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Viewing all posts tagged "facebook"
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Facebook Unblocked in Syria, But Sees Little Change in Traffic
My guess, which has also been suggested by others around the net, is that Facebook, YouTube and all Blogspot blogs were unblocked so that the Syrian government could more closely monitor users’ activity on these social networking sites. As Jennifer said, this was a really clever move by the Syrian government because it has the appearance of a progressive change in policy; indeed, human rights groups and net freedom activists have already praised the move. But as the below article suggests, there was no real change in usage patterns from Syrians. They had all found ways to access these social networking sites despite the 3-year ban — namely, by using proxy servers (that is, by putting a code into your web browser which makes it seem like your computer is accessing the internet from another location in the world) — and so lifting the ban wouldn’t necessarily have attracted new users or increased traffic from existing users. Now that the ban is lifted, I’d be interested to know whether Syrians will continue to use proxy servers in order to mask their physical locations.
The Syrian government recently announced they planned to lift a five-year-long block on Facebook, YouTube and Blogger. The move was welcomed by the State Department’s Alec Ross as a “positive move.” Indeed, traffic to YouTube appears to have markedly increased.
But over at Facebook, they aren’t seeing major changes in usage patterns in the country.
» via The Atlantic
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Unfriended: Six Million Americans Fled Facebook Last Month
Senior Editor Cord Jefferson reports on the recent exodus of Facebook users:
I told you last month why I thought everyone should get off Facebook, and it turns out people listened. Though the social networking behemoth continues creeping toward 700 million global users, six million Americans quit the site in the month of May. That’s the first time Facebook has lost U.S. users in over a year. The site also posted losses in Canada, the U.K., Norway, and Russia, while most of its gains came in countries in the developing world, including Mexico and India.
What explains the stunted growth? Several things, the first of which is a growing concern about privacy amongst Facebook users. It was inevitable that a social site that turned its users into a commodity for advertisers would eventually be a turnoff for some, and that looks to be happening at Facebook en masse. Beyond that, competing sites like Twitter, which demand less engagement and information from users, are also siphoning away some former Facebook loyalists.
Read more on GOOD.
» via GOOD
Emphasis mine. Beyond the privacy concerns, which you can manage yourself fairly easily with a few clicks, all the ads are pretty annoying. Still, though, I wouldn’t leave Facebook yet.
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We also asked respondents’ opinions on Google+ vs. Twitter. This did divide opinion, with 40% saying that they did prefer it to Twitter, but 33% saying that they didn’t and 27% not sure. There’s certainly mixed feelings about this one, and is indicative that it’s really too early to call whether Google+ can surpass Twitter or whether they’re competitors at all. (via Over 2/3 of Google users are ready to say goodbye to Facebook - TNW Google)
Keep in mind this is a closed beta currently used mostly by tech geeks. I’m betting a lot of the core users of Facebook aren’t going anywhere.
Also, there’s a big difference between prefer and actually cutting ties with Facebook. A lot of folks want to leave but don’t want to lose the connection to friends and family.
Well said. Goole+ works great. But until your mom and sister and next door neighbor and high school track coach are on there, along with all their contacts, posting photos and status updates and event invitations Facebook has little to fear. I think that there eventually will be very many dual users of Facebook and Google+, just as today there are very many dual users of Facebook and Twitter.
I want a program that tracks the amount of time my browser windows are open to certain domains. At the end of each day the program spits out the number of minutes spent on *.facebook.com, twitter.com, *.tumblr.com and plus.google.com. After some weeks or months pass, I plot all the data points on a 100% stacked area chart in order to see how certain social networks have been eating away time from the others. Because the program tracks computer usage only and doesn’t account for time spent on my mobile device, the resulting chart wouldn’t be completely accurate… but it’d be close, and I reckon it might look something like this:
Has someone already built a program like this? Browser plugin perhaps?
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Facebook ticker broadcasts your every move, does not allow opt-outs
The new Facebook ticker automatically stalks your every move, and then shows it in real-time to all your friends. Now every “like” or comment or game or share is broadcast without your control. As a result, you are able to view information about friends of friends — people you don’t even know. Likewise, your photos, statuses and comments are appearing in front of people who don’t even know you. Facebook really should let you opt-out your activity from the real-time status ticker.
To take one example, here my friend Ariane has just become friends with someone named Gabriel. It’s great that they’re connected, but I just don’t care. I don’t know Gabriel at all and certainly don’t need to see her birthday, where she’s from, where she currently lives, and a picture of her child.
Apparently, some people have taken to posting this sort of message on their own walls:
“Please do me a favor and move your mouse over my name here, wait for the box to load and then move your mouse over the “Subscribe” link. Then scroll down and uncheck the “Comments and Likes”. I would really rather that my comments on friends and families posts not be made public, thank You! Then re-post this if you don’t want your every single move posted on the right side in the “Ticker Box” for everyone to see”
I guess that works! But so many steps — who will actually go through all of that? I think instead I will start posting this sort of message on my own wall:
“Please do me a favor and move your mouse over to http://plus.google.com/ where you have full control over what you broadcast to people AND over what is broadcast to you.”
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