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February 03 2012
Tweet Us Not Into Temptaton. OK, Just This Once.
Oh! Oh God, I spent the last 8 hours on Facebook!!
When you text thousands of people seven times a day for a week, and ask them whether they have felt temptation recently, what do you get? A giant database of thousands of tiny vices and people’s own admissions—some true, some likely edited for the sake of vanity—of whether they caved.
According to researchers who recently performed just such a study, people’s biggest willpower failures related to checking things like Twitter or email. People were more able to control sexual urges or the desire to spend money than they were the desire to check social media (though we note that it may take two people contemporaneously caving for certain sexual urges to be considered indulged). Though the paper isn’t available online yet for us to check on this, the researchers told The Guardian that the number of times people were tempted by cigarettes, coffee, and alcohol was surprisingly low, and that the desire to check social media was much more frequently reported. The fact that media temptation came up so frequently, and was so often indulged, may be because unlike smoking, drinking, or spending gobs ...
March 29 2011
What Every Lonely Guy Needs: A Fake Facebook Girlfriend
Some guys only dream of having a Facebook girlfriend; others are willing to pay a company to create one for them. Soon, lonely dudes with extra cash may feel better about themselves as they interact with a “virtual girlfriend,” convincing their friends that they actually are dating material.
A startup called Cloud Girlfriend plans to provide a service that would post messages on your Facebook wall from a virtual girlfriend (or what they call your “social network girlfriend”). The process is simple: “Step 1: Define your perfect girlfriend. Step 2: We bring her into existence. Step 3: Connect and interact with her publicly on your favorite social network. Step 4: Enjoy a public long distance relationship with your perfect girl.”
Currently the website only allows visitors to provide their emails in order to know when the service actually launches. According to Technology Review’s Christopher Mims, despite having not even started yet, “it’s already experiencing overwhelming demand.”
So what are the benefits of having a virtual girlfriend? According to company co-founder David Fuhriman, having a fake girlfriend may help men get a real one: Women seeing that at least one other woman likes this guy ...
February 01 2011
Facebook Addicts, Rejoice: Airplanes Offer Free Access in February
For all those penny-pinching, world-traveling Facebook-users out there, you’re in luck: you’ll be able to check Facebook during your flight and not pay a dime if you fly during the short, sweet month of February.
Of course this means we all need to prepare ourselves for the inane status updates. Like: “I can see my house from here!” And: “Clouds… wow.”
Participating airlines–including American Airlines, Delta, United Airlines, AirTran Airways, Alaska Airlines, Virgin America, and U.S. Airways–are partnering with Gogo Inflight Internet and Ford to provide airline passengers with free Facebook access. As Mashable reports:
It’ll work like this: Once the travelers are allowed to turn on tablets, phones, laptops and other personal electronic devices, they will be able to access the Gogo Wi-Fi network, and then click on the Ford/Facebook banner to access Facebook.
Of course, the ulterior motive is that you won’t want to stop just at Facebook, in which case you’ll be charged for internet access, starting at around $5. And in March, the Facebook free ride will be over, too.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Map of Facebook Friend Connections Lights Up the World
December 14 2010
Map of Facebook Friend Connections Lights Up the World
What do 10 million Facebook friendships look like? It pretty much looks like the world at night from space. Facebook intern Paul Butler made the map and was surprised by how elegantly it lit up the world. Facebook has truly gone global. From his Facebook post about the map:
I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.
To make the map Paul looked up 10 million friendship pairs, and listed the friends by current city, then tabulated the number of friendships between cities. He then mapped this connection strength to the latitude and longitude of the city.
The data rendering was a little bit more complicated, as Paul explains in the post:
I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight.
Many of the areas with few connections are regions with small populations (hello, Sahara and Amazon!) or low internet penetration. And the lack of connections to China would be because the government blocks Facebook access, though there is an almost identical site called Ren Ren Wang.
The dark vastness of Russia is explained by the fact that Facebook is only the seventh most popular social networking site in the country, with only two percent of Russia’s online audience using it. But it still beats MySpace, so that’s really all that matters.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Desperate For Facebook Friends? Buy Some!
Discoblog: Worst Science Article of The Week: Facebook Causes Syphilis
Discoblog: Teen Sues Mom for Hacking His Facebook Account
80beats: Facebook Unveils Its Messaging System—Just Don’t Call It Email
80beats: The Facebook Movie Comes Out Today. Is It Fact or Fiction?
80beats: Facebook CEO: People Don’t Really Want Privacy Nowadays, Anyway
DISCOVER: Map A World Full of Spam
DISCOVER: Map What Does the Internet Look Like?
Image: Facebook Engineering Page
September 21 2010
It Has 3,700 Facebook Friends, 1,800 Twitter Followers, & It’s a Tree
This 100-year-old tree wants to tell you about its day.
The tree, an English-speaking Belgian, shares pictures, videos, audio, and comments about it’s day to day life with the world via its website, twitter feed, and Facebook page. But don’t try to Facebook friend it right now—the tree is already over its friend limit.
The tree’s also outfitted with special sensors that detect the CO2, soot and ozone levels and also acts as a weather station, detecting local rainfall and temperature fluctuations. All of this information is transmitted to software which translates it into status updates like these examples on io9:
They analyze what the tree sees and senses, then translate that into updates like “Won’t be doing too much photosynthesis in this cloudy weather,” and “This ozone concentration makes it difficult to do my job.” It also advises people to ride their bikes on days with air pollution.
The information gathered by the tree’s sensors can also be used by researchers. Check out the making of the social-media tree video for more information on what went into the creation of this arboreal social media master.
Though the tree has to deal with the ups and downs of climate change, it is still pretty chipper as based on his social media slogan:
Hello! I’m a tree, and this is my feed. I’ll be online all day to keep you posted on how I feel.
Related content:
Bad Astronomy: Archiving NASA’s social media
Bad Astronomy: Social media diseases
Discover Magazine: Talking Plants
Image: The talking tree’s Facebook Page
August 16 2010
Fake Facebook “Dislike” Button Leads to More Dislike
They only wanted to show their disapproval. Friends eager to counterbalance all those Facebook “Likes” rushed to “Download the official DISLIKE button now” as received in a message. But, sadly, no dislike button was in store. Instead, installing the application provided users with several surveys and left their profiles vulnerable to spammer control. If there was ever a time to unleash their Dislike, this was it.
Yet, as Graham Cluley of the security firm Sophos told the BBC–mentioning a similar ploy that offered Facebookers the chance to see an anaconda vomiting up a hippo–such “survey scam” applications are nothing new:
“Anyone can write a Facebook app–these scams are constantly springing up.”
Perhaps Facebook should take note: Users were willing to sacrifice their security for the mere power to express negative feedback. Or, at least, the mere power to express negative feedback without typing.
Perhaps a compromise is in order? Unfortunately, a new Meh button application seems to need some tweaking. As in the Atlantic Wire:
Turns out, every time you click the “meh” button it registers your vote—allowing an individual user to “meh” something 10,000 times or more. That’s a lot of indifference.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Teen Sues Mom for Hacking His Facebook Account
Discoblog: Bulgarian Politician Punished for Playing Farmville During Budget Meetings
Discoblog: Are Happy Facebook Pics Proof That You Aren’t Depressed?
Discoblog: Desperate For Facebook Friends? Buy Some!
Discoblog: Computer Program Can “Out” Gay Facebook Users
Image: Facebook
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