Remember “YouTwitFace,” the Conan O’Brien joke that took on a life of its own online? It could be a real Web site soon. On June 3, Mr. O’Brien brought back a popular sketch on “The Tonight Show” called “In the Year 2000,” in which he muses on the future. In one premonition, he said, “YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will merge to form one super time-wasting Web site called YouTwitFace.”
Larry Page should have been in a good mood. It was the fall of 2007, and Google’s cofounder was in the middle of a five-day tour of his company’s European operations in Zurich, London, Oxford, and Dublin. The trip had been fun, a chance to get a ground-floor look at Google’s ever-expanding empire.
Mothers have dramatically increased their use of social-networking tools in the past three years, according to a new survey of 25,000 women conducted by parenting site BabyCenter.
About 63 percent of moms used Facebook, Twitter and blogs this year, a whopping increase from 11 percent in 2006.
Facebook is testing a new privacy setting that for the first time allows its members to share their status updates and items with a wider Internet audience than just Facebook members.
The status update box–now called Publisher and an all-purpose location for updates, links and photos–will allow users to customize their audience.
In the wake of the disputed Iranian election, American Internet companies including Facebook and Twitter have given Iranians an avenue to voice their opinions and to break through the wall of censorship their embattled government has built around the country’s traditional media.
Given the buzz over the last few days about the role that Twitter has played as a communications platform for the Iranian protesters, it would be tempting to take a cynical view about the fact that Facebook today is announcing that it is launching a new version of the site…in Persian.
European privacy regulators could be about to throw a spanner into the works of attempts by social networking sites such as Facebook to find new ways to increase profits as they try to restrict the way internet groups release personal data.
Social networking services like Facebook and Twitter have played a remarkable role in breaking the Iranian government’s grip on information, both before and after last Friday’s election. But lately, access to the Internet in Iran has slowed to a crawl, demonstrating considerable technical sophistication on the part of Iranian authorities.
Imagine the odds: No sooner did Facebook swing open the doors to its fire sale of vanity URLs than a geeky frat party ensued, as members reserved prankish, clever and lewd names instead of maybe the digital alias their friends (and mothers) might have hoped for.
The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned.
A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.
This Saturday, Facebook users get to replace the string of numbers Facebook has assigned them as a profile name with a personalized URL based on their real name, or another alias they choose.
This means Facebook users can find each other by remembering the address of a profile–tough to do currently, since profiles are currently in a format like www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=12345678. If users have opted to make their profiles public, anyone could get to them by typing in the new URLs too.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been, and remains, one of the world’s harshest censors of the Internet, frequently blocking sites that are deemed “immoral” and politically offensive to the unelected authorities in power.
While 99 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on social networks, only 22 percent use Twitter, according to a new survey from Pace University and the Participatory Media Network.
We don’t espouse political philosophy here on Inside Facebook, though we are in favor of encouraging constructive political debate.
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