Social Networking

This study examines the content of MySpace pages to reveal the types of personal information users disclose on their pages and the types of communication users engage in via through their MySpace accounts. The researchers performed a traditional content analysis on MySpace user profiles to learn about user characteristics and about the types of content posted on profiles pages. Findings showed a clear pattern of use of the site for creating and developing personal identities and relationships online. Findings show a high degree of control by users over private information, with very few users posting personal information such as telephone numbers and addresses. The results of this research contribute to an understanding of the use of MySpace as a social networking site, a communication tool, and a means of self-disclosure and identity formation.

In this article, I argue that online social networking is anchored in surveillance practices. This gives us an opportunity to challenge conventional understandings of surveillance that often focus on control and disempowerment. In the context of online social networking, surveillance is something potentially empowering, subjectivity building and even playful - what I call participatory surveillance.

The Wall Street Journal is borrowing elements from popular Internet hangouts like Facebook as it seeks to boost usage.

WSJ.com, one of the few news sites to restrict many of its stories to paying subscribers, is changing its layout to help nonpaying visitors navigate and identify free, ad-supported content. Those visitors will see a different home page from users who sign in as subscribers.

The new "Journal Community" is coming Tuesday as part of the site's first major revision since 2002. There, paying subscribers create personal profile pages with their real names, job details, interests and photo, much as users can at Facebook and the professional-networking site LinkedIn.

Community members will be able to comment on individual stories, create discussion groups on specific topics and ask one another for advice on such topics as starting small businesses or finding a place to take clients during a business trip, say, in Prague.

The Journal's online audience has been growing fast, and nonpaying visitors make up the lion's share. WSJ.com has 4.7 million visitors in July, nearly twice July 2007's total of 2.4 million, according to comScore Inc. Only about 5 percent of the site's users are paying subscribers, the Journal said.

Today, we're announcing a new logs retention policy: we'll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.

Back in March 2007, Google became the first leading search engine to announce a policy to anonymize our search server logs in the interests of privacy. And many others in the industry quickly followed our lead. Although that was good for privacy, it was a difficult decision because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient of innovation. We have published a series of blog posts explaining how we use logs data for the benefit of our users: to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam.

Over the last two years, policymakers and regulators -- especially in Europe and the U.S. -- have continued to ask us (and others in the industry) to explain and justify this shortened logs retention policy. We responded by open letter to explain how we were trying to strike the right balance between sometimes conflicting factors like privacy, security, and innovation. Some in the community of EU data protection regulators continued to be skeptical of the legitimacy of logs retention and demanded detailed justifications for this retention. Many of these privacy leaders also highlighted the risks of litigants using court-ordered discovery to gain access to logs, as in the recent Viacom suit.

 Facebook Inc. has grown 153% during the past year, propelled by the soaring growth of new in virtually every market outside North America, according to a report on social networking released Tuesday by ComScore Inc.

While the growth in the number of new social networking users leveled off to 9% in North America between June 2007 and June 2008, growth in several other regions soared by well over 30% during the same period, according to the ComScore report. For example, the number of new users in the Middle East and Africa grew by 66% during the year, while usage in Europe grew by 35% and in Latin America by 33%, the report noted.

I'm a huge fan of social networking, loving the opportunities it gives me to interact with friends online, make new contacts, and keep in touch with people who I wouldn't otherwise be able to. But I'm 31 years of age, and am able to control my own online persona. Which is why I find the idea of social networks for babies an utterly bizarre and contemptible one.

Social networking sites like Facebook are increasingly offering the same applications found in Yahoo!, but the latter's executives argue this will not drive away its users.

Instead, top Yahoo! executives, who held a short briefing with local media in a visit to Manila, stressed that the company is in fact embracing social networking as it introduces new features in tools like Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail.

"Does it make sense to reinvent the wheel inside social networking services? Or do we take such services and instead integrate them into Yahoo!?," answered Scott Dietzen, Yahoo! senior vice president for global communications products.

"I believe it is much easier for us to embrace new forms of social networking than the other way around," Dietzen added, when asked by INQUIRER.net whether Yahoo! feels threatened by social networks like Facebook.

Yahoo! has been criticized many times by analysts for getting left behind in the social networking train. Two years ago, it announced a billion-dollar bid for then-emerging social networking site Facebook but was thwarted.

British Sky Broadcasting (Sky) is working with Pluck - the industry-leading provider of social media capabilities to publishers, brands and retailers - to embed an array of innovative social media tools across its range of digital media properties. The new functionality, which will roll out across the portal this autumn, will be positioned under the new Sky Community platform.

Incorporating the likes of skynews.com, sky.com and sky.com/showbiz, the Sky Portal currently ranks as the 6th most popular commercial website network in the UK (ComScore). The incorporation of new social networking functionality - including cross-site user profiling - will help support greater audience engagement and provide improved levels of integration across the portal.

The first Sky website to launch with the new social media capabilities will be the award-winning Sky News site ( http://www.skynews.com/). Sky News has launched a variety of social media features across the site, including blogs, discussion boards and user comments, designed to give people more of a voice in shaping and contributing to the news agenda. The Sky News site will also host a user-generated 'citizen journalism' section in which people can share videos, photos and comments on breaking news events. By the autumn a range of other Sky properties - including Sky.com, Sky

Mozilla is currently deep in the heart of its celebration over officially setting a new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads (8,002,530!) in 24 hours for its Firefox 3 browser. But the company isn't cheering alone - its enjoying this victory with the community it rightfully credits for helping it to succeed.

Mozilla's marketing strategy has historically been word-of-mouth engagement, a method that very creatively began with its 2004 Firefox 1.0 launch. As more social networking venues have opened up and expanded to businesses, Mozilla has adapted to putting up appropriate channels and resources.

"Since Firefox is all about the online experience it's a natural fit for folks who are open to social networking," said Paul Kim, vice president of marketing for Mozilla. "We announced Download Day with a very concerted plan to leverage multiple social networks and to seed content on those networks that would drive traffic to the download site."

Last November, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's former campaign strategist, derisively said that Barack Obama's supporters "look like Facebook."

Chris Hughes takes that as a compliment. Hughes, 24, was one of four founders of Facebook. In early 2007, he left the company to work in Chicago on Obama's new-media campaign. Leaving behind his company at such a critical time would appear to require some cognitive dissonance: political campaigns, after all, are built on handshakes and persuasion, not computer servers, and Hughes has watched, sometimes ruefully, as Facebook has marketed new products that he helped develop.

"It was overwhelming for the first two months," he recalled. "It took a while to get my bearings."

But in fact, working on the Obama campaign may have moved Hughes closer to the center of the social networking phenomenon, not farther away.

The Obama campaign's new-media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool, helping the candidate raise more than two million donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters.