Twitter has fixed a major bug that saw many users of the service appear to lose all of their followers and friends.
The problem began when a flaw was uncovered that allowed people to force others to “follow” them on the site.
People who typed “accept” followed by a person’s Twitter name forced the user to be added to their list of followers.
The hack was quickly passed around the social network with many people using it to force celebrities to follow them.
Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.
Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.
The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.
While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago ”” mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.
It is the online version of the bathroom wall in school, the place to scrawl raw, anonymous gossip.
Formspring.me, a relatively new social networking site, has become a magnet for comments, many of them nasty and sexual, among the Facebook generation.
While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.
By setting up a free Formspring account and linking it to their Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook accounts, young people invite their hundreds of online friends to ask questions or post comments, without having to identify themselves.
In part, Formspring is just the latest place to hang out and exchange gossip, as teenagers have always done. But because of the anonymity, the banter is unvarnished.
“We’ve still barely hit the tip of the iceberg for people who could play [the] games but don’t think they can,” says David Roberts, the CEO of PopCap, the company that created Bejeweled.
“With Bejeweled, 70 percent of our customers are women, and that astounds almost everybody,” he says….
Roberts says people were wrong in assuming that games on Facebook would appeal to a more traditional audience of younger males.
“What you find is a lot of women who are both working and raising children just have no time for relationships,” says Misiek Piskorski, who teaches about online social networking at the Harvard Business School. “But it’s not like they wouldn’t want to spend more time having these relationships. It’s just really, really hard. And this allows them to basically sustain these relationships.”
As he sat in Church last Sunday afternoon, Guillaume Humblot found himself troubled by the declining number of Catholic priests in France, and asked himself if he was ready to join the cloth.
“There are almost none left,” the 31-year-old Humblot said.
On Facebook, Humblot discovered a forum dedicated to people who, like him, are considering the priesthood. The page was part of a campaign, launched by the Catholic Church this month, to attract young people to the priesthood following decades of dwindling ordainments ”” and amid waves of sexual abuse allegations that have darkened the reputation of the Catholic priest.
Earlier this month, Facebook sought to increase its reach by connecting with other sites across the Web. The Open Graph Protocol, announced at Facebook’s f8 Developers Conference, makes it easier for outside sites to share information with Facebook when visitors want to recommend a page. But Facebook has come under increasing scrutiny for making users’ data more public and available to search engines and for making changes to the terms of its privacy policy, which some users have been unaware of.
Few have been as vocal about Facebook’s actions as Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England. More generally, she has called for Web companies to take more responsibility for how they handle users’ personal information. Technology Review’s assistant editor, Erica Naone, recently talked with Boyd about how to think about Facebook’s latest moves….
Pope Benedict XVI isn’t the world’s most prolific celebrity blogger. In fact, he’s not on Twitter and his Facebook profile is more empty than St. Peter’s Basilica on a Monday. But His Holiness isn’t as out of the Internet loop as you might think (The Vatican does have its own YouTube channel). On Saturday, the Pope took to the airwaves to discuss the spiritual advantages (and shortcomings) of the Internet, and to inspire Internet users to be more conscious of how we connect.
It’s our responsibility to preserve the “quality of human contact, guaranteeing attention to people,” Pope Benedict said at “Digital Witness,” a panel organized by the Italian Episcopal Community.
“The dangers of homologation and control, of intellectual and moral relativism are also increasing, as already recognizable in the decline of critical spirit, in truth reduced to a game of opinions, in the many forms of degradation and humiliation of the intimacy of the person.”
Charities are always looking for new ways to raise funds, and for some, reaching out electronically with social media tools like Twitter and Facebook is a perfect match.
For example, the American Red Cross’ successful text-messaging campaign raised tens of millions of dollars for Haiti. It spurred charities’ interest in the use of social media, but nonprofits are finding that some of these new fundraising methods need to be handled with care.
Northern Virginia Family Service, a relatively small nonprofit in Virginia that helps needy families, participated in a new Pepsi Refresh contest, hoping to receive some of the $20 million Pepsi is giving away this year to nonprofits and individuals that win the most votes online for their charitable proposals.
The group wanted to win $50,000 so it could buy a much-needed walk-in freezer and refrigerator for its food pantry. It has used Facebook and Twitter as well as an updated Web site and a YouTube video to win support.
Like many Americans, Doug Pagitt grew up outside the world of organized religion. Neither his parents nor his grandparents were churchgoers, and there was no expectation that he would be any different. Today, with his goatee, ear stud and funky clothes, he could easily pass for the sort of Gen X hipster who lives an entirely secular life.
But at 17, Pagitt saw a Passion play that hit him like a thunderbolt, and he wound up becoming a Christian pastor. His church in Minneapolis, Solomon’s Porch, is blazing a trail in a new movement that could be called Church 2.0.
That was, in fact, one of the terms used last week during a three-day conference about the future of American Christianity at the Claremont School of Theology. Pagitt was among about 150 ministers, laypeople and academics who gathered to discuss “Theology After Google.”
The consensus: It’s a whole new world out there. Churches will ignore it at their peril.
Like many Americans, Doug Pagitt grew up outside the world of organized religion. Neither his parents nor his grandparents were churchgoers, and there was no expectation that he would be any different. Today, with his goatee, ear stud and funky clothes, he could easily pass for the sort of Gen X hipster who lives an entirely secular life.
But at 17, Pagitt saw a Passion play that hit him like a thunderbolt, and he wound up becoming a Christian pastor. His church in Minneapolis, Solomon’s Porch, is blazing a trail in a new movement that could be called Church 2.0.
That was, in fact, one of the terms used last week during a three-day conference about the future of American Christianity at the Claremont School of Theology. Pagitt was among about 150 ministers, laypeople and academics who gathered to discuss “Theology After Google.”
The consensus: It’s a whole new world out there. Churches will ignore it at their peril.
Faced with declining enrolment and revenue that will force it to shutter churches on Vancouver Island, the Anglican Church is turning to the social medium where millions of followers already flock: Twitter.
The Anglican Diocese of British Columbia last weekend voted to close seven churches outright and move those congregations to “hub churches.” The meeting, during which several members tweeted updates to followers, came on the heels of an ominous recent report that predicted that the once powerful church was headed for extinction unless dramatic changes occur.
In addition to recommending that churches close, the report described Canada as a post-Christian society and urged a change in attitude to attract new members, including embracing modern forms of evangelism.
When it comes to Facebook, Jesse Rice sees an immensely popular social networking site that’s great for sharing photos and keeping in touch with friends.
He also sees something that encourages attitudes and behaviors that don’t work as well in real life.
Rice, 37, is the author of “The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community.” A former worship leader an evangelical megachurch in California, he has degrees in organizational communication and counseling/psychology and — just as important to his readers — a sense of humor.
The call to blog took a lot of people by surprise. After all, the 82-year-old from Bavaria is better known for his conservative doctrine and revival of the Latin Mass than for his computer savvy. At first, the Rev. James Martin was startled as well. Martin is the author of The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything and blogs each day for the Catholic magazine America. Then Martin thought, surely Jesus would blog if he were on the Earth today.
“He didn’t sit around and wait for people to come to him,” Martin observes. “He went out and met people by the Sea of Galilee who were fishing. He went to tax collectors’ booths. He went into synagogues. He went all over the place. And so we need to, figuratively speaking, go out to the ends of the Earth ”” which includes the blogosphere.”
The pope has not announced his own blog. But if he does, he might be wise to listen to the experts.
On the morning of Christmas Eve last week, I arrived at my gym””usually open at 5 a.m.””at 7:40, only to find that the holiday had delayed its opening to 8 a.m. Four of us stood there in a vestibule, listening to a frosty wind blow outdoors. The moment seemed perfect for holiday banter””how virtuous we were to be squeezing in a workout, how virtue would utterly disappear in the festive hours ahead. But one fellow pulled out his BlackBerry, and as if on cue, the rest of us did the same. For 20 minutes we read or sent emails and spoke nary a word to each other.
Of course, the image of the Internet holdout isn’t exactly a wholesome one. “Luddite” is the usual word for him, and the most infamous Luddite in modern times, Ted Kaczynski, was a lonely lunatic who killed and maimed in the name of tradition.
But in truth, little is really known about the offline American, and much is assumed: that he is rural, poor and possibly militant in his opposition to the Internet (although one blessing is that such opponents would have trouble finding each other offline).
It’s another Sunday morning at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Southern California. But some congregants are holding more than just the printed page, thanks to their iPhones. That’s because they have access to the entire Bible on the device.
Technology is producing a new form of religious interaction. There are over two dozen Bible apps for smart phones. And beyond Scripture, people are using gadgets for devotional purposes.
Dave and Jackie Brown had been reciting the rosary in their daughter Isabella’s hospital room. But her cancer treatment made her sensitive to light.
Here in the United States, an office of the Pentagon held an unusual contest earlier this month. Researchers wanted to see how thousands of people around the world could compete and collaborate to solve a problem that was too big for any one individual. The task was to find balloons scattered around the U.S. Competitors posted information and misinformation on Twitter and other social networking sites. Dr. Peter Lee is with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which sponsored the contest.
Dr. LEE: On December 5, we, in 10 public but undisclosed locations in the continental U.S., hoisted big red eight-foot wide weather balloons, about 50 to 100 feet in the air. And we challenged the world to find them. And the first person to report the locations – latitude and longitude of all 10 – would win a $40,000 prize.
[ARI] SHAPIRO: What was the point of this?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. LEE: There were several reasons we did this. I think the most fundamental is we wanted to create the conditions that would allow researchers to understand something more about how information flows on the Internet and on social networks. But we also wanted to create an adversarial situation.
Caught this one yesterday via podcast on the morning run–fascinating. Read or listen to it all.