No Facebook friends for Obama girls

Michelle Obama says her daughters aren’t on Facebook, and that’s the way she likes it, reports the Associated Press. The first lady says her girls, Sasha, 9, and Malia, 12, have certain restrictions that other children don’t have because of Secret Service security issues. But she also said during an interview on NBC’s “Today Show” on Wednesday that she’s “not a big fan of young kids having Facebook.”

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Feds settle case of woman fired over Facebook site

One expert said the case will have employers around the country re-examining their internet policies.

School and other employers should think twice before trying to restrict workers from talking about their jobs on Facebook or other social media.

That’s the message the government sent on Monday as it settled a closely watched lawsuit against a Connecticut ambulance company that fired an employee after she went on Facebook to criticize her boss.

The National Labor Relations Board sued the company last year, arguing the worker’s negative comments were protected speech under federal labor laws. The company claimed it fired the emergency medical technician because of complaints about her work.…Read More

Social media monitoring services stir debate

Some companies offer services that update parents when children post unsafe information online.

As cyber bullying and inappropriate online behaviors become more commonplace in today’s technology-rich world, some companies are offering services that alert parents when their children are at risk or are misbehaving on a social network. Critics say the services amount to spying, but supporters say they open lines of communication and help children understand what is and is not acceptable online.

The services typically work like this: A parent opens a Facebook account and runs the monitoring service as an application. Once the parent and child are “friends” on Facebook, the parent invites the child to run the monitoring service as an application on the child’s own Facebook account.

When the child accepts the application, the parent is notified and able to view their child’s Facebook activities only when the service detects pre-selected words or phrases that the parent deems worrisome or inappropriate. Some services also send notifications when children establish new friendships on Facebook, or when their children are tagged in photos on the site.…Read More

Facebook treads carefully after its vital role in Egypt’s anti-Mubarak protests

In Egypt, the tried-and-true tool for opponents of President Hosni Mubarak in recent years has been Facebook, the Washington Post reports. Most recently, it was on Facebook – which boasts 5 million users in Egypt, the most in the Arab world – where youthful outrage over the killing of a prominent activist spread, leading to the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Mubarak’s promise to step down this year. But Facebook, which celebrates its seventh birthday Feb. 4 and has more than a half-billion users worldwide, is not eagerly embracing its role as the insurrectionists’ instrument of choice. Its strategy contrasts with rivals Google and Twitter, which actively helped opposition leaders communicate after the Egyptian government shut down internet access. The Silicon Valley giant, whether it likes it or not, has been thrust like never before into a sensitive global political moment that pits the company’s need for an open Internet against concerns that autocratic regimes could limit use of the site or shut it down altogether…

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New service lets voices from Egypt be heard

With the unruly sounds of protests in the background, the Egyptian man declared there were 50,000 demonstrators in the streets of Cairo.

“And the number is growing,” he said, raising his voice to be heard on the recording.

Unedited, raw, anonymous and emotional, Egyptian voices are trickling out through a new service that evades attempts by the authorities to suppress them by cutting internet services, reports the New York Times. There is still some cellphone service, so a new social-media link that marries Google, Twitter and SayNow, a voice-based social media platform, gives Egyptians three phone numbers to call and leave a message, which is then posted on the internet as a recorded Twitter message. The messages are at twitter.com/speak2tweet and can also be heard by telephone……Read More

Facebook boosts security, allows ‘sponsored stories’

Facebook unveiled new security enhancements on Jan. 26 designed to protect the content of users’ profiles, RedOrbit reports. The new security tools include the availability of one-time passwords that members can use at shared computers in places such as airports or coffee shops, where keystrokes might be saved. Users can request a one-time-only password that expires in 20 minutes by sending a mobile phone text message “otp” to 32665.  The mobile phones must be registered in Facebook users’ accounts to receive the temporary passwords. The announcement of the new tools coincides with this week’s international Data Privacy Day, the company said. “This Friday is Data Privacy Day, an international effort by governments, businesses and advocacy groups to raise awareness about the importance of staying in control of personal information. A key part of controlling information has always been protecting it from security threats like viruses, malware and hackers,” wrote Alex Rice, a security engineer with Facebook, in a posting on the company’s blog…

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Facebook raises $1.5 billion

If you thought Groupon’s $950 million was big, hold on to your hats. Facebook has announced that it has raised $1.5 billion in funding at a $50 billion valuation, reports ReadWriteWeb. According to the release, the company has received $1 billion from Goldman Sachs Overseas Offering today, which, when combined with the previous $500 million, equals the $1.5 billion investment. Read on for details and a Facebook-led Q&A on the deal…

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Hate mobs thrive in Asia’s booming social media

While the exact circumstances of the crash are unclear, the outrage unleashed on Facebook, Twitter and other websites has highlighted the murky phenomenon of cyber “hate mobs” on popular social networking sites, the AFP reports. Behind this trend is what is known as “Internet disinhibition”, said Adrian Skinner, a clinical psychologist in Britain who has researched behavioural differences on the web.

“It’s now well established that some people can behave in a much less inhibited way on the Internet, and the primary reason is that they feel there’s no return, no comeback,” he told AFP.

He explained this “lowered sense of responsibility” was coupled with the fact that writing online involved much less effort than taking to the streets in a revenge-seeking crowd — a more likely option in the pre-Internet age.…Read More

Students use social media to promote safe driving

From left, Christina Greve, Ritika Jain, and Jenny Felter, all Marshall High students, present their proposal to the judges on Dec. 9.

High school students from Fairfax County, Va., are using social media and other methods to help discourage their peers from driving while distracted by cell phones.

A team of three students from George C. Marshall High School were named winners of the “Orange Cones. No Phones.” High School Safety Challenge on Dec. 9. The contest, sponsored by Transurban-Fluor, asked Fairfax County high school students to develop a marketing plan that would discourage young drivers from texting while behind the wheel.

Transurban-Fluor is currently working on the largest highway construction project in the country, adding high-occupancy toll lanes on the Capital Beltway.…Read More

Infographic: Facebook vs. Twitter 2010 user stats

Facebook and Twitter are the big boys in the social networking space. This breakdown was put together by Digital Surgeons and shows demographic statistics (and a few fun facts) for both sites. You may know that Facebook is much larger with 500 million users compared to Twitter’s 106 million, but did you know that 52 percent of Tweeters update their status every day while only 12 percent of Facebook users do the same?

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Facebook’s Zuckerberg starts China visit

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg started a visit to China on Monday with a tour of the offices of the country’s top search engine, while his own social networking site remained blocked on the mainland, the Associated Press reports. Photos of Zuckerberg’s visit to Baidu Inc. were quickly posted online.

“Obviously I’m not going to deny what’s in the pictures,” Kaiser Kuo, Baidu’s director of international communications, told The Associated Press by telephone. Zuckerberg had lunch with Baidu CEO Robin Li, Kuo said, adding that he didn’t know what they talked about. He said the two had met before.

Not many in China are familiar with Facebook, but Zuckerberg is known for being Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year, according to Kuo. China censors internet content it deems politically sensitive and blocks many websites, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But curiosity has been high about Zuckerberg’s visit to China and any possible business angles. Zuckerberg has expressed a business interest in China, saying during a speaking engagement in October, “How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?”…Read More

How Twitter use has changed, from 2009 to 2010

It’s been a good year for Twitter, and not merely because the company announced yesterday it has secured another huge round of funding, reports ReadWriteWeb. The microblogging platform has grown by over 100 million users this year and expanded its staff from 130 to 350 people. And it’s rolled out major redesigns and improvements to its site, mobile apps and APIs. People who created a Twitter profile before January 2009 now account for just 4.7% of the total Twitter population. That’s one of the findings in a new study by the social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos that examines over 1 billion tweets from 2010 and compares the data with Twitter usage in 2009. So how has the influx of new users changed the ways in which Twitter is used? The results of the study suggest we may be disclosing more personal information in our profiles and following more people, but even as more people have joined, most Twitter activity still comes from a very small number of users. The number of Twitter users who provide personal information in their bios has more than doubled since last year; 82% of Twitter users now provide a name, compared with only 33% in 2009. And 73% provide location information, compared to 44% in 2009. Forty five percent give a website address, up from 22% a year ago. This seems to indicate that Twitter users are becoming more comfortable disclosing personal information on the site, but more importantly perhaps, that having a profile on Twitter is becoming increasingly important.  Of course, one of the most popular two-word phrases in personal profiles is “Justin Bieber,” so I’m not sure we can argue that this is all about professional networking…

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