Pinterest user) saying the company needs to upgrade its Digital Millenium Copyright Act policies or risk being shut down.
Connie Mableson, an attorney in Phoenix, offers a point-by-point breakdown of where Pinterest’s DMCA policy could get the increasingly popular social...
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Twitter Users Say Cirque du Soleil Steals Oscars... →
Viewers sent 2.05 million tweets about last night’s Academy Awards presentation, but non-viewers may surprised to see that the most-tweeted moment had nothing to do with any of the films that had been nominated. Meanwhile, none of the three big awards - best film, best actor and best actress awards - managed to make the top three most tweeted moments of the three-hour broadcast, according to...
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Hollywood Pressures D.C. Lobbyists To Cut Ties... →
Three of the four Washington, D.C. lobbying firms Facebook had hired abruptly terminated their contracts with the social networking giant.
Citing conflicts of interest, Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock, the Glover Park Group and TeleMedia Policy Group have all walked away from contracts with Facebook, which upped its spending on lobbying efforts to $1.4 million last year from $351,000 in 2010....
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Report: Facebook Read Users' Text Messages →
The London Sunday Times is reporting that Facebook read text messages of users who downloaded the social network’s smartphone app.
The story is behind a paywall, but Fox News summarized the article and said Facebook admitted to reading text messages as part of a trial to launch its own messaging service. It is not clear whether Facebook has discontinued the practice.
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Worst-Best Possible Start To My Morning | Dave... →
Love my dog enough to kill him right now….
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How Facebook Can Help Advertisers (And Itself) →
Best Western became the first global hotel to allow users to book rooms through its Facebook page.
As we reported earlier this week, loads of retailers have been closing down their Facebook storefronts because they simply aren’t worth the effort. Travel is a completely different sector, and one that seemingly could lend itself to better integration with a social network like Facebook.
That...
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Twitter Ordered To Turn Over I.D. Of User Who... →
Twitter needs to turn over the identiy of a user who made threats against Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., according to a federal judge’s ruling that was released Thursday.
The user was identified as Mr. X in court papers. In August, he posted “”I want to f—- Michelle Bachman … with a Vietnam era machete” in reference to the then Republican presidential...
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Obama's Privacy Push Means Business As Usual For... →
If the Obama administration wanted a simpler way to protect consumer privacy, it didn’t need to issue a dense report or pressure on Congress to pass laws increasing government oversight of the private sector - especially during an election year.
The White House simply needed to look in its own consumer protection playbook and take a page from its efforts to help credit card customers avoid...
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Forget $3B In Revenue: Things "Don't Look Good"... →
Evidence is quickly mounting that Facebook’s initial public offering will not be the big boost the social media sector needs as Silicon Valley companies try to prove to Wall Street they can grow revenues.
On Thursday, PrivCo CEO Sam Hamadeh told VentureBeat that several people close to the company were saying Facebook was going to miss first-quarter revenue projections. Meanwhile, eMarketer...
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Obama Administration Sides With Consumers In... →
The White House released its “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights In A Networked World” Thursday, outlining key rights and safeguards Americans should expect when they do business online.
The proposal is notable in that it marks the first time the Obama Administration has articulated clear-cut support for consumer privacy protections. While the proposal is voluntary for now, the...
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Bing Now Lets You Verify Whether Search Results... →
Ever Google someone before a blind date or deciding to hire them? Of course you have.
But going forward, if you choose to Bing them instead of Google them, you may end up getting results they have manually approved as being about them. Microsoft launched Linked Pages to its Bing search engine. The feature, which is currently only available to users in the U.S., essentially lets you control what...
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Facebook Faces Nationwide Class-Action Lawsuit →
A Baltimore law firm filed a nationwide class action lawsuit against Facebook Friday, claiming the social network illegally tracked user activity on the Internet.
In its claim, the law firm Murphy P.A. said the company “repeatedly ignored” warnings from a user who noticed Facebook continued to track users’ activities on the Internet even after they had logged off. Facebook...
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Facebook Shares Could Be Overvalued By First Day... →
More than 1,000 people are now trading shares of Facebook on private markets - well above the 50 to 100 that most companies have ahead of their initial public offering.
Sam Hamadeh, head of research firm PrivCo., who made the current shareholder estimates for Bloomberg News, said that has pushed Facebook’s valuation over $100 billion and could limit the returns the company’s first...
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As Romney's Wife Takes To Pinterest, Campaign... →
And you thought First Lady Michelle Obama was hip for jumping on Twitter.
Wannabe First Lady Ann Romney - as far as we can tell - is the only 2012 Presidential candidate’s wife on Pinterest, the rapidly growing social network. But while Ann Romney is busy pinning family photos, “candid” campaign shots, books worth reading, recipes and Patriotic images, her husband’s...
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Rawporter Is A Brilliant, But Poorly-Executed,... →
The future of journalism, as Rawporter sees it, will include armies of regular people selling raw video footage to outlets who can’t get a crew to breaking news events.
But, based on a test of Rawporter’s iOS app Tuesday, the future of journalism is going to have to wait. And the test also provides a case study in why rushing an app out the door may not be the best business strategy:...
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Judge Rules Against Man Who Claimed Harassment... →
One of the first rules of public relations is “never be photographed with a drink in your hand,” but now, in the Facebook age, it may simply be “never be photographed.”
A judge ruled that people can’t sue for harassment simply because someone posts an unflattering photo of them on Facebook. Aaron Olson of Chisago City, Minn., sued his uncle, Randall LaBrie, for...
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Do's And Don'ts For Using Storify →
A lot of journalists are going to conferences and being told to use Storify, a site that lets you curate loads of social media on a given topic and present them in a narrative or timeline: you can, for example, pull tweets and YouTube videos, urls and Facebook posts.
That is generally a good thing, providing they do it right. But, unfortunately, like a lot of things related to social media,...
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Facebook Needs To Figure Out How To Turn... →
In the past year, Gamestop, Gap, JC Penny and Nordstrom, to name a few, have pulled the plug on storefronts they had set up on Facebook. There are other retailers on the list who have gotten fed up with their efforts to sell on Facebook, and without changes, others may join them in abandoning their so-called F-commerce efforts.
Whether or not the blame lies with Facebook or the retailers and,...
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Write effective sentences with these simple... →
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Hurdles Remain Before College Classrooms Go... →
OnlineUniversities.com came out with an optimistic infographic last week about how college classrooms are going digital.
But as someone who makes as much as a quarter of his income from teaching college classes in any given year, and who also spends a good amount of time speaking at conferences trying to help professors incorporate technology and social media into their curriculum, the view from...
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Senators Want Details On Twitter's New Censorship... →
Two U.S. Senators want Twitter to give more details on how and when it will censor content when requested to do so by foreign governments.
“We understand that Twitter has an obligation to comply with legal requests that do not violate human rights,” Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., wrote in a letter to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. “And we appreciate that you are taking...
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Group Says Twitter Gave In To French Government's... →
The digital rights group Internet Without Borders is accusing Twitter of shutting dwon four accounts that parodied the recetnly created Twitter account of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
If true, it could mark the first time Twitter has succumbed to pressure from a government to censor user-created content. We’ve asked Twitter for comment and will update as soon as we hear back from them.
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Pinterest Will Let Web Publishers Opt Out With... →
Pinterest is offering code that will let publishers opt out of having their site content shared on the increasingly popular social network.
In an interview with LLSocial.com, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said users who try to pin from sites using the code will see a message telling them “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks...
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How You Could Get Sued For Using Pinterest →
The Boston Business Journal stopped using Pinterest one day after setting up its account after realizing it could be sued for images it uploaded to the site.
Web editor Galen Moore started playing around with the rapidly-growing social network on Thursday as a possible way to share the visual images that the Boston Business Journal uses in its coverage of real estate development: things like...
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Think Wall Street Executives Make Too Much Money?... →
Where did Facebook’s profits go last year?
Fortune is pointing out that, according to the company’s initial public offering, 8% went to its top five executives. That’s more than most Wall Street firms, including JP Morgan Chase, which only shelled out $79 million to its top five executives.
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Zynga Wants To Cut Dependency On Facebook →
Zynga is in talks to partner with other portals in a bid to wean itself off the Facebook teat.
The company is the largest game developer on Facebook and raised $1 billion last year in an initial public offering of its stock. But investor enthusiasm has been lackluster since then, in large part because the company, which credits 90% of its sales to Facebook, is seen as being too dependent on...
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Twitter Ads For Sale, No Sales Rep Required →
Twitter advertisements, which, anecdotally, have proven to be highly effective in boosting sales, will be available to more small businesses come March.
The company is partnering with American Express to set up a long-awaited self-service advertising program. Initially, the program will only be available to merchants who use and accept American Express cards, and American Express is offering $100...
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U.S. Wants Automakers' Help In Stopping In-Car... →
The U.S. Department of Transportation is asking car makers to design in-dash control panels to block users from accessing Facebook, Twitter and other social networks while the vehilce is in motion.
In non-binding guidelines released Thursday by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, automakers are also asked to block users from manual texting, Internet browsing, 10-digit phone dialing and...
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Facebook's Unknown Strategy Worries Stock Analysts →
For us mere mortals who probably won’t get first crack at purchasing Facebook shares when the company goes public, the question becomes whether or not it’s a solid investment.
That will, of course, ultimately depend on where it prices. But at least one research firm is throwing up a caution flag because Facebook’s initial public offering filing doesn’t give a clear-cut...
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msnNOW Doesn't Want To Be Your Grandfather's News... →
Microsoft launched msnNOW, a new site aimed at tracking news trends from social networks.
Although we’re a bit skeptical about a spokesperson’s claim in an email that it’s “the first service designed to surface breaking trends from across the Web, show what people are saying about the trends, and why they matter with the help of expert editors,” it does add...
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Oops! Readers Can't Remove Contacts From Twitter... →
Several people who read yesterday’s post about Twitter storing their smartphone contact information for 18 months have reported trying the Twitter-recommended fix only to get an error message.
“I just attempted to do this and received the error ‘Oops, we couldn’t remove your contacts at this time’,” jeffehobbs wrote in the comments for the post. “Oops?...
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Twitter Did NOT Break News Of Whitney Houston's... →
MediaBistro’s AllTwitter blog is claiming it has an exclusive interview with the Twitter user who “broke” the news of Whitney Houston’s death a full hour before the mainstream media.
Here’s the problem with the claim: the user, @BarBeeBritt did nothing more than simply ask “Is Whitney Houston really dead?”
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[INFOGRAPHIC] Grammy Awards Generated 2.1 Million... →
TweetReach has a cool stream graph that takes all of the speculation out of who was being talked about when during Sunday night’s broadcast of the Grammy Awards.
No surprise: Adele topped the evening’s Twitter activity with 340,000 mentions. The official #grammys hashtag was tweeted 2.1 million times by 700,000 users.
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Twitter Is The Latest Company To Admit It Uploads... →
Twitter has joined the list of companies making sheepish confessions that it uploads your smartphone’s address book when you install its app.
Last week Path made a similar dicslosure, which was followed by changes by photo app Instagram to give users more privacy controls. And that led to a bit of self-discovery by smartphone users that nothing is truly free.
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Microsoft Will Try To Solve Social Media Hurdles... →
Microsoft used Social Media Week to launch a new advertising platform aimed at incorporating user reviews and comments into social media sites.
The company said People Powered Stories will be the first of several social advertising products Microsoft plans to launch in the coming months. The product’s release comes at a time when there is growing evidence that people are more likely to...
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Twitter CEO: Company Won't Be Ready For IPO For "A... →
Don’t expect a initial public offering of shares of Twitter anytime soon.
CNN is reporting that the company has placed restrictions on employees who hold shares, forcing them to keep 80 percent of the shares they own. The cable news outlet cited company emails about the policy, which has been in effect for a year, and said at least one high-level employee resigned because of the policy.
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Media-Savvy New Yorkers Share Their Social Media... →
SocialFlow, which exited its beta last week, is doing a very New York-esque campaign where people who use social media are sharing their “social media secret weapons” in one-minute video clips.
The campaign is tied into Social Media Week, and you can play along at home: the company is giving away a Kindle Fire to the best strategy shared via Twitter or Facebook by noon on Wednesday....
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White House Will Renew #40dollars Campaign On... →
The Obama administration plans to renew its #40dollars campaign today, complete with a White House event this morning involving some of the people who posted Twitter messages about what $40 meant to them.
Launched in December, the Whiote House used Twitter to let ordinary people sound off about the value of $40, which is the amount that would have been cut from the average American’s weekly...
What Facebook’s IPO Means For You, The Facebook... →
Another one from my blog….written responses for an interview I just gave.
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Microsoft Isn't Laughing At Twitter Parody Of... →
Microsoft demanded the takedown of a phony Twitter account purpoting to be that of Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky.
Over the weekend, Microsoft used its @BuildWindows8 account to send a message to the account owner, saying “@StevenSinofsky please see guidelines on parody and impersonation. Your account is not following them them and has been reported.”
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Chipotle Scores An Unexpected Social Media Win... →
Last night’s Grammy awards was not the Super Bowl, which broke a tweets-per-second record, but it was still a chance for advertisers to tap into an audience watching the event on television and using second screens to discuss the event on social media.
But, much as they did last week, most brands scored a big swing-and-a-miss: big, because Twitter was already super-charged with Saturday...