NewsFacebook Movie in the Works
Posted 06/24/09 at 08:57:14 AM by Paul Lilly
According to Variety, Columbia Pictures is putting the pieces in place to release "The Social Network," a film about the formation of Facebook. David Fincher appears to be the front runner to direct the new flick, who's previous works include The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Panic Room, Fight Club, and others.
As for the movie itself, Variety says the film will focus on the 2004 creation of Facebook by then Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg and follow the social networking site's evolution to where it is today, over 200 million members strong.
This isn't the first time social networking has been linked to Hollywood. A Twitter-based reality show is also said to be under way, which will seek to "put ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format."
News"Web 2.0" to Become the Millionth U.S. Word
Posted 06/11/09 at 03:10:04 PM by Paul Lilly
It's official - the Global Language Monitor, which analyzes and tracks trends in language, has dubbed "Web 2.0" as the one millionth word. To qualify, potential words must appear 25,000 times in searches and be widely accepted. Web 2.0 fit that criteria, beating out Jai Ho, Noob, Slumdog, and Cloud Computing (among others) as the millionth English word or phrase.
The list has some linguists up in arms, who dismissed the whole thing as nothing more than a publicity stunt.
"I think it's pure fraud. I'ts not bad science. It's nonsense," Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters.
His and other similar opinions didn't seem to phase Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, who insisted that his method has merit.
"If you want to count the stars in the sky, you have to define what a star is first and then count," Payack said. "Our criteria is quite plain and if you follow those criteria you can count words. Most academics say what we are doing is very valuable."
Word up.
NewsChina Blocks Social Networks in Bid to Hide 1989 Tianamen Square Massacre Remembrance
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.
NewsWindows Live Gets More Social with Facebook, Digg, and Other Connections
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).
NewsTwitter Users Hope Cure for Mikeyy Worm Lasts
Posted 04/14/09 at 06:47:08 PM by Mark Edward Soper
Over Easter weekend, many Twitter fans were getting worms instead of finding Easter Eggs, as the developer of a rival microblogging site (StalkDaily), one 17-year-old Michael "Mikeyy" Mooney, was busy drawing Twitter users to his site through infected links and Twitter profiles. According to PCWorld and the Twitter status page, the infection has now been brought under control. But inquiring minds want to know, "what happened?" and "how can we stop a future attack?"
Doing a Google search for "Mikeyy" or "TwitterWorm" isn't the best way to find out, though, as the F-Secure security blog points out that fake news sites are being used to infect curious searchers with (unrelated) malware. To get the real scoop, join us after the jump.
NewsAre Celebrity "Tweets" Real? It All Depends on the Meaning of "Real"
Posted 03/30/09 at 01:25:30 PM by Mark Edward Soper
Our own Will Smith uses Twitter to announce new articles and content on Maximum PC, my wife and I use Twitter to keep track of our kids and their friends, and "Britney Spears" uses it to entertain and inform her fans. Why the quote marks? A weekend article in The New York Times reveals what Cnet says "we all sort of knew already" - Twitter is full of ghostwritten entries.
Some of the sports figures, celebrities, and politicians who use ghostwriters on Twitter and other Web 2.0 social network sites include Britney Spears (although her staff is now signing their own entries), 50 Cent, Candidate/President Barack Obama, Kanye West, Ron Paul, and others. However, the Times also gives credit where due to to celebrities who write their own tweets like Shaquille O'Neal and Lance Armstrong (who one-handed a recent tweet about breaking his collarbone).
Join us after the jump to sound off about celebrity social-network ghostwriting.
NewsHulu Upgraded with Social Networking Features
Posted 03/13/09 at 09:46:55 AM by Pulkit Chandna
Hulu is celebrating its first anniversary. And what an amazing inaugural year it was for Hulu: its market share rose steadily through the year making it one of the most riveting video sites on the internet. The video-on-demand site has stepped into its second year armed with new social networking features.
Now website users can share their favorite shows with each other using the new "Hulu Friends" feature. Users can import contacts from major social networks and email services. The site ensures that friends are kept up to speed with each other’s viewing activities. This move is expected to make Hulu more enticing for advertisers.
NewsEmployee Misconduct, Social Networks, and Mobile Media Are Big Three IT Security Risks, Survey Says
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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