Facebook wants your life story

Last night Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive did it again: he made the web even more social. And naturally, he put Facebook at the heart of it.

At f8, Facebook’s annual developers conference in San Francisco, an increasingly polished and media savvy Zuckerberg took to stage to explain the site’s latest makeover – after a little aside in which he told the crowd that the site had managed to attract half a billion users in a single day.

After the cheers and whooping, which have become customary at these American live-streamed tech bonanzas, Zuckerberg introduced the ‘Timeline’.

The concept of Timeline, is that users put their entire lives on Facebook, organized by days, months and years. And then they can fill in the blanks – right back to their births.

Scan in baby pictures, upload old home movies, load in maps to chart memorable journeys – Facebook wants everyone’s life story loaded into its system.

Facebook members can edit the ‘Timeline’, erasing or adding chapters as they go. Boyfriends can be deleted and new ones added – it’s your life and therefore your story.

“Facebook needs to focus on becoming useful to people who aren't on Facebook.com - by adding social relevance and connections to the sites where all two billion global internet users spend time. Getting traffic to Facebook.com and monetizing that traffic with a self-serving advertising platform is pretty small thinking.

“The big thinking has to be about using their data to make the web richer to users on other sites, and monetizing that data in other ways other than simple little on-site ads.”

Facebook wants to host everyone’s life story, from start to finish, mixed with the web’s best content. Will Facebook's seven hundred and fifty million users join in?

five dangers of sharing information on social networking

An expert in online privacy drew attention to the five dangers of sharing information on social networking site Facebook. Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online, said that marketing efforts by the company often results in a compromise on account holders' privacy.

Goodchild noted five risks of using Facebook. They are:

1. According to Facebook policy last updated on April 2010, "When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends' names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to "everyone." ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection."

2. In March, private e-mail according to a Gawker report, private email addresses that many Facebook users wanted to keep hidden were revealed publicly on a multitude of Facebook profiles. The glitch was later resolved by Facebook.

3. Recently, a Facebook event invitation was reportedly sent to some over 2,300 friends of Jim Breyer, Accel Partners venture capitalist who sits on Facebook's board of directors, asking "Would you like a Facebook phone number?" However, the message was actually a scam and the users who entered their passwords in response to the message in turn sent the whole thing to their friends lists too.

"This was a phishing scam and Jim's account appears to have been compromised," read a statement from Facebook as provided to venture industry news site PEHub.

4. On May 6th, the popular social network patched a major security bug that allowed users to snoop on their friends' private chats, and view their pending friend requests. The exploit forced Facebook to temporarily disable chat.

5. Earlier this week, 15 privacy and consumer protection organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the site manipulates privacy settings to make users' personal information available for commercial use.

Twitter Begins Accepting Political Ads

Twitter on Wednesday started accepting political ads and announced a sales team dedicated to the category.

The company ran its first such ad today, a Sponsored Tweet from GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. (See below.) Romney is one of a small group of candidates and national party committees that Twitter is working with on a pilot program for the effort. Those partners will also run ads in coming weeks. The ads will be distinguished from other advertising by a purple “Promoted” icon and a Federal Election Commission disclaimer.

Twitter’s new political sales team will be run by Peter Greenberger, who until recently ran political sales for Google.

The 2012 presidential election has gotten under way in earnest. The FEC estimates that candidates for the 2008 presidential election spent $1.8 billion on ads.

What do you think of Twitter’s decision? Let us know in the comments.

Dumped on Facebook, IIM student commits suicide

BANGALORE: An MBA student hanged herself in her hostel room in the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, on Monday evening. Malini Murmu, 22, was a first-year MBA student and a native of Jamshedpur in Jharkhand.



Investigation officers said she found out from Facebook on Sunday that her boyfriend had dumped her. Depressed, she did not attend classes. When her classmates noticed her absence, they went to her room, No. 421 in the college hostel, and called out to her. Malini did not open the door so they called the security guard and broke open the door. They found her hanging from the ceiling fan.

She had left a suicide note on her laptop, saying her boyfriend had left her and she was killing herself over it. She'd also scribbled 'He ditched me' on a board in her room. She had no roommates, police said.

Police said her boyfriend was in town and the couple had an argument, which resulted in the breakup. Later, her boyfriend had left a post on Facebook saying, "Feeling super cool today. Dumped my new ex-girlfriend. Happy independence day."

Malini's body was shifted to a mortuary. Police are waiting for her parents to reach Bangalore before carrying out an autopsy.

IIM-B officials refused to comment.

Eric Schmidt says Google has not 'cooked' search results

WASHINGTON: Google Inc has not "cooked" its search results to favor its own products and listings, executive chairman Eric Schmidt told a Senate hearing examining if the search giant abuses its power.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel said on Wednesday that Google has evolved to become a dominant and potentially anti-competitive force on the internet.

"Google is in a position to determine who will succeed and who will fail on the internet," said Republican Senator Mike Lee. "In the words of the head of the Google's search ranking team, Google is the biggest kingmaker on Earth."

Google has been broadly accused of using its clout in the search market to stomp rivals as it moves into related businesses, like travel search.

The Federal Trade Commission is looking into that charge and others, including whether Google manipulates its search result rankings to favor its own products.

Lee aggressively quizzed Schmidt over whether Google deviates from its search algorithm to boost its own listings.

He brought a chart that showed a study comparing the success rate for shopping-related key word searches. Lee said that search rankings for price comparison sites -- Nextag, PriceGrabber and Shopper -- varied while Google's shopping site was consistently ranked third.

"I see you magically coming up third every time," Lee said. "I don't know whether you call this a separate algorithm or whether you've reverse engineered one algorithm, but either way you've cooked it, so that you're always third."

Schmidt replied: "Senator, may I simply say that I can assure you we've not cooked anything."

Schmidt calmly walked the senators though his argument that Google operates in a competitive environment. He is confident the FTC will clear the search giant of any wrongdoing.

"While no company would request such a government investigation, we are confident that our business practices will stand up to scrutiny," Schmidt said.

Google controls more than two-thirds of the global search market. But Schmidt argued that specialty web sites -- like those with restaurant reviews and travel search -- give Google stiff competition.

Facebook is another competitor, Schmidt contends. "Consumers, particularly young ones, increasingly are turning to their online friends to find out what to wear, where to eat, and what to watch," he said.

SEO for Small Business Sites

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    3. Keyword research, which means selecting keywords with the best search-volume-to-competition ratio
    4. On-site SEO, optimizing meta titles, creating correct robots.txt file, creating and submitting a .xml sitemap of your site, and a thorough     analysis of your site’s content and structure
    5. Link building
    6. Results analysis

Conclusion

So to sum it all up, let’s outline the main takeaways:

• SEO is a perfect tool for small businesses promotion
• plan your SEO campaign carefully, monitor and spy on your successful competitors
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Facebook-related job - Careers | Facebook

A recent study published by the University of Maryland indicates that Facebook and mobile technology have generated at least 182,000 new jobs and $12.19 billion in wages and benefits. The study, which was released by the Robert H. Smith School of Business this morning, stated that more aggressive estimates indicate that the “Facebook App Economy” could be responsible for as many as 235,644 jobs and a $15.71 billion impact on the economy.

The research found that 53,000 of the jobs created were people directly employed by software companies that design Facebook apps. For example, Zynga, the popular social gaming company, has over 2,000 employees.  This quickly growing company  is worth an estimated $15 to $20 billion dollars and recently announced plans for an IPO. Zynga is one of the many companies that employs Flash, C++, PHP and Java programmers to program Facebook Apps.

In addition to direct employment, the Facebook App Economy created at least an additional 129,000 jobs related to supply and increased spending.

Il Horn Hann, co-director of the Smith School’s Center for Digital Innovation, Technology, and Strategy said the following:

“Our findings confirm that social media platforms have created a thriving new industry. As Facebook and other platforms grow, we will continue to see job growth and the ripple effects of these advances in the U.S. economy.”

In addition to Facebook app development, Facebook-related job growth has been propelled by the over 2.5 million websites and companies that are now integrated with Facebook. These companies are hiring web designers, social media consultants, and page managers.

Since Facebook launched in 2004, it has increased its staff by over 50% each year. The social media giant, which now has over 750 million users, directly employs over 2,000 workers.

The numbers posted in this Facebook-funded study were higher than expected.

Facebook to Add New Buttons: Report

Facebook is said to have a big announcement planned at the f8 developer conference Thursday. TechCrunch thinks it may know what it is, having heard from a source that the company is planning to add several new buttons to the social network. Similar in functionality to the “Like” button, TechCrunch’s source says the new buttons will be “Read,” “Listened,” and “Watched.” It also says Facebook plans to introduce commerce-oriented buttons like “Want” down the road. Lending some credibility to TechCrunch’s report is the fact that Facebook’s motto at f8 is “Read. Watch. Listen.”