Social Networks Give Users Data to Third Party Tracking Sites

If you thought your browsing habits were safe on social media sites, think again. Web Pro News reports many popular social networking sites typically make personal information available to companies that track browsing habits and allow them to link anonymous data to specific people, according to a new study by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).

Whole Foods boycott movement gains strength through social media

Social media is becoming a driving force in the grassroots efforts to organize a nationwide boycott against the “natural” grocery store chain Whole Foods. According to ClickZ, thousands of people have signed up to “Boycott Whole Foods” groups and pages on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, with the number continuing to grow daily.

The controversy started when the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece on Aug. 11 written by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey calling for less government intervention in health care reform. Within days of the article’s publication, people were flocking to various groups and pages on social media sites urging for a boycott of the chain. The “Boycott Whole Foods” Facebook group, for example, currently has more than 30,000 members.

However, that’s a fraction of the more than 125,000 members of the official Whole Foods group on Facebook, and a drop in the bucket of the 1.25 million followers of the Whole Foods blog. Only time will tell if this is a major PR blunder by Whole Foods or a momentary pause.

Facebook Cracks Down on Privacy

Facebook has announced plans to provide users with more control over their information and privacy. The popular social networking site will be rolling out a series of enhancements that include privacy settings and practices, additions to its privacy policy, and technical changes that give users more transparency and control over the information that they provide to third-party applications.

“These planned changes are a result of collaborative discussions we’ve had with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, which has spent more than a year reviewing Facebook’s privacy policies and controls,” wrote Tim Sparapani on the company blog.

The main reason for the investigation was that the way in which Facebook provides privacy information to users is often confusing or incomplete, according to a press release by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. The announcement confirmed that Facebook has agreed to help users make more informed decisions about how widely to share personal information on the site.

Although the details about the new enhancements have not been released, Facebook plans to implement the improvements in the coming months and will be providing more information during that time.

Ubiquity of social media continues to grow

It might seem to some people that everyone is using social media. And while that’s not true, a new report from Forrester Research shows that the use of social media sites is on the rise. In fact, for the first time we can now say that the majority of online Americans use social media – barely.

The data shows that 51 percent of all online Americans maintain an account on a social media site such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. This is a large increase from 2007, when only 25 percent of all online Americans said they used social media. And there was a similar increase in what Forrester defined as “spectators” – people who view content on social media sites such as videos, podcasts and blogs but don’t interact with other. 73 percent of online Americans classified themselves as “spectators” in the most recent survey, up from just 48 percent two years ago. And only 18 percent of all Internet users say they consume no social media.

Twitter Introduces New Geolocation Feature

Twitter has announced that it will be adding a new location-based API to its micro-blogging service. The company plans to launch a geolocation feature that will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any Tweet. While users can currently specify account-level location information as part of their profiles, the data isn’t very reliable. The new feature will make Twitter completely location-aware, adding a new layer of context to each tweet of information.

“Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time,” wrote Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone on the company blog.

Along with this new feature, users will have the opportunity to read only the Tweets of accounts from certain neighborhoods or cities—whether they follow them or not. Stone provides several examples when this type of data could come in handy, such as during an earthquake or an event like a concert. He adds, “There will likely be many use cases we haven’t even thought of yet which is part of what makes this so exciting.”

Twitter plans to release geolocation to platform developers first and expects to have it available as an app of choice before it’s available on Twitter’s Web site.

Employers turn to Facebook to research potential new hires

Even though LinkedIn is designed as the “professional” social media alternative to Facebook, that doesn’t mean that employers aren’t using Facebook to research potential candidates. In fact, CMS Wire says that a study by Harris Interactive shows that more employers use Facebook to perform background checks on perspective employees than use LinkedIn.

Overall, it appears that social media networks in general are becoming popular places for employers to look into the lives of job seekers, with 45 percent of all HR professionals who responded to the survey saying they have used social media sites as research tools for background checks and another 11 percent saying they plan to incorporate social media searches “in the very near future.”

Of all social media sites, Facebook was the most searched at 29 percent with LinkedIn at 26 percent. MySpace was third at 21 percent, with resources such as blogs, personal home pages or Twitter coming in far behind. The moral of the story seems to be that if you are looking for a job, you might want to take a look at your social media pages and get rid of any incriminating or embarrassing evidence.

- Richard Manfredi

Online Profile: Fake or Genuine?

A new company has made it possible for users to verify if someone’s online profile is genuine, reports TechCrunch. The new startup, CheckedProfile, launches today and allows users to check profiles on site such as Twitter, Facebook, and more importantly, dating sites.

According to the CheckedProfile Web site, the first step is to upload a picture that you would like the company to verify as being really you. Next, the company will provide you with a custom identifier. Customers are then asked to write the identifier on a sheet of paper and take a photograph of themselves holding the page with the identifier. Once the new photo has been uploaded, CheckedProfile will verify that the person in both images in the same. If proven to be genuine, the company will provide the user with a new verified photograph, which can be used on all of the popular social networking Web sites.

Although the service is free for women and children, it costs $1.99 for men. And it doesn’t come without its skeptics. Mike Butcher of TechCrunch writes “CheckedProfile claims it has patented this whole process - although to be honest it sounds pretty replicable. And what I don’t get is why they can’t apply a facial recognition technology to this process or perhaps crowd-source it - because having humans checking profile does not scale.”

However, founder of the new startup Ben Way told Butcher the company has “an incredibly efficient back end” that takes on average 20 seconds to verify a photo, and that other facial recognition technologies are not up to the job yet.”

SEC backs off of social media ban

After receiving criticism for its proposed ban on social media updates from its games, the Southeastern Conference has backed off and revised its regulations – to a point. The SEC had previously announced that fans would not be allowed to update sites such as Twitter or Facebook with real-time updates or images from games they were attending. But a backlash from sports and tech media has seemingly forced them to change their policy.

As Mashable reports, they are now allowing fans to post social media updates from games – with the exception of posting live video from games. The SEC says this is to protect its broadcast partner CBS – which holds exclusive broadcast rights for many of the top SEC football and basketball games. Of course, it’s doubtful that grainy, 15-second footage taken from a cell phone camera is going to make someone not watch a game live on TV. But the policy certainly is a lot more reasonable than the draconian methods the conference had previously attempted to institute.

Twitter Brings Retweet Feature Onboard

Although Twitter users have been retweeting for quite some time now—the action of copying and pasting another person’s tweet and sending it as their own–the popular micro-blogging service has announced it will be adding the feature to its platform and Twitter.com.

“We are still sketching out exactly how this feature and its API counterpart work,” writes Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Users will be allowed to retweet their follower’s tweets as well as turn off annoying retweets from other users.

While Twitter did not announce the date of the launch, the company plans to make it available for developers first. “Sharing our thoughts before launching means developers will have the opportunity to prepare their applications, writes Stone. “In a few weeks or so we’ll launch the feature on our Web site and because app developers had a chance to prepare, it should become available across most of the Twitter ecosystem about the same time. This way, we can all enjoy retweeting—however we choose to access Twitter.”

Twitter Surveys

While Twitter might be the hottest social media application, for many Americans it’s just a bridge to a lot of white noise. That’s the finding of a study by Pear Analytics that looked at 2,000 English-language Tweets from a random period of time and broke the content into six categories, including “pointless babble” – which the study considered to be any Tweet that offered nothing of relevance (i.e. “I am eating a sandwich).

And what were the results? More than 40 percent of all posts tracked by Pearl Analytics were considered to be “pointless babble.” Including that number with the posts that were Spam and blatant self-promotion, then more than half of all Twitter posts essentially have no value to anyone. Which makes you wonder what the true value is of Twitter if people have to search through so much garbage in order to find posts with content that have even a grain of substance.

Meanwhile, social media analytics firm Sysomos broke down the most prolific Twitter uses, and to no surprise the list is populated with – as InformationWeek’s Michael Hickens says, “new media marketing types promoting themselves by sharing some of their expertise (a marketing version of paying it forward, I suppose), or tech mavens promoting their respective consulting and speaking businesses by demonstrating (showing off?) their acumen.”

So is Twitter an important communications tool, or just filled with drivel or people preaching to the choir? Only time will tell.

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