There’s an old saying: “If you’ve two real friends, count yourself lucky.” Well, no doubt! You’re though, not going to have an easy time playing FarmVille. Its creator Zynga (also credited with popular social games like Mafia Wars and Words With Friends), is going to start providing friends to those who lack them. The company’s recent announcement of a new gaming platform suggests matching up players who don’t know each other but who might share a mutual interest in spelling quirky words with J, Q and X, or getting the crops. Read the rest of this entry »

With early signs of the stuttering economy slightly but surely improving, a large number of wary self-employed professionals are looking to get back to the chores of day-today work. To help boost their nascent visibility and credibility in the fragile job market, some of them returned to the basics to develop skills and expertise in social media. Read the rest of this entry »

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users, including you, should start bracing up for a lot more vigorous flow of advertising – not only in their newsfeed and on their mobile but also when they are logged off.  The top social networking site has just announced a suite of advertising-oriented products aimed at inserting more ads into its traditionally clean interface. The company intends to draw more from mobile ads, where it has apparently struggled. Read the rest of this entry »

The US has been pressing hard for a stringent privacy bill of rights, which would allow consumers greater control over what kind of personal data is gathered online and what sort of limits would or should be placed on it. The agreement reached in this regard covers all of the major advertising alliance’s members, such as AOL, Time Warner, NBCUniversal, Google, and Yahoo. Read the rest of this entry »

The creation of MIT Media Lab graduate, Jonah Peretti, this is a news+search+social site that leverages his immense expertise in fathoming content likely to be most ‘liked’. He first used that acumen at The Huffington Post, brewing up a bubbling cauldron of goofy cat shots and tatty celebrity news behind a leading page of serious news, analysis and commentary. Now, the foresighted expert has developed technologies, which lets his brainchild very quickly determine what media content flow is dominating at a given point. Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike Bing or Google, Wolfram Alpha does not actually forage the Web. It tries to cull information from its own meticulously curated database to come up with answers. Its goal is to make all kinds of systematic knowledge immediately computable and available to all. Its researchers make constant innovations with regular data updates to countless sources and improvements to its natural-language parser, new data sets and functionality. The formal name of this computational knowledge engine’s new version is ‘Wolfram Alpha Pro, and Dr’. Read the rest of this entry »

For millions of fervent football fans world over, the Super Bowl is always one of the most memorable social occasions of the year. That’s also becoming the case for several marketers and advertisers, as has been evident again, this year. Brands and businesses clearly enhanced their presence across social media channels during the sporting extravaganza that hit the headlines last week. Read the rest of this entry »

A report just released about Facebook and its users, provides some interesting insights. Instead of focusing on the social site’s financials, as most analysts are currently doing, it tries to explains how social interactions on the platform tend to mirror those in the real world.  This insightful study, entitled ‘Why Most Facebook Users Get More Than They Give’ tries to shed light on how Facebook users tend to engage and connect with each other and what they really get out of it. Read the rest of this entry »

The controversy over privacy rules continues to heat up as European governments, strongly supported by the top EU top justice official, are putting pressure on Google for a pause button on privacy policy changes even as they investigate its implications for data protection of individual users. This sure will have a rub-off effect on the people and officials in the US about surveillance and data monitoring by companies.

The move is a major shot across the bow for many online sites including Facebook, which depend on the European market of close to 500 million people for a large portion of their business. Back and forth moves are coming amid a vigorous drive for making privacy protection in Europe more efficient and coherent. The E.U. justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, had already called on relevant European authorities ‘to make sure EU laws are fully complied with in the new privacy policy of Google.’

EU seeks legal certainty and compliance from Google over new policy

A request has been sent to Google by national data-protection authorities, seeking from the search engine giant suspension of its planned change in privacy policies from March 1, 2012 while they do an inquiry into its implications. They wrote to the company’s chief executive, Larry Page, to ask for a pause in the interests of making sure that there is no misunderstanding about its commitment to their users’ information rights and those of EU citizens.

Ms. Reding stated that a thorough investigation in this matter would help impart ‘legal certainty for both citizens and businesses.’ The action follows Google’s announcement, as extensively reported, that it would start combining different privacy policies for its online properties and products into a simple system for the users.

But the changes would mean it can use data shared on a particular Google service in other services for those signed into a Google account.

For example, Google could guide a user who had looked for recipes using the Google search engine to relevant cooking videos the next time that person signed in to YouTube, which is also owned by Google. As it has elaborated,

“The main reason is to create a better user experience. Our approach to privacy has not changed. We continue to focus on providing transparency, control, and security to our users.”

The points that the company wants to emphasize are as follows:

• Users will continue to have both choice and control. The major change in the new policy is for users who sign into Google Accounts. People won’t need to sign in to make use of many of its services like YouTube, Search and Maps.
• If a user is signed in, he or she can still turn off or edit his/ her search history, delete and edit viewing history of YouTube, switch one’s chat to ‘off the record’, and also control the manner in which Google tailors ads to one’s interests using its Ads Preferences Manager. They can employ a host of other privacy tools listed at google.com/privacy/tools.
• The policy changes do not affect existing privacy settings of users. If one has already utilized privacy tools for opting out of personalized search/ads, for instance, one will be opted out.

It remains to be seen whether EU authorities, seeking legal certainty and compliance over its new privacy policy, are satisfied with the company’s explanation.

Twitter encountered considerable backlash and criticism after making an announcement that it would be forming a new policy for country-by-country censorship largely aimed at blocking Tweets perceived to be in violation of local laws and governmental viewpoints. But now, it has emerged that Twitter was not the first online entity to devise a far-reaching framework for ‘conditional censorship’. Read the rest of this entry »