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13 Feb 2012 15:26

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Culture: Having too many Facebook friends can make you depressed

  • 354Facebook friends ought to be your limit source
  • » There’s nothing wrong with denying that friend request: A recent study presented at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting asked a group of participants to check their friend’s status updates. After doing so, they rated their lives as “much less satisfying” than a group that didn’t check their news feed. They looked at how many friends the users had, and found that 354 friends was roughly the point at which reading status updates started making them sad. The theory is that status updates often paint a disproportionately positive picture of peoples’ lives. Readers of said updates compare their own lives to those represented in status updates, and figure that they’re having a lot less fun than everybody else. The solution, then, is to either clean up your friends list, or befriend a bunch of depressed misanthropes.
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

29 Jan 2012 13:30

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Tech: Study: Teens flocking to Twitter more than they did two years ago

  • 8% of young people ages 12-17 had Twitter accounts in 2009, according to a Pew study
  • 16% of young people ages 12-17 had Twitter accounts in 2011, according to an updated study source
  • » Not so square anymore? Two years ago, Twitter had a bit of a reputation as the social network of choice for slightly older professionals, while many young teens were giving it a pass. The study appeared to be showing an interesting trend among teens, who preferred to stick with Facebook or other services. Things appear to have changed since then. “I love twitter, it’s the only thing I have to myself … cause my parents don’t have one,” noted 17-year-old Britteny Praznik. One major difference? Rather than self-promotion, the goal seems to merely be social in nature. Wow, who would’ve thought? A social network for social networking? Be still our hearts.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Jan 2012 23:37

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Tech: New bookmarklet turns Google’s unofficial motto against itself

  • “Don’t Be Evil” tool cuts back on Google’s self-promotion: Remember Google’s new social search feature? It features results from your friends — and Google+ accounts — before other results, even if the other social sources are more popular than the Google+ account. The new “Don’t Be Evil” extension “looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+,” according to Focus On the User. Would you install this? source
Posted by samimain • 0 Comments • Permalink

29 Nov 2011 00:37

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Tech: Aw, Zucks. We’re hoping this won’t “poke” our portfolios too badly.

  • Want to own a piece of Facebook? You might be able to in the spring of 2012. It looks like, despite founder Mark Zuckerberg’s well-known resistance to the idea over the years, the company is on its way to its “initial public offering” — the sale of stock that a private company makes available to the public. (Groupon just had an IPO, and it hasn’t been going quite so well for them.) The social media trailblazers could raise as much as $10 billion from first-day stock sales; that would put the company’s total value at $100 billion. Not bad for a guy who screwed over most of his friends from Harvard (and a couple of Winklevi) to get there. source
Posted by samimain • 0 Comments • Permalink

27 Sep 2011 01:38

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Tech: Too social? Spotify and Facebook get too friendly for some users’ taste

  • Not cool. My Spotify account isn’t linked to Facebook, and it’ll stay that way, thankyouverymuch. If I didn’t have an account already, this would prevent me from signing up.
  • A Get Satisfaction user • Venting about Spotify’s Facebook-only signup option for new users. On top of that, Spotify recently started cross-posting what songs users are listening to on Facebook, which might be a little to personal for some people. Whistling Britney Spears while you work? Have a soft spot for Depeche Mode? Now all your friends will know, too. Follow these steps to stop or limit Spotify oversharing. source
Posted by samimain • 0 Comments • Permalink

30 Jun 2011 13:26

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Tech: If you’re looking to join Google+, you’re out of luck for now

  • before People who were on Google’s new social networking site had the ability to invite their friends to join in. That’s good because it allows Google to test their new service on a smaller amount of people, but make sure that they still have friends to talk to.
  • now It should have worked, at least. Google had to shut down the invite feature because too many people were joining. That’s how popular Google+ is. If you’re looking to join, you’re going to have to wait for a little bit — they haven’t announced when invites will be back. source
Posted by Justin Jones • 0 Comments • Permalink

27 Jun 2011 14:27

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Tech, World: Fun fact: Chinese Twitter clone nearly as big as Twitter itself

  • 57% the share of China’s microbloggers that use Sina Weibo — a Chinese Twitter clone; that’s roughly 140 million users (compared to Twitter’s roughly 200 million worldwide)
  • 87% the share of China’s total microblogging activity that goes through Sina Weibo; not bad for a former Yahoo-like portal site that’s stretching its wings source
  • » This is pretty huge. China has more internet users than any other country, and Sina is dominating their microblogging market. They’re trying to make themselves more than just China’s Twitter, though; they want to add more Facebook-like features as well. But that won’t be easy. Competition is fierce, because no single social media site dominates and the company faces strong competition from RenRen and Tencent. On top of that, though, Sina has to police its users and censor them if they’re talking against the government — something Twitter doesn’t have to do. Regardless, this sort of outside-in social media cloning is pretty fascinating to us.
Posted by Justin Jones • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

09 May 2011 23:41

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Politics: Newt’s Pre-Announcement Announcement Fail

  • A two-day advance warning that Newt Gingrich will announce [a presidential run] on social networks demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the modern media landscape.
  • Republican Strategist Mindy Finn • On the Newt’s pre-announcement announcement. Funny, we were thinking the same thing. We’ll never quite understand why the modern Republican party is unable to grasp the nuances of social networking, but it’s sure fun to watch (Note: Finn advises Tim Pawlenty on digital outreach, so perhaps hope remains for the GOP’s new media skills). source
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

26 Apr 2011 21:43

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Tech: Friendster throws its old, forgotten friends out on the curb

  • Your emotions get wrapped up in it. It reflected a particular moment in time in our lives.
  • Former Friendster user Jim Leija • Reflecting with sorry about the site’s decision to delete information stored on the site by its early users since the heady days of 2003. The current site, which allows people to store photos, blog posts and comments, will become an entertainment-focused site along the lines of MySpace, but with a focus on their current Asian stronghold. For folks like Leija, who met his partner Aric Knuth on the site, the death of the current Friendster is bittersweet. “All of our early exchanges were with each other through their messaging systems. We were writing early love notes back in the winter of 2003.” Fortunately, if Leija wants to keep his old data, Friendster created an app to do just that. (BTW, the NYT quoted Jason Scott — who’s kind of the internet archivist du jour and doesn’t like the cloud for this very reason.) source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Jan 2011 19:32

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Biz, Tech: Mark Zuckerberg swimming in Facebook cash infusions right now

  • We know what Mark Zuckerberg’s doing right now. He’s taking his daily swim in Facebook money. (We’re sure the Winklevi are rowing through their much smaller pile of litigation money.) As we’re sure you’ve heard, Facebook has been making fast friends with Goldman Sachs to increase its funding base without going public, which they’re going out of their way to not do for some reason. How much money have they raised? Well, to give you an idea:
  • $1.5 billion raised by Facebook in the last freaking month
  • $500
    million     the amount Facebook raised in that shady-sounding Goldman Sachs deal a while back
  • $1
    billion     the amount Facebook raised from Goldman Sachs’ uber-rich individual international clients source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
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