Facebook Researchers Say It’s 4.74 Degrees of Separation, Not Six

Facebook teamed up with the Università degli Studi di Milano to revisit Stanley Milgram’s 1967 experiment concerning the number of social connections separating any two people. The results from the new investigation point to there being a separation of 4.74 degrees between individuals instead of six. The Italian and American team’s conclusions were published Monday on Facebook. The two research papers can be read at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4570.

During the original Milgram experiment, data obtained from a mere 296 volunteers was used. By comparison, Facebook and U. degli Studi di Milano looked at data from all 721 million of Facebook’s users. As everyone is mentioning, that number is more than one-tenth of the entire world’s population.

The notion of “six degrees of separation,” has had a long history. It first appeared in 1929 in the Hungarian short story “Chains,” by Frigyes Karinthy. More recently, the idea was popularized in United States by the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which players attempt to connect anyone within the movie industry to the Footloose actor. The premise is that anyone can be connected to Bacon within six degrees.

Via Twitter, Bacon himself agreed with those opining that the new figure lacks the sonorous ring of the old one.     

Read More:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.html?_r=1&ref=technology

On Facebook, Rihanna’s Entire New Album is Streaming for Free

Shakira and Barack Obama may currently be besting Rihanna in Twitter rankings, but the Barbadian songstress is doing her part on the social media scene to change the status quo. Last week, RiRi, as she’s known to her fans, let pop music lovers everywhere get a compete earful of her newest album, “Talk That Talk,” through her Facebook page. The free Facebook streaming came four days before the official November 21st release date.

Today, you can head over to the most impossibly retro-cool record shop around to get your hands on the disc, download it from iTunes, or continue streaming it for free to save some money for Thursday’s feast. The pre-release Facebook streaming of Rihanna’s sixth album was part of “Unlocked,” a big publicity campaign that so far has proved successful.

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that since “Unlocked” began, Rihanna has gained a million new Twitter followers and over 700,000 Facebook fans. The campaign, which got underway in September, involved delegating “missions” to fans; upon their completion, information about Rihanna’s new studio material was revealed.

As of this writing, the first single off “Talk That Talk,” “We Found Love,” is at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100. On the left is the cover of the album’s deluxe edition.

Read More:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/11/rihanna-streams-talk-that-talk-on-facebook.html

Salman Rushdie Overturns Facebook’s Decision to Call Him “Ahmed Rushdie”

Like many people, Salman Rushdie goes by his middle name, even on Facebook, which prefers, apparently, that folks go by their first. This Monday saw the two sides come to a head-to-head public battle. After unceremoniously deactivating Salman Rushdie’s account until he complied with a passport copy request to verify his identity, Facebook reinstated his active status but changed the name on his profile: “Salman Rushdie,” as it appears on the cover of the gazillions of books he’s sold, to “Ahmed Rushdie,” as an airport customs official might greet him. Yikes! would be an understatement.

Rushdie did not waste time in seeking a rectification. After getting nowhere with Facebook’s tech support, he decided to change his medium and put his appeal out on Twitter.

Maybe @MarkZuckerbergF is a phony. Is the real#Zuckerberg on Twitter? Where are you hiding, Mark? Come out here and give me back my name!

That worked. Just two hours into his plucky online campaign Rushdie, informed his followers that Facebook had relented:

Facebook has buckled! I’m Salman Rushdie again. I feel SO much better. An identity crisis at my age is no fun.

Along the way, Mr. Rushdie managed to get the #MiddleNameUsers hashtag going and to bring to the world’s attention the fact that both James “Paul” McCartney and William Bradley “Brad” Pitt go by their middle names. That’s Rushdie at the far right, standing next to Voltaire and Christopher Hitchens.

Read More:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/technology/hiding-or-using-your-name-online-and-who-decides.html?_r=1&ref=technology

Highbrow Socialbots Infiltrate Facebook

Scholars at the University of British Columbia created 102 fake Facebook profiles to analyze security weakness of the world’s super social network. The fake profiles were socialbots or “automated software” that once introduced into Facebook could make friend requests and maintain a steady stream of updates. The droid activity is what conferred the guise of authenticity to the profiles. The academics published an interpretation of the experimental data obtained in a paper titled: “The Socialbot Network: When Bots Socialise for Fame and Money“; the credited authors are Yazan Boshmaf, Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin Beznosov, and Matei Ripeanu.

So what did the learned folk find out about Facebook’s security? That it was quite susceptible to socialbot “infiltration.” The Canadian bots were able to friend a great number of people and gain access to users’ and the friended users’ friends’ personal intel: email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and even home addresses. In other words, they stated that identity theft was possible through Facebook reconnaissance missions.

In all, the researchers’ socialbot network tallied 8,570 outgoing friend requests, 3,055 friends, 46,000 email addresses, and 14,500 home addresses. Through the initial 3,055 friends made, the researchers gained access to details of 1,085,785 separate Facebook profiles.

Facebook responded to the publication stating that they had “serious concerns about the methodology of the research by the University of British Colombia,” and would be “putting these concerns to them.”

Read More:

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/11/01/socialbot-network-harvest-data-facebook/

http://allthingsd.com/20111102/researchers-infiltrate-facebook-through-mutual-friends/

On Facebook, Israel Writes in Arabic to Engage a Contentious Public

The men and women in charge of branding and marketing for Israel’s military are known for their active engagement in social media, but something they had not been particularly known for, at least not until very recently, was the generation of content written and produced in Arabic. Incredibly, this week didn’t just see Palestine voted into full membership at UNESCO, it also saw the public unveiling of the Israeli army’s first bona fide Arabic Facebook page. It’s set to join the ranks of the army’s official Arabic Twitter, YouTube channel, and the Israel Defense Forces’ official Arabic website.

The army’s updates on the world’s largest social network are intended to supply “approved public information” about its “activities in the Palestinian territories” and spark off interactive engagement with its readership — something the Israelis don’t expect to have much trouble with.

That Israel is providing military dispatches in the language of its famously disputatious brethren is being viewed by many as the country reaching out to the domestic and international Arabic-speaking community — most especially the great numbers that find themselves under new, if unresolved, leadership on account of this year’s phenomenal Arab Spring uprisings.

Maj. Avichay Adraee, spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, is credited with championing Arabic social engagement. He has referred to the need for Israel’s military to build a relationship of trust with the Arabic-speaking public — one that is “maintained on a daily basis” and that extends beyond times of crisis.

Read More:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2011/10/israeli-army-launches-arabic-facebook-page.html

Concerns Raised About Children’s Use of Facebook

Federal laws, the Federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 comes to mind, prohibit websites from collecting personal info from children younger than 13 without parental consent, but these laws are consistently flouted left and right. Last spring, Consumer Reports did the math and found that 7.5 million minors younger than 12 had Facebook accounts, which compromised, illegally, their personal information.

Facebook, of course, thrives on information gathering — Share! is its mandate and, like its tech peers (Google), it has been beefing up for increased political influence, in the form of lobbyists and a political action committee, to contest legal restrictions on its business model. Upon hearing the Consumer Reports news, Facebook had no qualms about making its position on the matter known: “That will be a fight we take on at some point,” declared its founder Mark Zuckerberg in a slightly muted rebel yell.

Facebook can provide a wonderful medium for young people to interact with friends and family, but if they lack guidelines for practicing safe engagement in social media, they risk being exposed to cyberbullying and other forms of harassment. So far, Facebook has proved to not completely dismissive of the issue — it is, after all, a proud partner of the police’s Amber alert system.

Read More:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/magazine/why-facebook-is-after-your-kids.html?ref=technology

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2011/june/electronics-computers/state-of-the-net/facebook-concerns/index.htm

Facebook Gets Friend.ly, But Will It Also Get Sweet?

At just two years old, Friend.ly has entered the whale’s mouth that is a Facebook acquirement. It seems like a fitting cap for a very eventful sophomore showing — this was the year, after all, that the startup experienced a robust growth spurt in user numbers, clinched $5 million in venture funds, and scored a magnate-ish deal with the Palo Alto/Menlo Park young folk.

The media has already gotten in a few jabs, pointing out that calculations from AppData suggest that although the number of registered users has grown — there are currently 25 million of them — the number of active users has seen a phenomenal decline: 6.9 million earlier in the year and only a measly 300,000 today.

In Friend.ly-speak, Why the drop? Perhaps it’s growth cycle is normalizing; the first jump in numbers was a prompted by successful infrastructural changes designed to improve the sharing rate of Friend.ly content on Facebook.

Friend.ly is supposed to strengthen bonds with old friends and spark new acquaintanceships through online posing and answering of questions, some with a good heaping of mawkishness. Recent questions featured on the Friend.ly blog included “What made you smile today?” and “When was the last time you walked barefoot through the grass?”

Concerning the big news, Team Friend.ly issued a statement thanking users and investors “from the bottom of [their] hearts,” while Facebook praised its new addition for the “really compelling way” it created “for people to express themselves and meet others through answering questions.”

Read More:

http://blog.friend.ly/2011/10/facebook-friends-friend-ly/

http://allthingsd.com/20111010/facebook-acquires-qa-site-friend-ly/

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/04/15/friend-ly-question-answer-connect/

Congressional Bi-Partisan Caucus Throws the Book at Facebook

Is Facebook tracking you without lawful permission? The co-Chairs of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Caucus seem to think so. The concerned and chairing congressmen are Ed Markey, from Massachusetts and Joe Barton, from Texas — their political persuasions correspond to well-established national topoi of northern and southern states.

Jointly, they’ve signed and sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting that an investigation be made into Facebook’s practice of “gathering information about the websites its users visited even after users logged out of Facebook.”

The Democrat and Republican made reference to Nik Cubrilovic with their “Australian technology blogger” shout-out and went on to say:

We believe that an investigation of Facebook tracking its users even after they log out falls within the FTC’s mandate as stipulated in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act with respect to protecting Americans from “unfair and deceptive acts or practices.”

Subsequent to his calling foul, Nik Cubrilovic has accepted that Facebook has taken measures to mend the problem of tracking user activities after they’ve logged out. In his own words he’s said: “Over the course of the past 48 hours since that post was published we have researched the issue further and have been in constant contact with Facebook on working out solutions and clarifying behavior on the site.”

Read More:

http://markey.house.gov/docs/ftc_facebook_letter_09.28.11.pdf

http://nikcub.appspot.com/facebook-fixes-logout-issue-explains-cookies

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/09/ftc-facebook-cookies-log-out.html

Backlash to Facebook’s Awesome Timeline

Around the start of summer, Facebook brass kept commenting about a “something awesome” that would soon be unveiled. Well, as of yesterday everybody knows what the social network’s most awe-inspiring launch to date is: the FB Timeline. It seemed media watchers couldn’t keep pace with the torrent of positive feelings and thoughts that were too awkwardly lurching their way to their keyboards and screens.

Nevertheless, amid all the high-fiving and heart-felt hurrahs, some couldn’t help spelling out a few apprehensions about Timeline. At AllthingsD, Kara Swisher wrote about the “creepy” factor of a “cradle to grave” online profile/existence. She also ruminated about the consequences of having a detailed visualization of one’s entire existence available for self- and public-scrutiny throughout the extent of one’s life, and even beyond it.

Most of the rather mild backlash centers around Facebook’s unexamined aim to provoke ever greater sharing from its users. With Timeline, FB users will be updating friends in real time about such ordinarily minor things as listening to a song or watching a TV show. Taken instance by instance, the action is minor, but the accumulated storing, over time, of every such action is something major — for users, for Facebook, and for advertisers.

Besides the perhaps steeper-than-thought fee that Facebook may be extracting from its “free” service, writer Maura Johnston also griped (a little) about the complexities of tying up “technology” with “persona.”

Read More:

http://allthingsd.com/20110923/from-cradle-to-well-you-know-the-creepy-factor-of-facebooks-timeline/

http://maura.tumblr.com/post/10548489653/on-facebook-privacy-and-the-hindered-development-of

Twitter’s Coattails Extend With Arrival of Paid Political Ads

Everybody knows that despite this year’s Weiner scandal, Twitter is still really big with politicians as it is with all the usual talking heads — apparently 80 percent of Congress tweets. Twitter honchos have undoubtedly known as much for a while, and that’s why it makes so much sense for them to open up their platform to purchased political advertising. Politicians’ ads are relevant to the Twitter readership and the company needs the cash. The first paid-for political ad on Twitter appeared this week: a “promoted tweet” for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign that ran on Wednesday, September 21st.

Contrary to what would be expected, there seems to be no need to summon any bracing fortitude in preparation for an overwhelming campaign onslaught on your Twitter stream, at least not yet. Leadership at Twitter seems to be intent on introducing advertising in as an intrusive a way as possible. Adam Bain, the company’s president of global revenue was quoted in Politico, where the takeaway of his comments was found to be that Twitter did not wanting to look like it was “cash[ing] in on its massive popularity and cultural cachet,” on account to the advertising. Bonus points for that. Political ads on Twitter will be marked with a purple checkmark and hovering over them will produce a political disclosure.

Read More:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63985.html#ixzz1Yj2sWZyt

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/09/twitter-begins-selling-political-advertising.html

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