social media - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• You Are Here: Scary New Location Privacy Risks

  Location-based services on a mobile phone are terrifically helpful when you need to find a nearby business or directions to the freeway.

• Facebook engineer: Going large requires thinking small

  When managing a constantly expanding system with many moving parts, it is crucial to break the system into large numbers of small pieces and manage them with lots of small, dedicated teams, advised Bobby Johnson, who is director of engineering for Facebook, at the Usenix Annual Technical Conference in Boston.

• Judge rules in favor of YouTube over Viacom

  Viacom's US$1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google's video-sharing site YouTube has been dismissed by the court, ending for now an acrimonious legal battle between the companies that has been going on for more than three years.

• Flickr revamps photo page

  Flickr has given a makeover to the layout of its site's photo display page, making the default picture size larger, revamping the navigation scheme and consolidating capabilities and information under fewer menus and sections.

• Why security needs to catch up to Web 2.0

  Security managers can keep blocking Facebook, refusing to support mobile devices and vetoing cloud-based services, but they aren't going away.

• LinkedIn Tip: Your Guide to the New 'Groups' Features

  LinkedIn announced today a bundle of updates to its Groups pages-the section of the social networking site dedicated to communities of professionals based on common interests, experiences, affiliations and goals. This update, rolling to users out throughout this week, is the first major facelift for LinkedIn since Groups launched in August 2009.

• Reports: Google working on news, music services

  Google is developing services to let consumers pay for access to news articles and songs through individual purchases and subscriptions, according to various news reports.

• BP, in crisis mode, misses social networking target

  While oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico and BP Plc. faces PR nightmare, the last thing the company needed to do was make matters worse.

• Google exec: Social key to success in display ad business

  Expect Google to deepen its efforts in social media and social networking as part of its broader push to increase its display ad business.

• Opinion: Is crowdsourcing cultural issues through social media a good idea?

  Anyone who has used Facebook - or any social networking site, for that matter - would by now be familiar with how they run. You share anything and everything with your friends, family and complete strangers and, in return, the social networking sites kindly use that information to tailor advertising targeted at your demographic. How kind of them!

• Thai riots spark reporting via Twitter, YouTube

  The serious riots in Bangkok this week have taken a tragic toll out on the streets, but have also sparked an unprecedented emergence of amateur news gathering, shared over YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which has proved ideal for the fast-moving situation.

• Budget 2010: Creatively common budget should have used Twitter

  By any standard, the Federal Budget was a boring thing to watch on the ABC last night. And for those, like us journalists, that had to sift through the papers well into the night, it was hard to get the juices flowing.
  

• SAS introduces social media analytics to enterprise

  There are dozens of social media measurement tools out there, but this one might be the first to comprehensively tackle the space. An in-depth look at SAS's new Social Media Analytics solution, unveiled at the SAS Global Forum in Seattle.

• Microsoft introduces 'social phone,' Kin

  Hoping to lure the Facebook and Twitter crowds, Microsoft introduced its Kin mobile phones Monday.

• Survey: Social media not useful for BI yet

  While the number of users on Twitter, Facebook and other social-networking sites continues to grow, business intelligence practitioners remain skeptical about the value of knowledge such services could generate, if one survey by a data warehousing firm is any indication.