Thursday, April 9, 2015
NJ lawyers need a social media policy for employees Jennifer Marino Thibodaux of Gibbons writes: The subject attorneys were retained to defend a town and its police sergeant in a personal injury action. One attorney directed his paralegal to conduct Internet research about the plaintiff. The …Friday, January 2, 2015
Message scanning lawsuit against Facebook won’t go awayJohn Timmer reports at Ars Technica: The court responded to this request by pursuing an extraordinarily rare course of action: it read Facebook’s entire terms of service. And, in this case, their vague language—typically used to provide …Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Facebook is not freeIf you use Facebook, this article is a must-read. It’s now common knowledge Facebook is always watching and analyzing how you use the service. But the breadth and depth of the company’s participation in the data brokering economy is staggering. The worst part? You literally …Friday, July 4, 2014
Facebook COO Sandberg apologizes for emotional contagion experimentR. Jai Krishna, reporting on the reaction of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to the outcry over the company’s experiment on the emotions of nearly 700,000 unwitting users: We take privacy and security at Facebook …Saturday, June 28, 2014
Facebook experimented on its users' emotionsAviva Rutkin, reporting in New Scientist: A team of researchers, led by Adam Kramer at Facebook in Menlo Park, California, was curious to see if this phenomenon [of contagious emotion] would occur online. To find out, they manipulated which posts showed …Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Avoid Facebook’s all-seeing eyeViolet Blue, reporting at ZDNet: Facebook also announced Thursday it will begin tracking its users’ browsing and activities on websites and apps outside Facebook, starting within a few weeks Her article is full of great advice for people who want to minimize …Thursday, May 22, 2014
Mark Zuckerberg on survival of the most passionate I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is because it’s kind of irrational at the time, so it kind of selects for the people that care most about doing it. A great point. That young man is going places.Monday, May 5, 2014
When Facebook acquired fitness tracking app Moves, the two said user data would not be commingled. But Moves’ new privacy policy reverses course. First, when fitness tracking app Moves was acquired by Facebook in April, it said: For those of you that use the Moves app – the Moves experience will …Friday, March 28, 2014
Facebook buys virtual reality company OculusFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting virtual reality will follow mobile as the next major communication paradigm. While I’m not sure that’s true with VR tech alone, the massive user base and data stores of Facebook, used wisely despite a minefield of …Friday, February 14, 2014
Facebook Opens Up LGBTQ-Friendly Gender Identity And Pronoun OptionsFollowing up on my recent tirade, this made me happy. Facebook has massive amounts of influence, and is influenced by massive amounts of people, and changes like this are a positive step forward in how technology reconciles with …Thursday, January 2, 2014
Facebook scans messages for ad targetingI know this is an unpopular stance, but if you operate on any assumption other than that this happens all the time on myriad services you use, you’re a crazy unrealistic person lacking in the minimum amount of cynicism (read: realism) required to use the …Friday, October 11, 2013
Sheryl Sandberg: The real storyCNN’s Miguel Helft, in a great profile of Sandberg at the Money blog: How Sandberg, amid all her Facebook activities, managed to write Lean In, orchestrate flashy book tours on three continents, launch a foundation, and become a ubiquitous spokesperson for the …Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Facebook Testing VIP App With Some CelebsIn case you thought I was becoming a Facebook fanboy, let me just say that this celeb crap is something Zuck will be adding to his list of regrets within the year. Granted, that’s probably a very short list, but this VIP thing is a distraction an a gimmick …Wednesday, August 14, 2013
101 million of Facebook’s 128 million daily U.S. users are on mobile devicesMy headline says it all. If you still had any doubt about the importance of mobile to anyone doing anything on the Internet, this stat should disabuse you of that uncertainty. Amazing.Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Facebook Said to Plan to Sell TV-Style Ads for $2.5M EachHugeThursday, May 2, 2013
The Perfect Empty VesselThis is a good piece on how hard Facebook tries to keep the social juices flowing. Alexis Madrigal, commenting on Facebook’s designer-hiring spree: As all these designers vanish into the bowels of the company, so, too, does their work. Facebook wants to create design that …Saturday, April 20, 2013
Why carriers should be more worried than Google about Facebook HomeEllis Hamburger, writing at The Verge: Mirroring its rollout of free VoIP calling for iOS, Facebook has updated its Messenger app for Android to allow free calling for users in the US. I think this is Facebook’s true …Thursday, April 4, 2013
Facebook announces Home, an Android launcherI was right. Oh, and in case you were worried, there will eventually be ads in Facebook Home.Friday, March 29, 2013
Facebook To Reveal “Home On Android”I predict Facebook will announce a custom Android launcher — a “home” screen. Update April 4, 2013: I was right.Thursday, March 14, 2013
Dear Wall Street Journal: Why is Facebook’s hashtag implementation news?I love that this is “news” at the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps the only news-worthy aspect of this story is that it’s one of those rare instances where Facebook is the one keeping up with the Joneses, instead of the other …Saturday, February 23, 2013
Facebook is buying your loyalty card historyCotton Delo of Ad Age: The targeting would hypothetically enable Coca-Cola to target to teenagers who’ve bought soda in the last month, or Pampers to show ads to North Carolina residents who’ve recently bought baby products, since Facebook’s own array of …Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Facebook “Graph Search” mines your network in response to plain-language queries I predict it will be panned because it’s not “sexy” enough for the expectations Facebook raised, but that it will also be widely-used. It looks to me like one of those things people don’t know they want …Friday, December 7, 2012
For Netflix and the S.E.C., a Facebook Share Should Be Public EnoughIt’s true, but not really because lots of people can follow Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Facebook, but because many reporters actually do. This was not going to go unreported.Monday, December 3, 2012
Facebook Makes A Huge Data Grab By Aggressively Promoting Photo SyncJosh Constine at TechCrunch: There no big launch event yesterday because Facebook didn’t need one. In fact, it probably didn’t want one, considering it didn’t even notify bloggers like me as it usually does. This isn’t going to …Monday, September 24, 2012
MySpace renovationsDear MySpace: I am happy to see you lean away from Facebook and toward the new Digg and Rdio, with a clean design that prizes whitespace as much as content. Give me something functional and pretty, without the spammy taste of Facebook or the learning curve of Google+. Do this for …Saturday, August 18, 2012
FTC OKs Facebook’s privacy settlementTony Romm, writing at Politico: The order means Facebook must now obtain consent before sharing a user’s information with advertisers or others in a way that differs from their current privacy settings, and it bars Facebook from again misrepresenting its privacy …Saturday, August 18, 2012
Only crazy people don’t use Facebook?Zoe Fox, writing at Mashable: Employers may suspect that an applicant’s absence from the social network means the account is so full of offensive material that it had to be deleted. But what if I deleted my Facebook account because my friends’ accounts …Monday, June 25, 2012
Howard Mittman, VP and publisher at Condé Nast property Wired Magazine, told Ad Age's Nat Ives: I’m interested in ways to bring advertisers in front of our community. When Flipboard becomes that, I would love to reengage and reinvigorate our product. Until then, we have to wait and see and not …Wednesday, May 23, 2012
CNET’s Steven Musil: Users log in to the network with their Facebook or Windows Live accounts. There are two reasons I can’t help but be cynical about So.cl, Microsoft’s latest social search experiment. I have no “official” user experience training, but both of my reasons might be considered UX …