As voters increasingly spend their leisure time with things other than newspapers and television, political campaigns need new methods of making sure their messages reach those people. Obama for America’s Rayid Ghani took to Facebook to find not just possible voters, but possible campaign workers. Read more »
The SEC says Netflix is in trouble for sharing news on Facebook rather than through a more traditional method like a press release. The incident shows how regulators can fail to recognize transformations in our communications infrastructure. Read more »
The mobile-messaging value chain is changing as OTT players upend mobile operators’ SMS business. There will be 27.7 trillion messages by 2016, and most of the growth in traffic will come from IP-based services. Successful carriers will use this new technology to extend reliability and scalability. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Instagram says it is removing the ability for Twitter to embed photos because it wants users to go to its own website instead of Twitter’s to see that content. Other media companies should probably also be asking themselves similar questions about their relationship with Twitter. Read more »
Plexxi has made a new networking box that it calls a switch, but is radically different from the switches on the market today. The switch contains software plus an optical transceiver that link to other Plexxi boxes to form a fast connection between thousands of servers. Read more »
Facebook will soon allow anyone to sign up for its Facebook Messenger App with just a name and a phone number instead of requiring users to have a Facebook account. The roll out begins on Android in select countries before going international and iOS soon. Read more »
Are you cheating on your quantified self? Even if our quantified selves are a little better, fitter and more hardworking than our actual selves, they’re still part of a new kind of virtual, fluid and filtered identity that’s becoming more common place on the internet. Read more »
The photo and video app market is a sizable one undergoing rapid changes right now. With low barriers to entry, this is a market that also consists of a large number of developers and is certainly not limited to a handful of well-financed startups. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Who has the right to use platforms like Facebook and Twitter? On Thursday, a federal judge emphatically sided with Facebook against an adware company that wanted to use the site for its own ends. Read more »
After critics accused its new Jerusalem bureau chief of making inappropriate comments about the Middle East on Twitter and Facebook, the New York Times has appointed a senior editor review her posts — but this robs social media of the power it has when used for journalism. Read more »
A study of Black Friday cyber-shopping said that social media advertising was a big bust with few people buying things in response to an ad from Facebook. The story is very different if you use other metrics to define “responded.” Read more »
Thanksgiving, shopping, social — boy aren’t we overwhelmed by all the clamor. It is time to make sense of it all. Why Verizon doesn’t get social. 10 Gbps broadband. Where is MOG founder going? And GE CEO Jeff Immelt is all crazy about the Industrial Internet. Read more »
Archify isn’t the first service to promise a personal search engine but, with smart touches such as Gmail integration and the recording of social streams, it has a decent chance of being the one that succeeds. Read more »
Looking to give your friend the perfect birthday gift, or want an easy way to give your kids a gift card for the holidays? Facebook announces Monday that it will be integrating iTunes gift cards and content into its digital gifts platform. Read more »
An old hoax has resurfaced that suggests Facebook users can tell the company what to do by posting a legal notice on their profile. Alas, it’s not true — your interactions with the company are governed by law and licenses, not your wishes. Read more »
Apple’s Passbook joins the mobile payments gold rush. But Jeff Fagel, of edo Interactive, has doubts about its viability and says until we see a system that’s easier for everyone, plastic will remain king. Read more »
Included in the changes that Facebook recently announced to its privacy and governance policies was an admission that it aggregates and shares data on user activity with advertisers — and Facebook says it plans do so not just inside the network but on external websites as well. Read more »
Critics of Apple’s social features have argued that it should buy Twitter, but former Apple engineer Patrick Gibson says the real value in such a deal would be that Twitter might be able to help Apple build web services that actually work. Read more »
Facebook is proposing integrating user data with Instagram user data, and abolishing a voting system that allowed users to weigh in on potential changes to the site. The changes bring some privacy concerns for users, but come from Facebook’s desire to monetize and streamline user data. Read more »
Twitter has been restricting the ways in which external services can use its API, and has also said that it plans to launch curation tools for journalists — both of which could potentially affect Storify’s future. But co-founder Burt Herman says the company isn’t afraid. Read more »
Firefox is has released version 17 of its browser, which its new Social API. Users who update to the latest version can now connect to Facebook Messenger, the first service that will work in Firefox’s new sidebar. Read more »
Big data tools such as Cassandra and Hadoop are transforming how data is stored and exploited at scale. But without similarly capable search technologies, enterprise adopters face challenges when it comes to gaining insights from that data. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In the past, information flow during a military campaign was mostly controlled by the armies involved, but now that everyone has the ability to publish and distribute data including photos and videos, it changes the nature of attacks like the latest Israeli campaign against Hamas. Read more »
Social media chatter claiming incorrectly that a British politician was a pedophile has proven a far-reaching scandal in the UK — and one of the rare times that the network has self-corrected a lie. Is this a new dawn? Don’t get your hopes up. Read more »
Why does one person’s timeline look totally different from another person’s, even if they share many of the same friends and like the same brands? Facebook responded to recent criticism over the surfacing of posts, saying it tries to reduce the number of posts users dislike. Read more »
The Washington Post’s new editor, former Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, faces a mountain of problems at the newspaper, which has seen circulation and revenues fall dramatically. Here are some areas he needs to focus on in order to turn the sinking ship around. Read more »
After his abrupt departure from Microsoft last week, inquiring minds want to know just where Steven Sinofsky will land next. Here are a couple intriguing possibilities. What do you think? Read more »
Facebook is going big with its Gifts product for the holidays, announcing a bunch of partners including Baby Gap, Dean & Deluca, Fab, Pandora and Mondavi Winery. The Gifts feature, which is now available to tens of millions of U.S. users, is rolling out over time. Read more »
Israel is waging war on Hamas, but it is also waging an information war using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other tools. How firmly do these networks support the principle of free speech, and how do they decide what content to permit and what to remove? Read more »
How does it change the way we perceive a war when the armies involved become media entities — publishing their own live news reports, uploading photos and videos and even live-tweeting their attacks as they happen? The Israeli army has started doing just that. Read more »
Some prominent users of Facebook such as billionaire sports-team owner Mark Cuban are complaining that the social network wants to charge them to reach their users with marketing messages — but shouldn’t it be fairly obvious that this was part of Facebook’s plan all along? Read more »
Facebook’s North Carolina data center has a PUE of 1.07, lower than the PUE in Prineville, Ore. — a more temperate climate. Facebook has posted a blog with the details of how the N.C. facility has done without A/C even on a 100-degree day last summer Read more »
When a friend or loved one dies, their online identity often continues for some time after their death, thanks to Facebook and Twitter and other networks. Is being reminded of them every time we sign into those services a good thing or a bad thing? Read more »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook has open sourced a new system called Corona for scheduling and managing Hadoop jobs. Corona attempts to do away with many of the problems that come along with massive-scale Hadoop operations, and soon looks to take Facebook’s Hadoop deployment beyond just MapReduce. Read more »
Does your data center compost? This question may become more relevant if an Open Compute Foundation project that’s sponsored by Facebook ends up a success. The goal is to build a biodegradable server chassis to replace existing steel enclosures. Read more »
There’s shift happening in the world of online data collection, meaning consumers might expect to get paid for access to their data rather than always playing the role of uncompensated mark. Done right, it’s a system where both sides of the equation stand to win. Read more »
Any web service that is growing as quickly as Tumblr is should be of interest to Facebook — but especially one that focuses on creating and sharing viral social content, and one that is appealing to growing numbers of young users. Read more »
It might be a marketing tactic, but it’s certainly a refreshing one: Buffer, the app best known for scheduling your tweets and Facebook status updates, candidly explains how they’ve been profitable so far and why they aren’t necessarily looking for more fundraising right now. Read more »
Crowd labor is outsourced information work that can be provisioned automatically. It’s ideally, inexpensive, on demand, and elastic. Platforms providing such services are on the rise in 2012, promising customers lower labor costs in the short term and higher-quality output in the long term. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
