Just when he thought his week couldn’t get worse, losing GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has begun losing Facebook friends by the score. The Washington Post noticed this sad capper on the former Massachusetts governor’s lousy week and took the time to track the rate of loss: Read More
It’s crunch time! President Obama again took to Reddit tonight, this time to the Politics subreddit, in order to urge people to vote (for him, natch).
“Reddit, this is important” reads the title of the post, which links to a page on BarackObama.com that allows users to input their addresses to find their local polling place. Read More
After rumors began swirling on Twitter about layoffs at Salesforce, the cloud-computing company confirmed to Business Insider that it has laid off a fair chunk of its Radian6 employees. Salesforce says that less than 100 employees were impacted, but considering that Radian6 boasts only 320 employees total (according to Crunchbase), that’s still almost a third of the staffers being shown the door.
Radian6, a social media monitoring platform, is an integral part of Salesforce’s big play for a piece of the social marketing space. It acquired Radian6 back in March 2011 in order to build out the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Read More
Hackers are spreading new malware attacks via Skype contact lists. Unassuming Skype users are lured into clicking on infected URLS from anxiety-inducing messages like, “lol is that you?” only to find their computer infected by a variation of the Dorkbot worm.
Don’t let the funny name fool you. Dorkbot has a nasty mission. Infected computers may end up locked down and held for ransom: Read More
Just as the social networking monolith hits a landmark 1 billion users, Facebook has had to admit it really does have a fake “like” problem. The fake clicks may well be hardwired into Facebook’s architecture at the moment, based on discoveries about the nature of false clicks. The BBC reports: Read More
App.net has generously created a $5 per month plan and lopped $14 off its yearly membership fee. That means people with $36 to spare on a Twitter lookalike can now snag their very own App.net handle and bragging rights to spending $36. Or $60, if you opt for the $5 monthly plan.
As The Next Web notes, members who ponied up the original (and infamous) $50 yearly fee won’t receive a refund, just extra months on their current plan. Read More
They Alley may think it’s got somethin’ on the Valley, but in California it’s now illegal for employers and universities to solicit your social media passwords. Damn hippies. [The Atlantic]
Speaking of California, General Assembly partnered with LaunchPad LA to open a branch in Los Angeles. [PandoDaily]
Google faked an address in its “iLost” Motorola commercial to make Apple Maps look bad. Come on, guys. You don’t need to lie to make Apple Maps seem unusable. [AppleInsider]
App.net is giving out $20,000 per month to developers that already have $50. Sigh. [App.net]
Kittydar uses Javascript to detect cats in photos. Sadly, when we uploaded a picture of our cat hanging out in our fridge’s crisper drawer, it could not locate him. [Github]
Hootsuite, the social media management platform for individuals and enterprise businesses, launched Hootsuite Conversations today, a new tool that allows internal collaboration for teams managing various social media accounts.
Hootsuite Conversations is an internal conversation tool built on top of the already-existing Hootsuite platform that allows community and brand managers to collaborate and provide feedback on content like tweets and status updates before publishing them. It also allows users to have conversations surrounding specific tweets or updates, a potentially useful feature for customer service reps managing social media accounts. Read More
As one of her very first posts for Betabeat, this reporter said “fuck it” and wrote a melodramatic lament of the fact that the tech scene has become overrun with popular kids and self-quantifying jocks, designer jean-wearing business douches and people who think a familiarity with CSS is the same as knowing how to code. “We Need to Make Tech Uncool Again,” we implored, calling for the ponytailed Linux users to inherit what’s rightfully theirs.
We were kind of joking, but kind of not. Perhaps it was a personal reaction to the rise of brogramming. Whatever it was, it seems we may finally be getting our wish. Read More
True Crime Diary is a great true crime blog run by writer Michelle McNamara. Ms. McNamara doesn’t update her blog daily, but when she does, the product is often an insightful and thought-provoking long read. That’s true of this entry posted yesterday, “#bloodbath: how social media might have changed one of history’s most infamous crime sprees.“
The crime spree in question: the horrific murders committed by the followers of maniac Charles Manson during the Summer of ’69. Using facts from the case, Ms. McNamara posits an alternate timeline in which smartphones and Twitter were as ubiquitous then as they are now. She paints a brief portrait of how tech might have altered the course of the Manson Family’s rampage, beginning the night Manson followers slaughtered actress Sharon Tate and several guests at Ms. Tate’s secluded Hollywood home: Read More
