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It turns out people leave Facebook the same way they lived Facebook: with lots and lots of sharing.

Artist Man Bartlett posted a blog earlier this weekcalled “Why I Deleted My Facebook Account,” which marks the latest installment in the burgeoning genre of Facebook-quitter confessionals. Call them the de-Facement diaries.

Usually when we decide to stop doing something online, we just stop. We unplug, we close the window, delete the app, or just never come back. But like a four-year relationship that suddenly bites the dust, leaving Facebook apparently merits an exegesis of what went wrong and why. And just like a messy, acrimonious breakup, it’s always, “It’s not me, it’s you.

Bartlett’s tell-all follows the same narrative arc as previous accounts of “de-Facing” as other masters of the genre, such as the New Yorker’s Steve Coll, the New York Observer‘s Elise Knutsen, and The Daily contributor Sean Bonner, whose tell-all treatises on leaving Facebook all appeared within days of each other (and Facebook’s public offering) in May. A rash of them also appeared in February on the heels of Facebook announcing its plans to go public, including “What I Learned When I Quit Facebook” in The Daily Muse, “Why I Quit Facebook, and Why You Ought to Join Me” in PolicyMic, and “Why I Quit Facebook” in the New York Post.

The tales of social de-networking read like self-help books: I thought I was happy, but I was hurting myself and others around me. Here’s how I got better and you can, too. They also imply that leaving Facebook is something surprising and bold. And two years ago, when a handful of techie early adopter-types became Facebook’s early defectors, perhaps it was.

But these days, discontent with Facebook seems more the rule than the exception. More than a third of Facebook users are spending less time on the site now than they were six months ago, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found, and Facebook’s U.S. user growth rate in April was the smallest ever since comScore started tracking the figure four years ago. According to a forthcoming report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, “customer satisfaction with the site [Facebook] is falling.” Even Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president and an early investor in the company, said he feels “somewhat bored” by the social network.

A love letter to Facebook would be a bigger surprise than seeing another “Dear John” letter detailing the social network’s flaws, and the uptick in these tell-alls means they increasingly draw eye-rolls from the Internet.

“Top indicator that yr a precious doof: u write grandiose article abt how u quit Facebook,” tweeted Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall, his hashtag an abbreviation for “who the f–k cares.”

I’d counter that it isn’t that no one cares — people post all kinds of things to the Internet every day that we care nothing about. Instead, our response to the list of grievances outlined by authors like Coll, Bartlett and Knutsen is often an exasperated, “We know.” Reading about their concerns with Facebook’s respect (or lack thereof) for personal information feels like being told Exxon isn’t doing enough to help wildlife. We get it. What else is new?

So why do people leave? Lack of trust, mostly — a sense that Facebook can’t be depended on to protect our personal information and will sell us out to make a buck. We are its greatest asset, but what Facebook does with us and our identities online is entirely beyond our control, the authors of these quitter confessionals argue. Facebook helped their case just a few weeks ago when it automatically updated members’ profile pages to show the addresses of their Facebook email accounts. The only way to avoid having the information featured was to take it down after Facebook put it up.

The issue for the social networking site is whether this tension between public and private, and people and profits, can ever be resolved. Clearly, hundreds of millions of users aren’t too bothered by it.

But as the tell-alls show, users’ doubts haven’t been put to rest, and if anything have been reawakened by all of the coverage concerning Facebook’s need to make money. Their public offering put a dollar figure on our personal data that the citizens of the social network aren’t soon going to forget, especially when each quarter will bring a new financial statement with an updated estimate of what we’re worth.

Since its privacy meltdown two years ago, the company has tried to be on its best behavior, revamping its privacy settings to allow for more control, weeding out confusing legalese from its terms of use, and publicizing its safety measures. Yet just as Facebook ensures that our own indiscretions go unforgotten, Facebook may find that getting the rest of us to forgive and forget is harder than it had hoped.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Image via CrunchBase

Rapportive, a startup that makes a Gmail add-on that displays social media info about contacts as you email them, confirmed on Wednesday that it had been purchased by LinkedIn.

Rahul Vohra, CEO of Rapportive, confirmed the acquisition on the company’s blog. “In business, partnership is dating — and we went on a lot of dates with LinkedIn. Slowly, but surely, we fell in love,” Vohra wrote. Vohra wrote that despite the new ownership, Rapportive will continue building its product. “At LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people.”

The confirmation comes after a report earlier this month from All Things D pegged the purchase price in the “low teens” of millions of dollars. Vohra did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

Rapportive is a sidebar for Gmail that displays information from relevant email contacts’ social media accounts, including LinkedIn, as you open and compose emails. It also lets you add those email contacts as friends on social networks without leaving your inbox.

The startup’s website says its plugin looks up more than 20 million contacts every month — which, considering how many emails can come to one account, doesn’t necessarily give much insight into the size of its user base. It competes with other personal relationship management products such as Smartr and Mingly

Source :- http://mashable.com

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• LinkedIn acquires Gmail plugin, Rapportive (agbeat.com)

Image by Orbmiser via Flickr

Software company SmartBear recently released the seventh installment of their quarterly Web Performance Index for Social Networks. It ranked which social media sites were the fastest and which were the most reliable in the third quarter of 2011.

The findings are based on data collected by SmartBear’s AlertSite, which monitors the home pages of these five sites across 12 U.S. cities, collecting data every five minutes between 6 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. EST.

To collect the data on social media speed SmartBear times how long it takes the website to load completely. According to PC Magazine, this includes “images, JavaScript, Flash, and third party objects.” The sites availability depends on how often it loads completely in under 60 seconds.

Although it was slightly faster in the second quarter, the speed winner is the same social media behemoth that has taken home the top prize every quarter since SmartBear launched its performance index.

However, according to SmartBear, it’s Twitter, the site ranked #4 in both rankings, that’s the most interesting. Even though this micro-blogging platform “didn’t win, place or show–and in fact, even dipped slightly in both website speed and availability,” the fact that it was even close to the benchmark average is impressive.According to a post written by SmartBear’s Gary Beerman for the company’s official blog, this site experienced remarkably high levels of use four separate times in the third quarter. Wrote Beerman, “Once upon a time, such high traffic and tweet frequency likely would have taken Twitter offline and sent its availability for the quarter plummeting.

Check out below to find out if your favorite social media site is wasting your time.

• Facebook - Average Response Time: .73 Seconds, Benchmark Average: 2.29 Seconds

• LinkedIn - Average Response Time: 1.33 Seconds, Benchmark Average: 2.29 Seconds

• YouTube - Average Response Time: 1.58 Seconds, Benchmark Average: 2.29 Seconds

• Twitter - Average Response Time: 2.73 Seconds, Benchmark Average: 2.29 Seconds

• Myspace - Average Response Time: 5.09 Seconds, Benchmark Average: 2.29 Seconds

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Link insertion is a term that’s being thrown around a lot lately as so many new publishers and companies are getting involved. And social media has, of course, exploded in use over the last years and more and more companies are now using sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to help spread their message, which is ultimately to purchase their service.

The real reason that marketers and advertisers are tapping into this massive resource is because people actually trust other people—such as a Facebook comment—a lot more than they trust a company trying to sell their product.

So this social media content, even a simple Facebook comment, can be extremely valuable in today’s world.

Social media, at least from a marketing standpoint, is all about getting as many people as possible to talk about you and your product, so you can see how a single Twitter user with thousands of followers can be an excellent tool for this purpose.

So this content is obviously valuable to advertisers because it’s the top of the funnel to get people to buy a product—it starts the consumer’s interest and gets them to research and then ultimately purchase whatever it is you have for sale.

Simply put, value is instantly created with content surrounding the pure purchase of that product, so now a lot of companies are starting to realize the true value of that comment—or millions of comments, and advertisers are now seeking to reach people through these comments.

And this is why in-text advertising is so valuable: It allows publishers to create real value from their content.

I’ve been working with link insertion company INTENTclick, which does a very good job at using content—whether it be in social media or wherever—to make you money. I wrote an e-book about the technology, titled “INTENETclick” ,:In-Text Advertising Secrets, which goes into a more in-depth look at the company that specializes in helping people with SEO and sales-driven content as well as monetizing user-generated content that maximizes returns for publishers. Please read the E-book I wrote, “Online Content Monetization” for more information on this topic.

I advise you to look at more content monetization tools in order to get the full value of the content you’re already producing. Trust me, it’s probably more than you might expect.

Disclosure: I am working for INTENTclick.

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Rebtel, a mobile VoIP company, commissioned a study from research firm Harris Interactive on the social networking habits of men and women. The researchers, who looked at the communication habits of 2,361 adults aged 18 and over, found that women are significantly more likely to use online social networks, like Facebook or twitter, to communicate with friends, family, and co-workers. A whopping 68 percent of womenuse social media to stay in touch with friends, as opposed to 54 percent of men.

“Our findings show that men tend to lag behind women when it comes to communicating with others through social media, which debunks other recent studies that suggest that men are more savvy networkers between the sexes,” Rebtel‘s CEO Andreas Bernstrom said in a statement.

When the participants were asked which method of communication they would use if they were only allowed one, 18 percent of women chose social media as opposed to 12 percent of men. The rest still preferred to communicate via call, text, email, and even face to face.

The data showed that men like talking on the phone and texting more than women, but the difference was small: 73 percent of women use the phone to stay in touch with friends whereas 75 percent of men do. Not surprisingly, considering how deeply integrated Facebook is becoming with our lives, one in five participants said they expected to increase their use of social media in the future. Men especially expected their social media use to increase in the coming years, probably partly because, compared with women, relatively few of them use it now.

He may have been talking about LinkedIn’s June study which found men to be the “Savviest Networkers.” However, that study only looked at professional connections on LinkedIn, and didn’t take into account other social networking sites or non work related connections.

On the other hand, according to a study by the Social Technology Review, women have an average of 55% more wall posts than men, but the same amount of friends.

Take a look at Rebtel’s visualization of how much more likely women are to use social networking than men.

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Image via CrunchBase

The Web has a winner: Facebook.

According to new research from Nielsen’s “The Social Media Report,” American Internet users now devote more time to Facebook than any other website, spending a total of 53.5 billion minutes a month on the world’s largest social networking site.

This is far ahead of sites like Blogger, to which Americans cumulatively devote 723 million minutes a month, Twitter, which receives 565 million minutes of users’ time per month and LinkedIn, on which claims 325 million minutes per month. Yahoo, the second most popular web brand overall, receives just half as much time of users’ time as Facebook (Americans spent 17.2 billion minutes on the site), followed by Google (12.5 billion minutes, which does not include the 9.1 billion minutes people spent on YouTube).

Facebook announced earlier this year that it had surpassed 750 million users and Google’s DoubleClick ad planner reported that Facebook had reached 1 trillion monthly page views, a disputed number that one analytics company pegged closer to 467 billion.

Yet Nielsen gave the blog platform Tumblr the equivalent of a nod for “most likely to succeed,” noting that the “emerging social network” increased grew its audience three-fold in a year. Tumblr also recently celebrated its 10 billionth post, just a year after reaching its 1 billionth.

Nielsen’s report tracked both the popularity of social networking sites, as well as usage patterns among Americans online.

Users devote more time to social media and blogs than to online games, email and search combined, Nielsen found: 22.5 percent of the time people spend online is given over to sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Blogger; 9.8 percent is spent playing games online; 7.6 is spent on email; and 4 percent on search.

Though social networking apps are the third most popular mobile application category, behind games and weather-related apps, 37 percent of users said they consume social media via their phones–by comparison, a full 97 percent use their PCs.

The research also found some notable differences in the ways varying demographics use social media sites. Women, who Nielsen said “make up the majority of visitors to social networks and blogs,” and users between 18 and 34 years-old were highlighted as the “most active social networkers.”

Women account for 62 percent of Facebook’s page views, Nielsen wrote, adding that men are “more likely to visit LinkedIn and Wikia.” Female Internet users also watch more online videos than men, but men spend more time (247 million minutes per month) watching video online than women (226 million minutes per month).

Social networking users make up a lion’s share of all adults online. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s August 2011 report, for the first time, more than half of all adult Internet users (65 percent) now use social networks.

Read Nielsen’s full report–which includes more on mobile usage, how active social networkers behave online, and much more–here.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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The NYPD has formed a new social media unit, The New York Daily News reports, to catch criminals who use Facebook and Twitter to announce law-breaking plans or to brag about their latest crime.

In June, an overcrowded house party in East New York, Brooklyn that was advertised on Facebook as “Freaky Friday” ended in a shooting that left one man dead and seven injured.

After that incident Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters “We look at social networking. We’re very much focused on weekend parties, the type of parties that happened last weekend, and we visit them ahead of time. But not every one of these parties happen at a place we can readily identify… Our gang division, our borough personnel look at party advertisements. A lot of these things are at peoples’ apartments.”

In March, 18-year-old Anthony Collao was killed in an anti-gay attack at a Woodhaven, Queens, house party advertised on Facebook. Calvin Pietri, one of six later arrested, bragged about the murder on Facebook.

NY1 asked New Yorkers in June what they thought of cops snooping around on Facebook and Twitter. One said, “If it is going to help cut down on the homicides, then I guess I’m for it,” while another lamented, “I really do think it is an invasion of privacy.”

The relationship between mayhem and social media was brought into focus this week as violent riots spreading across London were coordinated via Twitter and Blackberry messages.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Fashion designer Kenneth Cole’s latest project isn’t a line of shoes or a fall collection: it’s a new site, “Where Do You Stand,” that aims to spark debate on social issues, from gun control to same-sex marriage.

Where Do You Stand marks a continuation of Cole’s socially conscious—and sometimes controversial—ad campaigns that have promoted not only bags, shoes and apparel, but also political issues. For example, a past ad featured an illustration of a condom with the caption, “Our shoes aren’t the only thing we encourage you to wear.”

On the Where Do You Stand website, visitors are prompted to select one of two portals: “What You Stand For,” where people can participate in varying degrees of debate on several topics, and “What You Stand In,” which is the more fashion-oriented portion of the site consisting of video style guides hosted by editors from GQ and Vogue. A link to Kenneth Cole’s online store is featured throughout.

Cole, who regularly tweets from the official @KennethCole account, notes that social media has been a game changer when it comes to raising awareness for both brands and social issues. (He adds that his two favorite people to follow on Twitter are Barack Obama and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.)

“The world moves so quickly today, and social media is the best way to communicate the message,” Cole said. “I feel very in the moment [when using Twitter], which makes me feel very empowered.”

While Cole and his company have embraced tools like Twitter and Facebook, their foray into social media hasn’t always been problem free. The designer committed a highly-publicized Twitter gaffe earlier this past spring when, during the protests in Egypt, Cole tweeted, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC.”

“I’ve struggled to find the right voice to reach people, and I paid for it when I tweeted about the Cairo uprising earlier this year,” Cole said of the incident. “It’s critical to our brand though…Nothing is black or white here. We are trying to figure it out, as is everyone else.”

Even as he praises the positive influence social media has had on social awareness initiatives, Cole reminisces about the days when “social” had a very different meaning.

“Is social media antisocial? Yes,” he said. “How are we defining social these days? We had a dinner for the blogging community a year ago, and everyone at the dinner table took out their cell phones. Not that long ago, that would have been considered rude.”

In spite of such nostalgia, Kenneth Cole is a gadget lover at heart. He owns an iPhone, a Blackberry, and an iPad, which have contributed to some information overload.

“I’m perpetually overwhelmed,” Cole said. “I used to try and consolidate, and now I just can’t do it anymore. I spend a lot of time with each of them.”

At its launch, the Where Do You Stand platform, which was developed by Kenneth Cole’s internal marketing team and Intersect, a web production agency, features four main discussion topics–marriage equality, gun control, abortion, and “war”–that the site’s creators say will evolve over time.

“Already, we’ve started looking at more provocative debates. As the national dialogue changes, so will we,” Cole said. “It’s sensitive to what people are talking about at the moment.”

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable hand-picks a few startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

How we as consumers of physical and digital content view and experience the world around us is changing, and the startups highlighted here are all dedicated to helping us better find, discover and consume content.

SocialGuide, which focuses on social media ratings of broadcast television shows, gives us a real-time glimpse at how viewing audiences are reacting to content. New video search engine Smivi aims to give us better tools to shift through the troves of the web’s video library. And, Sparkatour, a mobile guide maker optimized for museums, could come in handy when we’re exploring and consuming real-world content.

SocialGuide: Social Media Meets TV Guide

Genius Idea: Television show ratings that pivot around social conversations.

Mashable’s Take: Social media and armchair quarterback TV commentary seem to go hand-in-hand. Brooklyn-based SocialGuide, which launched in April, reveals much of this online chatter and makes sense of it in a TV guide-like fashion.

The service’s “Most Social Now” algorithm is a real-time ranking of TV shows generating the most online buzz. You can use SocialGuide to see which shows are super social, filter results by show genre, limit shows to just those your friends are watching or simply check out what’s on now.

SocialGuide also spits out “The Social 100? report of the top programs across 170 different cable networks. You can view the report in daily, weekly or monthly increments and check out the social performance stats for the top 100 shows.

SocialGuide has raised $1.5 million in funding from angel investors. In addition to its web app, the startup has TV companion apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

Smivi: Smart Video Search

Genius Idea: Discover live videos as you search.

Mashable’s Take: New video search engine Smivi launched its beta application Friday to help users better search for and discover online videos across the web — not just on YouTube.

“At its present data stage, Smivi has crawled videos from many of the top websites,” explains creator Danny Witters. “Smivi searches across numerous video sources and puts all relevant results, whether they are from YouTube, TED.com or ESPN.com, in one convenient place.”

Smivi also supports categorial search to help you filter video searches (use “search query .category”), and has a follow feature so you can keep track of your queries. Smivi also has a live search marker that informs you when videos on the results page are being live streamed.

Sparkatour: Mobile Phone Museum Tours

Genius Idea: Giving museums and their visitors a more practical alternative to audio guide hardware.

Mashable’s Take: Carrying around bulky audio hardware while touring a museum feels unnecessary, especially considering that most of us already tote around more-capable machines in our pockets. Such is the belief of Sparkatour, a San Antonio-based startup that helps museums create mobile guides to replace antiquated audio tours.

“Museumgoers are becoming increasingly more technologically savvy and want to interact with the pieces of art in different ways,” Sparkatour co-founder Kyle Rames explains. “Museums can leverage their visitors’ devices instead of purchasing equipment.”

Museums, for a cost, can use Sparkatour to quickly create a mobile app that includes all their video, audio and image content. They can even assign guests numbers to use as visitor keys to gain access to specific tour content.

Sparkatour’s first client is the San Antonio Museum of Art. The museum created a mobile guide for the last destination on its “The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama” exhibit. San Antonio River Foundation and The National Ranching Heritage Center are also said to be soon releasing mobile guides of their own.

Source :- http://mashable.com

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Twitter has added a way to flag links within tweets as “possibly sensitive.” The company announced late Thursday that there is a new field in the Twitter streaming API that will show up whenever a tweet contains a link, giving Twitter users the option to be warned before they click links that might be too sensitive for the workplace, or for tender ears and eyes.

The new feature is not functional yet, but Twitter was informing developers that it was just added and is now in the testing phase. According to Twitter representative Taylor Singletary, “In the future, we’ll have a family of additional API methods & fields for handling end-user ‘media settings’ and possibly sensitive content.”

According to Gizmodo, Twitter reps say the company doesn’t intend to censor material. But according to Twitter’s media policy document, the company will “remove media that might be considered sensitive such as nudity, violence, or medical procedures.”

In the announcement, Singletary encouraged those who were curious about how this capability would ultimately be used to read that media policy document.

To us, this seems like a feature that’s long overdue, giving users the ability to control the kind of content they or their children are exposed to, letting them use Twitter without fear of being unpleasantly surprised when they click on an inappropriate link.

Source :- http://mashable.com

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