Category Archives: social media

Facebook’s New Terms Of Service

Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.” This month Facebook revised its Terms of Use, a document it is legally permitted to update at any time without informing users. Users demonstrate tacit acceptance of the Terms by continuous use of the site.

The revision grants Facebook complete, perpetual ownership of content uploaded or added to Facebook — including the rights to sublicense said content:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

The sublicense clause is of particular interest in a media landscape where users habitually share significant amounts of personal data on public websites — including Facebook, MySpace, flickr and blog platforms like Xanga or Blogger. Two years ago, a Dallas family sued Virgin Mobile/Australia for appropriating an image of their teenage daughter — which Virgin found on Facebook — for use in billboards and web ads.

Facebook’s Terms of Use previously stated that material uploaded onto the site falls under the license of the company. Prior to the February 4 update, however, users that removed their content from Facebook legally forfeited its license to their material, though the socnet reserved the right to maintain archives.

Prior to February 4, the Terms of Use read:

If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

The dramatic about-face peaked the interest of the The Consumerist, which today brought the news to the attention of an increasingly concerned Twittersphere. Throughout the morning hours, users repeatedly re-Tweeted the Consumerist’s spin on the news: Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”

Facebook Joins Board of OpenID

Facebook has joined the board of OpenID, the open user-authentication system also used by MySpace, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and IBM.

“It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web,” Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s director of engineering, wrote in a blog post.

Facebook Connect lets users put their profile information on various Web sites across the Internet, register and sign in to the third-party sites using their Facebook login, access their friend lists, and share their current browsing activities on the connected sites with chosen friends.

Luke Shepard, a member of Facebook’s Platform and Connect teams, will join the eight-member OpenID board.

“Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook working within the community to improve OpenID’s usability and reach,” board members David Recordon of SixApart and Chris Messina of Vidoop, wrote in a blog post.

Facebook initially deployed a proprietary log-in system for Connect while MySpace and Google used OpenID for their rival MySpaceID and Google Friend Connect services.

Since the December launch of Facebook Connect, it has been deployed on more than 4,000 Web sites and desktop applications, Schroepfer wrote.

The social networking site will host an OpenID Design Summit next week at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, he said.

“The summit will convene some of the top designers from Facebook, the DiSo Project, Google, JanRain, MySpace, Six Apart and Yahoo, focusing on how existing OpenID implementations could support an experience similar to Facebook Connect,” Recordon and Messina wrote.

“The core set of services and APIs we’ve introduced have allowed a thriving ecosystem to emerge,” Schroepfer continued. “In our view, the success of the Platform community is a result of the strength of the products we produce, the opportunities provided to developers, and the value they deliver to users.”

Yahoo joined OpenID in January 2008, and Microsoft, IBM, Google, and VeriSign followed suit a month later. MySpace issued its support in July 2008.

Andrew Nash, senior director of information risk management at PayPal, also joined the board in late January 2009.

Top 25 Celebrities on Twitter

If you haven’t quite caught on to the Twitter craze, now’s the time to. It’s a cool new way to keep track of news, your friends, and even your favorite celebrities. And speaking of celebrities, here’s a list of the top 25 celebrities to stalk on Twitter courtesy of MSN’s new gossip website, Wonderwall.

The celebrities that rank highly are often more prolific writers than others, and have something interesting to say (although if you read Britney Spears’ entries, you’ll find that this isn’t always the case.)

 

So without further ado, these are the top 25 celebs to follow on Twitter.

Stephen Fry – http://twitter.com/stephenfry
John Mayer – http://twitter.com/johncmayer
Britney Spears – http://twitter.com/britneyspears
Tina Fey – http://twitter.com/mrskutcher
Ashton Kutcher – http://twitter.com/aplusk
Rainn Wilson – http://twitter.com/rainnwilson
Snoop Dogg – http://twitter.com/snoopdogg
Stephen Colbert – http://twitter.com/stephencolbert
Lance Armstrong – http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong
Jimmy Fallon – http://twitter.com/jimmyfallon
Russell Brand – http://twitter.com/rustyrockets
Pete Wentz – http://twitter.com/ztnewetep
Shaquille O’Neal – http://twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ
Mischa Barton – http://twitter.com/MischaBarton
Vanessa Hudgens – http://twitter.com/vanessahudgens
Rachel Bilson – http://twitter.com/rachel_bilson
Al Gore – http://twitter.com/algore
MC Hammer – http://twitter.com/MCHammer
Diablo Cody – http://twitter.com/diablocody
Luke Wilson – http://twitter.com/lukewilson
Dave Matthews – http://twitter.com/DaveJMatthews
Christian Siriano – http://twitter.com/csiriano
Michael Phelps – http://twitter.com/michael_phelps
Eli Manning – http://twitter.com/elimanning

Social Media and e-learning

Global Organizations have started realizing the importance of having a “LEARNED” working force and the impact they can have to their core business. Traditionally these organizations have been investing a significant amount of money in training infrastructures which include classroom trainings, e- learning courses and tracking the competency of their employees through integrated Performance Tracking tools. However, the effectiveness of such trainings has always been debated and of late most of the market studies have corroborated the fact that these trainings are not as effective as they are expected to be. Market studies also state that most of the knowledge gained by individuals is through the day to day interactions they have with the people around and most of the time it is through informal mechanisms. The term ‘informal’ learning is fast catching up and organizations have started realizing the value in leveraging technology to implement such informal learning platforms. Collaboration solutions are aimed to provide this platform to the organizations by leveraging the Web 2.0 concepts and design.

The basic idea involves building a platform that acts as a meeting place for geographically separate employees to share their thoughts, views and get their questions answered. It’s an informal mechanism that not only makes it easy for an individual to learn new concepts, but also a reference platform that is available for a longer period that be referred to as and when required. Web 2.0 concepts like Blogs, Wikis, Discussion forums, Personalization, Targeted search and podcasting can be leveraged extensively to build such platforms. These platforms can also be designed for various portable devices, thus making them accessible to a wider audience that may not be computer savvy.

Corporate Social Networking

Corporate or enterprise, Social Networking (CSN) technology is changing the way relationships are formed and strengthened in business environments, and, therefore, is changing the way business is conducted. In the past, employees built relationships by working in close proximity or sharing information over the proverbial water cooler. As organizational structures evolve, disperse, and separate geographically, individuals have begun to initiate, extend, and manage their network of professional relationships through social, Web 2.0 technologies.

Online social networking within the enterprise increases the density of connections among individuals to drive business value. A Corporate Social Network is a collection of social networks, among which affinity groups of employees and other constituents learn about each other and interact through their own, individual profiles. Employees and other constituents may be members of multiple networks within the Corporate Social Network, requiring that their profiles be portable and able to collect and amalgamate information from that individual’s interactions and knowledge sharing among all of the corporate networks to which he or she has access. These networks are secure and private, open only to those constituencies identified by the enterprise, and they provide role-based access to people and information which are controlled by the enterprise, as well as varying levels of privileges for network administrators.

The connections fostered through Corporate or Enterprise Social Networks are anchored in affinity and beneficial to individual members through the people and information they are able to find, creating connections and knowledge capital that become attached to their profile and visible to other network members. Corporate Social Networks are used primarily to build trust and share knowledge on a peer-to-peer basis, as opposed to through documents that are subject to information obsolescence. Network members share knowledge in real-time, in effect creating a living knowledge map within the enterprise network. Today’s corporate environment is unique and dynamic; organizations are globally dispersed, high value is placed on knowledge, and requirements for innovation are ever growing. Companies that thrive in this environment are finding ways to connect their people through Corporate Social Networking.

Social Media and business 2.0

Many of you don’t visit blogs—or haven’t since blogs became a sensation in last year’s Presidential race. According to a Pew Research Center Survey, only 27% Some newer numbers: According to Forrester, 11.2% of online adults in the U.S. publish a blog at least once a month. Of the same group, 24.8% read a blog and 13.7% comment on a blog at least once a month. The numbers are higher for youths. Of online youths, 20.8% publish a blog, 36.6% read a blog, and 26.4% comment on a blog at least once a month. But I suspect the numbers are unreliable because many mainstream sites with millions of readers—celebrity site TMZ and gadget sites like Gizmodo—are actually blogs. But are all the readers aware of this? I doubt it. This is the blurring of the blog/mainstream divide, a theme we’ll see again and again in these revisions. of Internet users in America now bother to read them. So we’re going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story—call it Blogs 101 for businesses—in the style of a blog. We’re even sprinkling it with links. These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story’s online version to another Web page. This all may make for a strange experience, but it’s the closest we can come to reaching out from the page, grabbing you by the collar, and shaking you into action.

First, a few numbers. There are some 9 million blogs out there, Yes, there were 9 million, but how many of them were active? Probably only a fraction. In early 2008, says Technorati Chairman David Sifry, the search company indexes 112 million blogs, with 120,000 new ones popping up each day. But only 11% of these blogs, he says, have posted within the past two months. That means the active universe is closer to 13 million blogs. Kevin Burton, CEO of FeedBlog, argues that the number should be lower, from 2 million to 4 million blogs. with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. “Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo,” reads only one April Posting. Let’s assume that 99.9% are equally off point. What we didn’t see in early 2005 was the advent of the spam blog. These blogs, produced automatically, are designed to show up in search results and to attract Google advertisements known as Adsense. Sifry estimates that fully 99% of the blog posts reaching search engines are spam. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.
Give the paranoids their due. The overwhelming majority of the information the world spews out every day is digital—photos from camera phones, PowerPoint presentations, government filings, billions and billions of e-mails, even digital phone messages. With a couple of clicks, every one of these items can be broadcast into the blogosphere by anyone with an Internet hookup—or even a cell phone. If it’s scandalous, a poisonous e-mail from a CEO, for example, or torture pictures from a prison camp, others link to it in a flash. And here’s the killer: Blog posts linger on the Web forever.

Yet not all the news is scary. Ideas circulate as fast as scandal. Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.