Tag: Social Media

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News

Racist group “Isle of Man KKK” removed from Facebook

clip_image002Facebook has shut down a group called the “Isle of Man KKK” for violating its Terms of Service. According to the Telegraph, almost 100 youngsters had subscribed to “Keep the Isle of Man white and free from foreigners.” The page has now been removed by Facebook as it allegedly contained racist comments and a photo of a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Group Talk

The creator of the group wrote to the other members that –

“There are too many comovers on the Island. They are taking all of the jobs, houses and most of all they are taking advantage of our ####ing Island…. join us and help cleanse the Isle of Man.”

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Another message on the group’s ‘wall’ read-

“Damn blacks and Indians, coming over here taking our jobs – who the #### do they think they are?”

Facebook’s Terms of Service

“You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.”

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Hmmm… This content surely seems to falls under this category.

About 40 messages had been posted on the group’s “wall” before it was closed down.

Authorities Talk

Messages posted on the group focused on non-Manx newcomers to the island and ethnic minorities, however it is being debated whether or not they were meant to be written as sarcasm and out of ignorance. The authorities are taking this problem seriously by diving deeper into the problem till the investigation is over.

A spokesperson for the education authority said-

“The department finds the sentiment behind this site deplorable and cannot condone racist comments and viewpoints.”

(Source: Telegraph)

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Reviews

Food Network Launches a New Site: Food2

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Focusing to engage the younger generation through blogs and video content, Food Network has started a flashier site called food2.

Features

  • Videos: Short five minute visuals on ‘how to make a dish’.
  • Video series: From young cooks. e.g. Kitchen Conspirators,clip_image003 Brooklyn (A NY-based b group- Whisk & Ladle).
  • $12 Challenge: Aclip_image003[1] ‘food meets love’ show, where two young chefs try to woo a bystander with an inexpensive meal.
  • How-to series: Leading viewers through how to make simple drinks and food items.
  • Blog section: Features content from recipes to other news about food.
  • Tips: Focusing on the kitchen basics.
  • Social Media: Integration with Facebook.

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It should be a useful platform for its 20+ age group audience, who would be more interested in cooking quick and cheap meals.

Though Techcrunch claims it to be a new site, the blogs on the site dates back to February 2009.

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The Alexa report shows traffic on the site since 1st April, though there is no data about the launch date of the site. See the chart below:

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(Source: TechCrunch)

(Image Credits: Food2, Food2 Blog, Alexa)

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News

#1 Social Gaming Company Sued for an Unjust Employee Termination

clip_image003Zynga is in trouble again! Not long back in February, Zynga was sued for copyright infringement by the creator of Mob Wars who claimed that Zynga’s game was copied from Mafia Wars. This time, clip_image001the company’s ex-employee – Robert Fulop – has filed suit against them for violating the FEHA – Fair Employment and Housing Act – that prevents employee discrimination.

Fulop is a game designer, with over 30 years of industry experience. He joined Zynga as a contractor from early August 2008 and was later brought on with Zynga as a full time employee.

It has been alleged that Fulop was discriminated on the grounds of age and disability.

Fulop had requested to temporarily reduce his work load and some time off as he had to undergo a heart operation. He was terminated from the company soon after the operation.

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Seeking Compensation

Fulop is seeking a total of $50,000, along with further damages whose amount will be determined at trial.

Excerpt from the document:

“… As soon as Fulop informed Zynga of his medical condition and his need for accommodation, he was immediately terminated. Fulop’s request for accommodations was summarily ignored without any discussion whatsoever.”

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“As a pretext for the termination, Fulop was informed that he was being terminated because there was no work for him. This pretext is belied by the fact that he was terminated approximately five weeks after he was hired as an employee and by the fact that immediately after Fulop was terminated, Zynga sought to hire another person for his exact position”

Zynga is known to provide one of the top social network of gaming applications on the web and have built classic games like Poker, Battleship, and Attack. They have been famous for their casino games, word games, board games, and party games, which can be found on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, and Hi5.

(Source: techcrunch)

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Reviews

Categorize your Friends on Facebook

clip_image003Facebook has recently updated their Friends page, giving the users more options to organize and manage their contacts. Now, you could organize hundreds of friends into different categories making categorization and management easier for yourself. You can now divide your friends into “logical groups” like friends, relatives, college buddies, acquaintances, etc.

New Enhancements

You can…

  1. Organize people into various lists. This will not show up anywhere on your profile page, but is only for own convenience.
  2. Create Friend Groups and send bulk or private messages easily.
  3. Have up to 100 friend lists and up to 1,500 friends per friend list.
  4. Have the same friend on multiple lists as well.
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The new friends page also makes navigation simple within the friends page.

Here is the list of the the views you get now:

  1. Friend Recommendations
  2. Search
  3. Browse by Network
  4. Browse in Alphabetical Order
  5. Phonebook
  6. Recent Friends
  7. Friend List Filters

Shortcomings

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Some people might disagree and not call this an improvement at all. A few of my friends have been telling me that they were quite happy with the way things were earlier. In the earlier version also, they were able to arrange and manage their Friends lists quite effectively. Now every thing appears to be mixed up and all their earlier settings are out of order. Who has the time to sit again and reorganize everything again?

Moreover, this feature lacks privacy controls, which is a big drawback. Also, I have hundreds of friends in my network… what a painful task to go through the entire list and arrange them into the various categories. Honestly, I don’t see my self doing that. I’d rather leave them as they are.

Share your comments and let us know what you think of Facebook’s new friends list.

Categories
News

Facebook improves its Photo Application

image Photo application happens to be Facebook’s most popular feature. There are some 15 billion photos on Facebook till date making Facebook the biggest photo sharing website today.

These 15 billion photos actually amount to a total of 60 billion as Facebook generates and saves 4 images of different sizes for every uploaded picture. That’s some 1.5 PB of storage. Wow!

Facebook says that their current growth rate is 220 million new photos per week, which translates to 25TB of additional storage consumed weekly. At the peak, there are 550,000 images served per second. Now, that’s intense!

Overcoming the choke-points of their old photo applications, Facebook launched a new, more efficient storage system some time back – the Haystack Photo Infrastructure.

The Outcome

  • Significant savings in costs
  • Better performance
  • Improved user experience

Job well done, I’d say.

For getting into the technicalities of Haystack’s What & How, click here.

(Source: Facebook)

(Image credits: ShoWareCenter)

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News

Twitter Quitters: Around 60% twitters fly away every month

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Twitter’s monthly user retention rate is just 40%. In other words, of all the Twitter users in a particular month, about 60% of them do not return the following month. The data was released recently by Nielsen Online- an Internet traffic research service.

The Pattern

If you take a closer look at this chart that compares Twitter loyalty against Facebook and MySpace loyalties, you will observe that the 40% retention is, in fact, the maximum when plotted against the internet reach. Nielsen research also suggests that for the last one year, the retention rate has been hanging below 30%.

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The significance

As per Nielson, the retention rate of 40% will limit the site’s growth to a 10% reach figure, over a period of time. See the chart below for details:

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Trivia

  • Twitter’s website had more than 7 million unique visitors in February this year as compared to 475,000 in February a year ago.
  • Facebook has a retention rate of about 70% with around 200 million users.

(Charts: Nielson)

(Sources: Reuters, Nielsen)

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Reviews

Google Profile: Your Personal Google Identity

As you might be knowing already, Google profile has been around for quite some time, however, never really made it big. But it is now being integrated in most Google services allowing the user to have a uniform identity.

Google profile will automatically connect you to your other Google contacts. This means that your contacts will get access to your complete profile, and vice versa. This will also allow you to connect your Google Profile to Google Maps and your Picasa photos albums.

According to Google:

“A Google profile is simply how you present yourself on Google products to other Google users. It allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are. With a Google profile, you can easily share your web content on one central location.”

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Features:

  1. Receive messages by enabling the “Send a message” feature to allow anyone with a Google Account to email you without revealing your email address. (Unless you are OK with spam, I am not sure how many people would like to do that. Somehow, this feature appears a little foolish to me)
  2. Add photos from Flickr or Picasa. (Make sure you re-check your Picasa settings to decide on what you really want to share in public)
  3. Create a page about you in the About me tab and tell people about yourself.
  4. Add your contact information and be sure of whom you are letting this info out to. There is a way to control that, so make use of it! (Unless you don’t mind strangers stalking you!)
  5. Add links to your other profiles and sites like your Blogger blog, public Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader shared items, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
  6. Show your location on a map with your current location and places you’ve lived.

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I don’t have a Google profile yet, maybe because the idea of creating one sounds a little scary to me. It would only expose my personal profile details and even photos to a whole bunch of people. Google profile appears to be a very PUBLIC space.

However, if you wish to try this out yourself, here’s the link – Create your Profile

Link: Google profile

(Image credits: Google profile)

Categories
Reviews

Create your digital identity with Sprout!

I was just casually surfing the web, looking around for some new stuff online and I came across SPROUT.

So, what is Sprout?

Sprout is a site which allows the user to develop complex multimedia content. Sprout is very simple to use and uses the drag and drop mechanism. Sprouts can be either informational, educational or even used for creating multimedia visiting cards. You can embed your sprout with pics, videos animations, flash etc. They are like mini banners which can be put in your blog or in your social website like Orkut or Facebook, making your page look totally trend… and it just happens in 3 steps…

BUILD—->>>> PUBLISH —->>>> MANAGE

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Point your browser to www.sproutbuilder.com . There is no signup required and we can start right away…

The available menus are easy to use. One can click the assets button to insert some pics or videos or some flash stuff. I fiddled around and created my own sprout within a matter of few minutes.

After creating your sprout, you can preview your sprout and if you are satisfied, click on the Publish button.

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There are two options available now, either one can use the free sprout or use a premium one. The only difference between them is that in the free sprout, along with your sprout, there will be tiny official sprout logo. When you opt for free sprout you require to fill in a small form and the procedure is quite simple. After that, we can publish the sprout in any of the social websites or in your personal site. I tried posting one in my Orkut account and indeed it worked!!!

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I think this is an incredibly useful site for all those people who want to personalize their digital identity. So what are you waiting for? Dive into the world of SPROUTS and create your own digital entity.

Link: Sprout

Categories
Tips

How can I club all my accounts into one?

nutshell-mailBaffled with too many messaging accounts? Now, don’t waste your time logging into different accounts separately to check your emails.

NutShellMail will allow you to access and manage your emails and social networking accounts from one common place, for FREE.

After a one time set up, NutShellMail will pull copies of your messages (from your multiple accounts) and then send them to your most preferred email address (the inbox of your choice). For example, if you chose Gmail as your most preferred account, then NutShellMail will send all the messages from your other accounts to your Gmail account. This means you end up saving a lot of your time, as you will have everything consolidated in one single account.

NutShellMail supports most of the email services, like:

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  • Gmail
  • Hotmail
  • AOL
  • Yahoo
  • Mac
  • All POP3 or IMAP enabled accounts

Social networks currently supported by NutShellMail are:

  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • LinkedIn

(they have plans to add more providers to the list soon)

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NutShellMail is compliant with most corporate policies:

Most of the companies these days do not allow access to any external messaging accounts. This means that you can not access your personal emails or messages from office even when critical. For all those who face a problem, this could be the solution!

This service allows access to third-party messaging accounts, WITHOUT violating the company’s corporate policies. How??? Well, NutshellMail is based on an email forwarding concept, which means it would forward all your emails and messages to your corporate account, and as a result, pass through your company’s email servers, like any other email. Isn’t that awesome?

Try NutShellMail – club all your accounts in one place, save time and improve your productivity.

Link: NutShellMail

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Reviews

Looking for a Free Online Photo Editor?

picnikHave you ever been to picnik.com? It happens to be one of my favorite online photo editing sites. It’s well organized and very easy to use, and performs many of the tasks that most of us would expect a good photo editor to do.

When you are short on time and can’t afford to sit and spend hours editing your photo albums before sharing them with your friends, picnik.com comes well in handy and gives you quick, yet fine results. And moreover, it’s fun to use!

Its features:

Of course, it is not as high-end as Photoshop, but you can perform most common tasks like-

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  1. Auto-Fix the image in just a click
  2. Fine tune results with Picnik’s advanced options
  3. Rotate, Crop and Resize
  4. Change the exposure
  5. Modify colors by changing the warmth, saturation, and the white balance.
  6. Sharpen more
  7. Correct red-eye
  8. Add special effects, from artsy to fun
  9. Add jazzy text fonts to the image using their type tool
  10. Add various shapes in the form of stickers and frames to liven up the image
  11. Perform unlimited Undo’s, and more…

Striking stuff…

Picnik allows you to upload images not only from your computer, but also from:

  1. Facebook, Flickr, My Space, Photobuckt, Picasa, Web Albums, and more.
  2. You could even upload a picture from your Web Cam.
  3. It works on Mac, Windows, and Linux!

So, will it cost me?

Unless you don’t want to upgrade to its Premium version, Picnik is absolutely FREE!
The Premium Upgrade would cost you $24.95 a year, which is approximately 2 bucks a month.

Altogether, this site is quite impressive. Not just for fun alone, this photo editing tool will also give you excellent results in no time at all. See for yourself.

Link: picnik