Tag Archives: social networking

Book Review: Navigating Social Media Legal Risks

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Social media makes it relatively easy for organizations to find and retain customers and increase sales, amongst many other benefits. At the same time, it can expose an organization to significant and highly-expensive legal risks and issues, and find themselves at the receiving end of a subpoena.

via Book Review: Navigating Social Media Legal Risks – Slashdot.

At $30, Navigating Social Media Legal Risks: Safeguarding Your Business is the cheapest legal advice you can get, and is worth every penny. If you are looking for crystal clear and detailed advice on social media law, you won’t find a better book.

The underground economy of social networks

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In a new study, Barracuda Labs analyzed a random sampling of more than 70,000 fake Twitter accounts that are being used to sell fake Twitter followers.

via The underground economy of social networks.

This underground economy consists of dealers who create and sell the use of thousands of fake social accounts, and Abusers who buy follows or likes from these fake accounts to boost their perceived popularity, sell advertising based on their now large social audience or conduct other malicious activity.

Facebook Page Owners Can Pay $500 For 250,000 Eyeballs With ‘Promoted Posts’

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‘Promoted Posts’ didn’t come up much during Facebook’s recent earnings call despite being launched at the end of May, but COO Sheryl Sandberg did spend a lot of time talking about the importance of advertising — such as Sponsored Stories — that appear organically in Facebook News Feeds rather than explicitly as ads. This was Sandberg’s only nod to the new strategy of asking Facebook users to pay to reach more eyeballs with their “normal” posts, via the transcript of the call on Seeking Alpha:

via Facebook Page Owners Can Pay $500 For 250,000 Eyeballs With ‘Promoted Posts’ – Forbes.

Zynga’s weak earnings show social gaming’s diminishing returns

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Zynga’s stock fell roughly 40 percent, to a price of just over $3, after the company posted per-share earnings of just a penny, well below analysts expectations of 6 cents a share. The stock is down almost 80 percent from a high of $14.69 back in March, and market analysts have severely scaled back their guidance on the company. “We were wrong about the current state of Zynga’s business,” Morgan Stanley’s Scott Devitt said flatly in an analyst note. “Something smells in FarmVille,” wrote Evercore analyst Ken Sena, who thinks the stock will continue to fall.

via Zynga’s weak earnings show social gaming’s diminishing returns | Ars Technica.

What’s really troubling for Zynga, though, is that each new release seems to be seeing further diminishing returns, with smaller user peaks and quicker drop-offs. While CityVille managed to attract over 100 million users at its peak in early 2011, CastleVille peaked at just over 50 million monthly users after launching last November, and is already back down to 16.7 million players (The Ville, which launched earlier this month, is still in the “quick growth” phase of the pattern). This isn’t that surprising, since with each new wave of what’s essentially the same game, more players are likely to be overly familiar with the basic concepts already, and get bored that much quicker.

Online Social Networks can be Tipped by as Little as 0.8% of their Population

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The spreading of a trend or behavior in a social network is a very active area of research. One very important model of trend spreading is the “tipping” model. With tipping, an individual in a network adopts a trend if at least half (or some other proportion) of his or her friends have previously done so. An important problem in viral marketing is to find a “seed set” of individuals in the social network. If all members of a “seed set” in a social network initially adopt a certain trend, then a cascade initiates through the tipping model which results in the entire population adopting that trend. So, if a viral marketer wants to provide free samples of a product to certain individuals, a seed set is likely a good place to start.

via Online Social Networks can be Tipped by as Little as 0.8% of their Population | The Central Node.

Our work, “Large Social Networks can be Targeted for Viral Marketing with Small Seed Sets,” will be presented at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) as a full paper this August

Badoo set to help facilitate hookups across the U.S.

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Essentially, as its Russian founder has explained before, Badoo is a “nightclub on your phone,” where people, “as adults, are looking to do adult things.” The site first was launched in Spain, where it soon expanded to neighboring Portugal, France, and then, hopped the pond to Brazil and Mexico and now, claims users in 180 countries.

via Badoo set to help facilitate hookups across the U.S..

Last fall, The Economist proclaimed it as having “a shot at becoming one of Europe’s leading internet firms.” But now, says GigaOm, the site appears poised to grow rapidly in the United States,particularly after its official American launch just last month.

Look out Facebook!

Equally Creepy And Creative, Cheek’d Is Online Dating In Reverse

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The cards also have a short ID code on them, with a URL for the Cheek’d website. When a suitor receives the card, the idea is that they’re so filled with curiosity that they enter the code on Cheek’d and are taken to your profile page. Cheek’d calls it online dating in reverse.

via Equally Creepy And Creative, Cheek’d Is Online Dating In Reverse | TechCrunch.

You get the first month free, and can also get a free deck of five cards (shipping and handling not included.) Past that, you pay $9.95 for a monthly subscription (which basically means you pay $10/month to keep your profile live). Cards you still have to pay for, and decks come in various sizes with corresponding pricing.

Wow.

Tinychat Now Has 20 Million Registered Users, Hits Profitability

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Tinychat, the web-based video chat service, just surpassed 20 million users. Founded in 2009, the company has been on a roll lately and is showing some impressive momentum. Just about a year and a half ago, after all, Tinychat only had about one million users. The company’s co-founder Dan Blake also tells us that the site currently sees about 400,000 daily users and signs up about 50,000 new users every day. The average user now spends a good 22 minutes on the site per session.

via Tinychat Now Has 20 Million Registered Users, Hits Profitability | TechCrunch.

Facebook Considers Adding The Hate Button

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According to Facebook’s S-1 filing, users are now generating 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day. With the Hate button, Facebook expects to at least double that. The S-1 noted “popular Pages on Facebook include Lady Gaga, Disney, and Manchester United, each of which has move than 20 million Likes.” Many inside the company think the Hates could easily top that.

via Facebook Considers Adding The Hate Button | TechCrunch.

Foursquare

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Foursquare, stylized as foursquare, is a location-based social networking website for mobile devices, such as smartphones. Users “check-in” at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby.[3] Location is based on GPS hardware in the mobile device or network location provided by the application. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes “badges”.

via Foursquare – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The service was created in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application.[4]