How do you compare? New report reveals stats about social media usage in Canada

By Michael Oliveira, The Canadian Press - Monday, April 29, 2013 at 6:39 PM - 0 Comments

Kainaz Amaria/Bloomberg via Getty Images

TORONTO – One in three anglophone Canadians won’t let a single day go by without checking into their social media feeds, suggests a new report by the Media Technology Monitor.

The report is based on telephone surveys with 4,001 anglophone Canadians in the fall and found almost seven in 10 Internet users declared they were regular social media users, logging on at least once a month. That figure was up by about six per cent compared to 2011.

Those growing numbers didn’t surprise Aimée Morrison, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, who researches digital culture.

“It’s becoming a mainstream part of how we get the business of life accomplished and you’re at a disadvantage increasingly if you don’t do it,” says Morrison.

“I think social media is hitting a tipping point in a way that cellphones did in the later part of the 1990s, where we’ve moved from the stage where it was something that the early adopters did and then the hipsters did and then the kids did.”

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Reuters deputy social media editor charged with LA Times hacking conspiracy says he was fired

By The Associated Press - Monday, April 22, 2013 at 2:29 PM - 0 Comments

SAN FRANCISCO – A Reuters deputy social media editor accused of conspiring with hackers to deface a Los Angeles Times story says he has been fired.

Federal prosecutors say 26-year-old Matthew Keys provided the hacking group Anonymous with login information to access the computer system of The Tribune Co., the Times’ parent company.

According to an indictment handed up last month, a hacker altered a Times article posted in December 2010.

Keys had earlier been fired from a Tribune-owned TV station.

Reuters hired him in 2012 and suspended him from his New York social media job on March 14.

A Thomson Reuters spokesman declined to elaborate on why Keys is no longer employed.

Keys tweeted Monday his union would be filing a grievance.

Keys’ attorneys did not respond to email messages seeking comment.

Twitter launches application to let users discover music, tweet songs from Spotify, iTunes

By The Associated Press - Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 10:24 AM - 0 Comments

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Twitter has launched a service for people to find music they like and tweet songs from iTunes, Spotify and Rdio.

Twitter said in a blog post that an app will be available for download from Apple’s online store Thursday. A Web version is also expected Thursday. Twitter said the service will eventually be available on Android devices as well.

The service uses information from Twitter chatter to find popular tracks as well as new artists. Users who follow musicians can see what artists those musicians follow and listen to songs by them.

Thursday’s announcement about a music service had been expected. “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest tweeted about it last week. It’s called (hash)music, following Twitter’s practice of using hashtags to organize tweets around topics.

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Rehtaeh Parsons: a self-portrait

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 3:31 PM - 0 Comments

No one dies anymore without leaving a little of themselves behind—in this case, on Twitter. The picture Rehtaeh left of herself in the last few months of her life (which includes a snapshot of a report card) may not be the one her parents or her self-appointed postmortem defenders would make, and who knows how faithful it might be to the broad sweep of her life. Probably not very. But it is a picture she assembled for the consumption of others, piece by piece; and her desperate deflection of darkening spirits by means of gangsta bravado, humour, and idealism is heartbreaking. I will leave it to the reader to treat this as forensic data and imagine possible implications for some revenge project or other. Such a thing might or might not be warranted; she hasn’t left us any clues here.

Has Facebook become less fun?

By Barbara Ortutay, The Associated Press - Tuesday, April 2, 2013 at 1:56 PM - 0 Comments

(David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

NEW YORK, N.Y. – To see what Facebook has become, look no further than the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer.

Sometime last year, people began sharing tongue-in-cheek online reviews of the banana-shaped piece of yellow plastic with their Facebook friends. Then those friends shared with their friends. Soon, after Amazon paid to promote it, posts featuring the $3.49 utensil were appearing in even more Facebook feeds.

At some point, though, the joke got old. But there it was, again and again — the banana slicer had become a Facebook version of that old knock-knock joke your weird uncle has been telling for years.

The Hutzler 571 phenomenon is a regular occurrence on the world’s biggest online social network, which begs the question: Has Facebook become less fun?

That’s something many users —especially those in their teens and early 20s— are asking themselves as they wade through endless posts, photos “liked” by people they barely know and spur-of-the moment friend requests. Has it all become too much of a chore? Are the important life events of your closest loved ones drowning in a sea of banana slicer jokes?

“When I first got Facebook I literally thought it was the coolest thing to have. If you had a Facebook you kind of fit in better, because other people had one,” says Rachel Fernandez, 18, who first signed on to the site four or five years ago.

And now? “Facebook got kind of boring,” she says.

Chatter about Facebook’s demise never seems to die down, whether it’s talk of “Facebook fatigue,” or grousing about how the social network lost its cool once grandma joined. The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project recently found that some 61 per cent of Facebook users had taken a hiatus from the site for reasons that range from “too much gossip and drama” to “boredom.” Some respondents said there simply isn’t enough time in their day for Facebook.

If its users leave, or even check in less frequently, Facebook’s revenue growth would suffer. The company, which depends on targeted advertising for most of the money it makes, booked revenue of $5.1 billion in 2012, up from $3.7 billion a year earlier.

But so far, for every person who has left permanently, several new people have joined up. Facebook has more than 1 billion users around the world. Of these, 618 million sign in every day.

Indeed, Fernandez hasn’t abandoned Facebook. Though the Traverse City, Mich., high school senior doesn’t look at her News Feed, the constant cascade of posts, photos and viral videos from her nearly 1,800 friends, she still uses Facebook’s messaging feature to reach out to people she knows, such as a German foreign exchange student she met two years ago.

Fernandez uses Facebook in the same way that people use email or the telephone. But she prefers using Facebook to communicate because everyone she knows is there. That’s a sign that Facebook’s biggest asset may also be its biggest challenge.

“We have never seen a social space that actually works for everybody,” says danah boyd, who studies youth culture, the Internet and social media as a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. “People don’t want to hang out with everybody they have ever met.”

Might Facebook go the way of email? Those who came of age in the “You’ve got mail” era can reminisce fondly about arriving home from school and checking their AOL accounts to see if anyone sent them an electronic message. Boyd, who is 35, recalls being a teenager and “thinking email is the best thing ever.”

Few people share that sentiment these days. Ian Bogost, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently listed email alongside “Blood, frogs, lice, flies, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, death of the firstborn” in a Facebook post.

“I was just going through my daily email routine, reflecting on the fact that it feels like batting down a wall of locusts,” Bogost says.

Although email has gone from after-school treat to a dull routine in the space of 20 years, no one is ready to ring its death knell just yet. And similarly, Facebook’s lost lustre doesn’t necessarily foreshadow its obsolescence.

“I don’t see teenagers leaving in droves,” boyd says. “I just don’t see it being their site of passion.”

In early March, Facebook unveiled a big redesign to address some of its users’ most pressing gripes. The retooling, which is already available to some people, is intended to get rid of the clutter that’s been a complaint among Facebook users for some time.

Facebook surveys its users regularly about their thoughts on the site. Jane Leibrock, whose title at Facebook is user experience researcher, says it was about a year ago that she noticed people were complaining about “clutter” in their feeds. Leibrock asked them what they meant. It turns out that the different types of content flowing through people’s News Feeds —links, ads, photos, status updates, things people “liked” or commented on— “was making it difficult to focus on any one thing,” she says. “It might have even been discouraging them from finding new content.”

The new design seeks to address the issue. There is a distinct feed for “all friends,” another for different groups of friends, one just for photos, and one for pages that users follow. As a result, says Chris Struhar, the lead engineer on the new design, the new feeds give people a way to see everything that’s going on.

“The amount of stories you have available to see has continued to increase,” Struhar says. “What we try to do now is give you more control over what stories you see in your feed.”

With that kind of control, the company hopes people will spend more time on the site and share more information about themselves so companies can target them better with advertisements.

Paul Friedman, a 59-year-old dentist in New York City says he’s using Facebook less now than when he first signed on four years ago, but he’s not sure if the site has “become less interesting or that I am just less interested in it,” he says.

“I think that it might have seemed more interesting in the past because it was a new ‘forum,’” Friedman says. “Now that it is not new, it takes does take more unique content to make it interesting.”

That said, Friedman still uses Facebook, to see if friends are organizing events, such as music gigs or yoga classes, or to check out interesting YouTube videos. He says seeing the same jokes reappear doesn’t really bother him.

“Ninety-nine per cent of it is a waste of time anyway,” he says. “If it wasn’t for the one per cent, I’d close my account.”

When it comes to people of a certain age, Friedman may be in the minority. Tammy Gordon, vice-president of the AARP’s social media team, says the 50-plus set is just now settling into Facebook. The organization’s own Facebook page grew from 80,000 fans to a million last year. This age group is growing the fastest because older people tend to be latecomers to Facebook. According to a recent Pew survey, 32 per cent of people 65 or older use social networking sites, compared with 83 per cent of those 18 to 29.

“They are not necessarily at that point where some of the younger generation is, where they have News Feed overload,” Gordon says.

Robert Worden, who is 62 and has nearly 1,100 friends on Facebook, isn’t overwhelmed. He says he got on Facebook two or three years ago primarily to establish a relationship with his estranged son, whom he didn’t see for a quarter century before he found him on Facebook.

Through his son, he also found out he had a granddaughter, who has been adopted and used Facebook to find her biological family when she turned 18. They are now all connected.

Worden, who lives in Paducah, Ky., says he probably wouldn’t have found his son were it not for Facebook, never mind his granddaughter. He also reconnected with people from his Memphis, Tenn., neighbourhood using Facebook — people he had not seen in half a century. The neighbourhood, he says “literally fell apart” in the 1960s “and we had never been able to get back together.”

“So someone said ‘why don’t you start a Facebook page?” he says. The group recently had its first reunion, 50 people showed up.

Worden says Facebook is his “major communication tool to the world.”

“Other people use news and I don’t find the nightly news or daily news to be adequate,” he says. “On Facebook I can actually hear from people who are living in the places where things are happening, and I can get instant information.”

Daniel Singer is 13 and, according to his public Facebook profile, he enjoys “designing beautiful user interfaces and sitting down at my desk and creating great iOS apps.” Last year, the eighth-grader created YouTell, a site that lets people ask for anonymous feedback from friends. You can use Facebook to log in, or email. As someone who designs applications, Singer calls Facebook’s graphical design “brilliant.” Still, he thinks the average teenager wants to see new stuff. Twitter, comes to mind, along with Instagram and Pheed, a photo-text-video-audio sharing app launched last fall.

For Singer, Facebook is part of a daily routine. “Kind of like brushing your teeth,” he says.

In the seven years since Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dormitory, Facebook has moved from a closed social networking service available to college students to a place where one-seventh — of the world’s population logs in at least once a month. No other social networking fad has accomplished such a feat.

Facebook’s predecessors MySpace and Friendster shone brightly but fizzled once finicky teenagers moved on to the next big thing. To boyd, though, Facebook is not only a destination site, but “a technical architecture that underlies many different things.”

“It’s not about new features to lure people back in,” boyd says. A bigger question, now, she says: What does it mean when your company is providing a vital service, rather than “a fun, glittery object”?

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose for-profit content creation site Wikia recently surveyed its young users about their technology habits, agrees. Teenagers, he says, “do see value in Facebook.”

“I think we are seeing a shift from (it being) a place to talk to each other as just part of the world —the infrastructure of the world,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s to the detriment of Facebook in the long run.”

Facebook study: Clicking ‘like’ says more than you realize

By The Associated Press - Monday, March 11, 2013 at 3:22 PM - 0 Comments

LONDON – Clicking those friendly blue “like” buttons strewn across the Web may be doing more than marking you as a fan of Coca-Cola or Lady Gaga.

It could out you as gay.

It might reveal how you vote.

It might even suggest that you’re an unmarried introvert with a high IQ and a weakness for nicotine.

That’s the conclusion of a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers reported analyzing the likes of more than 58,000 American Facebook users to make guesses about their personalities and behaviour, and even whether they drank, smoked, or did drugs.

Cambridge University researcher David Stillwell, one of the study’s authors, said the results may come as a surprise.

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Twitter prepares to rate the value of your tweets

By Emily Senger - Monday, February 18, 2013 at 10:39 AM - 0 Comments

Prepare to be judged by Twitter. Starting Wednesday, Feb. 20, Twitter has announced that it will begin assigning values to each and every tweet using: none, low and medium. Eventually, “high” will be rolled out as well.

The idea is that the new data, which will be publicly available, will allow developers to better sort through the millions of tweets to find the data that is useful to them. In the words of Twitter developer Arne Roomann-Kurrik: “This will allow applications to more easily surface certain types of content from otherwise noisy or high-volume feeds.”

The exact way that the tweets will be valued is a bit unclear, but it’s likely that it will work in the way that top tweets appear now during a Twitter search. For instance, tweets that are being retweeted by many people, or tweets from people with a lot of followers, will likely be assigned a higher value ranking. Likewise, that tweet about your lunchtime tuna sandwich to your 201 followers might get a “none” or “low” ranking.

Sam Laird at Mashable writes that the new development seems like it will be good for users: “It’s definitely a positive for Twitter, which will have the power to designate “high” value tweets (in some cases, perhaps, for a price) and possibly experiment with new ways of displaying tweets.”

The downside, according to Laird: “On the other hand, judging the value of tweets is a significant and unprecedented step for the company. Some could find it a bit invasive and, well, judgmental.”

Another downside: The new rating system could make it difficult for users with smaller followings to be featured, even when they have something good to say.

Note to St. Valentine: the media says love is dead

By Mika Rekai - Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 12:08 PM - 0 Comments

Bored now/Flickr

It’s Valentine’s Day again, and what better way to celebrate then by reading dozens of articles about why love is probably dead. The reason, according to silver-haired columnists around the world, is because of today’s youth and their unholy reliance on technology. Why is there so much texting, they all ask, and so little staring into the soulful abysses of your lover’s eyes?

In 2009, David Brooks at the New York Times may have well started the trend for curmudgeonly Valentine’s griping when he wrote this article. According to Brooks, Facebook, Twitter, online dating–even cellphones themselves–are to blame for sucking all the rose-tinted, candle-lit romance out of life and leaving only the cold, tasteless husks of a casual relationship in their place. Brooks suggests a return to the “Happy Days era” when “courtship was governed by a set of guardrails”. While Brooks seems to appreciate that Happy Days is a fictional television show set in a pre-feminist era, he still thinks it’s better than whatever young people are up to now: instagraming their love into oblivion, probably.

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Part of the LinkedIn elite? You and 10 million others.

By Lindsey Wiebe - Monday, February 11, 2013 at 4:37 PM - 0 Comments

If you’re an active LinkedIn user, the odds are good that in recent days you’ve received an email congratulating you on what seems, on the surface, like a flattering bit of news: Your profile is among the top five per cent (or one per cent, or 10 per cent) most-viewed profiles on the site.

The email includes a link back to a personalized letter of congratulations. It’s decked out officiously — blue ribbon, wax seal and all — with the tagline “A stat this delightful deserves to be shared” above a pre-written message and social media sharing buttons. (Notice of the email blast went out on the company blog late last week: “Starting today, we’re sending personal emails to many who have been instrumental in helping us reach this milestone to recognize their part in our journey,” wrote Ada Chen Rekhi, a product marketer for the company.)

There’s no reason to doubt LinkedIn’s stats, but the achievement loses its lustre when you consider the basic math. Total membership is now 200 million, which means that elite five per cent works out to a rather deflating 10 million people. (Seven million of LinkedIn’s users are in Canada, which makes our top five per cent ranks a slightly-more-exclusive 350,000).

But those numbers haven’t seemed to faze the legions of people who’ve heeded LinkedIn’s encouragement and shared their accomplishment: hundreds of new tweets trumpeting the news had popped up in the span of an hour Monday afternoon.

How the internet makes you boring

By Emma Teitel - Friday, February 8, 2013 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Jackson/Getty Images

In the third year of Facebook’s existence, I sat in the back of an after school Judaica class called Torah High and listened to a rabbi proselytize about the evils of social media. Jews don’t usually believe in the devil, but I suspect he did. The Internet, the rabbi said, was an evil place. Facebook, YouTube and Google were where vice found company; where freaks found freaks, tax evaders found tax evaders, terrorists found terrorists, and Jewish men found Gentile women. It was a world built on individual choice and preference and given every choice imaginable, we were bound to make the wrong ones.

Torah High isn’t exactly Yeshiva, or rabbinical school: a typical afternoon consisted of kosher pizza (looks like pizza, tastes like chicken) and awkward, long-winded lectures in pop philosophy. I imagined the Torah High rabbis as the televangelists Jews never had, stuck interminably with a shiftless, godless audience. But that day our rabbi was onto something—not the iniquity of cyberspace (I was 15 at the time and would have been at home, on Facebook, if I wasn’t listening to him admonish it), but the notion that pursuing your interests to the end of the Earth—even a digital Earth—was, maybe, not ideal for the soul. What our rabbi didn’t know, however, was that the future of the Internet’s most insidious damage lay not in people pursuing their own interests, but in our interests pursuing us. Continue…

Hackers vs. Twitter: 250,000 accounts hit

By macleans.ca - Saturday, February 2, 2013 at 5:50 AM - 0 Comments

Hackers take on Twitter: Tweeps tweet news of attack

Twitter notified 250,000 users that hackers may have had access to their names, email addresses and passwords. In details posted on Twitter’s website, the company said it had notified all those affected by the hack.

Storified by Maclean’s Magazine· Sat, Feb 02 2013 02:47:30

Twitter confirms hackers may have accessed 250,000 user accounts

By The Associated Press - Saturday, February 2, 2013 at 5:30 AM - 0 Comments

SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter confirmed Friday that it had become the latest victim in a number of high-profile cyber-attacks against media companies, saying that hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users.

The social media giant said in a blog posting that earlier this week it detected attempts to gain access to its user data. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected.

But it discovered that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users. Twitter reset the pilfered passwords and sent emails advising affected users.

The online attack comes on the heels of recent hacks into the computer systems of U.S. media and technology companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both American newspapers reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important.

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OHL referee Joe Monette suspended for insulting Sault Ste. Marie on Twitter

By The Canadian Press - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 8:12 PM - 0 Comments

TORONTO, Cananda – An Ontario Hockey League referee’s controversial Twitter post has cost him a lot more than the hostility of some hockey fans.

The OHL announced Wednesday that Joe Monette has been suspended for the balance of the 2012-13 season as well as the playoffs for his disparaging tweet about the city of Sault Ste Marie.

Monette was in Sault Ste. Marie on Friday to officiate a game between the Greyhounds and Windsor when he posted “Soo Saint Marie, two words, Slim Pickens #noteeth #hicktown #allfaties.”

The comment started a backlash on Twitter and Monette later apologized, posting “My tweet last night was not meant to be offensive and was meant as a joke between myself and a buddy of mine that lives in the Soo. I apologize if I offended anybody”

His account @MONZY25 has since been closed to public access.

“Mr. Monette displayed extremely poor judgment and the ‘tweet’ not only contravened the league’s social networking policy, but as well was detrimental to the welfare of the league, the officiating staff and fans of the OHL,” OHL commissioner David Branch said in a statement. “The league apologizes to those that may have been offended by such comments.”

Harper and social media: an open question

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, January 29, 2013 at 10:32 PM - 0 Comments

This evening I read listlessly from a library copy of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by historian Daniel Walker Howe. It’s part of the multi-volume Oxford History of the United States, and covers a relatively unloved part of that country’s history. It begins at the end of the War of 1812 and ends before the long prelude to the Civil War. But Howe depicts that period as the opposite of a dry spell between bursts of action. Technological breakthroughs in communications and transportation, especially the telegraph and the steam locomotive, changed the nature of social intercourse in a still largely empty country. Howe says the advent of fast transport and faster broadcasting of ideas was at least equal in its social impact to the arrival of the internet 150 years later. As one example among many, he argues that Southern slaveholders didn’t need to care what anyone else thought of their nasty business in 1815, but that that had started to change for good 33 years later.

I’m writing a book about Stephen Harper and it occurs to me that when he was elected in 2006, there was (for most Canadians not enrolled in higher education) no Facebook, no Twitter, and Youtube was barely six months old. I’ll tell you right now I don’t see the social-media revolution as having had a deciding impact on Canadian electoral politics or government. But I’ve got a hunch it’s had some impact.

I invite your observations and theories in the comment section below. I don’t have a leading question because I have no idea what I’m looking for, but: have technological changes had any influence on Canadian politics since 2006? Feel free to DM me on Twitter or email me if you have thoughts you want to share more quietly. As always, be nice to one another in the comments, please.

Vine lets you tweet six-second videos, just like you never wanted

By Jesse Brown - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 10:41 AM - 0 Comments

What to make of Vine? Twitter rolled out the “micro-video” app yesterday, and like Twitter, it’s more than it seems. 

Vine lets you shoot and share videos with your phone. Big deal, right? But six years ago, I heard about Twitter, an app that lets you share sentences. I said “big deal” then too. I could already do that, just as I could already make and share videos.

Twitter turned out to be a big deal indeed. Its genius was its simplicity. Sure, I could already write sentences–lots of them–on my blog and share them with the world, but by constraining me to 140 characters and feeding my tweets into an opt-in stream with pushbutton network effect (the brilliant “retweet”), Twitter removed all barriers to real-time chatter with an unlimited audience. The result, we now see, was a pretty significant transformation in communication.

Vine applies the same factors to video. It constrains you to six seconds, max. It removes all trickier aspects of video production–even basic editing tools are absent. It processes all videos into files similar to animated gifs–those lightweight, looping meme-able moments that proliferate wildly. Vine is integrated with Twitter (naturally), so you can attach one to a tweet as easily as you would a photo.

Early hype has it that Vine will be huge. I’ve learned my lesson and won’t predict otherwise, but I do have some reservations:

• The written word is incredibly efficient. You can say a lot in 140 characters. But video? Less may be more here. Moving pictures often convey less info than still photos. What can you say with a six-second clip that you couldn’t say with a TwitPic? I guess we’ll find out.

• Streamlining video is a step in the right direction when it comes to the instantaneous culture of social media. But even constrained to six seconds of compressed loopage, a vine is much more data-heavy than a tweet. It apparently takes a full 30 minutes for Vine to process and post each clip. On the receiving end, the burden of loading a constant stream of twitching videos is already crashing and clogging twitter clients. (Incidentally, I’m not embedding any vines in this post, since this page filled with them keeps crashing my browser.)

• What the heck will we use it for? Twitter succeeds (for Twitter, at least) when it becomes second nature–when you barely think before you tweet. But people seem to be having lots of trouble thinking of anything substantive to share through Vine. Day one has brought us a barrage of pet videos and cinematic panoramas of people’s desks.

I look forward to eating these words in the days ahead, as users the world over stretch the limits of the micro-vid.

Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBrown

Facebook unveils new search feature for friends, interests, photos and places

By Barbara Ortutay - Tuesday, January 15, 2013 at 2:07 PM - 0 Comments

MENLO PARK, Calif. – If you’ve ever wanted to know the most popular TV shows among your Facebook friends who are doctors, or wanted to see all the photos any of your friends have taken in Paris, the world’s biggest online social network has the answer.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new search feature on Tuesday in Facebook’s first staged event at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters since its May initial public offering.

Called “graph search,” the new service lets users search their social connections for information about people, interests, photos and places. Continue…

Facebook’s mystery press event has social media buzzing

By The Associated Press - Tuesday, January 15, 2013 at 5:54 AM - 0 Comments

SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook’s mystery “press event” on Tuesday could reveal a more robust search feature that would intensify the competition between the social networking giant and its rival Google Inc.

Facebook is holding the event at 10 a.m. at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. The company has not said what it plans to announce. Last week, it invited bloggers and journalists to “come see what we’re building.”

The company probably won’t be showing off a new office building —unless it decided to make its invitation very literal.

It’s also unlikely to be unveiling a much-rumoured “Facebook phone” —unless CEO Mark Zuckerberg has changed his mind recently. Last fall, as he’d done on numerous occasions, he publicly shot down speculation that Facebook was building its own smartphone.

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Library of Congress adds Twitter archive, struggles with search function

By Emily Senger - Monday, January 7, 2013 at 11:51 AM - 0 Comments

The Library of Congress is adding tweets to its archives, but users still aren’t able to search through the more than 170 billion (and growing) tweets.

The agreement between the library and Twitter was actually signed back in 2010, and the library announced Monday that it has just now completed its initial objectives in the tweet project, which included: “to acquire and preserve the 2006-10 archive; to establish a secure, sustainable process for receiving and preserving a daily, ongoing stream of tweets through the present day; and to create a structure for organizing the entire archive by date.”

The next challenge for the Library of Congress is making that archive accessible in a way that will be of use to researchers, something that it hasn’t quite figured out how to do, reports the Washington Post.

“People expect fully indexed — if not online searchable — databases, and that’s very difficult to apply to massive digital databases in real time,” Deputy Librarian of Congress Robert Dizard Jr. told the Post. “The technology for archival access has to catch up with the technology that has allowed for content creation and distribution on a massive scale.”

In addition to its 170 billion existing tweets, the Twitter archive increases by approximately half a billion tweets each day.

Iran says it is developing software to control social networking sites

By The Associated Press - Saturday, January 5, 2013 at 2:36 PM - 0 Comments

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s police chief says the Islamic Republic is developing new software to control social networking sites.

Gen. Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam was quoted in Iranian newspapers Saturday as saying the new software will prevent Iranians from being exposed to malicious content online while allowing users to enjoy the benefits of the Internet. He did not say when the software would be introduced.

Moghadam also did not specify which social networking sites would be affected, but both Facebook and Twitter are popular in Iran.

Iranians currently have access to most of the Internet, although authorities block some sites affiliated with the opposition, as well as those that are seen as promoting dissent or considered morally corrupt.

Iran created a government agency last year to oversee Internet usage in the country.

Picture of Zuckerberg’s family leaks online, sparking outcry about privacy

By The Associated Press - Thursday, December 27, 2012 at 7:10 AM - 0 Comments

SEATTLE – Even Mark Zuckerberg’s family can get tripped up by Facebook’s privacy settings.

A picture that Zuckerberg’s sister posted on her personal Facebook profile was seen by a marketing director, who then posted the picture to Twitter and her more than 40,000 followers Wednesday.

That didn’t sit well with Zuckerberg’s sister, Randi, who tweeted at Callie Schweitzer that the picture was meant for friends only and that posting the private picture on Twitter was “way uncool.” Schweitzer replied by saying the picture popped up on her Facebook news feed.

The picture shows four people standing around a kitchen staring at their phones with their mouths open while Mark Zuckerberg is in the background.

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Noted on Twitter: People tweeting photos of airport Christmas trees

By macleans.ca - Saturday, December 22, 2012 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

Noted: People tweeting photos of airport Christmas trees

Storified by Maclean’s Magazine· Fri, Dec 21 2012 17:00:48

Reacting to users’ outcry, Facebook’s Instagram reverts to prior policy on advertising

By The Associated Press - Friday, December 21, 2012 at 5:53 AM - 0 Comments

SAN FRANCISCO – Instagram has abandoned wording in its new terms-of-service agreement that sparked outcry from users concerned it meant their photos could appear in advertisements.

In a blog post late Thursday, the popular mobile photo-sharing service says it has reverted to language in the advertising section of its terms of service that appeared when it was launched in October 2010.

Instagram is now owned by Facebook Inc. and maintains that it would like to experiment with different forms of advertising to make money.

Its blog post says that it will now ask users’ permission to introduce possible ad products only after they are fully developed.

The outcry to the changes announced earlier this week led the company to clarify that it has no plans to put users’ photos in ads.

How a fake video of an eagle stealing a Canadian baby fooled the world

By The Canadian Press - Wednesday, December 19, 2012 at 2:17 PM - 0 Comments

MONTREAL – Relax, world — your baby won’t get snatched by an eagle if you visit Montreal.

An online video of the massive bird plucking an infant off the ground has been acknowledged by its creators as a fake.

The admission comes after the video, produced by students at a new-media training school in Montreal, had gotten more than 1.2 million views on YouTube and been covered by dozens of media in Canada and internationally.

The video was picked up by newspapers in the U.K., was tweeted by at least one member of the White House press corps in Washington, and it moved on the international news wires through Agence France Presse as well as in numerous other major international publications.

But Claude Arsenault, a spokesman for the Centre NAD, says the video was done as part of a class project in 3D animation and digital design.

“Both the eagle and the kid were created in 3D animation and integrated in to the film afterwards,” said a statement from the school.

An online debate raged about whether or not the video was real, with many people weighing in that it was fake. As that debate raged, media picked up the story — with some treating it seriously and others warning that it could be a stunt.

It’s not the first time a hoax from that class has gotten attention. An earlier effort showed a penguin escaping from the Montreal Biodome. Although that earlier video of the pengiun waddling down Sherbrooke Street, outside the Olympic Stadium, only got a fraction of the attention generated by the stolen-baby video.

It was the second time in a week that media and the public had been drawn in by a hoax involving animals in Montreal.

A fake CBC Radio interview where a phoney Montreal city councillor proposed a bylaw requiring dogs in public spaces to be bilingual also caused a tempest before it was denied by the public broadcaster.

In the meantime, the Montreal eagle has shown up with his own Twitter account, saying he grabbed the child because he thought it was a Hobbit.

The Agence France Presse news service noted the proliferation of weird stories emerging lately from Canada.

“A YouTube video of a golden eagle swooping down and lifting a toddler off the ground in Montreal could soar to Internet stardom as the latest episode of animals behaving strangely in Canada,” the report began.

“(It comes) just a week after a monkey wearing a sheepskin coat was found wandering around an IKEA parking lot in Toronto.”

Twitter launches new photo filters in war with Instagram

By Emily Senger - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Twitter has launched its own photo filters and editing options as it continues to compete with social media photo sharing app Instagram.

The Twitter update allows users to edit photos and add one of eight filters without using a secondary app. It looks like this:

(blog.twitter.com)

At the moment, the update is available for Android operating systems only, and is expected on iOS soon. In 2011, Twitter allowed users to attach a photo directly to a tweet, but there was no way to edit that photo in Twitter until now.
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