Our advertising lecturer Yeşim Ulusu is doing "applied research on Facebook".
I was pretty sure that with the start of classes, Facebook membership rates would get a boost in Turkey. That happened really and now some columnists write about a Facebook mania in Turkey. My initial excitement is gone. I don't spend much time any more although i am always online there. Well, someone told me one can display oneself as offline, too but i haven't tried it yet.
Even the most hostile ones on social networking tools are now becoming members. Well, Facebook offers more than many other social networking tools. It is not particularly a dating site. If that was the case, we, lecturers would at least assume a disguised user name there (!). It seems to offer something for every net literate so that Facebook threatens not only networking sites but many web 2.0 sites. At least Facebook could achive the confluence of formal and informal networking and with gradually more advanced tools, one will be able manage "friends" at different levels. (But of course there is always the danger of messing up relations as some people are having difficulties in their work environments. Check out the round up below. )
A huge round up can also be found in my social bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/sakaerka/facebook
I am always excited with new web tools, so does the Facebook but i try to be more balanced. It is good to discover that with this Facebook frenzy you can get in touch many people from your past or near past. Well, an editor accepted my friendship request although he never replied my mails and I could never interview him. The girls i like in high school (but could never ask for a date) are now friends with me although some are married and I still don't feel like asking the single ones :p [in fact, to a shocking suprise for many, i never started a relation thru an online acquintance although i am such a net junky] I am now friend with my best buddy in secondary school; we haven't seen each other since then except being in the same restaurant a few months ago and we still did not try to meet.
However, I am particularly using it to update my status. Here I started a game: I am declaring how many words I have in my dissertation draft. In order to declare I write more (!). I could never like many photo sharing sites (even Flickr) so I use FAcebook photos intensively. That tagging function is great. "Groups" does not work very productively, but to follow up trends, it is an great tool. As my former student Eren Demir told me newspapers are using the photos of airplane crash victims in Isparta that were uploaded in Facebook. Well, one can see the rise and fall of anti AKP groups or many other stuff. There is also the "events" function which seems to be very useful. Well, i will create an event for my blog party and the first invitation will be sent out thru that event tool. Anyway, i have spent too much time in this Sunday afternoon now I will join Nurdan to do some reading and in the mean time you enjoy reading this post:)
by Hans A.H.C. de Wit
I wrote almost ten days ago that I left Facebook. Wrong, I am still out there in the schizophrenic world. But no vampires, werewolves and pirates on my neck anymore. Made some great contacts and I use it as an email account once and a while.Oh...before I forget to mention the most important news of today, I married Idil, and she said yes, and now we are drinking champagne..) Facebook's supposedly innovative new advertising feature called Beacon is quickly turning into a disaster for the popular social network.
Nrbelex writes "Facebook is reining in some aspects of a controversial new advertising program, after users became extremely upset and threatened various 'protests' over possible privacy infringement issues. 'Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users' Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time ... Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages.'"
by Nick O'Neill
It has been an eventful few days in the world of Facebook Beacon. According to a study by Computer Associates, Facebook Beacon is transferring information from third-party sites after you have logged off from the Facebook site. While this information is not displayed in your newsfeed, Facebook could store the data and use it to profile your shopping behavior online. I have reached out to Facebook and am awaiting a response.
by KRISTINA KAMP
One morning when Onur Çelik (24) opened his email account he found a quite unusual message: “Hey Onur, I found you! I was the one who sat next to you in primary school; you were always hitting my head!” -- scary!
by Dave Ambrose
I think Nick hit on an excellent point about the circuitous nature of the media over on The Social Times. Let’s be honest, it’s a relatively slow news week for all things Facebook, so why not throw redundant information in the pot, stir it a few times and then recreate it with a spiffy title. Perhaps it will hit Techmeme?
by Nick O'Neill
For most people, Facebook means keeping in touch with your friends. For others it means keeping in touch with your family and professional contacts as well. According to the Turskish Daily News, Facebook has also turned into a place for finding people for sexual encounters. Given that the writer of the article is based in Turkey, they received many more results with groups, events and profiles with explicit content. It appears that within my networks, Facebook has done a relatively good job with filtering out explicit content.
by Nick O'Neill
The Harmony Guy has posted an interesting article highlighting a vulnerability in the Compare People application on Facebook. This is significant given that the application has close to 700,000 people and close to 10 million people have added the application. This means that Google technically has information about almost 20% of all application users. So what information do they have exactly? According to the Harmony Guy:
by Nick O'Neill
I have spent the past few months filtering through thousands of applications to find the best ones. I have added and removed thousands of applications but only a few still remain. After going through all the applications and figuring out which applications I will return to, I have narrowed down the list to the following 25 applications. For organizational purposes I have broken the list into application categories.
by Nick O'Neill
On Tuesday, Tim O’Reilly posted an article that discussed new Compete statistics about Facebook usage. While out of date, the numbers still proved to be interesting. In contrast to the diagram (displayed below) which shows 14 million users using Facebook applications, Facebook published their own numbers two weeks ago that showed that over 33 million users have installed applications. I’m not sure who’s numbers are accurate but I would lean toward Facebook’s.
check out the original size here.
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