Posts tagged facebook
Middle East is Going Off. Twitter & Facebook’s Role? Debatable…..
Watching all this stuff (Tunisia, Egypt, rioting, internet being turned off, etc) reminded me of a piece by the ever-popular Malcom Gladwell this summer. Basically, his argument is that Facebook, Twitter, an dother social media are/will be bit players at best in large scale social protest and change.
Enjoy w/your lunch. Excerpt below, full story at the link. http://nyr.kr/9Y92DZ
SMALL CHANGE
Social media can’t provide what social change has always required. At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted. By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm GladwellOCTOBER 4, 2010
……..
Facebook & Goldman Again
Just more than a week after Goldman Sachs offered its most prized clients a chance to invest in Facebook, the firm on Monday withdrew the opportunity from clients in the United States because of worries that the deal could run afoul of securities regulations.
The decision is a considered a serious embarrassment for Goldman, which had marketed the investment to its wealthiest clients, including corporate magnates and directors of the nation’s largest companies.
The offering was supposed to have been a triumph for the firm, which is trying to move past run-ins with regulators, including a $550 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission last summer over a complex mortgage investment. But the Facebook plan is now likely to raise new questions about whether Goldman tried to push regulatory boundaries once again.
Goldman made its decision after the investment plan drew scrutiny. The S.E.C. had opened an inquiry into the structure of the offering and whether it violated the law because of widespread news coverage. Federal and state regulations prohibit what is known as “general solicitation and advertising” in private offerings. Firms like Goldman seeking to raise money cannot take action that resembles public promotion of the offering, like buying ads or communicating with news outlets.
First, let us take a moment of silence. How dare the regulators meddle with the affairs of God’s Bank. They’re just taking orders from a higher power…….
The more interesting issue is that of the valuation (ie, a capitalization table) and who all is involved. We’re working on the cap table. In the meantime, another great chart from Business Insider has some illuminating details on ownership. Zuck held on pretty tightly. And so he’s gonna make it rain.
When FB goes public, these folks are gonna be rich. It’s good to own land.
As Facebook Places launches, TC offers up a survey of the location based service world. In a chart. Naturally.
Let’s just pretend for a second that Facebook Places aka Facesquare is a charitable attempt on Facebook’s part to quell check-in fatigue by making nice with Foursquare
, Gowalla, Booyah and Yelp (and not another attempt by Facebook to turn the world into this).
Because Booyah
As a wise TechCrunch commenter once said, “Just because you don’t use it, or have never heard of it, doesn’t negate its market share.”
Lunchtime Read: The Web Means the End of Forgetting
NYTMag Preview:
Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.
When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.
According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.
Technological advances, of course, have often presented new threats to privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet. Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008 as the largest social-networking site, now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.
In Brandeis’s day — and until recently, in ours — you had to be a celebrity to be gossiped about in public: today all of us are learning to expect the scrutiny that used to be reserved for the famous and the infamous. A 26-year-old Manhattan woman told The New York Times that she was afraid of being tagged in online photos because it might reveal that she wears only two outfits when out on the town — a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt or a basic black dress. “You have movie-star issues,” she said, “and you’re just a person.”
We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.
Muy interestante.
(via ilovecharts)
What I’m trying to say is that I need to get a Father’s Day gift. Stat.
Print and Mail your Facebook Updates to Family Members like a Newsletter
Imagine this. Your parents, your cousins and everyone else in the family is active on Facebook but for your grandparents who either don’t use a computer yet or find Facebook too confusing and therefore stay away from it.
You don’t want your sweet grandma to miss all the family updates because she is not on Facebook but how to keep her in the loop without the computer? Well, the good old way – print your status updates and any photos that you may have recently uploaded to Facebook on paper and send them to her via snail mail just like a newspaper.
Don’t worry – you don’t have to do anything manually.
There’s an interesting Facebook service called PostEgram that will automatically create full-colored printed newsletters of your status updates and your Facebook photos and it will send them to your loved ones via post.
» via Digital Inspiration
A Handy How-To: Lock Up Your Fb Profile Under New System
A nice tutorial. It still takes 13 steps (before the changes last week, it took over 30!)
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