Monday, December 20, 2010

Facebook, The Good of Social Media? From Facebook to WikiLeaks

 Hollywood has already made a movie about Facebook, which wasn't particularly flattering to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder. However, according to the article below, consider if in the future a movie is made about WikiLeaks and all the drama surrounding that social media. Would the indiscretions surrounding Facebook be considered child's play by comparison?  Interesting.
    . . . June

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From Facebook to WikiLeaks: The good, bad and ugly of technology
latimes.com:

Years from now, when Hollywood makes a more-or-less factual feature film about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, perhaps starring a puffier, silver-haired Jesse Eisenberg, will it be titled 'The Anti-Social Network?' Or maybe 'The Social Network That Big Brother Wanted 86'ed?'

Will Assange be portrayed as a Dadaist prankster? Or a tragic Promethean figure, a digital-age Daniel Ellsberg, persecuted for bestowing enlightenment on mankind at enormous personal cost?

Or, at the other extreme, as both left-leaning intellectuals like Todd Gitlin and rightist politicos such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee maintain, will he be viewed instead as a slash-and-burn "minister of chaos (Gitlin) and "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" (Palin)?

In retrospect, the release this year of "The Social Network," David Fincher's brilliantly chiaroscuro portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, looks like a warm-up, a sort of pop-culture prophesy, in advance of the polemics that have erupted around Assange. Compared to WikiLeaks' revelations about the Saudis' lobbying for the U.S. to take out Iran's nuclear capability, rating your ex-girlfriend's "hotness" on Facebook seems like, literally, child's play.

And if "The Social Network" suggested a modern-day spin on "Citizen Kane," as more than one film critic suggested, a future biopic based on Assange might play like an updated "Dr. Strangelove," mixing black comedy and absurdist farce with sobering meditations on the 21st century's answer to the Atom bomb: the global Internet, with its awesome capacity for creation and destruction. Assange could be seen as a kind of digital-age J. Robert Oppenheimer, hoping that by forging a powerful weapon he could help check governments' abuses of power. Like Oppenheimer before him, he's discovered it's easier to harness technology than to change the fundamental (and fundamentally secretive) nature of power.

However you regard Assange and his cyber-assault on diplomatic secrets, it's in large part because of him that 2010 will be remembered as a pivot point in the tussle between social and antisocial networks. In the year now concluding, we've seen a ratcheting up of the contest pitting networks that open our minds, disseminate useful information and constructively connect us with one another against networks that exploit our emotions, replicate falsehoods, enslave us to high-tech toys and turn the awkward traces of our personal lives into public titillation and downloadable humiliation.

Assuming, that is, that those are separate networks. But of course they're not.

Technologically speaking, the network that enabled WikiLeaks to broadcast state secrets as openly as if they were pop-up Viagra ads is the same as the network of credit card companies and website hosts like Amazon that tried to pull the plug out from WikiLeaks after politicians began howling in protest. And it was the same technological network, in turn, that enabled WikiLeaks' anonymous supporters to bombard Amazon, Pay Pal and other corporate powers with hacker attacks.

Read entire article

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Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Time's Person of the Year 2010 Is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Time Magazine has named Mark Zuckerberg Time's Person of the Year, according to the article below. The online vote for Person of the Year was won handily by Julian Assange, but the prize was given to the Facebook founder instead.




Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, named Time's Person of the Year 2010:
washingtonpost.com Wednesday, December 15, 2010; 12:11 PM

Time magazine has named Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO their Person of the Year 2010. As Hayley Tsukayama reported:

Time magazine named Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year for 2010. Zuckerberg, 26, owns about a quarter of Facebook's shares and is, to quote Time, "a billionaire six times over."
After pledging earlier this year to give $100 million to the Newark, N.J., school system, Zuckerberg last week joined the Giving Pledge--the effort led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett to convince some of the country's richest to give away most of their wealth. Others that have joined the campaign include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, media titan Barry Diller, CNN founder Ted Turner and filmmaker George Lucas.
On his Facebook page, Zuckerberg on Wednesday commented that "Being named as Time Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I'm happy to be a part of that."
As Melissa Bell explained, the online vote for Person of the Year was won handily by Julian Assange, but the prize was given to the Facebook founder instead:
Despite Julian Assange handily winning the online vote, the editors of Time opted for Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, as their person of the year. The editor's letter said, "There is an erosion of trust in authority, a decentralizing of power and at the same time, perhaps, a greater faith in one another," and that Zuckerberg is at the center of these changes

Read entire article


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Sunday, December 12, 2010

A Microsoft Corporation Takeover Bid For Facebook?

 It appears that there is a potential takeover bid in the works for Facebook by Microsoft Corporation, according to the article below. A merger of these two giants has a magnitude almost impossible to imagine. Facebook and Google are among the top-visited websites in the world. Think of the potential of advertising to these two combined. It boggles the mind.
    . . . June

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More Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Facebook Details:
Emoneydaily.com - Posted on 12 December 2010 by Felice Medders

More info about the potential Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) takeover bid for Facebook have emerged.

One of the executives from Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) said that the company attempted to acquire social networking giant Facebook in 2007 but failed to impress Facebook’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Technology blog TechCrunch reported that during an interview with Microsoft Corporation’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) senior director of corporate strategy and acquisitions, Fritz Lanman, told “Ballmer took this reply as sort of challenge. He went back to Microsoft’s headquarters and concocted a plan intended to acquire Facebook in stages over a period of years to enable Zuckerberg to keep calling the shots.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) stocks was at 27.34 at the end of the day’s trading on 12/10/2010. There’s been a 14.6% change in the stock price over the past 3 months.


Read entire article


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Monday, November 22, 2010

How Facebook Deals With Social ADVERTISING


 Facebook and other Social media have changed the way people interact on the internet. Buying advertising space on a website like Facebook would not have been an option a few years ago, but according to the following article, this is now one of their major revenues. According to the article below, one of their most important innovations was to reach out to the smallest advertisers with self-serve ads. Apparently, Setting up a Facebook ad is simpler than using Google AdWords. Leave it to Facebook to simplify everything.
     .  .  .  June

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How Facebook fixed the social advertising problem
Fortune Tech:

So much of the discussion around Facebook centers on the way it's shaping our social interactions with others that it's easy to overlook how profoundly the company is rewriting the rules of online advertising. When Facebook's revenue is mentioned, it's usually in the aggregate: The six-year-old company will bring in as much as $2 billion this year and close to twice that next year.

The bulk of that figure will come from selling ads on its social-network platform – a web technology that was seen as barren soil for ad revenue until a year or so ago. Facebook made social ads pay through a number of tricks. One of the most important innovations was to reach out to the smallest advertisers with self-serve ads on its social-networking site.

Setting up a Facebook ad is simpler than using Google AdWords. To test the idiot-proof concept, I set up a page for my work as a freelance writer. It wasn't terribly elegant but it did take less than two minutes. In another five minutes, I had created an ad targeted at my own demographic – male, 40s, college grad, living in the San Francisco Bay Area and interested in business or technology journalism.

Facebook instantly narrowed it down to 4,220 members who might see the ad and recommended I bid between 30 and 45 cents per impression, or between 72 cents and $1.05 per click. Granted, it must have been one of the most thoughtless and ineffective ads in Facebook's history, with no hope for a return on the 30 cents I bid. But it illustrated an important point: In less than ten minutes, any business can not only hang up a virtual shingle on Facebook, it can also became an advertiser.

Basic tutorials on the site help advertisers design more effective ads. Once they are live, they can receive customizable, granular data on its performance in a simple format that encourages them to experiment with different kinds of ads. Tweaking the location or demographics of users or trying out different text, images and keywords is aided by data comparing the response to alternate ads.

Facebook benefits from the experimentation too. The company doesn't charge for the data, but the experiments of its legion of advertisers offers the company an unprecedented insight into what makes people click on ads on its site.

Read entire article


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Saturday, November 13, 2010

Is Facebook Going Into The E-MAIL Business?

 Facebook and Google are already in competition for internet popularity. This service would certainly boost Facebook's popularity even more. According to the article below, it isn't official just yet. We may have to wait a few days for a definitive answer.
    . . . June


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Facebook to Start an E-Mail Service
NYTimes.com: November 12, 2010, 8:20 PM By Miguel Helft

Facebook has more than 500 million users around the world. And Americans spend more of their time online with Facebook than with any other Internet company, including Google and Yahoo.

Now the company wants people to weave their online lives even more tightly into Facebook.

On Monday, Facebook is expected to unveil a revamped set of communications services that will include an e-mail system in which users will have addresses with the facebook.com suffix, according to two people briefed on Facebook’s plans who asked to speak on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

Facebook has invited reporters to a press conference on Monday, but has refused to say what it plans to announce. The company declined to comment on any unannounced communications services.

Facebook already offers an online chat service and an internal message system between Facebook users. The new services, whose exact details could not be learned, would greatly expand Facebook’s communications offerings.

But one person with knowledge of Facebook’s plans said that the new communications services would not be meant to be used on their own, like other e-mail systems. Instead, they would be tightly coupled with Facebook’s other services.

“They are not trying to do a standalone rival to Gmail,” the person said. “They are building an integrated experience in everything they do.”


Still the new services could sharpen Facebook’s competition with Google and others.

Read More


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If you're a Facebook fan, wouldn't you use Facebook email service instead of Google? Leave a comment

June


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Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Will Facebook Be Announcing a Phone on Wednesday?

 Wow!  This leaves us all wondering!  According to the article below, Facebook, the social-networking giant sent out invitations Monday for a special event Wednesday with little in the way of details -- leaving a curious public to speculate on just what Facebook has in store for us. Will it be an announcement about some new and reamped services? - or possibly the potential launching pad for the oft-rumored Facebook Phone? We don't know!
    . . . June


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FOXNews.com - Will Facebook Announce a Phone on Wednesday?:
Published October 05, 2010 | FoxNews.com

New phone? Revamped service? More millions of charitable donations? Complaints about the movie? With details short and buzz high, rumors are stacking up about a special Facebook event Wednesday.

The social-networking giant sent out invitations Monday for a special event Wednesday with little in the way of details -- leaving a curious public to speculate on just what Facebook has in store for us.

The popular website, now with 500 million users and (like it or not) its very own blockbuster movie, has been especially busy as of late: launching a geolocation feature called Places in August, overhauling its gaming notifications, and most recently upgrading its photo platform to allow for higher-resolution pictures. Will we see some event unveiling more information and branding about these things? Possibly, some argue.

Others expect Wednesday to be even bigger -- the potential launching pad for the oft-rumored Facebook
phone. The event is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. and last through lunch, after all, and Mark Zuckerberg himself was rather nebulous the last time he discussed the potential for Facebook phone.

"At the end of the day, when people say 'building a phone' they actually can mean very different things," he told TechCrunch at the time.

Read entire article