By Steve Huff 9/17/12 9:44am

Antisocial Media

Takes on a new meaning here. (Photo: Pc1news.com)

Our Sad Future Online: Fake Likes, Fake Friends, Fake Fans

If you think people act fake online now, just wait: troubling research seems to indicate that in just two years’ time, up to 15 percent of our social media interaction will be truly fake. This means fake “likes” on Facebook pages and Twitter accounts padded with thousands of followers with obviously machine-generated names and nonsensical tweets will become a common feature of our social media experience.

As TechCrunch explains, however, the advent of paid social networking stroke jobs has given birth to sleuthing services to help us separate the merely glib from digitally-generated affection: Read More

By Jessica Roy 9/12/12 1:47pm

Privacy Police

(Photo: Inquisitr)

New NYPD Social Media Guidelines Say It’s O.K. to Use Fake Facebook Profiles to Monitor Citizens

If you received a new friend request recently, and it wasn’t from a foreign spammer or a Taliban official posing as a hot chick, there’s now a chance that it’s an NYPD officer. According to the New York Daily News, the NYPD recently instituted its first official guidelines for using social media to benefit investigations, and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has decided that spying on people using fake Facebook profiles is a-O.K. Consider it the online version of stop-and-frisk. Amurica! Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 8/14/12 5:58pm

Klout Me Over the Head

Mr. Fernandez. (Photo: Twitter)

Klout Is Now Based on Science, So You Should Totes Take It Seriously, Okay?

Today Klout debuted a sweeping revamp, meant to make that pesky social media score more accurate and their methods of calculation more transparent. That’s right: No more excuses for your underwhelming score, pal.

The new and improved Klout Score now factors in 300 new signals (as opposed to 100, previously). New metrics include various actions on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other sites. Wikipedia has also been incorporated into the score, which is important, because it allows someone like Barack Obama to rank higher than Justin Bieber, thereby making us all feel much better about the state of social media and America more generally.

Another new feature, aptly dubbed “moments,” allows you to track the most important incidents in your social media history, so maybe now you can figure out just what you did to become so influential on Fiber-Rich Vegetables and Humidifiers. That’ll also enable you to keep track of what your friends are up to, you cyberstalker.  Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 8/07/12 1:22pm

Antisocial Media

(Photo: YouTube)

Before He Was Mayor, Michael Bloomberg Actually Liked Social Media

On Mayor Bloomberg’s weekly radio address last month, he asked his cohost a pointed question, “How do you govern when there’s an instant referendum on everything, before you get a chance to build a constituency, before you get a chance to do a pilot?” It’s a refrain we’ve heard from El Bloombito before. In March, he made similar remarks, telling a crowd in Singapore, “Social media is going to make it even more difficult to make long-term investments,” in cities.

It’s a remarkably abrasive attitude from a mayor who has made sprucing up the city’s social media presence a priority during his last term, not to mention his gleeful bid to become Silicon Alley’s primary benefactor. As it turns out, however, the Mayor wasn’t always so disdainful about the wisdom of the crowd or the democratizing wave of the information age.  Read More

By Jessica Roy 8/03/12 8:19am

Linkages

Seemed like a cat pic kind of day. (Photo: Pusheen.com)

Booting Up: The Mayer Effect Edition

Two more execs are leaving Yahoo. Call it the “Mayer effect.” Or is that the term for bringing Googlers to Yahoo? [AllThingsD]

The social media sector has LinkedIn and Yelp to thank for boosting its image by meeting their projected revenues. The rest of y’all look like chumps. [Wall Street Journal]

Hey everyone let’s freak out and say you can’t read Quora anonymously. But psst…you can. Just change your settings. Problem solved! [GigaOm]

Au revoir, piracy police. At least in France, anyway. [PaidContent]

Yes, you can go to jail for admitting to rape on Reddit. Also, you’re a monster. [BuzzFeed]

By Kelly Faircloth 7/30/12 2:30pm

The Olympics

Not to stereotype or anything. (Photo: flickr.com/s_w_ellis/)

After Incessant Carping About NBC’s Olympics Coverage, Journalist Is Suspended from Twitter [UPDATED]

Time to check in on the Twitter-lympics! How are the first social media games going? About like we expected. Well, we’re not sure who’s pulling ahead in the athletic arena, but looks like we’ve already got an instance of outstanding PR clusterfuck. Someone’s gonna end up with a headache over this one.

Deadspin reports that Guy Adams, a reporter for the Independent, has spent the last couple of days complaining about NBC’s allegedly less-than-stellar coverage of the Olympic games (we wouldn’t know, as we studiously ignore summer athletics). The tweets at issue are here, including such zingers as quoting anchor Matt Lauer’s less impressive attempts to fill airtime (“Madagascar, a location indelibly associated with a couple of recent animated movies”) and deeming him a #tosspot. Burn, ya’ll. Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 7/25/12 1:05pm

Eye of the Tiger

Get your own. (Photo: flickr.com/jspatchwork)

Get Ready to Watch the London Olympics Play Wack-A-Mole With the Internet

The first “Twitter Olympics” start Friday. And how is that going, so far? Let’s just say the games are off to a rocky start, and we’re popping popcorn in anticipation.

As we’ve mentioned before, the International Olympic Committe rolled into town with a long list of social media rules for athletes, volunteers and anyone with a press pass. The document concluded with a warning: “The IOC will continue to monitor Olympic on-line content to ensure that the integrity of rights-holding broadcasters and sponsor rights as well as the Olympic Charter is maintained.”

So how’s that going? Well, it’s not even day one and already an Olympian has been booted from the games for offensive tweets, athletes’ complaints are going viral, and organizers are begging participants not to tweet about and therefore spoil the opening ceremony.  Read More

By Steve Huff 7/20/12 12:31pm

Planet Reddit

Aurora Massacre suspect James Holmes on CNN

Covering Theater Shooting in Colorado, Reddit Becomes a High Speed Newswire

Shortly after a black-clad psycho opened fire in an Aurora, Colorado midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises on Thursday night, killing at least 12 and injuring 50, Reddit users began racing to compile as much information on the tragedy as possible. In the process, the link aggregation giant became a real-time feed of raw data, much of the information accurate, some of it not, all of it published for a fully-engaged and active audience well in advance of any national news outlet. The Future Journalism Project on Tumblr defined it correctly as crowd-sourcing the reportage and noted some of the most organized efforts by Redditors: sequential, linked threads in the /r/news subreddit: Read More

By Jessica Roy 7/17/12 12:57pm

Funding Fun

Mr. Kallenberg (Photo: LinkedIn)

Social Media Referral Platform Tout’d Raises $1.4M in Seed Funding

New York-based “Word-of-Mouth” platform Tout’d announced this morning that they raised $1.4 million in a seed round led by Warner Hill Angels. Tout’d, led by Techstars alum Arron Kallenberg and Wall Street vets Rob Morelli and Saro Cutri, allows users to crowdsource questions like, “What’s the name of a good plumber?” to your social connections, who can provide helpful answers.

Tout’d users can sign in using Facebook Connect and have personalized recommendations immediately delivered to them based on their social circle. Picture Foursquare tips, but for anything, and with more in-depth details.

Tout’d CTO Mr. Kallenberg, who is basically the definition of “serial entrepreneur,” has had his fair share of experience knocking around startup ideas. “When I got to college I wanted to study cultural anthropology, but my family operates a commercial fishing boat in Alaska and the fishing industry took a nosedive economically, so I started a consulting company doing app development when I was pretty young,” Mr. Kallenberg told Betabeat by phone. Read More