Technologizer

Xbox Live, Facebook and Twitter: Incompatible

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Here’s a telling moment from my first experiences with social networking on Xbox Live: While rifling through status updates on Facebook, I spotted a comment that seemed worthy of a response, which would’ve taken forever to type on my controller. Also, there was a Web link which the Xbox 360 couldn’t access. So I got [...]

Judge Cans “Spamford”

Thursday, October 29, 2009

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Today, a California court awarded Facebook $711 million in civil damages against Sanford Wallace, the notorious sell proclaimed “spam king” who is also known by the derisive nickname ‘Spamford.’ The court found Wallace guilty of violating the CAN-SPAM act, and he could face time in prison if convicted. Wallace allegedly accessed Facebook accounts without obtaining permission, [...]

Think Before You Tweet

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

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My roommate recently put a bug in my ear about an October article in the New York State Bar Association Journal. The premise was simple: You can be held accountable for what you post on social media Web sites, and some people have gotten themselves into a real fix. Author Michael Getnick recounted stories of clients [...]

MySpace Looks Past Social Networking

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

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MySpace has been especially busy it seems in recent weeks to recast itself as an entertainment destination as it cedes the social networking space to Facebook. In fact, the two sides are talking about ways they could work together, according to comments made to the Telegraph newspaper. Facebook is apparently interested in MySpace’s content, which they [...]

Facebook for the Departed

Monday, October 26, 2009

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Over at Facebook’s official blog, Max Kelly has written about what happens to a Facebook profile when its owner passes on. Facebook offers a service called memorializing which leaves the account in place but mostly freezes it in time: When an account is memorialized, we also set privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the [...]

Facebook’s New Front Page Looks DOA

Sunday, October 25, 2009

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For a market-leading company, Facebook’s moves are sometimes so half-baked that it’s practically mindnumbing. The latest example of this is the site’s new home page. For whatever reason, Facebook has tweaked the news feed to become more of a “top stories” format then a chronological timeline of your friends’ activities. (If you’re curious, here is why [...]

Will the CIA Snoop on Social Networks?

Monday, October 19, 2009

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The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has bought a stake in a company that monitors social media as part of an ongoing clandestine effort by the agency to aggregate content from public sources, Wired is reporting. The CIA has invested in Visible Technologies, a company that produces technology for search engine marketing for social media. The CIA’s [...]

Secret Service Investigates Facebook App

Monday, September 28, 2009

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Facebook polls typically ask questions as mundane as “what’s your favorite breakfast cereal?” But over the weekend, a poll asking whether U.S. President Barack Obama should “be killed” was anything but mundane, and drew the attention of the Secret Service. The poll gave respondents four options: Yes, Yes if he cuts my health care, Maybe, and [...]

Is Twitter Worth a Billion Dollars?

Thursday, September 24, 2009

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Twitter, the micro-blogging company with no fully-disclosed revenue model, has reportedly raised around $100 million in private equity from T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners, placing its total valuation at about one billion dollars. It’s Twitter’s responsibility to share its business plan with investors, but I see nothing but a new manifestation of the [...]

Your Stance on Facebook

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

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In a blog post yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social network he founded now has 300 million members. That’s worldwide, but it also happens to be roughly the same number of people who live in the United States–give or take a few million. For a service that’s only slightly over five years [...]

Threadsy: All Your Communications, All in One Place

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

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I’m still at TechCrunch50–it’s winding down, but there’s still so much going on that you’ll miss a product launch or two if you so much as take a restroom break. The debut that’s happening right now is one of the most interesting ones so far: Threadsy is a Web-based integrated communications service that looks uncommonly [...]

AIM Gets More Social

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

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I use AOL’s instant-messaging network all day long, but I’m not sure when I last used the AIM software itself (with the exception of the iPhone version). I’ve associated it with feature bloat, annoying ads, and a sort of old-timy, Web 1.0 feel. So I long ago switched to other clients that support the AIM [...]

More Lite Versions, Please!

Friday, September 11, 2009

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I think of them as Facebook brain freezes: Every so often, when I’m on the site, I just get overwhelmed by the quantity of features it offers and can’t figure out how to do something simple such as post a photo. They’re a temporary condition, but a frustrating one. Which is why I’m intrigued by [...]

Facebook Gets @Mentions

Thursday, September 10, 2009

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One of the things that makes Twitter Twitter is @mentions–the use of an @ to indicate you’re mentioning another Twitter user in a tweet. Now Facebook is getting @mentions, in a somewhat different form: Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include [...]

Facebook (or Part of It) Lands on Android

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

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iPhone owners have had a very solid Facebook application for a while now–one that’s better than ever in the recent 3.0 release. Users of Android phones just got their first Facebook app–developed by Google with help from Facebook, and available in the Android Market–and the charitable way to look at it is to think of [...]

Obama Praises Tech Giants

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

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U.S. President Barack Obama heralded the technology industry in a speech today about the importance of education. The speech, which was given to school children across the country, emphasized personal responsibility, hard work, and perseverance. In his remarks, Obama told school children that students sitting in classrooms a generation beforehand had grown up to produce Facebook, [...]