An annual report from comScore on what happens online has shown that 1 in every 5 minutes of time online this year was spent on social networking sites – as compared to the 6% of internet time that went to social networking in 2007. By all accounts that sort of growth is expected to continue, and speed up, in 2012.
Yes, you read that correctly, the “occucopter” is a drone that is being used by protestors to monitor the police. As the 99 per cent continue their protests around the world, they’ve acquired their own surveillance drone. Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the “occucopter”.
It hasn’t been Woolworths’ finest month in retail relations. At the beginning of the month, the retailer abruptly announced it would be relieving Jupiter Drawing Room of its advertising business. Then, allegations of product counterfeiting and imitating began to emerge yesterday. Now, another small business owner has come forward and identified Woolworths as selling a knock-off of his product.
IsAnyoneUp.com is a website that posts pictures of user-submitted cellphone nudie pics, along with screenshots of their Facebook profiles. The only problem is, the Facebook profile part is often done without consent. Zuckerberg isn’t exactly happy about it.
Old Spice is at it again. This time, Isaiah Mustafa is MANta Claus, and he’s on a mission to give the world’s seven billion residents gifts before the festive season ends. His mantra is, “One Man, Seven Billion Gifts.”
How do you like them apples? Thanks to a technical glitch, never before seen photos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have leaked online. His longtime girlfriend, his dog, and Barack Obama also feature in them. A Facebook user reportedly exploited a security loophole and accessed them.
Facebook yesterday released a big ol’ lump of data about the most shared content of 2011, both globally and for specific countries. Osama Bin Laden’s death was far and away the most popular status update topic, followed distantly by the Super Bowl results and and the Casey Anthony trial for second and third most popular, respectively.
The Democratic Alliance today launched an aggressive campaign to protest the current form of the draft Protection of Information Bill. The political party is calling on all South Africans to join forces and show their support against the legislation, while also planning more protests.
Office Christmas party time is in full swing again, and those trigger-happy camera folk will be out in full force snapping and sharing photos with total disregard for the consequences. That’s what Norte beer’s Photoblocker is for: when a sensor built into this beer chiller detects a flash, it emits its own flash in order to overexpose any photograph.
Time Magazine has published photographs from inside Facebook’s Headquarters – taken shortly after Mark Zuckerburg was made Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year. The photographs reveal a bizarre work place which resembles something closer to The Office, than the fantasy land you might have thought. Sure, they’ve got free snacks and a coke machine, but […]
Twitter has revealed the 10 biggest stories to break on the micro-blogging site over the last year. These are moments in 2011 that happened first on Twitter, or “could only happen on Twitter”, according to the founders of the Twitter Stories project.
YouTube is launching what they’re calling their biggest redesign in history today – and, granted, every time a website changes they tend to say that, but the differences here are pretty striking, with sweeping changes to the homepage and channel pages, strongly emphasising social media integration.
In a glowing display of Christian charity and respect for others, a religious blog in America, Christians For A Moral America, has issued a statement to its followers via Twitter, calling on them to pray for pop singer, George Michael’s death.
Back in the day, people used to send each other messages using something they called the telegram. For the singing telegram, a real person actually used to call you up or come to your home and sing to you. Money transfer giant, Western Union, is bringing the singing telegram back and plans to get users involved: karaoke-style.
Yesterday DJ Fresh tweeted the following regarding a family member: “Attention seeking person i know says ‘i just tried to kill myself’… would it be ‘wrong’ to send them 5 ways that WILL work? #SOselfish [sic]”. He also called his cousin “a suicidal brat”. This has upset a lot of people, including the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), yet Fresh remains defiant on the matter.
Police in riot gear are moving in on anti-Wall Street activists in Los Angeles right now. They’re enforcing the mayor’s order to evict protesters who have camped outside City Hall for the past eight weeks. Supporters are streaming into the area in a show of solidarity as the protesters seek to defy the order and risk arrest.
Egyptians began voting today in the first election since toppling former President, Hosni Mubarak in February. These elections are the first of a programme of elections that will last until March 2012, and although only a tiny proportion of the population has internet access, Google is continuing to do its bit for democracy and hoping to inspire Egyptians to vote.
Facebook, the social network we all love to hate. Already in its seventh year of existence, the online community has managed to connect everyone with everyone, even if they barely know one-another. For exactly that reason, many people have gone about culling off some of these Facebook “friends”, and while it freed up their newsfeed, it left others scorned.
Not happy with their recent spate of public embarrassments, Qantas poured some more petrol on the PR fire to really get things going when they launched their recent Twitter campaign.
As part of it’s “off-season spring cleaning,” Google today announced the end of a handful of services, including Google Buzz, Google Wave, and Google Knol. The thinking behind the initiative is to free up resources for Google+ and other higher-priority projects. While some of the shut-downs make sense, others are a little more unexpected.
Pakistan’s telecoms watchdog, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, has decided that mobile phone operators in that country must block all text messages using offensive words. The list contains over 1 600 words and phrases including, “flogging the dolphin”. Some linguistic purists are expected to be delighted by the move that comes into force today, while George Orwell turns in his grave.
Happy birthday Facebook wall posts just got interesting. It probably won’t be long before one starts scrolling through those birthday wall posts to see who has sent a greeting card with a little bit of a surprise attached. Tech-savvy grannies everywhere will be rejoicing.
Thailand’s Thai Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Department confirmed that a total of 562 people have already died during the more than three-month long flooding taking place there, which is the worst in over 50 years. Nevertheless, some Thai residents affected by the flooding have begun dealing with the lemons that life has thrown at them in unique ways.
Nonhle Thema lost the plot again last night on Twitter. She tried to have another catfight with Bonang Matheba because Bonang had mentioned Nonhle’s name in an interview. But Nonhle ended up battling herself instead. It could also be because Bonang has more Twitter followers than Nonhle, and that Nonhle was jealous over Bonang’s new True Love cover shot.
There is a good chance you will have come across, or heard about, a cat meme. Either in picture or video format, they can be rather amusing. Or not. This isn’t an actual cat meme, but rather a lewd take on the phenomenon of cats and the internet.
Other than the obvious benefits of the various social networks out there; networking, re-connecting and event-planning, amongst other things, recently they have become a serious law-enforcement tool. In the most recent case, New Jersey police used Facebook to track down suspects in a vicious assault case involving a machete wielding madman.
Just when you thought the stench of death had finally lifted from the Harry Potter series, today it emerges that certain parts of Twitter are getting their eye-liner all smeared up regarding the fictional 30th anniversary of the slaying of teen wizard Harry’s fictional parents. For realsies…
There have been murders and rapes associated with Facebook, but this is likely to be the first house burning as a result of someone defriending someone else on the social networking website. Jennifer Christine Harris decided it was a good idea to burn down Nikki Rasmussen’s house while Nikki and her husband, Jim, were in their beds sleeping.
Rupert Murdoch will shortly face shareholders in the News Corporation annual general meeting that’s taking place in Los Angeles today. It should prove riveting as British lawmaker Tom Watson plans to use the event to reveal new details of what he claims are hidden surveillance practices by company employees.
Neuroscientists have discovered that using Facebook has a measurable impact on the size of particular areas of the brain. The results of a recent study show that the more Facebook friends you have, the bigger and denser become the three parts of your brain which are associated with the power to socialise. It’s unclear whether by ‘socialise’ they mean really, in real life. But maybe.