Items tagged with social-media
Social media provides a lot of value to the world, but a new study suggests that we should start taking it in smaller doses - ideally no more than 30 minutes per day. The experimental study was conducted by Melissa G. Hunt and others at the University of Pennsylvania, and indications so far show that modest use of social media can directly improve our mental well-being. With the help of 143 participants, two groups were created. The first group was limited to 10 minutes of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat each day. The other group consisted of people who didn't have to change their habits at all. Before the study was kicked off, every participant filled out a "well-being survey" to gauge...
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Facebook is working hard to change how it operates to make the social network a more inviting place for users to connect with friends. Doing this involves bringing the hammer down on fake news and allowing the Facebook masses to determine what news sources they trust. Facebook has announced that one of the things it tried to do make the network better for everyone failed, and has since been killed off. Facebook's Adam Mosseri wrote, "We constantly try out new features, design changes and ranking updates to understand how we can make Facebook better for everyone. Some of these changes—like Reactions, Live Video, and GIFs— work well and go on to become globally available. Others don’t...
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We have been bookmarking websites with our internet browsers for almost as long as the public internet has been in existence. Twitter, on the other hand, hasn’t made it easy to save favorite tweets, images, and other content until now. Luckily, Twitter has officially rolled out Bookmarks. Bookmarks will allow users to quickly and easily save Tweets for fast access later. Saving stuff for you to peruse later isn’t all Twitter is doing, however, it is also making it easier to share content with a new "share" icon on every Tweet. Twitter wrote, "With our new 'share' icon on every Tweet, you’ll be able to bookmark a Tweet, share via Direct Message, or share off of Twitter any number...
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Social networks are great ways for friends and families who may not live close by to communicate with one another and share pictures, videos, and stories. At the same time, social networks are also viewed by some people as a detriment to users and society in general. A former Facebook exec named Chamath Palihapitiya has spoken out against the social network that he has been a part of cultivating, by saying that it is "ripping society apart." The former exec went so far as to say that he feels "tremendous guilt" for the influence that Facebook has had on people and its ability to manipulate users. Palihapitiya has also suggested that users take a break from using social media and has banned his...
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You may have hundreds or even thousands of Facebook friends, but chances are that the vast majority of them would turn their backs on you in a flash if you were truly in need, or at least that's what a recent study suggests. Research from Oxford University’s Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology, found that most people are terrible at maintaining relationships with their Facebook friends. In addition, the actual number of Facebook friends that a person can rely on or have a true "emotional connection" with is similar in number to the friends that you have in the real world face-to-face interactions. This should really shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone reading this, as many Facebook...
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Apple's Siri has long been fodder for tales of the miscommunications variety, most of them laced with humor of one ilk or another. The latest reported Siri easter egg, though, fails to bring the funny, and instead results in an immediate and very serious call to the cops. Recent posts on Facebook, Twitter, and in other social media hubs have suggested that iPhone users looking for a spark of entertainment should ask Siri about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Instead of hilarity and smiles all around, however (as if someone could find any kind of glee in the subject, anyway), those opting to engage Siri in such a request are finding themselves quickly connected to 911 emergency services. So a gag...
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Facebook Messenger users no longer need to keep fingers primed to tap out "Do I know you?". The social media giant's chat service is maturing rapidly and is now offering publicly shared information at the top of message threads — place of residence, job title, etc. — that will allow users to screen incoming messages from non-Friend users. Messenger's new feature — Facebook's Vice President of Messaging, David Marcus, calls it "enhanced caller ID for messaging." — will also display information for Facebook Friends with whom you have not previously chatted with via the service. Thus users can avoid closing the circle on uninvited communications with friends...er, Friends with whom they would just...
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Facing accusations from the Belgian Privacy Commission dating back to February that it is violating the privacy rights of its users, Facebook yesterday confirmed that the watchdog group had uncovered a "bug" that mistakenly tracked people even when they were not on the social media giant's website, but denied the body's assertion that the company gave users a "false sense of control" over their personal information. Facebook said that it has begun to fix the problem at hand, which leveraged cookies to track people who had not signed up for the service when they visited websites that employ certain types of Facebook technology. In a blog post, however, Facebook European Policy Chief Richard Allan...
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Considering all of the talk and worry in the air these days on the subject of drones it seems all but impossible that nearly 16 months have passed since Jeff Bezos first revealed Amazon's plan to deploy such devices in the service of delivering our books, tech hardware, etc., in the can-see-it-from-here future. In the days immediately following Bezos's reveal on "60 Minutes" in December 2013, the Amazon drone service — Prime Air — became for a short time one of the most shared stories (and videos) across the social media sphere. Then as fast as the topic rose into the collective connected consciousness it faded from thought. That is, until yesterday,...
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A man named Duff Watson nearly got himself and his two young sons (ages 6 and 9) thrown off of a Southwest Airlines flight out of Denver over an angry Tweet. He was upset that the gate agent wouldn’t let his kids board early with him even though he had priority status and posted on Twitter, “RUDEST AGENT IN DENVER. KIMBERLY S. GATE C39. NOT HAPPY @SWA” according to Reuters. The crew then pulled him off of the plane and made him delete the post before letting him back on, even threatening to call the police unless he complied. He relented, deleted the Tweet, and flew on to Minneapolis. Obviously, there are pieces of the story missing here. For example, how would Kimberly S. have...
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Here’s an interesting psychological factoid: Emotional states can be transferred to other people via text-based messages on social media, such as Facebook. That means that if, for instance, you view a bunch of sad posts, you’re more likely to pen a sad post yourself shortly thereafter even though you don’t realize that the sad posts made you sad. Here’s another even more interesting but more disconcerting factoid: Researchers figured that out by running experiments. On Facebook. Without your knowledge or consent. Here’s a snippet from the “Significance” section of the paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of...
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As if any of us needed a reason to spend more time doing things online that are ultimately unnecessary, Twitter is apparently testing a new feature that lets individual users--and, it would seem, anyone else--see who views each Tweet receives. Twitter itself is mum on the possible feature, but a friend of The Verge noticed the tweak on her account, and screen grabs clearly show how many views each of her Tweets have gotten. The images show the hit count in Twitter’s iOS client, so it’s not apparent if or when this feature might roll out elsewhere. Credit: The Verge You can already see how many times someone has “favorited” a Tweet, and Retweets are of course a handy way...
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If your company has any sort of web presence, you’re on Facebook, and the company is rolling out changes to its official Pages that are designed to simultaneously make it easier for consumers to find the info they’re looking for and make Page management easier for businesses. The new look features all your Page’s posts just on the right side of the screen, instead of that two-column look that has your eyes darting back and forth down the page. The left side of the window has all your business’s information, such as hours, contact info, “about” blurb, and images and video. As the Page administrator, you can see your insights from top-of-the-page navigation;...
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If you live in San Francisco, Washington D.C., New York, L.A., Atlanta, Miami, or Boston, you’ve been looking for love in the top six wrong places. Or put another way, you’re least likely to find that special someone in those cities, according to Facebook. The Wall Street Journal asked Facebook to run some data based on available profile information. In October, Facebook measured the number of people who were single at the beginning of the month and those who professed to being in a relationship at the end of the month from 48 U.S. cities, with sortable results. The aforementioned cities had the lowest relationship formation rates, while Colorado Springs, CO; El Paso, TX; Louisville,...
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If you can believe it, Facebook turns 10 years old tomorrow. That seems completely wrong until you realize that February 4th, 2004 was indeed 10 years ago, even though for anyone over 30 or so the year 2004 seems more like 10 minutes ago. Facebook’s influence on the world is undeniable, with its 1.2 billion users and inspiration of a new generation of social media sites and services that have become the new way people young and old communicate and stay in touch. But things are changing in the ever-fickle tech world, and Facebook is in danger. Regardless of what the numbers may or may not indicate, and irrespective of what Facebook execs such as Sheryl Sandberg say, the site has a serious...
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Amid a claim and a denial about Facebook’s plummeting popularity among teens, an EU study has emerged that affirms the former assertion, at least among teenagers in the UK. Professor of Material Culture at University College of London Daniel Miller wrote that his research team is conducting 15-month ethnographies on teens in 8 countries, and among the results they’re finding, it would seem that Facebook is not doing well in the 16-18 age group. “What we’ve learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried,” he wrote. “Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it.”...
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If you’re an avid Facebook stalker, here’s some good news: Facebook is removing the feature that formerly let users prevent others from finding them by searching for their name in the Facebook search bar. If you’ve been successfully avoiding old classmates, a crazy ex, your boss, or just the general public on Facebook, you better start tidying up your profile, because that privacy is vanishing soon. Facebook said in a blog post that it’s removing the feature, and users will be notified about it soon. The company’s logic for why it’s phasing it out is kind of hilarious: The setting also made Facebook's search feature feel broken at times. For example, people...
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Although it’s disturbing that there needed to be laws preventing employers and institutions of higher learning from demanding Facebook usernames and passwords from job applicants and employees, apparently the practice (or at least the threat of the practice) became widespread enough that six state legislatures passed laws to that effect. NBC News noted that California, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan and New Jersey all enacted legislation to keep bosses out of employees’ social media accounts. Michigan’s law was just signed into law and enacted days ago, and Illinois’ and California’s respective measures went into effect on the first day of the new year. In...
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We’ve all seen our share of bogus social media activity, be it fake likes, ratings, or reviews, that are paid for by a company trying to goose its sales or generate buzz about some product. According to research firm Gartner, the amount of that bogus activity will account for 10-15% of all social media activity by 2014. To be clear, the problem is not that companies are sponsoring content; that’s been a common practice for a long time in a variety of media, and as long as there are appropriate disclosures, there’s no problem. The issue with this kind of covert marketing is that it’s essentially a lie. The FTC certainly feels that way; in 2009, the commission ruled that...
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