Neworking sites top in billing rates

Last week, the Harvard Business Review published a long interview with Howard Schultz. The Starbucks CEO talked about the coffee company’s many moves to win back customers and battle against the ill winds of the recession. As evidence of Starbucks’ rebound, Schultz pointed to the biggest of the social networking sites out there. “We’re the number one brand on Facebook,” he boasted.

Starbucks, in fact, was the first brand to top the 10 million-fan mark. Just to put this in perspective, that’s more fans than the entire population of New York City (8.2 million) and all but seven states in the US. That’s more Facebook fans than its closest rival, Coca-Cola (8.3 million fans) and way more than other large global brands.

McDonald’s has 2.5 million fans. Target has 1.43 million, Abercrombie and Fitch 1.37 million, and the trendy teen clothier Forever 21 totals 1.27 million. Among high-end food and food-related brands, Ben and Jerry’s has 1.35 million Facebook fans with Whole Foods lagging behind with just 296,152 fans.

The other day, my Facebook page (I have 302 friends) told me that many people who like Barack Obama also like Starbucks. Turns out the president is one of Starbucks few Facebook rivals. He has 10.9 million fans, a few more than Starbucks. But Starbucks still has more fans than Sarah Palin (1.93 million), Mitt Romney (460,832), and Bill Clinton (353,583) combined.

Most pop culture figures don’t reach Starbucks’ level of fans either. Apart from Facebook leader Michael Jackson (16.6 million) and Lady Gaga (12.9 million), the coffee giant has more online backers than Bruce Springsteen (880,459), Adam Sandler (5.44 million), and even teen idol Justin Bieber (7.88 million).

When it comes to coffee companies, there is no contest. Starbucks’ closest competitor (in terms of its number of cafes across the US) Caribou has 154,754 fans. Peet’s has 45,497. Not long ago, Time Magazine wondered if the famed Portland, Oregon independent roaster Stumptown might be the next Starbucks. Not on Facebook. It has only 10,780 fans.

From the business side — and from the side of studying culture — what do all of these numbers mean? Clearly, brands and personalities have turned to Facebook to market their products, enhance their image, and communicate with their customers. But beyond that what does this new form of fandom mean, beyond a sort of crude measure of popularity?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Neworking-sites-top-in-billing-rates/articleshow/6232505.cms

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Facebook launches online safety page

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook has launched a Web page devoted to staying safe on the Internet.

The “Safety Page” will highlight news and initiatives focused on ways people can keep data secure at the world’s leading online social-networking community, Joe Sullivan of Facebook said in a blog post.

The new page was intended to augment a virtual Safety Center that Facebook introduced in April and was based on a “security page” that boasted more than 2.2 million “fans”.

“Online safety is a shared responsibility,” Sullivan said. “We’ll continue to think of innovative ways to promote safety on our service and elsewhere on the Web.”

The number of people using Facebook topped the 500 million mark last week, meaning one in every 14 people on the planet has now signed up to the social netowork.

The launch of the Safety Page came in the wake of demands by privacy activists that Facebook give users of the booming social network more control over the use of their personal data.

A coalition of privacy groups, in an open letter to Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last month, welcomed the social network’s recent overhaul of its privacy controls but said additional steps were needed.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Facebook-launches-online-safety-page/articleshow/6222131.cms

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The copyright troll is born

This is an interesting development that is already getting quite a bit of coverage in the US. Righthaven, a company based in Las Vegas, has been buying copyright material from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. And since March, it has initiated legal proceedings against 80 websites and bloggers, and is also said to have settled cases with a number of others. The target of Righthaven’s actions have been sites which reproduce the Review-Journal’s material without permission. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues,” says Righthaven’s founder Steve Gibson. Stephens Media, the owners of the Review-Journal like what Gibson is doing so much, they are said to have authorised him to expand operations to all 70 of its titles. “We perceive there to be millions, if not billions, of infringements out there,” Gibson states.

According to TechDirt (not the most disinterested of sources I grant) , the company’s modus operandi is to issue a writ without sending any warning first or requesting a DCMA takedown; it then “quickly demands a settlement fee”. TechDirt also claims that at least some of the organisations and individuals targeted have actually been rerunning stories printed in the Review-Journal in which they appear, and are also providing links back to the newspaper’s website.

As a business model this all sounds quite familiar, doesn’t it? Find as many alleged infringers of your rights as possible, issue a writ and then demand a settlement fee to make it go away. The settlement fee will often seem more attractive than having to fork out money to defend an action – even if you think it may have no real basis in law. And if you have no knowledge of legal concepts such as fair use, and you know that you have posted copyright material without permission, then you may well bite off the hand of someone offering you a settlement rather than a court case.

Putting aside the rights and wrongs of what RightHaven is reported to be doing, what will be interesting here is to see whether other copyright owners turn to third parties to enforce their rights. What we don’t know, as far as I can tell, is how much Gibson has paid Stephens Media for the right to enforce – is it an upfront sum, a share of the proceeds or a mixture of the two? But if they are making decent money from it, you can imagine others wanting to get a share of the action too.

The other thing is that unlike the NPE model, this may well be quite simply exported to other parts of the world. There will never be any issues with quality and validity – a copyright is a copyright is a copyright, after all – while tracking down potential targets and sending them a writ is not exactly expensive. The only argument is whether the alleged infringement is covered by the fair use/fair dealing concept; and, in fact, in many countries such provisions are actually much stricter than they are in the US. But that does not even come into it if your writ and offer of a settlement gambit pays off, which it could well do quite a lot of the time.

If the model works well, all you are doing is playing a numbers games: there are plenty more potential online infringers of written copyright material than there are patent infringers, you don’t need to do any reverse engineering and the money you need from settlements in order to turn a profit is nowhere near as much.

Of course, what this will also do, though, is to make IP an even dirtier concept for many people. Free access to information is considered something of a right online. Legal moves that are seen as seeking to deny this will always raise hackles. I can already see the world’s various Pirate Parties writing angry press releases and demanding action.

Source: http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/Detail.aspx?g=66f3eeeb-f8f8-4f28-b7eb-06ddba1d3aa6

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Facebook reaches 500 mn users

SAN FRANCISCO: Social networking site Facebook officially has 500 million users, the company has announced.

The milestone means that the six-year old website now reaches eight percent of the planet’s population, just 18 months after it passed the 150 million user mark.

Last month Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said there is a “good chance” that the social networking site could boast one billion users within three to five years.

Facebook has continued adding users at a record-setting pace despite growing concerns about the privacy policies of a site that has more data on its users than any other website.

Facebook marked the milestone with the launch of a special section in which users are encouraged to post their personal stories about how Facebook has affected them.

“Half a billion is a nice number but the number isn’t what really matters here. What matters are all of the stories we hear from all of you about the impact your connections have had on your lives,” Zuckerberg said in a video message.

“Instead of focusing on numbers, we want to help people around the world hear about these stories for themselves, and we want to let you tell your own story.”

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3 Hottest Tips for Lawyers using Social Media Marketing

Some helpful tips to lawyers using social media marketing to develop brand recognition.

Social media marketing is a fantastic way for your law practice to be noticed and to grow. It allows for potential clients and others to form “personal” online relationships with staff who may be blogging, tweeting or posting information online for others to see. This aids in developing brand recognition and in bringing a larger clientele through your firm’s doors; however, when using social media in a professional capacity there are a few things that should always be kept in mind

1. Don’t treat these communications any different from typical client communications – always maintain your professional integrity.

2. Assume that anything you say in an e-communication will be disseminated and read widely, so ensure you govern yourself accordingly.

3. Remember it is no more acceptable to discuss and disclose a client’s business online that it is anywhere else.

Source: http://www.fastpitchnetworking.com/pressrelease.cfm?PRID=44100

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Approach could help software learn how to identify fake accounts with less honorable intentions.

By Tom Simonite

It’s not unusual to have user profiles on multiple social networks, or even separate accounts on sites like Twitter–one for work and one for play. But Kyumin Lee at Texas A&M University has 60 Twitter accounts, and not because he’s popular.

Lee’s accounts are “honeypots,” designed to attract the attention of the spammers that increasingly use social networks to spread links to malware and phishing Web sites. Software developed by Lee monitors messages sent to the honeypot accounts to learn the tactics used by spammers.

“The concept of a honeypot is well established at the network level,” says Lee. Usually it takes the form of unprotected computers used to monitor spam e-mail or network-based attacks. “We decided to apply it at a higher level to learn about spam in social networks.” Lee is carrying out the project with A&M colleagues James Caverlee and Brian David Eoff, and with Steve Webb at Georgia Tech University. The work is partially supported by a research award from Google.

The honeypot accounts, like this one, automatically post updates drawn from a collection of 120,000 real tweets harvested from Twitter. The team has also deployed honeypots on MySpace, and created software that uses dummy profiles on both networks to learn about spammer tactics. “We have a bot monitor who contacts our profiles, ” says Lee. “It looks at what they put in their messages and also accesses their profile to see their demographic information and past updates.”

So far, Lee says, “our 61 honeypots tempted and collected 30,867 spammers on Twitter.” The data gathered by those bots can also be used to train “classifier” algorithms to identify spammers that haven’t yet contacted a honeypot. A classifier trained using the Twitter honeypots proved capable of correctly identifying spam profiles more than 80 percent of the time. A public Web service is being built from the trained model that will allow people to look up which accounts it considers spam, and submit corrections for any that are misidentified, says Lee.

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A real-time auction system will create even more targeted ads

By Erica Naone

The real dream of any advertiser is to grab the attention of the right person at the right time. A new approach to online advertising, known as real-time bidding, could help make that vision easier to achieve.

Real-time bidding involves auctioning off the opportunity to show an online display advertisement to a specific type of user at a precise moment. A San Francisco-based startup called Triggit recently scored $4.2 million in funding from two venture capital firms, Foundry Group and Spark Capital, based on the promise of its real-time bidding platform.

“Every person has a different value to different advertisers,” says Zach Coelius, Triggit’s CEO. He points to the advertising auction system used by Google for search keyword. People searching for particular keywords are bracketed together as likely having similar intentions. With display advertising, he says, the interests of the person visiting a page is less clear, and it’s more difficult to match an ad to the ideal user. It is increasingly possible to gather information about a user by looking at her browser’s cookies–tiny files that show which sites she has visited. But matching this information to advertising is a still relatively crude process.

Real-time bidding lets advertisers bid against each other to show advertising users based on different pieces of information about that person and their behavior. Bids and counter-bids are made in the microseconds before the winning ad is served up on a page.

Triggit’s technology processes about 15 billion Web impressions a day. The company works with 10 companies that provide data on Web users’ demographics and interests based on tracking the sites they visit online, and offers inventory from nine online ad exchanges.

When setting the price for a particular advertising opportunity, Triggit considers the user’s browsing history, the type of site currently being visited, and other details. The company then works out how much money the ads on a particular website are worth, and sets a price. An ad is automatically auctioned quickly enough to serve the ad to the user without perceived delay.

Coelius says his company has developed intellectual property in several areas: algorithms that deal with large-scale data and extract insights from it, technology that allows Triggit to process billions of impressions per day, and its user interface for advertisers. The company began to build its current technology in 2009. It received some of its initial funding from founders of Urchin, a company that was acquired by Google.

Coelius says real-time bidding helps advertisers deliver ads more effectively and drives up the prices that publishers can command for their ad inventory.

Seth Levine, a technology investor and managing director at Foundry Group, which recently invested in Triggit, says that real-time bidding is a new technology, and its potential impact isn’t yet clear. However, he believes that it promises “pretty groundbreaking” benefits to publishers and advertisers, particularly in cases when publishers have good data on the users of their sites alongside high-value content.

Levine was attracted to investing in Triggit because of the company’s ability to scale its technology to process a very large number of advertising impressions. “I don’t think all demand-side platforms are created equal, with the same ability to handle the firehose,” he says.

“We’re getting closer to buying people rather than buying dumb impressions,” says Marissa Gluck, founder and managing partner of the Los Angeles-based consulting firm Radar Research. She sees companies like Triggit as part of a growing trend, but adds that real-time bidding requires clever technology to work effectively and efficiently.

Gluck believes that advertisers and publishers will welcome real-time bidding. But while the benefits are clear for advertisers, she says, “the larger question is how they affect publishers.” Though companies like Triggit claim to help publishers by increasing their ability to sell inventory that might otherwise go unused, Gluck believes it’s too soon to say for sure whether real-time bidding will help publishers make more money.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/business/25773/page2/

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The online encyclopedia is exploring ways to embrace the semantic Web.

By Tom Simonite

As a global resource built from the spare time of millions of volunteers, Wikipedia may be the epitome of Web 2.0. But the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, among other projects, is now thinking about how to make it a linchpin of Web 3.0, or the semantic Web.

That means making some of the data on Wikipedia’s 15 million (and counting) articles understandable to computers as well as humans. This would allow software to know, for example, that the numbers shown in one of the columns in this table listing U.S. presidents are dates. That could, in turn, allow applications that draw on Wikipedia to automatically generate historical timelines or answer the kind of general knowledge questions that would usually entail a person finding and reading a relevant entry on the site.

At the 2010 Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco last month, the foundation’s deputy director, Erik Möller, and colleague Trevor Parscal, a user-experience developer for Wikimedia, showed some first steps taken by the foundation to explore how more semantic structure might be added to Wikipedia. They also appealed to the semantic Web community to help develop ways to make Wikipedia’s knowledge more accessible to computers and software.

“Semantic information already exists in Wikipedia, and people are already building on it,” says Möller. “Unfortunately, we’re not really helping, and they have to use extensive processing to do so.”

One example is DBPedia, a semantic database built using software collect data from the site’s pages, and maintained by the Free University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig, both in Germany. Another is Freebase, a for-profit knowledge database, much of which was also sourced by scraping Wikipedia. Freebase is the data source used by question-answering search engine PowerSet, which was acquired by Microsoft to be part of its Bing search engine.

The first targets for Möller and Parscal are the “infoboxes” that appear as summaries on many Wikipedia pages, and the tables in entries, such as this one showing the gross national product of all the countries in the world.

“Just being able to reuse that data within Wikipedia would be a big thing,” says Yaron Koren, who runs a consultancy that specializes in Semantic MediaWiki, an extension to the MediaWiki software used to build Wikipedia. “The manual work that goes into maintaining the many tables and lists today could be eliminated,” he adds. Instead, lists could be automatically generated from the infoboxes of other pages. It would also be possible to generate maps, using the location coordinates that feature on some pages, or automatically generate timelines to summarize periods in history covered by many other pages, says Möller.

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Rumor: Google to Challenge Facebook with “Google Me”

By: David Murphy

Is Google prepping to launch some kind of Facebook-killing service? That’s the rumor of the day, spawned by a brief Twitter update by Digg founder Kevin Rose.

According to Rose, the new service is going to be called “Google Me,” and it will—in some way—offer up a social profiling functionality that could rival Facebook’s.

If true, it wouldn’t be the first time that Google’s launched a new high-profile service to compete with an equally high-profile Web 2.0 entity. Remember Google Buzz?

It remains to be seen just how much of a mark Buzz has made in terms of dedicated users, however, one number in particular is rather telling: According to ReadWriteWeb, 90 percent of all content published on Buzz is just an automated rehash from an existing Twitter account or RSS feed.

So what, then, would the proposed “Google Me” really do? The only details thus far are sheer speculation. However, it appears that Google Me could fly in as an upgrade to the preexisting Google Profiles service that, itself, is almost like a mini-biographical profile page.

However, its unclear as to just how Google’s other user information feeds—Buzz, Wave, and even the company’s experience with the social networking site Orkut—would tie into the grand picture.

“Knowing that a Google account is required to use Orkut, and a Gmail account is required for Buzz, we can safely assume that we’re looking at roughly 200 million users to any service that would combine the two,” writes The Next Web’s Brad McCarty.

“It wouldn’t take much for Google to not only be a thorn, but to actually come knocking with a heavy hand on the door of Facebook,” he adds.

Adding more fuel to the fire, the site All Facebook reported earlier this week that Open-Graph-friendly Web pages were now showing up in search results on the social media site.

Open Graph, in a nutshell, connects Web elements to Facebook by allowing users to “like” elements of third-party sites—like a movie on a retail platform—which then becomes a part of one’s social experience on the site. Said movie would, in theory, be added to your list of favorite movies and, depending on how many others like the product, would be prioritized in your search results accordingly.

Open Graph represents the start of Facebook’s “social semantic search engine” and, as some have suggested, a direct shot across Google’s bow. With Facebook dipping its toes into search, and Google dipping its toes into social, it’s going to be quite a battleground for user interest over the next many months.

Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365734,00.asp

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Facebook tops in online evidence: divorce lawyers

New York: Forgot to de-friend your wife on Facebook while posting vacation shots of your mistress? Her divorce lawyer will be thrilled.

Oversharing on social networks has led to an overabundance of evidence in divorce cases. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers says 81 percent of its members have used or faced evidence plucked from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites, including YouTube and LinkedIn, over the last five years.

“Oh, I’ve had some fun ones,” said Linda Lea Viken, president-elect of the 1,600-member group. “It’s very, very common in my new cases.”

Facebook is the unrivaled leader for turning virtual reality into real-life divorce drama, Viken said. Sixty-six percent of the lawyers surveyed cited Facebook foibles as the source of online evidence, she said. MySpace followed with 15 percent, followed by Twitter at 5 percent.

About one in five adults uses Facebook for flirting, according to a 2008 report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. But it’s not just kissy pix with the manstress or mistress that show up as evidence. Think of Dad forcing son to de-friend mom, bolstering her alienation of affection claim against him.

“This sort of evidence has gone from nothing to a large percentage of my cases coming in, and it’s pretty darn easy,” Viken said. “It’s like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

Neither Viken, in Rapid City, S.D., nor other divorce attorneys would besmirch the attorney-client privilege by revealing the identities of clients, but they spoke in broad terms about some of the goofs they’ve encountered:

- Husband goes on Match.com and declares his single, childless status while seeking primary custody of said nonexistent children.

- Husband denies anger management issues but posts on Facebook in his “write something about yourself” section: “If you have the balls to get in my face, I’ll kick your ass into submission.”

- Father seeks custody of the kids, claiming (among other things) that his ex-wife never attends the events of their young ones. Subpoenaed evidence from the gaming site World of Warcraft tracks her there with her boyfriend at the precise time she was supposed to be out with the children. Mom loves Facebook’s Farmville, too, at all the wrong times.

- Mom denies in court that she smokes marijuana but posts partying, pot-smoking photos of herself on Facebook.

The disconnect between real life and online is hardly unique to partners de-coupling in the United States. A DIY divorce site in the United Kingdom, Divorce-Online, reported the word “Facebook” appeared late last year in about one in five of the petitions it was handling. (The company’s caseload now amounts to about 7,000.)

Divorce attorneys Ken and Leslie Matthews, a husband and wife team in Denver, Colo., don’t see quite as many online gems. They estimated 1 in 10 of their cases involves such evidence, compared to a rare case or no cases at all in each of the last three years. Regardless, it’s powerful evidence to plunk down before a judge, they said.

“You’re finding information that you just never get in the normal discovery process – ever,” Leslie Matthews said. “People are just blabbing things all over Facebook. People don’t yet quite connect what they’re saying in their divorce cases is completely different from what they’re saying on Facebook. It doesn’t even occur to them that they’d be found out.”

Social networks are also ripe for divorce-related hate and smear campaigns among battling spousal camps, sometimes spawning legal cases of their own.

“It’s all pretty good evidence,” Viken said. “You can’t really fake a page off of Facebook. The judges don’t really have any problems letting it in.”

The attorneys offer these tips for making sure your out-loud personal life online doesn’t wind up in divorce court:

What you say can and will be held against you

If you plan on lying under oath, don’t load up social networks with evidence to the contrary.

“We tell our clients when they come in, ‘I want to see your Facebook page. I want you to remember that the judge can read that stuff so never write anything you don’t want the judge to hear,’” Viken said.

Beware your frenemies

Going through a divorce is about as emotional as it gets for many couples. The desire to talk trash is great, but so is the pull for friends to take sides.

“They think these people can help get them through it,” said Marlene Eskind Moses, a family law expert in Nashville, Tenn., and current president of the elite academy of divorce attorneys. “It’s the worst possible time to share your feelings online.”

A picture may be worth … big bucks

Grown-ups on a good day should know better than to post boozy, carousing or sexually explicit photos of themselves online, but in the middle of a contentious divorce? Ken Matthews recalls photos of a client’s partially naked estranged wife alongside pictures of their kids on Facebook.

“He was hearing bizarre stories from his kids. Guys around the house all the time. Men running in and out. And there were these pictures,” Matthews said.

Privacy, privacy, privacy

They’re called privacy settings for a reason. Find them. Get to know them. Use them. Keep up when Facebook decides to change them.

Viken tells a familiar story: A client accused her spouse of adultery and he denied it in court. “The guy testified he didn’t have a relationship with this woman. They were just friends. The girlfriend hadn’t put security on her page and there they were. ‘Gee judge, who lied to you?’”

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/facebook-tops-in-online-evidence-divorce-lawyers/125562-11.html?from=tn

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