WebProNews

Tag: friends

  • Yeah, But Which One’s Chandler? Game of Thrones Gets A Friends Makeover

    I like Friends. And if you have a problem with that, well, FINE BY ME. Sure, watching it now it feels a bit dated, and that’s not just an effect of Lisa Kudrow’s overalls. But damnit, there’s no way I’m going to be shamed by Friends haters out there. If nothing else, let’s all remember Jennifer Aniston and white tank tops.

    I also love Game of Thrones, but it’s doubtful that I’ll meet any resistance on that one.

    Putting the two together produces exactly what you’d think – a pure delight.

    The internet is filled with its share of TV show/movie reimaginings that attempt to paint the original in a new light. Viral vids like “Shining,” a classic that turns Kubrick’s The Shining into a family comedy, have proven that all you need is some clever editing and the right music and anything can be misrepresented.

    That maxim holds true here, as I’m sure you already know what song you’re about to hear as the new soundtrack for Westeros.

    Oh, and just because, here’s Chandler Bing dancing on the Bing logo:

    (image)

    [via UPROXX]

  • Facebook Including Deactivated Accounts In Total Friend Count [UPDATED]

    UPDATE: Facebook has told me that your friend count does in fact include some deactivated friends –

    We recently changed the way we count the number of people you are friends with to include some accounts that are not currently active on the service. It is important to note, that while we are showing different counts, no additional user information will be available. Due to our internal infrastructure we can provide an even faster experience for those that use our service by showing these modified counts.

    Facebook said that the reason they show you your deactivated friends on your list is so that you can defriend them and to “prevent any possible security risk posed by temporarily deactivated friends.”

    ORIGINAL ARTICLE: Although my Facebook Timeline says that I have 593 friends, I actually only have around 564 at the moment. It appears that the discrepancy is due to friends that I once had – but have now vanished from the Facebook landscape. You know, the ones that got away – the deactivators.

    And apparently, I’m not the only one. One of my Facebook buddies recently posted a status that read “Apparently, FB did a recount today and gave me 120 new friends…WTF.” Tons of other users responded with similar stories. “I got like…40 new friends,” said one user. Another said, “yeah, I gained like 100 myself.”

    It appears that the extra friends appearing on people’s friend tally are merely phantoms, sadly. You’ve haven’t had an overnight boost in popularity – the increase in your total friends is coming from the inclusion of deactivated accounts in the figure.

    One reddit user posted that Facebook was showing deactivated accounts on your friends list, to which they received a reply:

    “Yep. And my friend count jumped up more than 30. I just happened to see it the other day, and saw a friend post that there number had mysteriously gone up so I checked.”

    A quick look at my friends list confirmed that Facebook is displaying deactivated accounts in my friends list:

    Clicking on the names of one of those deactivated friends prompts this message from Facebook:

    It’s true that only you can see your deactivated friends on your friends list. If anyone else looks at your friends list, they’ll simply see a blank whitespace where a friend should be:

    Facebook explains the difference between deactivation and deletion of accounts in their Help Center.

    [With deactivation], people on Facebook will not be able to search for you. Some information, like messages you sent, may still be visible to others.

    We save your profile (timeline) information (friends, photos, interests, etc.), just in case you want to come back to Facebook at some point. If you choose to reactivate your account, the information on your profile (timeline) will be there when you come back.

    While your former friends who have deactivated their accounts are indeed invisible to everyone but you, they are still being included in your friend count. The rash of users commenting that their friend count jumped up overnight would lead us to believe that this is something new – that deactivated friends we not always counted in your total. I’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and will update this article accordingly.

  • Content More Memorable When Shared By Close Friends

    Data suggests that content and ideas online spread most effectively through large numbers of people sharing with small groups. There is little supporting data to prove that influencers are the best way to go viral and share information online. The future of media and online advertising is social and social media users are engaged visiting sites like StumbleUpon and Buzzfeed to find out what content friends, families and colleagues are sharing with each other. The proof is in the more than 4 billion page views each month, according to AdAge, the two platforms experience.

    There is a sharing behavior that is similar to what happens in the real physical world that disproves the past marketing practice of using influencers to reach audiences. The behavior can be witnessed on both BuzzFeed and StumbleUpon. Online sharing, even viral, takes place most effectively through many small groups not by an influencer or even a few influencers making single posts or tweets. Influencers can reach a wide audience but their effect is actually only for a short time. Content really goes viral when it is shared beyond particular spheres of influence and spreads out across the social web by regular people sharing the content with their friends.

    The largest stories on Facebook come from the intimate sharing of people, not from one person sharing in hopes of getting thousands to follow. Sharing is often compared to “word-of-mouth,” but when something is recommended in a casual conversation it’s far more memorable than if a bullhorn is used to spread the message. Intimate sharing is remarkably more effective than broadcasting. Sharing directly with friends is the most common outlet for content. To get content shared, marketers and publishers should focus on content that will resonate and get people talking to their colleagues, friends and families. Social media is about engaging people in conversations, like the real offline world.

    @PingTweets
    Yuping Liu-Thompkins    Good insight on how consumers actually share content online: http://t.co/CXmEVBqJ. Confirms our finding that reach by number means little. 1 hour ago via Twitter for Mac ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @sumakashi
    Suma Kashi    Best way to go viral is by engaging millions who share in small networks, not “influencers” who blast to millions http://t.co/mBdW36sR 23 hours ago via HootSuite ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

  • Facebook Adding Friends And Locations To Apps

    Facebook is consistently updating their API to let app developers add all the great stuff about Facebook into their own apps. With this new update, I can not only tell people what I ate, but I can also tell them where I ate at and with whom I ate with.

    Yesterday on the Facebook developers blog, the company announced the ability for app developers to implement friend tagging and location tags to Facebook updates made through apps. It’s the same as if you were updating your status, now it’s just through apps as well.

    Facebook Friends Locations Apps

    To get into the nitty gritty of it all, the new features are:

    Setting location on posts — with Open Graph actions and objects or with stream publish stories
    Tag friends on posts — with Open Graph actions or with stream publish stories
    Improved search for places — including optional latitude, longitude, and distance parameters as well as support for finding posts from friends around a place
    Read posts with location — using the FQL table location_post

    Controlling tags on apps is the same as it is on Facebook. Users can select who they want to share their activity with through the apps.

    As an added bonus, Facebook now lets developers who create photo or video apps access Open Graph. This allows users to display large user generated photos and videos on their timeline.

    For the specific code that developers need to use in their apps to enable these features, check out the blog post for all the details.

  • Friends Barred From U.S. Over Twitter Joke

    Friends Barred From U.S. Over Twitter Joke

    Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting got into some trouble recently. Van Bryan had a couple of especially interesting tweets that made Government officials raise their eyebrow. Van Bryan tweeted:

    “3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!”

    He also tweeted, asking a follower a question:

    “free this week for a quick gossip/prep before I go destroy America? x”

    Upon arrival to the states, the two were detained for extensive questioning. Van Bryan was held in a cell with immigrant drug peddlers, while Bunting was detained in a separate cell. Van Bryan explained to authorities that the term “destroy” was British vernacular for “party”. The two were later released and sent home on a plane.

    Both Bunting and Van Bryan feel U.S. officials took their seemingly innocent tweets too far. They say they were simply on holiday to America and just wanted to have some fun.

    With this recent news, do you feel government has taken security too far or do you feel that you can never be too careful? Let us know in the comments.

  • Email Shows Your Hierarchy of Friends

    Following the recent news that Facebook reveals about four degrees of separation among networks of friends, new research has come out demonstrating a similar phenomenon at work within a person’s email. Northwestern University researchers Stefan Wuchty and Brian Uzzi have published a new study indicating that the contents of your email inbox reflect your real life ties to the people in your life.

    Using email data collected from nearly 1.5 million non-distribution list emails from 1,052 managers of a “typical professional services company that offers various forms of consulting to services and clients,” Wuchty and Uzzi were able to distinguish that variables such as response time and even quick assessments of emails reflected self-reported ties of “real life” social networks. Further, the study demonstrates that, despite what curmudgeons may drone on and on about, electronic communication really hasn’t changed the way we interact with each other at all.

    Of key importance is the understanding that e-communication mirrors patterns of face-to-face communication in regard to different types of relationships while the availability of electronic communication channels drastically reduced communication costs and extended our potential number of and reach to contacts, the email dynamics we observed suggests that fundamental patterns of friendship and professional connections continue to operation in their classical fashion. How these dynamics aggregate to change human dynamics is putatively dependent on the contextual basis of our findings.

    Another telling observation to come from this research is that, similar to the study that Facebook conducted, email reveals approximately a similar degree of separation between participants in the study:

    Pretty fascinating stuff, given all the recent decries that email is outdated or, worse, dead.

  • Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon? Try Four Degrees Of Anyone On Facebook

    Do you subscribe to the “it’s a small world out there” philosophy? If so, you recognize that even though there are billions of people in the world, the chance that you share some sort of odd connection with any random stranger out there is at least reasonable.

    Everyone’s heard of the “Six Degrees of Separation,” or maybe its more pop-culture oriented cousin Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Both of those theories state that any two humans on the planet are separated by only a few jumps. For instance, I could somehow connect myself to some random girl in Siberia through six degrees, or six people between us. This would result in about seven jumps, or connections.

    Or, as my Uncle likes to tell during the holidays, his friend’s cousin’s kid takes a karate class with a guy who worked on Goodfellas with Robert de Niro.

    Apparently, things are a little different when you look at the Facebook community. The Facebook Data Team has an interesting post about the connections that Facebook’s 721 million+ active users have across the network.

    First off, the study found that Facebook’s 721 million+ active users have over 69 billion friendships represented. The average amount of friends that any given person has on the site is 190.

    Using an algorithm developed at the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano, it was determined that folks on Facebook are closer to one another than the “six degrees” of common thought:

    We found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users: While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops). And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74.

    So it’s highly possible that you can pick any random person on Facebook and there would only be 4 people between you guys.

    And if that person is in the same country as you, there’s probably an even smaller degree of separation – 3 people (4 jumps).

    It’s a small world of social media, after all.

  • Facebook Users Have More Intimate Friendships, Are More Trusting

    Remember that old line about Facebook allowing you to have a thousand friends that you’ve never met? Turns out that’s not really the case at all. According to a new Pew Internet study called “Social Networking Site and Our Lives,” Facebook actually helps to strengthen relationships rather than undermine them.

    The Pew study looked at the way Facebook and other social network (SNS) users compare to non-SNS users when it comes to friends and relationships. What they found was that SNS participants, especially Facebook users, tend to have more close friends, more overall relationship ties and tend to be more trusting of other human beings.

    First of all, the typical assumption that people have hundreds and hundreds of random friends on Facebook – ones that they just friend online and have never actually met – is a myth. According to the Pew study, only 7% of an average person’s Facebook friends are total strangers. A whopping 89% of Facebook friends are people who the user has met more than once.

    The average Facebooker has around 229 friends. This ends up being about 48% of their real life social network. And the truly interesting thing is that Facebook users not only have more friends than non-Facebook users, but they tend to have more close friends, or “discussion partners,” as Pew calls them.

    Discussion partners are the closest of the close according to Pew. The people who you really talk to about stuff. Basically, when it hits the fan, these are the people you’re going to call. Non-internet users only report an average of 1.75 people who fit this bill. Internet users as a whole report 2.27 people. Facebook users report an even higher amount, at 2.45 people.

    And who are people’s friends on Facebook? Overwhelmingly high school buddies, followed by college buddies.

    The study also found that internet users and especially Facebook users are more trusting, responding positively to the statement “most people can be trusted.” This year 41% of people overall said that most people can be trusted. That is up from 32% back in 2009.

    Only 27% of non-internet users agree with that statement. 46% on internet users do. Apparently Facebook makes you a more trusting individual, but not Twitter, LinkedIn or Myspace –

    Also, when we control for demographic factors and types of technology use, we find that there is a significant relationship between the use of SNS and trust, but only for those who use Facebook – not other SNS platforms. A Facebook user who uses the service multiple times per day is 43% more likely than other internet users, or three times (3.07x) more likely than a non-internet user, to feel that “most people can be trusted.”

    Social networking isn’t killing our relationships, on the contrary is looks like it is helping them. The “likelihood of an American experiencing a deficit in social support” or “being disengaged from their community” is “unlikely to be a result of how they use technology” according to the study. So if you’re looking to blame the decline of American social culture on Facebook, you’re barking up the wrong tree.