One such company, Lenddo, determines if you’re friends on Facebook (FB) with someone who was late paying back a loan to Lenddo. If so, that’s bad news for you. It’s even worse news if the delinquent friend is someone you frequently interact with.
via Facebook friends could change your credit score – Aug. 26, 2013.
In the latest twist, a computer virus widely used to steal credit card data, known as Zeus, has been modified to create bogus Instagram “likes” that can be used to generate buzz for a company or individual, according to cyber experts at RSA, the security division of EMC.
These fake “likes” are sold in batches of 1,000 on hacker forums, where cybercriminals also flog credit card numbers and other information stolen from PCs. According to RSA, 1,000 Instagram “followers” can be bought for $15 and 1,000 Instagram “likes” go for $30, whereas 1,000 credit card numbers cost as little as $6.
via Instagram “likes” worth more than stolen credit cards | News | PC Pro.
Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.
Video on Instagram will allow app users to shoot videos anywhere from 3-to-15 seconds long—unlike the mere six seconds of Vine. Video allows for the use of multiple cuts,
via Instagram hopes 15 seconds will be better than six for social micro-video | Ars Technica.
The gist of the study: Narcissists “like” Facebook and Twitter. A lot. And social media in general both “reflect and amplify” our culture’s deepening narcissism.
The study, by University of Michigan researchers Elliot Panek, Yioryos Nardis and Sara Konrath, was published online in Computers in Human Behavior.
via University of Michigan study links social media and narcissism – chicagotribune.com.
Everyone’s Facebook feed is pretty much the same as everyone else’s of the same age. Twenty-year-olds pose in the club, 30-year-olds share wedding photos, by age 40 you’re looking at a lot of cute pictures of your friends’ kids. But with Tumblr, you never know what you’re going to get — even with people you know personally. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between a social graph and an interest graph.
via Why Tumblr Was a Massive Steal for Yahoo – Adam Rifkin – Voices – AllThingsD.
Here’s an interesting tidbit from TechCrunch written Feb 2013. From Tumblr Is Not What You Think
Pop quiz: what is the favorite social networking site of Americans under age 25? If you guessed Facebook you are way behind the eight-ball, because Tumblr now enjoys more regular visits from the youth of America. That figure struck me while reading Garry Tan’s January 2013 survey and I wondered why? So I delved deeper; this article describes what I discovered while exploring the Tumblr network.
In the conference call, Mayer made an early reference to how Tumblr would be able to make good use of Yahoo’s advertising technology, in ways that fit Tumblr’s so-far successful, image-based, quick-blogging, youth-oriented format — what she called “native advertising formats.”
via Yahoo: Expect Ads On Tumblr To Ramp Up Significantly In 2014 | TechCrunch.
Overview
In an effort to make the code useful to as many people as possible, we’ve split it into several packages:
- The main package (probably the thing you’re looking for) is the publishing system, known as ebpub.
- Second, the packages ebdata and ebgeo contain Python modules for processing data and making maps.
- Third, the packages ebinternal and everyblock round out the code that powers EveryBlock.com. They’re internal tools and are likely not of general use, but we’re including them to be complete.
- Finally, ebblog and ebwiki are our blog and wiki software, respectively. Because, dammit, the world needs another Django-powered blogging tool.
via ebcode – Source code of EveryBlock.com – Google Project Hosting.
This might make for an interesting read through.
Run a local news website for your community, or use it to create news widgets and feeds for integration with your existing website.
OpenBlock is an open source project, supported by the Knight Foundation.
via OpenBlock | OpenBlock home.
Found this handy link in response to Everyblock shutting its doors today.
Vine sacrifices pixel resolution for speed and gets away with it because the user experience is primarily, well, mobile: you’re more likely to be watching Vine clips in a tiny square on your smartphone, not blown up on a Retina Macbook Pro.
via Vine’s Great Mobile Design Is All About Its Engineering | MIT Technology Review.