Fifteen years into the commercialization of the Internet, with people coming of age who don’t remember anything different, Davidson argues that we’re at the perfect moment to begin reimagining our institutions and developing practices to deal with the onslaught of information, the reality of constant connectedness, and the challenges of global collaboration.
In a press statement released last week, the group wrote, “We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over 1,000,000 users’ personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts.” LulzSec also claimed to have gotten hold of “3.5 million ‘music coupons,'” which the group then invited the public to “plunder.”
Their motivation, it seemed, was something other than monetary gain. But what? An introduction on their website offers a clue: “We have now taken it upon ourselves to spread fun, fun, fun… ”
Several noteworthy developments have impacted the mobile ecosystem over the last few years, such as the growth in advertising and applications. Let’s look at the top mobile trends that will continue to shape the industry.
Cara Stewart and Theresa Drieke of Remarx Media made a killer presentation about what social media is and also what it isn’t to our bi-monthly brown bag group. While this presentation isn’t quite as powerful without the voice over, it does give you some good grounding in the basics.
One of the things the presenters said that stuck with me was this: “With the speed that the social networking environment is changing, anyone who tells you there are an expert in field doesn’t get it, or is not being truthful.” With my experience with so called experts, all I can say is ‘Amen’.
The lawsuit against Facebook was filed in 2004, and a settlement agreement for both cases was reached in February, 2008, valued at $65 million. In May 2010, it was reported that ConnectU was accusing Facebook of securities fraud on the value of the stock that was part of the settlement, alleging the stock was worth $11 million instead of $45 million that the social networking giant had proclaimed.
The Winklevoss twins and Darendra then moved to get the settlement undone.
The Mikkelsen brothers founded Refugees United after helping a close friend—a refugee from Afghanistan—track down his brother following years of separation. The brothers recognized the web’s stunning potential to empower refugees to find loved ones and form a communication network. Bringing their passion and energy to bear, the brothers reached out to form partnerships to bring their idea to life in the form of a low cost, high impact system.
Posting on someone’s wall with a seven-line signature, mass-inviting people to every event (even if the event is local and the person is not even in the same country), to tagging people in articles that they are not even mentioned in just to get them to read it. There is a special vein in my forehead that you can clearly see when these things occur.
There’s a massive blind spot about the social component in our lives, and that’s where this data helps. On Facebook, you’re essentially voting all the time on your profile and nobody yet has the ability to make those votes count.
For example, there are about 740 million Internet users in Asia alone; Facebook serves 6 million page views per minute, requiring 30,000 servers; and there are 148,000 new zombie computers created each day by hackers using botnets:
MySpace is in the spotlight today because it revealed that 90,000 registered sex offenders have been kicked off its site in the past two years. But where did all of those sex offenders go? Some evidence suggests that a portion of them are now on Facebook.
Dispatches From The Front 