Peon's Place

I recall the days when MySpace was “the place to be”. We all had our profiles, decorated the way we liked, with our favorite songs starting up whenever anyone went to our profile page. Some profiles would never finish loading since people decided that 500 sparkly animated images about how cool things are was simply too awesome to pass on up, and they wanted to share them all with the world. Of course, this is one of the reasons MySpace died. Mass advertisements (removed by AdBlock, thanks very much!) and slow loading profile pages.

This is when Facebook began to flourish. Simple, clean pages, fast loading times, and you could easily find what you wanted to: your friends and their updates, all in one neat looking spot. Then began the now real of Facebook, with the online free gaming system, one Facebook application at a time. And as such, continued on went the days of slow loading pages, clutters and messes and not finding what you really want to see, and the needing of sorting through trash to again find meaningful updates from those you associate with.

It feels to me that every 4-5 years we are in need of a new social media connection. Google tried and failed with Wave, Buzz, and now their new toy is out, Google Plus. Will this finally be the magic trick that Google succeeds with?

I’ve taken a run through of the new Google+. For now, with limited friends, it does feel like Facebook, but reinvented for our new decade. More ajax framework, more ability to easily move and sort and group content and friends in the ways that you like. Classify any bit of your online life, how you choose. That’s how I would sum it up so far.

You can see the official website here: https://plus.google.com/

Google+ is designed around “Circles” that allow users to group people within their social sphere into different categories. Google says that the people you tend to meet up with on Saturday nights, for example, can be grouped into their own category, while parents can be placed into another. You can then decide to share only certain information with different Circles.  Read the rest of this entry » Google+ Trumps Facebook?

Social networking use has doubled since 2007, and it’s all thanks to Facebook, Twitter and an array of other social companies reaching record traffic highs. Website comScore’s latest numbers are out, and they paint a familiar story: social networking is on the rise. It’s the rate of growth that’s surprising, though.

According to the web analytics firm, the average online user in the U.S. now spends nearly 16% of his or her time on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr or Twitter. That’s up from just 8% in July 2007. In the last year alone, social networking use has increased by approximately 25%.

The biggest reason for the increase in social networking is Facebook and its 700+ million users. In August 2005, Facebook was tiny compared to MySpace, its primary competitor. Facebook attracted less than 10 million monthly U.S. visitors, compared to MySpace’s 20+ million.

It wasn’t until May 2009 when Facebook finally caught up with its competitor, and ever since then Facebook has been on the rise, while MySpace has experienced a dramatic fall from grace. In May 2011, Facebook garnered 157.2 million visitors, more than four times the size of Myspace (34.9 million visitors). Facebook now reaches 73% of the U.S. Internet population each month, while MySpace has lost nearly 50% of its audience in the last year alone.

Read the rest of this entry » Social Networking Account...

In a move to the direction of additional Facebook creepiness, you can now take your stalking to a whole new level. And by that, I mean, the stalking now comes to YOU.

The Breakup Notifier app lets users select the friends whose love lives they want to monitor and, whenever they change their relationship status on Facebook, it sends an e-mail. ”You like someone. They’re in a relationship. Be the first to know when they’re out of it,” says the tagline on the app’s website.

Dan Loewenherz, 24, a developer based in Beverly Hills, California, said it took him just about four hours to build the application. He launched the app and its website Saturday, and in the past 36 hours the site has been visited more than 700,000 times and the app has been downloaded by 40,000 people, he said.  ”I was blown away,” he said. “This weekend, I just thought it would be a fun thing to do. It was going to be a little joke, I was going to send it to some friends… but I think people really like this idea. I just didn’t intend it to be this big.”

Here are conceptual Facebook and Twitter shoes designed by Gerry Mckay for Adidas. If these ever make it to production, I may kill myself. Just after I burn the MySpace shoelaces that I picked up at a concert several years ago.

Hold on to your hats boys and girls, Facebook made things worse for you, not better! The personal details of more than 100 million Facebook users have been made available to download from the internet via file-sharing websites and torrents.

Canadian security consultant Ron Bowes of Skull Security developed a piece of software code that enabled him to harvest data on Facebook users who have not amended their privacy setting to make their information unavailable to search engines. Mr Bowes said he was able to uncover 171 million names, relating to over 100 million individuals, or more than one-fifth of Facebook’s total users.

Read the rest of this entry » Millions of Facebook user...

With Facebook hitting the 500-million user milestone, here are some facts regarding its popularity.

I just wish the CEO, with all his money, could learn to speak into a camera as opposed to reading off of cue cards. His speech isn’t all that difficult (see video below).

Read the rest of this entry » Facebook lands 500 millio...

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Monday said that the site’s recent privacy enhancements “missed the mark,” and confirmed that the social networking site will introduce simplified settings in the weeks to come. Zuckerberg also denied that Facebook shares users’ information without permission.

“There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Monday op-ed for The Washington Post. “We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services.” In December, Facebook rolled out new privacy settings intended to give users more control over their information, but made some users’ information more open by default. Last month, Zuckerberg discussed an “open graph” at the company’s annual f8 developer conference, which is supposed to connect people to Facebook on third-party sites. Both efforts have prompted inquiries from consumer groups, members of Congress, privacy watchdogs, and the Article 29 Working Party.

“Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex,” Zuckerberg wrote Monday. “Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.” Zuckerberg also laid out several privacy principles, which he said should clear up any concern about the sharing of personal information. Users have control over how their information is share, and Facebook does not share personal information with people or services users do not want, he said. He also denied that Facebook provides advertisers with access to their personal information or sells personal information.

Finally, Facebook will “always” be a free service for everyone, Zuckerberg concluded.

I guess they will keep their practice of opting in their users and leaving their users the task of opting out. Which means, if you do not keep your eye on your Facebook account 24/7, you will be opted into this or that, and your information shared until such time that you realize you have been opted in, and then set about to make necessary changes.

Just as he hoped to clean up his image, Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, is to be portrayed in a Hollywood film as a ruthless and untrustworthy sex maniac. The website and its 400 million users have been beset in the past week by rows over changes to its privacy settings.

The timing could not be worse. In the middle of a privacy crisis which has seen countless users delete their accounts, a script for an upcoming movie based on the youthful exploits of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has leaked out. Produced by Kevin Spacey, “The Social Network” portrays Zuckerberg (played by 26-year old Jesse Eisenberg) as a drunk satyriatic whose creation of the popular social networking site was spurred on by heartbreak after his girlfriend dumped him at the age of 19. The film also alleges that Zuckerberg was heavily motived by sexual insecurity. After hitting rock bottom and dropping out of Harvard, the film sees Zuckerberg move to the Silicon Valley with where he “indulge his fantasies with a stream of ‘groupies’” while his partner and Napster co-founder Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake) watches after the site. The Social Network is scheduled for release this October.

In the film Zuckerberg retreats to his college dormitory where, in a drunken fever, he writes the computer code turning Harvard’s annual collection of student photographs and biographies into a website where he and his male friends rank Harvard women as barnyard animals. Thirty minutes after “Thefacebook” goes live, it is so popular that it crashes Harvard’s computer network.

Critics who have seen the draft script for the film say it portrays Zuckerberg as a “borderline-autistic conniver”.