Wired's Danger Room blog reports that the U.S. Military is banning Twitter and social networks including Facebook and MySpace because of security concerns. Danger Room says the ban will last one year.
"These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries," reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday. "The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel... at an elevated risk of compromise."
The Marines' ban will last a year. It was drawn up in response to a late July warning from U.S. Strategic Command, which told the rest of the military it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites, due to network security concerns. Scams, worms, and Trojans often spread unchecked throughout social media sites, passed along from one online friend to the next. "The mechanisms for social networking were never designed for security and filtering. They make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users," a Stratcom source told Danger Room.
Danger Room also notes there are many in the military who find value in microblogging and social networks. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is on Twitter at @thejointstaff. He tweeted recently, "Obviously we need to find right balance between security and transparency. We are working on that. But am I still going to tweet? You bet."
A list of military twitterers can be found here on WeFollow.com.
901am reports that RIM has established a social network just for BlackBerry users called MyBlackBerry.
Perhaps it's because the company, while far from abandoning corporate users, is increasingly looking to impress consumers that the move has happened. The company has a large user base but certainly needs to do something fresh to stave off competition from the likes of Apple's iPhone and other smartphone manufacturers.
Facebook this social network isn't, but rather it's designed more as a bulletin board for users to talk (rant) about the various flavors of BlackBerry, set up a personal profile (tailored dependent on which handset you own), and rate and review applications.
The community could help BlackBerry because it provides a forum where people can share help with others and encourage other BlackBerry users to try new Apps and upgrades. There are many others ways - and many other social networks already existance - where manufacturers to keep up with problems, complaints and trends but RIM must have felt they could keep a better tabs on things by having an in-house community.
The White House blogged today about the launch of MySpace, Twitter and Facebook accounts for the White House. The White House says most of the content will come from the White House RSS feed but they do want to hear from followers. The blog posts says, "The WhiteHouse blog (RSS) will power a lot of the content in these networks, but we're looking forward to hearing from our fans, friends and followers."
Zac Efron may be the future but he isn't embracing social media. Zac Efron toldPeople that he doesn't actually want people to know what he is doing all the time.
"I don't have a Twitter, a MySpace or a Facebook or anything like that," says the star of the new comedy 17 Again. "I kind of value in people not knowing where I am or what I'm doing."
To demonstrate his take on the typical posting, he says with a laugh: "I'm on the toilet. Still on the toilet. Guys, dot-dot-dot, out of TP. Still on the toilet."
There may not be much reason for Zac Efron to be on Twitter right now since pretty much every step he makes is already covered. Other stars using social media tools like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook like the ability to get out ahead of - or repudiate - what the tabloids and blogs are reporting.
An Irish rock band named The Script claims that social interaction with fans is the way to music chart success. The Script says blogs, downloads and online chats are the secret to success. On the Script's website you can see that they have set up a number of social networking sites. However, they don't seem to have latched on to microblogging yet.
TechCrunch reports that AOL has acquired Socialthing, a social aggregator currently in private beta. Socialthing allows you to interact with several microblogging services including Plurk, Pownce and Twitter. You can also update to these services using Socialthing.
AOL clearly is very interested in lifestreaming because it was recently reported by Somewhat Frank that AOL recently quietly launched a social aggregator tool called Buddy Updates. You can read an overview of Buddy Updates here on lifestreamblog.com.
One of the reasons AOL may have been quiet about Buddy Updates is because they plan to use Socialthing instead. It remains to be seen whether AOL will use Buddy Updates or Socialthing or both websites as its lifestreaming offerings. They do have the large AIM userbase to tap into once they are ready to start promoting these new services.
The new version of the popular Delicious social bookmarking website has arrived. The announcement was posted on the Delicious blog where they say they have improved the speed, search and design of the website. Delicious now definitely is speedier and it has a much cleaner and more appealing look than before. The new website is at Delicious.com as Delicious leaves the old confusing del.icio.us url behind.
Speed: We've moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old back-end was getting creaky under the load of five million users.
Search: We've completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they're very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another user's public bookmarks, or your social network. Now it's easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.
Design: Finally, we've updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we're hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn. Check out the What's New page for an overview of the changes, or watch this animation that sums it up nicely:
Valleywag jokes that Delicious is now powered by cupcakes making reference to the small white cupcakes graphics on the site. Technically, it's Yahoo powering the site they acquired in 2005. They seem to have assigned powerful enough servers to Delicious to keep it speedy.
Mathew Ingram asks who still uses bookmarks? It does seem like enthusiasm over social bookmarking has diminished ever since sites like Twitter and Plurk started becoming more popular. However, a lot of social aggregators still pull in bookmark data from Delicious and a lot of the links posted to Delicious seem new and relevant enough so people are using the service. A Computerworld article says Delicious now contains 150 million bookmarked links and 5 million unique users.
A new study from Rapleaf.com has found that women outnumber men on social networks.
Here's the overall numbers.
Women: 24,821,901
Men: 20,559,526
Unspecified: 3,887,623
All of the social networks that Rapleaf.com looked at except LinkedIn and Perfspot.com. You can see the full chart here on ReadWriteWeb.com. Rapleaf.com's research did not include microblogging sites like FriendFeed, Plurk and Twitter.
Social Network Users Concerned Media is Watching Them
The BBC reports that a Press Complaints Commission survey found that 80% of those polled said they would be more cautious about what they posted on social media websites if they knew they were being watched by the media.
Almost 80% of social networking site users would be more careful about the details they put online if they knew the media might use them, a poll says.
The Press Complaints Commission said 89% of the 1,000 people polled wanted guidelines on what the media could use.
And 42% of 16 to 24-year-old who used such websites said they knew someone who had been embarrassed by material which was posted without consent.
The PCC is opening talks on how it should respond to the issue.
In a sense they are being watched by the media so they should be more careful. On the other hand a lot of what it is posted to social networks is trivial and unlikely to be of any interest to blogs or the mainstream media.
The study also found people think it is wrong for the media to take information they have posted publicly without their consent.
The poll also found 49% of respondents said it was wrong for the media to use information they had posted on line without asking the consent of the person concerned.
And 58% were fairly or very concerned about the lack of control about how they were depicted on websites.
And of social networking site members, 55% considered whether personal details such as photos might be used by someone else without their consent, before posting them online.
Sir Christopher said the PCC's current code of practice would be able to handle complaints about media outlets using material skimmed from networking sites.
Since this information is posted publicly it is hard to see how the media could be prevented from quoting it. Young people posting information publicly that is inappropriate probably have other even bigger concerns as well such as that an employer or university they are applying to might see it.
Common Craft has another helpful video out. This one explains social media in simple terms. They explain it through the invention of "social ice cream" in a town called Scoopville that lets anyone create a unique ice cream flavor. In Scoopville even the weird pickled flavored ice cream has a few fans. Unfortunately, they left out how easy it is for spammers to sneak unwanted ingredients into your social ice cream cone.
We originally heard that The Rising is being created in partnership with Windsor Media, Terry Semel's investment firm, but we still haven't gotten confirmation of their involvement. Windsor was created by Semel before he went to Yahoo, was put on hold during his tenure there, and fired up again after his departure last year.
The Rising will have original video content with a permanent host in addition to the social network where users can share stories and experiences, tapping into serious demand for this kind of thing. There are thousands of forums dedicated to paranormal and UFO topics today - among them is, yes, a Meetup site for ghost trackers.
The Rising sounds like a good name to use. It's vague enough to cover both the paranormal and UFOs as well as other unexplained happenings. You don't want to have the problem the Sci Fi Network has - they are trying to expand beyond science fiction but are somewhat limited by the initial name they picked for the channel. TechCrunch says The Rising is rumored to be launching sometime this summer.
The nonprofit OpenSocial Foundation has been launched. OpenSocial will provide a standard for the sharing of social network data using APIs.
It's like the Justice League of social media: Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.'s MySpace.com announced on Tuesday that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a non-profit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year as a way to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites.
The specific purpose of the new non-profit, according to a release, is "to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web." It's a particularly crucial move for Google, which has been eager to emphasize that OpenSocial is a community standard, not a Mountain View project.
"OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning," Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, said in a joint statement from the three companies. "The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open."
Dan Holevoet explains the Gadget xml files that developers can use to create applications using OpenSocial data in this video.
Google has a post on the launch and so does Yahoo Anecdotal. Yahoo also has a press release announcing their support of OpenSocial.
Facebook isn't joining the party.
And Facebook won't be joining the OpenSocial Foundation, either. "As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation," a statement from the company read. "The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience."
As Mashable notes OpenSocial includes a who's who of all the major social networks except for Facebook.
Bigger than the forming of the Foundation is the news that Yahoo has joined in on OpenSocial. For a reminder of who else is in, here's a shortened list: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. So, basically, out of all the social networks and web giants on the web, Facebook is the only one that's out of the loop - for now.
There are going to be some very interesting applications developed using OpenSocial. Facebook may come to regret not being involved. Of course, they could always join down the road as they observe how OpenSocial evolves as developers launch OpenSocial-based features and services.
Spielberg Might Be Planning Social Network About Ghosts and UFOs
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reports that director Steven Spielberg may be launching a social network focused on ghosts, UFOs and other unexplained phenomenon. Spielberg has directed many films that focus on ghosts and aliens including Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Artificial Intelligence: AI. Spielberg also wrote the screenplay for Poltergeist.
Hollywood super producer Steven Spielberg is preparing to launch a new social network, we've heard from multiple sources. The focus will be on users who've had or who are interested in sharing paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences. The new social network may also have original video content investigating alleged ghost and UFO stories.
Michael Arrington writes that Spielberg has also had a paranormal experience.
Spielberg has apparently had at least one paranormal experience himself. There are stories of him staying in a hotel called Excelsior House and being so frightened by ghosts that he fled the room and moved 20 miles away. We've also heard anecdotes about Spielberg seeing the ghost of a dead relative repeatedly as a child. Whether based in reality or the product of an exceptional imagination, these experiences may have had an impact on his life's work and this upcoming social network.
There are numerous websites and web forums about paranormal and extraterrestrial activity. People interested in this kind of subject matter would likely be interested in a social network that had Spielberg behind it. Gawker filed it under bad ideas but it sure sounds like a more interesting idea than another social network TechCrunch recently mentioned called TotSpot - it's a social network for babies.
Will Young People Still Care About Facebook in 2013?
There are some stories here, here, here and here that the traffic to Facebook might be falling or plateauing in the U.S. and/or in the UK. Webware notes that it was never going to be possible for Facebook to sustain its explosive 200,000 new members per day growth forever.
It's inevitable that the explosive expansion that Facebook experienced in 2007 can't possibly go on forever. And since no hot new destination has popped up to potentially suck away Facebook traffic, the obvious conclusion is to blame it on social-networking fatigue. Facebook, one could say, is a trend and users have simply grown tired of it.
The argument makes sense. For many there was an initial novelty to keeping in touch with faraway friends and classmates, wasting time at the office with games and other developer-created applications, and voyeuristically sifting through online photo albums all on a single destination site. Me, I've grown tired of the Scrabulous gaming application on Facebook--it's way more fun to play word games in person.
But an apparent leveling in traffic doesn't equal mass account deletion. "Coolness factor" always fades; now it's up to Facebook to prove it can stay relevant and useful in its post-expansion era. Remember when instant-messaging client adoption was soaring and people were IMing each other just for the heck of it? We're all still IMing, but it's no longer a novelty, it's a utility. ("Utility," by the way, appears to be one of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's favorite words.)
Robert Scoble thinks Facebook is not doomed but it is really too early to know for sure. What we really need to know is how many active members there are at MySpace, Facebook or Bebo. Will users of these sites dump them for another service or for privacy as they get older? Facebook isn't so over dude today but what about five years from now. Five years ago who would have believed young people would stop using email? Will today's Webkinz-using grade school students really want Facebook accounts when they reach high school and college age or will they seek out new destinations of their own that people in their 30s and 40s don't get? There is no real way to answer that question until a few years have passed but there have been many warnings against building a service that primarily targets the very young. If the next generation doesn't want Facebook then as big as Facebook has become they could still end up being beaten by Classmates.com or slowly become as uninteresting as GeoCities.
A new Digg-like news website called Newspond has debuted. What's interesting about Newspond is not the site's layout or features or that it is yet another social news (YANS) website. Instead what is interesting about Newspond is the audacious claims Newspond makes. TechCrunch found on Newspond's about page the claim that Newspond says they are the "most advanced news site on the planet."
But they just make ridiculous statements on the website that I can't ignore. The home page says Newspond is "The most advanced news site on the planet." The about page has a huge yellow ball thingy and the same words in 40 point type. It also calls itself "the ultimate hub for the latest news."
What's the technology behind this stunning new startup? Well, within "the heart of Newspond lies a tireless electronic brain" with "highly-advanced machine intelligence" that analyzes news "at a faster rate of speed than any human being could ever dream of."
With that brazen slogan Newspond seems to be taking a page from this awesome over-the-top 1984 Chevrolet Corvette car commercial. The commercial starts with "It began as genius and grew to be legend and has become at long last the most advanced production car on the planet."
More Newspond discussion here, here, here, here, here, here and here. The general opinion seems to be that Newspond is not the most advanced news site on the planet.
The White House 
TechCrunch 
The new version of the popular Delicious social bookmarking website has arrived. The 
TechCrunch 
The nonprofit 
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch 
There are some stories 
