Feb 18 2009

Facebook TOS compared with MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter

With today’s outrage over Facebook’s newly altered Terms of Service at its peak, I figured I’d do a quick comparison of their terms of service as regards user-uploaded content to the terms specified by other social networking sites, just to see if said outrage is fully justified. It looks as though the finger-pointing at the Bush robots.txt file wa

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Feb 17 2009

Twitter’s getting more reliable, LinkedIn’s getting worse

Yes, Twitter had more downtime last year (84 hours) than any of 15 social networking sites monitored by Pingdom, but it showed dramatic improvement from July on. LinkedIn, conversely, had more downtime every quarter. MySpace and Facebook were among the best

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Feb 17 2009

Map As Metaphor In a Location-Aware Mobile World

mattnyc99 writes “Two weeks after the launch of Google Latitude, your inbox is probably full of requests and privacy advocates probably have even more concerns than they did at first. But some tech pundits are already seeing the bigger picture of a digital lifestyle based around the always-on, GPS-based mobile map. The NYTimes’s John Markoff has a great piece in today’s Science Times about the map as metaphor for a time when ‘future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world.’ Over at Esquire.com’s Tech Therapist, Erik Sofge talks to the geek behind Latitude and offers a similar reality check: ‘Latitude will be precisely as annoying as e-mail and social networking sites and cell phones themselves — and just as useful. What won’t stop Latitude, or the wider rollout of location-based tracking, is bitching about it. These are juggernauts of free, culture-reorienting technology. And you and me, we are but posts on the massive Facebook profile of history.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Feb 17 2009

Facebook users protest retention of information – The Associated Press


BBC News

Facebook users protest retention of information
The Associated Press – 2 hours ago
NEW YORK (AP) – Tens of thousands of Facebook users are protesting new policies that they say grant the social-networking site the ability to control their information forever, even after they cancel their accounts.
Facebook Owns Your Business Data PC World
Facebook TOS Content Use Verbiage Vexes Users TechNewsWorld
InternetNews.com – Reuters – Calgary CTV – InformationWeek
all 471 news articles
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Feb 17 2009

Facebook’s Users Ask Who Owns Information

A change in a networking site’s terms of service has raised suspicions that subscribers no longer control personal material.

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Feb 16 2009

One Broken Router Takes Out Half the Internet?

Silent Stephus writes “I work for a smallish hosting provider, and this morning we experienced a networking event with one of our upstreams. What is interesting about this, is it’s being caused by a mis-configured router in Europe — and it appears to be affecting a significant portion of the transit providers across the Internet. In other words, a single mis-configured router is apparently able to cause a DOS for a huge chunk of the Net. And people don’t believe me when I tell them all this new-fangled technology is held together by duct-tape and bailing wire!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Feb 15 2009

Not Among Friends: The Dangers of Social Networks

For many people, social networking has become as much of a daily routine as brewing coffee and brushing teeth. IT administrators dislike it and cyber crooks depend on it.

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Feb 15 2009

Facebook Hits 175 Million User Mark

A little more than a month after announcing it had 150 million active users, Facebook has reached 175 million active users–the statistic the social-networking site prefers to use, rather than registered accounts overall.

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Feb 15 2009

Facebook makes partners jealous, researchers say – CBC.ca

Facebook makes partners jealous, researchers say
CBC.ca – 13 Feb 2009
Moreover, the more time one person spends online on the social networking site monitoring his or her partner, the more suspicious that person becomes, the two said in a news release Friday.
Facebook is … breeding spying, jealous lovers Globe and Mail
In love on Facebook? It's complicated Guelph Mercury
Exchange Morning Post
all 6 news articles
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Feb 15 2009

Facebook makes partners jealous, researchers say – CBC.ca

Facebook makes partners jealous, researchers say
CBC.ca – 13 Feb 2009
Moreover, the more time one person spends online on the social networking site monitoring his or her partner, the more suspicious that person becomes, the two said in a news release Friday.
Facebook is … breeding spying, jealous lovers Globe and Mail
In love on Facebook? It's complicated Guelph Mercury
Exchange Morning Post
all 6 news articles
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