Internet, Social Media | featured news

...And now, with Facebook’s newfangled search tool, it can allow strangers, along with “friends” on Facebook, to discover who you are, what you like and where you go. Facebook insists it is up to you to decide how much you want others to see. And that is true, to some extent. But you cannot entirely opt out of Facebook searches. Facebook, however, does let you fine-tune who can see your “likes” and pictures, and, to a lesser extent, how much of yourself to expose to marketers.

Many of us know Facebook users who are on the site seemingly 24/7, but we also know others who sometimes feel Facebook fatigue, and who have stepped away from the social network to clear their heads. Now a new study says that 61 percent of Facebook users say they've taken such breaks for several weeks or longer in the past.

Zynga reports a sharp drop in its losses in the last three months of 2012, as revenues at the designer of games including Farmville stabilised.

The clear favorite was Budweiser's "Brotherhood" spot, which told the story of a horse trainer reunited with a Clydesdale he had raised as a foal. Overall, there were 26,131,270 tweets about Super Bowl ads.

Twitter said it had detected "sophisticated" unauthorized attempts to access information from the short-messaging service used by more than 200 million people.

Facebook has faced a few controversies in the past few months, including controversies over privacy policies on its own site and on its photo-sharing site, Instagram. Still, the company has bolstered investor confidence with a series of moves that seem to lay the groundwork for Facebook to make more advertising dollars, particularly in the all-important mobile space.

Twitter says it turns over user data to government agencies in the U.S. in 69 percent of the requests made for such information, according to a new transparency report released by the microblogging site.

...Consumers in the critical 18-34 year old demographic are hooked on Tumblr, with the average visitor spending 1.5 hours per month on the site. Today, Tumblr hosts 90 million blogs that generate more than 89 million new posts every day. This astronomical growth helped the site soar into lists of the top 10 most popular websites in the U.S. at the end of last year and is attracting significant interest from brands ranging from fashion to finance.

As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online. Employers often seek to discourage comments that paint them in a negative light. Don’t discuss company matters publicly, a typical social media policy will say, and don’t disparage managers, co-workers or the company itself. Violations can be a firing offense.

...Our biggest disappointment was our misunderstanding of how Facebook Pages work. Instead of building a database of users that you can contact at will, you are essentially paying Facebook to build a list of people that you can then advertise to.