Yahoo didn’t just buy a company, it validated, to the tune of a billion dollars, the notion that bad business is worth pursuing. The entire concept of what makes something a good idea continues to be inverted, warped, and thrown in a gully. This is the idea economy, remember—the industry of fantasy. It doesn’t have to “make sense.” Money isn’t valuable. Success isn’t lucrative. Profit is pointless. These are the industry’s norms. All you need to do to become a billion-dollar business is make people entertained and vaguely interested.

David Karp did just that. Over 100 million entranced humans blog with Tumblr, and not a single one pays for the privilege. They’re free to swap reality show GIFs, aspirational shopping photos, and masturbate, with only the faintest whisper of marketing reaching their ears.

{ Valleywag | Continue reading }

One way to undermine social media monopolies is to refuse to contribute to the communicational economy they are based upon: don’t generate exploitable signals, stay quiet — and ask how this might be developed as a common response. Given the naturalized assumption that ‘more communication’ will automatically produce ‘more freedom’, suggestions, like this one, that are based on doing less of it might provoke hostility. However, in the case of the social media industries, communication is cultivated not in the interests of freedom, but in the interests of growth; social media wants to capture more of you through your transactions. Moreover, through this process communications are not made ‘more free’ but tend rather to become less open — certainly in the sense that they are commoditized.

{ First Monday | Continue reading }

photo { Hisaji Hara }

According to the studies he cited, 7 percent of people’s twitter followers are actually spambots; 30 percent of social media users are deceived by spambots and chatbots; and 20 percent of social media users accept friend requests from unknown people, 51 percent of which are not human. […] When it comes to “astroturfing” — the practice of creating fake grassroots movements to influence opinions — the hit ratio on email spams is about 12.5 million to 1. In order to create an astroturf movement on the scale of the anti-SOPA movement in 2011, every person on earth would have to receive the same spam message 8 times.

{ Gigaom | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Fisher }

Click by click, Facebook users are building a surprisingly nuanced picture of themselves, even without filling out their social networking profiles. […] Researchers found that they could, for example, correctly guess a man’s sexual orientation 88 percent of the time by analyzing the kinds of TV shows and movies he liked. It also found that few gay men — less than 5 percent in the study — identify with groups that openly declare their sexual orientation, so a man’s preference for “Britney Spears” or “Desperate Housewives” was more useful in predictions.

Similarly, the researchers also found that they could figure out if a Facebook user used drugs with about 65 percent accuracy based on their expressed public preferences.

The study even included “like” predictors that could tell whether users’ parents had separated when they were young vs. whether they had not.

Researchers told the British paper that they hope this study raises users’ awareness about the kind of information they may not realize they’re sharing with a wider audience.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

One of the increasingly famous paradoxes in science is named after the German mathematician Dietrich Braess who noted that adding extra roads to a network can lead to greater congestion. Similarly, removing roads can improve travel times.

Traffic planners have recorded many examples of Braess’ paradox in cities such as Seoul, Stuttgart, New York and London. And in recent years, physicists have begun to study how it might be applied in other areas too, such as power transmission, sporting performance where the removal of one player can sometimes improve a team’s performance and materials science where the network of forces within a material  can be modified in counterintuitive ways, to make it expand under compression, for example.

Today,  Krzysztof Apt at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands and a couple of pals reveal an entirely new version of this paradox that occurs in social networks in which people choose products based on the decisions made by their friends. 

They show mathematically that adding extra products can reduce the outcome for everyone and that reducing product choice can lead to better outcomes for all. That’s a formal equivalent to Braess’ paradox for consumers.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

A multinational security firm has secretly developed a software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

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The tension between experience for its own sake and experience we pursue just to put on Facebook is reaching its breaking point. That breaking point is called Snapchat. […]

The temporary photograph’s abbreviated lifespan changes how it is made and seen, and what it comes to mean. Snaps could be likened to other temporary art such as ice sculptures or decay art (e.g., Yoko Ono’s famous rotting apple) that takes seriously the process of disappearance, or the One Hour Photo project from 2010 that has as its premise to “project a photograph for one hour, then ensure that it will never be seen again.” However, whatever changes in the aesthetics of photographic vision Snapchat is effecting are difficult to assess, given that no one really knows what its self-deleting photos collectively look like. In many ways, this is exactly the point.

{ Nathan Jurgenson/TNI | Continue reading }

A number of Instagram’s 90 million active users are in a confused panic after being locked out of their accounts over the weekend, and several seem to believe they’ve been hacked. […]

Your account has been secured and requires account validation. Please login to Instagram.com from your desktop computer to validate your identify.

The desktop validation process then requires the user to upload a photograph of a government-issued photo ID by February 1 — a puzzling requirement for many thread participants, who worried that a hacker was attempting to gain access to their personal information. Which is not the case.

“Instagram occasionally removes accounts due to violation of terms and, depending on the violation, may ask people to upload IDs for verification purposes,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNET. […]

Instagram, like Facebook, requires that its users are at least 13.

{ CNET | Continue reading }

Analysts and observers who are content with cliches characterize Facebook as sitting on a treasure trove of potentially valuable data about its users, which is true enough. The cliched view is that what’s valuable about that data is names associated with locations associated with jobs associated with social networks, in a very granular way. That’s not it. That data can be mined easily from a variety of sources and has been mined relentlessly for years, before social media was even an idea. If an advertiser or company or candidate wants to find “professors who live in the 19081 area code who vote Democratic and shop at Trader Joe’s in Media” they can buy that information from many vendors. If that were all Facebook was holding, it wouldn’t have any distinctive wares, even imagined, to hock. All it could do is offer them at a bargain rate. […]

What Facebook is holding is a type of largely unique data that is the collaborative product of its users and its interface. […]

So what of the other unique information Facebook holds, a record of everything I’ve “liked”? Surely that’s information worth having (and thus worth paying Facebook for) for anyone desperate to sell me products, persuade me to join a cause, or motivate me to make a donation? Not really (or not much), for two reasons. First, because existing sources of social and demographic data are generally good enough to target potential customers. If you know who the registered Democrats with graduate-level education making more than $75,000 a year are in Delaware County Pennsylvania, you have a very good understanding of their likely buying habits and of the causes to which they are likely to donate. If you’re selling something that has a much more granular target market, it’s almost certainly more efficient and cheaper to use a more traditional media strategy or to rely on social networks to sell it for you simply because they’re interested in it. If you’re the budget-photography company YongNuo, you don’t need spend money to mine my Facebook likes and posts to see I’m interested in moving into studio-based strobist photography: existing networks of hobbyists and professionals are sufficient to acquaint me with your products. If you’re trying to sell a Minecraft pendant necklace, your potential customers are going to do a fine job of notifying each other about your product. […]

Social media that have no business model except trying to monetize the information that users provide to them will, sooner or later, be required to breach trust and demolish whatever is useful in their service, to come back again and again with new interfaces and terms of service that lie or conceal or divert.

{ Timothy Burke | Continue reading }

{ Actual Facebook Graph Searches }

Reviews on Amazon are becoming attack weapons, intended to sink new books as soon as they are published.

In the biggest, most overt and most successful of these campaigns, a group of Michael Jackson fans used Facebook and Twitter to solicit negative reviews of a new biography of the singer. They bombarded Amazon with dozens of one-star takedowns, succeeded in getting several favorable notices erased and even took credit for Amazon’s briefly removing the book from sale.

“Books used to die by being ignored, but now they can be killed — and perhaps unjustly killed,” said Trevor Pinch, a Cornell sociologist who has studied Amazon reviews. “In theory, a very good book could be killed by a group of people for malicious reasons.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ Brazilian site that builds fake girlfriend profiles on Facebook for 3, 7 or 30 days depending on your chosen plan }