Facebook logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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

Cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This article was updated from one that appears on ConnectSafely.org after the Yahoo password breach on July 12, 2012

A strong and confidential password is essential, not just for financial sites, but for social networking sites too. With social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, there’s the danger of people faking their way into the site and posting something embarrassing about you or others. They could use your account for hate speech or to bully or defame another person or put something on your site that jeopardizes your reputation or even your safety. Another risk is that they could use your online profile to assume your identity as part of a con, such as logging into a person’s Facebook account and using it to solicit money from his friends to a “friend” out of a tight spot.

Children and teens should be especially careful to never share their passwords, even with their best friends. It’s sometimes tempting for kids to give out their password to a friend so that the friend can update or check their profile for them, but it’s a bad idea. Friends have a way of becoming ex-friends and there is the danger that a friend might share the password or be careless with it.

Have strong passwords
One of the best ways to protect your online security is to have strong passwords that you change periodically. But that’s easier said than done. Coming up with hard-to-guess passwords is hard enough, but it’s even harder to have separate passwords for different sites and to remember new ones after you change them.

One way to create a password that’s hard to guess but easy to remember is to make up a phrase. You could type in the entire phrase (some sites let you use spaces, others don’t) or you can use the initials of each word in the phrase, for instance, “IgfLESi#85? for “I graduated from Lincoln Elementary School in ’85″ with a # symbol to add more security. An even better one would be “Mn1bfihswE&S” for “My number 1 best friends in high school were Eric and Steve.” You get the idea-upper case numbers, letters, and symbols that are seemingly meaningless to everyone but you. Microsoft has an excellent primer on passwords and a password strength checker.

• Don’t use the same password on all sites

But even if you do come up with a clever and hard-to-remember password, don’t use it for every site. Since lots of people do that, there’s the risk that a sleazy site operator — or a sleazy person who works for a legitimate site — could use it to break into your accounts on other sites. Or if hackers break into a site and grabs some passwords, they might try to use those passwords on other sites. One trick is to add a couple of unique characters for each site. For example, for your Google accounts you could have “Go” somewhere in the password and perhaps “Fk” in your Facebook password.

• Extra security for financial sites

You might want to consider having even stronger passwords for financial sites where there is a financial incentive for hackers to break in. Again, use numbers and symbols and letters that have no meaning to anyone but you.

• Lots of people have weak passwords

You might be surprised at the passwords some people use. After a July, 2012 password breach at Yahoo, CNET’s Declan McCullagh wrote a program to analyze passwords and found 780 times where “password” was used as a password and 2,295 “times a sequential list of numbers was used, with “123456″ by far being the most popular password. There were several other instances where the numbers were reversed, or a few letters were added in a token effort to mix things up.”

• Password managers

One solution is to use a password manager. There are several available programs and Web storage services, but the ones I’m most familiar with are RoboForm and Lastpass. These programs can generate passwords for you and remember them so you don’t have to. Both programs are, themselves, password protected, though you have the option of running RoboForm without a password or having Lastpass remember its own password on your computer, tablet or smart phone. That’s OK as long as no one else has access to your machine. I recommend that you manually enter your master password on a laptop or mobile device that could more easily fall into the wrong hands.

On Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer, Lastpass records your usernames and passwords when you first enter password-protected sites and then enters them for you automatically for subsequent visits. Passwords are stored in a “vault,” which is actually a Web page stored on your PC, as well as the company’s servers, so you can access it from any device, including a borrowed machine. The password vault on your machine is automatically synchronized with the server, so you don’t have to worry about synchronizing or backing up your data.

For a lot more on this password management, see CNET News reporter Elinor Mills’ post, “Facing the pain of passwords.”

Also, see ConnectSafely.org’s “Tips to Create and Manage Strong Passwords.”

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Kept graffitti in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s common practice to be asked to turn off your smartphone during a fitness class. But one Bay Area yoga instructor’s device ban cost her a job at Facebook.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Alice Van Ness routinely started her classes at the social networking company’s Menlo Park campus with a request that students stow their phones.

In March, one student started fiddling with her device at the front of the class while in the middle of an acrobatic half-moon pose, MSNBC reports.

Although Van Ness didn’t say anything to the student, she did give a disapproving look. And the look didn’t go unnoticed.

“I’m sure my face said it all,” the 35-year-old teacher later wrote in a blog post. “Previously, I had been asked by management to just let the students do whatever they wanted.”

The student later complained to the fitness center management. Two weeks later, Van Ness received her termination notice from Plus One Health Management, the contractor that employed her, which cited poor customer service as the reason.

According to the Chronicle, the dismissal also cost Van Ness a chance at a job with Cisco.

While she was outraged at first, Van Ness ultimately decided that she was happier not teaching class at tech companies, where “she routinely found herself dealing with students who came in late, left early, and fidgeted during short meditations.”

“The culture of these places is to let them do whatever they want,” she told the paper. “And I’m just not really okay with anarchy.”

According to her LinkedIn profile, Van Ness has taught yoga, Pilates and spinning in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than six years. Comments on Van Ness’ personal website laud her attentiveness to students’ individual needs.

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

Image via CrunchBase

Do you use your Facebook account to log onto places like LinkedIn and Yelp from your phone?

If so, get ready to start seeing ads in your mobile device’s Facebook News Feed that will be targeted based on your mobile app usage.

Here’s how it will work, according to the Wall Street Journal: if you like to play Zynga Inc.’s “Words with Friends,” your mobile News Feed will soon target you with ads for yet more Zynga games.

If the WSJ’s sources are correct about all this, the new ads will represent a boundary-breaking move for an ad-delivery company, given that none has thusfar tracked consumers on the basis of mobile app usage.

The ads will be enabled by the Facebook Connect feature, which lets users easily log in to third-party sites, applications, mobile devices and gaming systems with their Facebook identities.

Sources familiar with Facebook’s plans told the WSJ that the company is launching a new type of mobile advertising that will target consumers based on what apps they use, “pushing the limits of how companies track what people do on their phones.”

But wait, there’s more.

The unnamed sources told the WSJ that beyond tracking consumers’ use of mobile apps, Facebook is also pondering whether to track what people doon those apps.

That move would be an even bigger game-changer. As it now stands, mobile-ad networks only target consumers based on what ads a person clicks on from his or her mobile browser.

Both Apple and Google track their users’ mobile apps, but neither company tracks what people do in those apps.

One of the WSJ’s sources said that Facebook will charge advertisers every time an app is installed on a user’s smartphone.

That’s a highly profitable prospect, the WSJ noted, for obvious reasons – i.e., a heck of a lot more consumers download apps than click on ads:

Facebook can charge significantly more for an app installation than it can for the traditional cost of every one thousand people who have viewed an ad. 

Privacy advocates would far prefer that Facebook let users log in with Facebook Connect and then have a way to opt out of the new mobile ad targeting.

The WSJ quoted Justin Brookman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s project on consumer privacy, who noted that consumers just aren’t used to having ad companies peering over their shoulders every time they use a mobile app:

"Once you're signed in, are you really expecting that Facebook is going to be watching you while you're on there?" 

Of course, with the post-IPO Facebook now under the gun to monetize features such as Facebook Connect, it’s hard to imagine that the company won’t track what people do in their mobile apps.

What would that look like? The possibilities are limited only by our activities while using mobile apps.

Searching for experts in a given field – say, infosec! – in LinkedIn, for example, would open up whole new worlds of targeted advertising.

One of the WSJ’s sources said the new ads might be announced on July 16, unless privacy concerns convince the company to hold off on mentioning it until Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg conducts the company’s first earnings call with analysts on July 26.

The new ads would then launch on July 30, the source said.

Source:- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, shows off the new messaging system in Facebook. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg updated his status to “married” on Saturday.

Zuckerberg and 27-year-old Priscilla Chan tied the knot at a small ceremony at his Palo Alto, Calif., home, capping a busy week for the couple, according to a guest authorized to speak for the couple. The person spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

Zuckerberg took his company public in one of the most anticipated stock offerings in Wall Street history Friday. And Chan graduated from medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, on Monday, the same day Zuckerberg turned 28, the person said.

The couple met at Harvard and have been together for more than nine years, the person said.

Zuckerberg designed the ring featuring “a very simple ruby,” according to the person.

The ceremony took place in Zuckerberg’s backyard before fewer than 100 guests, including Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

The guests all thought they were coming to celebrate Chan’s graduation but were told after they arrived that the event was in fact a wedding.

“Everybody was shocked,” the guest said.

Rather than his trademark hoodie, Zuckerberg wore a suit for the ceremony, while his bride wore a traditional wedding dress.

Food was served family-style and included dishes from the couple’s favorite Palo Alto sushi restaurant. The two had been planning the marriage for months but were waiting until Chan had graduated to hold the wedding, the guest said.

The timing wasn’t tied to the IPO, since the date the company planned to go public was a “moving target,” the guest said.

Even after the IPO, Zuckerberg remains Facebook’s single largest shareholder, with 503.6 million shares. And he controls the company with 56 percent of its voting stock.

The site, which was born in a dorm room eight years ago, has grown into a worldwide network of almost a billion people.

Zuckerberg founded Facebook at Harvard in 2004.

He was selected as Time’s Person of the Year in 2010, at age 26.

Zuckerberg grew up in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

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

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Front page of The Pirate Bay, 20th June 2009. Screenshot. Text – “Click here to help Iran” “The Persian Bay” Licensing: TBP website carries the Kopimi license (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Pirate Bay has been down for over 24-hours as a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, according to the website’s Facebook account.

It’s not uncommon for the popular file-sharing website to be down for a few hours, but an outage this long is rare.

Torrent Freak and ZDNet have speculated that Anonymous may be behind the attack. Last week, The Pirate Bay criticized Anonymous for taking down Virgin Media’s website after the service provider blocked The Pirate Bay under an order from the British High Court.

The Pirate Bay responded to the attack on Virgin Media by saying, “We do NOT encourage these actions. We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us.”

The BBC reports it is unlikely that Anonymous is behind the current Pirate Bay DDoS though, since they typically defend–not attack– sites like The Pirate Bay.

The attack may be the least of The Pirate Bay’s problems, though. Founder Fredrik Neij is currently serving jail time in Sweden over copyright violation charges. The Hague recently ordered Dutch internet providers to block the Torrent-friendly website, making it virtually inaccessible to the entire country.

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

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iPhone 2g, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 (Photo credit: reticulating)

For about five years now, the question for smartphone buyers has been a classic either/or: “Android or iPhone?” Answering that question is more difficult than ever, thanks to large advances in Android, as well as the emergence of a third viable option: Microsoft’s beautiful Windows Phone OS.

This week, we’ll attempt to break down your three options, looking at each operating system’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. Which one you choose should depend largely on how you use your phone.

For the first part of this comparison, let’s look at the iPhone and the iOS operating system. The most oft-repeated (and spot-on) description of the iPhone and its operating system is that Apple knows what you want and gives it to you and doesn’t let you change it; you can’t really alter or customize the experience because — well, why would you want to?

Frankly, you would want to. There’s a lot that’s perfect about iOS, but there’s also a lot it could learn from Android and Windows Phone. Here’s where it sparkles over its competitors and where it could use work:

Strengths :-

• Games And Apps: Apple doesn’t just have the most apps in its app store; it also has the best apps. This is especially true for gaming: Gameplay on the iPhone is smoother than on any other smartphone I’ve tried.

• Camera: The camera on the iPhone 4S trumps any other smartphone camera I’ve tried. The HTC One X comes close, but for high-quality photography day or night, the iPhone 4S is your best bet.

• Easy To Use: The iPhone still has a simple interface that makes it a good buy for a first-time smartphone user. I think Windows Phone is a little easier to use — the larger icons help, especially for older buyers with declining eyesight — but the iPhone is still idiot-proof, from initial use, to navigating the phone, to the use of each individual app. The always-available Apple support team of Geniuses also helps.

• iMessage: The iPhone is the most popular single smartphone in America, and with iMessage, texting any other iPhone is essentially free. Rather than counting against your monthly text message, any message sent over iMessage counts a minimal amount against your data plan.

• Device Speed: Forget processors — the iPhone is still, screen-to-screen, the fastest smartphone experience that is available. Apps and games load quickly and without stutter, and the touchscreen is always responsive to your touch, something that no Android phone can say quite yet. It’s a satisfying experience and a big reason why the iPhone maintains its slick appearance.

Weaknesses -:

• Maps/Navigation: We’re still waiting on voice navigation — spoken turn-by-turn directions — on the Maps app on the iPhone. You can download other apps (for free) with Voice Navigation, but when you click on an address in an email or on a website to get directions, you’ll be taken into Apple’s Maps, not your GPS app of choice. Frustrating.

• Facebook: Uploading photos to Facebook — and Instagram, Google+, Dropbox and more, but let’s focus on the world’s largest social network — is harder than it should be on the iPhone. When you take a photo on Android or Windows Phone, there is an option to upload it to Facebook and even tag your friends straight from the camera. On the iPhone, you have to go into the Facebook app and manually upload it. Apps just don’t communicate with each other very well on the iPhone. For example, here is what I can do with a photo on the HTC One X versus what I can do with a photo on the iPhone 4S:

iPhone on the left, Android on the right. The list of apps you can share with grows as you download more applications (like Tumblr, Google+, etc.).

• Homescreen: The iPhone’s homescreen, and your options for what can be shown on it, is the most rigid and limited of the three major operating systems. When you unlock your iPhone’s screen, you’re going to be looking at your static rows of icons and nothing else. On Android and Windows Phone, you have the option to have “widgets” or “live tiles,” respectively, that can give you a preview of your new mail, the current weather, top headlines, Facebook and Twitter updates, etc, without having to open any individual app.

• Mail: Email on the iPhone is disappointing. Email reliably arrives slower on my iPhone than it does on Android devices, and searching through your archives for old messages is harder on the iPhone.

• 3G: Word is that Verizon salespeople are now pushing prospective iPhone buyers over to 4G Android devices, because the iPhone 4S runs on the slower 3G network rather than the newer, faster 4G network. Some writers are upset about this, but they really shouldn’t be: The fact is that, to a consumer who just wants a phone that can make calls, send text messages and surf the Internet, the difference between operating systems matters less than the difference between 3G and 4G speeds. According to a 2012 study from PCWorld, 3G smartphones’ (like the iPhone 4S) data speeds were around 1.05 megabytes per second on the download. On Verizon’s 4G LTE network, that number rose to 7.35 megabytes per second. It’s a speed advantage that is tangible when you are surfing the web or downloading apps on your smartphone.

So Who Should Buy The iPhone?

Buying an iPhone 4S is like walking into a pizza shop and getting a slice of pepperoni pie. It’s a safe choice that won’t let you down, but if you start to think about it, you might end up wondering what else you might have gotten.

The iPhone 4S is easily the best smartphone option for those who spend a lot of time playing games on their phones or who download a lot of apps to fill out their phone’s functions. For those who use their phone as their primary camera, the iPhone 4S is also the best choice. Given how easy it is to use, and Apple’s famously accessible “Geniuses” at its retail stores, I would also recommend it for first-time smartphone buyers who don’t feel comfortable or confident in their ability to navigate the system. If you anticipate having lots of questions or needing assistance, Apple’s help desk is phenomenal.

For those using their smartphone as an email, text message, Internet-browsing-portal, I would hold off on buying the iPhone until it upgrades to 4G LTE (probably in October), especially if you live in a large city, where 4G coverage will arrive first. You just might feel awfully silly with a 3G phone two years from now, considering the booming speeds and multibillion dollar expansion in 4G LTE networks that the four major U.S. carriers are going through right now. If you’re committed to iOS and the iPhone, wait five months to get a new phone.

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

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Image via CrunchBase

The technology has got advanced to a great extent, even; social networking phones are running on a fuel cell. But the main competition is in the field of social media network of goggle. There have been a lot of speculations that users made regarding Google’s social network known as Google Plus. With its rapid growth which surpassed other networks by 25 million in just a month, by far surpassing the growth of huge social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have achieved in their past years, it has shocked the entire online community and has even posed as a threat for the existing social media giants. However, true the figure is, it is still not enough. Google+ was still unable to draw in a huge number of followings and keep them intact in the network unlike what its giant competitors did. Google+ indeed has some unique features such as their “Hangouts” feature and other video conferencing tools which can’t be seen within any other social networks. In fact, these are truly impressive but the point here is how come that Google’s latest social networking attempt is a big failure?

There are in fact several reasons behind why users tend to stick to their current social networks rather than deviate to a whole new one. And for the part of the premature Google plus, here are some reasons why the network just won’t catch the heart of the crowd.

Nobody wants another social network as of this time -:

“Nobody wants another social network right now”. Those words came straight from Brian Solis, a well-known social media analyst from Altimeter Group. This might sound to be quite illogical, but it is in fact true. People are just too hooked up to the already famous social networks, and they just can’t find the time to jump off to a new one. Even though Google plus have just reached about 90 million registered users, it still pales in comparison with Facebook’s 845 million monthly users and 100 million that of Twitter. These numbers only show that you can find a lot of your colleagues and friends on Facebook and Twitter than you can on Google plus.

Also by comparison, ComScore has the number that Google+ users only spent a few three minutes per month on the network from September to January as compared to that of Facebook which goes around an average of 405 minutes per month.

Negative aspect of G+ -:

Lately Google has been coming under pressure in recent weeks because of the news that their user numbers and the amount of time that people are spending on the site are getting down by great time. To be honest here it is no surprise as I’ve been very negative on their chances since day one, but even I can’t believe on the sort of stuff they are releasing now. They have just announced that their latest feature is a mask that you can add to their Google Hangouts product so as you can turn yourself in to, wait for it….A cat or a dog. I literally thought it must have been April fool’s day or something when I first saw the story but it clearly isn’t and this is the level they have descended to in order to get attention for something that is turning in to a huge failure for them. People will turn around and say that this is only a bit of fun and a quirky little feature but Google seem to be doing more and more of this useless attention seeking stuff in recent times and it really is bordering on pathetic.
Google continues to ship upgrades to Google + at an unprecedented level. Even though Google considers it’s users of Google + as more of a “product” versus a customer they are obviously concerned about keeping the users satisfied and making sure that their over all experience on the site is a positive one.  There are at least two new upgrades this week worth noting: New invite feature to Hangouts and the change to the +1 button.

Over a million websites use Google+ plugins — like the +1 button and the badge for Pages – to help visitors connect with their brand and share their content with others. Today we’re excited to announce a number of improvements to these plugins that make sharing and connecting even easier.

Easier to share from the +1 button -:

Well, starting from today itself, it’ll be a little easier to share right from the +1 buttons all across the web. Now, after you +1 something, the share box will pop open right away, without an extra click. Add a comment if you want, choose the people you want to share with, and you’re done.

Easier to follow brands and businesses -:

When you add Google+ pages to your circles, it’s typically to follow their news and updates. That’s why we’re updating badges for Google+ pages to read “Follow.” With just one click, this button adds a business or brand to your “Following” circle, and if you want to customize which circle they’re in, you can do that too.

If you’re one of the many businesses and brands with a Google+ page, we’ve also put together a handy style guide (pdf) which includes recommended language and images for promoting your page.

Adding a badge for people, not just pages -:

We heard you! Now anyone (including Britney Spears!) can add a personal Google+ badge to their web pages, and let visitors add them to circles quickly and easily.

We’ve got lots more planned for the Google+ plugins, stay tuned!

About the author: Claudia is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on luxury and technology. These days she is working on google autonomous. 

YouTube – snapshot (Photo credit: tarop)

From the Dollar Shave Club to the taxidermy mastery of Chuck Testa, YouTube has shown itself to be an indispensable tool for businesses with creative campaigns to market themselves. Yet, until now, YouTube lacked the insightful and statistics-heavy tools that many brands use on sites like Facebook for evaluating their advertising campaigns. In a blog post on the YouTube blog, Baljeet Singh, a group product manager for YouTube, has introduced Google AdWords for video.

“With a global audience of 800 million monthly visitors to YouTube, every day can feel like you’re advertising in the Super Bowl, and one video can launch a business,”Singh wrote in the post.

Google AdWords for video will offer several ways for a businesses advertisements to gain visibility and micro target users who show interest in their products or industry. Combining YouTube with the Google Display Network, which includes millions of websites, allows brands to decide whether they want to pay to have their content searchable by a specific keyword or in connection with common interests or searches.

AdWords will also allow businesses to better understand the effectiveness and efficiency of their ad campaigns on YouTube. Tools will allow businesses to see how many people stayed to watch the entire video, visited the company website, stayed on the channel to watch another video and if they shared the video or subscribed to the channel after viewing an ad. In conjunction with AdWords will be TrueView video ads which allows for less wasteful spending, ensuring creators are only charged when people are truly engaged by the video and not those who skip the video or are repeat viewers.

To get the initiative rolling, Google and YouTube are offering $50 million in free advertising to help 500,000 businesses get into the online video world. Companies new to YouTube will receive a $75 credit when they sign up, enough money for a video campaign to reach 1,500 customers on YouTube for one month. YouTube is also offering an Advertiser Playbook sharing tips on how videos can help your business and the My Business Story channel, which are free tools you can use to create your first video. A so-called ambassador program, comprised of nine businesses who have built a following through successful through video campaigns, will be another resource for businesses that are new to YouTube to learn how to grow their brand.

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

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Image via CrunchBase

Facebook’s making more of your data available to you. The social network announced on its Privacy page on April 12 that its users will now be able to download “an expanded archive of your Facebook account history” through the updated Download Your Information feature available on the Account Settings page.

According to Facebook, the Download Your Information feature was first made available in 2010 and allows users to receive a copy of material they have shared on Facebook, including pictures, posts, messages and a list of friends and chat conversations.

With this latest update, a user will now be able to access even more information, such as previous names one has used on the social network, friend requests one has made and Internet protocol addresses from which one has logged on to the site. Eventually, Facebook will add even more categories of information that users will be able to download for themselves.

The Next Web points out, however, that users will not be able to download comments they have made on other people’s posts, friends’ pictures or status updates and any other personal information that belongs to other users.

According to The New York Times, this update is Facebook’s follow-through with an agreement it made with the Irish Data Protection Commission last December, following concerns raised by Austrian law student Max Schrems and others over how the social network stores its users’ information.

While Facebook is now making more information available to users, it’s still not enough for Schrems.

“We welcome that Facebook users are now getting more access to their data, but Facebook is still not in line with the European Data Protection Law,” he told The New York Times. “With the changes, Facebook will only offer access to 39 data categories, while it is holding at least 84 such data categories about every user.”

According to the BBC, Facebook will undergo a formal review by the Irish data protection commissioner of the progress it’s made this coming July.

What do you think about Facebook’s update to its Download Your Information feature? Do you think Facebook users should have more access to data? Let us know in the comments, but make sure to answer our poll below before you do!

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

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