Remember PleaseRobMe? The social experiment (now shuttered) used to display real-time updates from Foursquare users who publicly broadcast their current location via Twitter. In aggregate, said the site's founders, this data could be used by burglars, looking to find empty houses to rob.
Although many in the tech community dismissed the experiment as engaging in fear-mongering and scare tactics to make its point (that being the potential dangers of location-based services), it may have actually hit a nerve among mainstream users. According to a new survey of over 1,500 social networking users who own geolocation-ready mobile devices, over half (55%) are worried about the loss of privacy that comes with the use of mobile applications which broadcast your location.
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The survey, commissioned by security company Webroot, asked online participants in the U.S. and U.K. to share their thoughts via an online survey in June of this year. Out of the 1,645 respondents, 55% said they feared loss of privacy and 45% feared letting burglars know when they were away from home.
Women were more worried about the risks than their male counterparts, the survey found, with 49% reporting they were "highly conce/> [...]
If you massage the stats enough, Hulu's an entertainment giant, hanging neck and neck with this year's most popular movies. If you adopt a more objective perspective, however, it becomes pretty clear that the video-centric site hasn't exactly achieved blockbuster status.
In a report released this afternoon to NewTeeVee, Buzzpoint put Hulu just behind The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and ahead of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Up, and The Hangover in terms of revenue and opening weekend gross. The catch is that Hulu's revenue for all of 2009 ($120 million) had to be counted to keep it in this group.
Similarly, Hulu topped Buzzpoint's list related to visitors and audience members at opening weekends. By quite a lot, too - 42.5 million pairs of eyeballs focused on the free site, while runner-up New Moon attracted just 20.0 million watchers.
But the Hulu data covers the whole month of October, not a couple of days. And it's hard to imagine that every Hulu visitor spent two or three hours completely focused on the site.
The Buzzpoint report concluded, "While Hulu's content strategy is obviously centered around television shows rather than movies, these comparisons to Hollywood nevertheless help illustrate the lengths Hulu needs to travel in order to become a true blockbuster."
Numerous reports have indicated this week that Facebook is about to hit the 500 million user mark, and while there may be a big celebration, the social network isn't slowing down in its quest for users. Late yesterday, Facebook launched a new site that will provide some people with free and fast mobile access.
0.facebook.com actually represents an attempt to reach individuals all over the globe, as Facebook got 50 mobile operators in 45 countries to provide access to it with zero data charges. Then, more specifically, the site's targeted at folks who don't have iPhones and iPads, and perhaps can't afford all-you-can-eat data plans.
A post on the Facebook Blog explained, "[W]hen using the mobile internet, people around the world face two main challenges - sometimes the experience is too slow to be fun and the cost of data plans and understanding them can be daunting. We have designed 0.facebook.com to help solve these two barriers and we hope that even more people will discover the mobile Internet with Facebook as a result."
Some of the countries in which 0.facebook.com is available include Indonesia, Malaysia, and Qatar, along with Australia, France, and the UK.
This move should help Facebook reach large new segments of the population, perhaps allowing it to hit the 600 million user mark much sooner than later.
Some very cool new features have just been unveiled on YouTube, check 'em out…
VIDEO SHARING IMPROVEMENTS
We revamped the video watch page by adding more sharing features and a new streamlined design to the Share, Favorite, Playlists and Flag sections. We now show some top social sharing sites directly on the video watch page, making it easier for you to share your favorite videos with your network. These top sites are also personalized based on your usage – so if you Digg more often than you Facebook, Digg will show up instead. Video comments and responses have also been reorganized into a “Commentary” tab, including thumbnails for video responses and a handy scroll bar for easier navigation. The new “Statistics & Info” tab houses collapsible sections for recent ratings, video honors and sites linking to that video.
ADVANCED SEARCH OPTIONS
New advanced search options are now available anywhere you see a search field on YouTube. Just click “advanced search” to choose the results you want, based on different key word combinations such as exact phrases, all words, excluding certain words, etc.. You can also hone down your results further to find videos matching specific upload criteria like language, category, date uploaded, duration/> [...]
Copyright 2009 (c) Dylan Rosario - The founder of www.FleeQ.com a new semantic search and discover agent. Utilizing web 3.0 technology, fleeQ levels the playing field for small publishers and advertisers alike. www.fleeq.com and www.xyppy.com are based upon fleeQ technology.
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Remember PleaseRobMe? The social experiment (now shuttered) used to display real-time updates from Foursquare users who publicly broadcast their current location via Twitter. In aggregate, said the site's founders, this data could be used by burglars, looking to find empty houses to rob.
0.facebook.com actually represents an attempt to reach individuals all over the globe, as Facebook got 50 mobile operators in 45 countries to provide access to it with zero data charges. Then, more specifically, the site's targeted at folks who don't have iPhones and iPads, and perhaps can't afford all-you-can-eat data plans.
