Steve Jobs Passes Away

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs passed away, leaving behind an immense legacy of more than just an innovative company, but how we perceive and use the Internet, technology, and computing in what is undeniably a Digital Age. Words cannot express what a loss this is, but the tributes and obituaries we’ve been reading have been eloquent. We’re choosing to remember Steve by reading over tributes and this piece on which Apple products mattered most, and compiling our own tribute list.

Facebook Launches “People Talking About This” 

Facebook has rolled out a new metric called “People are Talking About This” (or “About This” for short) for fan pages, which will showcase what’s being said about a brand or page owner. The tab will tally liking a page, posting to a wall, sharing and commenting, as well as other activities one can now do through Facebook. This statistic is up for viewing, found beneath the total number of “likes” and is one of four page insights Facebook tracks. This will be interesting to see how brands decide to utilize this information once they see how they’re performing against direct competitors in their industry sector. You can check out “About This’” official Facebook page here.

The Washington Post Crowdsources with Instagram

The Washington Post is utilizing both crowdsourcing and Instagram by asking readers to submit their Instagram photos that depict what the “health” of the U.S. economy. While is a smart move that creates conversation, what about Android user? After all, they do have Flickr now.

Twitter Wants Pointers on Improvements, in 140 Characters or Less

Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey decided to open a floodgate of complaints, suggestions, and praise by asking users to reply to his Tweet asking what they’d like to see or have changed from the six year old service with 200 million members. We’re still whittling our response down to a 140 characters, but we’d definitely like if they released unused usernames.

Social Ad Revenues to Spike to $10 Billion by 2013

eMarketer released a recent study that predicted that global social network ad revenues will hit $5.5 billion by this year, and top $10 Billion by 2013. Facebook receives the lion’s share of revenues, with Twitter in second place. While LinkedIn is last, it has nothing to fret over as its main concern seems to be its recruiting. It should also be noted that the money going towards Social Media Ads is increasing at the cost of more “traditional” media.

How Twitter Tweeted about the iPhone 4S

We were chuckling during the live Tweet stream during the nonappearance of the iPhone 5. Although the iphone 4S still leaves a plethora of unanswered questions, we like this infographic that put together a week’s worth of iPhone 4S tweets, and even marked which new features were mentioned – seems the new voice feature Siri’s been the buzz of the town!

Did we miss anything? Let us know and join in on the conversation here!

Facebook has an array of privacy settings. In fact, they may be too complicated, and most users probably don’t pay attention to them. An application only has the permissions of the person using it, so if you install an application, by default, it can generally access all the information on your friends that you can. However, users can set the information available to applications their friends are using to be essentially nothing.

On MySpace, applications’ access to information is even more restrictive; only the name and image of a user’s friends who haven’t added the application are available through the API, although for some reason age, gender, and location are listed in the settings which also allows users to completely block apps from accessing their information. A developer could actually get more information on users just by scraping publicly viewable pages than through the API.

The real area for concern is that when using a Facebook application, it can access everything about yourself that you can, which is almost everything. On MySpace, an application can get most of the profile information on users who have added it, but this information is usually already on a public page. Unscrupulous developers could then store this against the sites’ policies and do what they want with it.

The bottom line is, if you don’t want something to be known by the whole world, don’t put it on a social networking site regardless of your settings. The only information required to register for Facebook is a name, email, and birthdate. On MySpace, it’s this plus country and zip code. Everything else is voluntarily, as is using the sites themselves.

Social networks are amazing tools to communicate with friends and make new connections. They just have to be used with common sense and intelligence, things that seem to be missing in journalism.