"A cute baby dolphin for your weekend-viewing pleasure" a Facebook friend of mine writes. Under the text, I see a link to an imgur-hosted image of that amazingly adorable marine mammal. Suddenly, my day is feeling a lot better. Did I just catch a mood... on Facebook?
A new study by Facebook data scientists shows that Facebook users can spread emotions to their friends through messages, posts and status updates. It suggests that emotional contagion happens quite frequently on the world's biggest social network. Facebook's Chief Data Scientist Adam Kramer presented these findings at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on January 27, 2012.
"It's time to rethink how emotional contagion works, since vocal cues and mimicry aren't needed," said Kramer.
Sometimes the "Like" button is not as clear cut as it seems. Even Zuck would agree.
ZDNet reports that a Facebook design flaw has accidentally convinced some readers that Zuckerberg is endorsing Republican Party presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
The awkward "Liking" took place earlier this week. Zuck "liked" a story by Salon.com's Farhad Manjoo, who posted the following status along with a link to mittromney.com: "Try, just looking at the Romney logo without seeing the word MONEY." When that image shows up on users' news feeds, however, it appears as if Zuck "liked" the Mitt Romney link rather than Manjoo's comment, coupled with a link to the Romney website. Whatever happened to the "Like" button making things simple?
Reuters reports that a Tennessee couple who "defriended" Jenelle Potter on Facebook were murdered by her father and another man.
"This is just senseless," said Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece told Reuters. "We've had murders, but nothing like this."
Jenelle Potter, 30, is one of those types who you just don't mess with. She is a Facebook fanatic who stays home with her parents and is constantly on Facebook.
"Once you've crossed her, you've crossed her father too," Reece said.
Last week Facebook IPO rumors swirled about the Internet. Few in the tech world were able to focus on anything else. Facebook's estimated $75-$100 billion IPO had tech-meisters and analysts drooling. Finally, the world's largest social network decided to put a price on everyones' personal data.
But there was an official announcement that dropped just days before the IPO: Games would start appearing in the main news feed.
Only one month before, Facebook began including games in the mobile news feed. If you're already feeling annoyed, remind yourself that this is nothing new. Remember when sponsored stories began appearing in the news feed?
Facebook can be whatever you want it to be. It's a promotional tool, a way to keep in touch with family members, a space for lifestreaming your every move, or a community forum for meaningful discussion about a specific topic.
But sometimes, it all just gets too overwhelming to deal with. You have 1500 Facebook friends from all walks of life - why? Those social ties expired long ago. So what's the point of holding onto that one last digital thread?
Last week Jenni Prokopy, a Chicago-based health care expert, freelance writer and founder of ChronicBabe.com, posted a status update that directly addressed this issue. With about 800 friends, Prokopy realized that her Facebook profile had become totally cluttered. "I started my Facebook a few years ago when there were no business pages," Prokopy says. "People knew who I was online from ChronicBabe.com, so they started to friend me on Facebook. And I was just trying to build my online community so I said yes - and everyone was like yeah, build your online community! And so I did."
"If the Super Bowl is such a meaningless game, why are so many people posting updates about how they're not going to watch it?" said one of my Facebook friends, as the game approached halftime.
OK, I don't follow football. And I especially don't know anything about the Super Bowl. After the Super Bowl, I was wondering why Nicki Minaj and MIA (aside from her Cee Lo flick-off) didn't play a bigger role in Madonna's halftime show. I was also pretty relieved that Madonna made it through that entire performance without slipping, though she did come scarily close. I was truly impressed by some of the throws (Eli Manning!) and was also curious about the stories behind the football players' tattoos.
What I do know about the Super Bowl is that the Giants won (go New York!), and I got to hang out with some very awesome friends and my friend's dog, who I want to steal. I also have a few witty one-liners thanks to my more football-savvy Facebook friends because I, like most other social TV watchers, checked Facebook and Twitter during the game.
Breasts. They're complicated.
Facebook states that breast-feeding pictures are okie dokie, just as long as there's no "exposed breast" that doesn't feature the child actively nursing. In other words, if there's no suckling, there's no posting. Today breast-feeding activists are using Facebook to coordinate "nurse-ins" outside of of the company's headquarters worldwide, including its homebase Menlo Park headquarters.
When it comes to flagging photos, Facebook asks users to flag photos as inappropriate. Then Facebook employees go through and remove those that violate the State of Rights and Responsibilities. Even though it's pretty clear that breastfeeding photos are fine, often times they will still be flagged and removed from the site.
Mark Zuckerberg says he has always been reluctant to make Facebook all about the ads and less about the user experience. This is surprising, however, coming from a freshly minted billionaire who owns more than 25% of his own company and holds more than 50% of the voting power.
"Mark has an evangelical approach to advertising," Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Plc, the world's largest advertising agency told Reuters. "He sees Facebook as a vehicle to open up communication, not to monetize." Facebook's attitude toward advertising is finally changing. Users have started to notice, too. Today Facebook took that first step, claiming that sponsored stories for mobile will be coming "within weeks."
It's over, Facebook. It's really over.
Last week's overvalued IPO, and the fact that Zuck owns more than a quarter of the world's largest social network and refuses to share the cash has put many users over the edge. But months before the IPO rumor even surfaced, there were plenty of folks who had already left Facebook for Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. They are happy to tell you why they left, and they encourage you to do the same. They have joined together on other social networks - Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ - to discuss why they left Facebook, or why they're thinking about leaving Facebook. On their website, http://www.im-not-on-facebook.com/, they sell mugs and t-shirts (women's available in four colors! Crew neck available in five colors and white!) for as little as $10.99 a piece. These rebels have banded together in a Facebook-centric culture focused on oversharing the mundane details of life.
Facebook's IPO filing, released this week, is fascinating for many reasons: We've already covered several angles.
Perhaps the most exciting, though, is the wealth of data about the company that is finally public - from its user statistics to its growth around the world to its finances. I've highlighted and visualized some of the most interesting data in this series of charts.
