Social Networking

Today, IBM is introducing a new social media monitoring tool, one that it says will measure consumer sentiment from data gathered on Twitter, blogs and other web services and networks. The software, called the SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, will use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze everything from product names and industry jargon to slang and emoticons, and it’s already being used by some pretty big businesses. ...

The University of California, Berkeley, has found that more than half young adults have become more aware of Internet privacy issues than they were five years ago. That number is similar to Internet users their parents’ age or older. “In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.” ...

I had a look at my twitter page early this morning and read “Twitter is a rich source of insanity”, and thought “Wow, the twitter marketroids are really bold, but it’s a good line.” Upon re-reading, however, I realized that what it really said was “Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information.” It might, however, have been a Freudian slip, because twitter got hacked yesterday, and bunches of celebs found they had been forced to follow the hacker. Even worse, as it struggled to right the ship, twitter temporarily removed their followers, and celebs found themselves in the traumatic position of being unpopular, at least for a while. ...

Buddy Media already helps big brands do more with their Facebook presence. Today the company is extending its service to include Facebook Open Graph integration. This update is about connecting the dots between user activity on and off Facebook — think the “Like” button — so that platform users can manage and track their website’s Facebook performance in addition to Page performance and content. They’ve also added real-time analytics for all social activity and a new publish option so that clients can connect with customers who “liked” content on their sites. ...

When consumer electronics shopping site Retrevo prepared for Mother’s Day by conducting a survey of parents’ social media practices, it found that nearly half (48%) of parents add their children as friends on Facebook. Parents admitted that “it can be awkward at times” when they follow their kids’ Facebook updates, but think that it’s probably worth it to keep tabs on them. Of course, savvy teens could easily exclude their parents from seeing potentially incriminating updates using Facebook’s advanced privacy features. ...

Ah, cellphones and dodgeball, they go together like… well… they don’t really go together at all, but that’s not stopping Samsung Mobile from organizing what will purportedly be the world’s largest dodgeball game on May 12. The practice of launching a stunt to herald the advent of a new product is nothing new — remember when the Droid took over Times Square? And Samsung is no stranger to the record realm; it attempted to make the World Record for collecting the largest donation of mobile phones in one location in April at the Samsung Mobile 500 at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, TX (the company failed). And managed to set the World Record for the fastest text message sent using Swype technology on the Samsung Omnia II. ...

A new blog post from the Twitter media team suggests that the company will launch an embeddable tweets feature sometime tomorrow. Most of the time, when a blog or website wants to add specific tweets to its blog posts, it has to either quote the text or screenshot the tweets and put them in the post. Suffice it to say, the former doesn’t have have the same impact as the latter, but the latter is a time-intensive affair. ...

Spam emails such as the one below have been doing the rounds on the Internet hoping to lure recipients into downloading a Facebook toolbar. If you download the file by clicking on “Download Here”, you’ll see a file with the icon shown below: If you take a closer look at the icon, “darkSector” is shown inside of it. How strange. Is this actually a Facebook toolbar? Let’s take a look at the property of the file since the file looks a bit fishy. In the file properties, you’ll see the following in the Details tab. ...

A group of Second Life users is suing Second Life’s creator over a virtual land dispute. They say their contractual property ownership rights have been changed and that this alteration of the terms of service constitutes fraud and violates California consumer protection laws. Before you scoff too much at this seemingly ludicrous lawsuit, remember that virtual worlds aren’t just “funny money” and avatars. They’re serious business, both for the owners and investors who profit from them and for the users who pump hundreds and even thousands of dollars each into creating characters and interacting online. ...

Self-proclaimed social media scientist Dan Zarrella has already applied linguistic methodologies to psychologically profile Twitter users. Now he’s using the same technology and approach to break down Facebook sharing behaviors. Zarrella uses the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) methods to arrive at the conclusion that, “Articles … that include sexual references in their titles are shared on Facebook far more than the average story.” ...