Posted 11/19/09 at 04:27:38 PM by Bart Salisbury

RapLeaf, a self-proclaimed “leader in automated search for people information on the social web,” has released the second part of its three-part study about the demographic characteristics of webmail users. In this part they consider the social media profiles and friend counts of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo users. What they find, unfortunately, doesn’t really reveal all that much about who does what, social networking-wise, based on their webmail ident.

It’s possible to conclude from the study that Gmail users have, on average, more online friends than other webmail users. And it’s possible to say that Hotmail users have more social media memberships then their online counterparts. But the differences are relatively slight; probably aren’t statistically significant; and quite likely within the realm of measurement error.

For example, guess how many friends the average Gmail user has.

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Posted 10/26/09 at 08:29:05 PM by Jason Barry

Facebook has taken a pot shot at Digg’s URL popularity service. The social networking giant has upgraded its Share button to display sharing statistics.

The Share button has been around for quite some time and was one of the first Facebook Connect features. It has had overwhelming success in turning Facebook into one of the best to share popular internet content—effectively making services like Digg obsolete.

Facebook also opened all of the analytics associated with the sharing habits of its Facebook users. Inevitably, this will change the way advertisers and media publishers tailor their content to fit the interests of their respective demographics. “We hope you’ll create tools to help analyze and understand how users interact with your content on Facebook,” said Mark Kinsey on the Facebook developer blog about the new analytics.

This is yet one more step Facebook as taken to continue its headstrong effort on becoming the all-in-one solution to the internet. Do you use Facebook Share? Do you (or did you) use Digg?

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Posted 06/04/09 at 02:09:10 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Tianamen Square massacre in Beijing. Tianaman Square was home of the Chinese student freedom movement, the "Goddess of Democracy" statue, and the location for the iconic photo of the student staring down a row of Chinese People's Army tanks. However, if you use the Internet in China, you probably won't see anything about this event this week - unless you're clever.

Starting Tuesday, the Chinese government shut down access to virtually all search engines and social networking sites, including Twitter, Flickr, Bing (Microsoft's new search engine), Live.com, Hotmail.com, Blogger, and others. All YouTube videos are also being blocked, as are BBC World News reports on the anniversary.

Are these actions unexpected? How can you bypass these types of blocks? Join us after the jump for more.

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Posted 04/24/09 at 05:34:13 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Trying to describe Microsoft's Windows Live family of web-enabled tools for Windows has been a bit like the parable of the blind men describing the elephant.

Is Windows Live a photo sharing service? A file sharing service? An email service? An IM service? With the news that Windows Live is adding connections next week  to many other popular Web 2.0 social networks, it's easier now to say, as ArsTechnica puts it, that Microsoft wants to:

[T]urn Windows Live into the average netcitizen's main hub for his or her social life, or at the very least to turn Windows Live into a social network.

Microsoft's teaming up with lots of social-networking partners around the world. US-based companies becoming BFFs with Windows Live include MSN, Digg, Facebook, SmugMug, and MySpace (see the full list of 31 current and new partners here).

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Posted 02/11/09 at 05:18:55 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu has just released its sixth annual Global Security Survey (PDF link). Some of the highlights (or lowlights, depending upon your point of view) include:

As in previous surveys, respondents recognize that people are both an organization’s greatest asset as well as its weakest link. But security vigilance is even more important in hard economic times, when the increased stress levels can lead people to behave in atypical ways.

Maybe DTT has cases like these in mind:

• a fired Fannie Mae programmer accused of planting a computer virus that could wipe out 4,000 servers
• a San Francisco computer engineer who held the city's computer network hostage last summer

However, not all the news is bad. For some good news in the threat arena, and your chance to share your biggest security challenges, join us after the jump.

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Posted 05/08/08 at 05:19:17 PM by Paul Lilly

Chipmakers introduce new documents in federal court, TorrentSpy hit with $110 million judgment, NVIDIA to simplify GPU lineup, and more!

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