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Antisocial Media

By Steve Huff 4/07/12 4:43pm

Antisocial Media

SlaterHearst

The Atlantic’s Social Media Editor Busted For Spamming Reddit

Media outlets should have learned a lesson when Village Voice Media got caught spamming Reddit and basically had to grovel for the Mechagodzilla of link aggregation sites’ forgiveness, but they didn’t. We know this because the Daily Dot ferreted out a new spammer, no less than The Atlantic‘s social media editor, Jared Keller–a.k.a. “SlaterHearst” during his time pimping Atlantic articles to the Redditorati, a.k.a. “redditors.” Mr. Keller’s skullduggery was revealed to Daily Dot by finding him on OK Cupid, where he used the same screen name, describing himself as an “Attempted journalist” and “lover of new ideas.”

As “SlaterHearst,” Mr. Keller was a highly successful redditor until the site banned him last month: Read More

By Foster Kamer 1/05/12 4:26pm

Antisocial Media

How to Succeed in Business Using LinkedIn

Joining LinkedIn: Costing People Their Jobs?

Social platforms being given rise to the point where if you’re not on one people look at you like ‘For real?’ has also resulted in a rise in social networking flubs, the kind born of avoidable sheer stupidity resulting in people being convicted of crimes, cheating on spouses (and being caught), and of course, losing their jobs. So: What ridiculously avoidable act of sheer stupidity did 34 year-old John Flexman do on LinkedIn to lose his job?

He joined it. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 8/16/11 9:05am

Antisocial Media

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Big Brother Joins Social Media

Politicians have been using social media to promote themselves and communicate with constituents for a while now–Yesterday, the White House joined Foursquare!–but government recently is turning to social media to monitor its citizens and crowdsource law enforcement. Scotland Yard is accepting anonymous tips about the riots in England via Facebook; the New York Police Dept. has created a new unit to monitor Facebook, Myspace and Twitter for status updates announcing plans for crimes or bragging about past acts. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 8/10/11 3:37pm

Antisocial Media

nypd

Guard Your Facebooks and Twitters, NYPD Social Media Unit Is Now Official (Thanks for That, London!)

Back in June, Commissioner Ray Kelly revealed that the NYPD is just as likely as your ex-boyfriend to troll Facebook to see if you’ve been up to anything bad, at least the public events page. “We look at social networking. We’re very much focused on weekend parties,” said Mr. Kelly. Now, it seems, they’ve made it official.

Fresh off the heels of the Catch a Looter Tumblr that attempted to out rioters using political strife as an excuse to get a new iPad (or in some cases what looks like a Tanqueray bottle), The New York Post reports that the police have formed a new unit social media unit “to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.” In London, rioters have been using both Twitter and BlackBerry messages to find targets and outwit the authorities. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 7/11/11 6:14pm

Antisocial Media

tom

MySpace’s Tom Is One of the Most Popular People On Google+

SocialStatistics.com, the website that measures the most popular Google+ users by their number of followers, has had a bang-up week. In just seven days, founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, announced this morning that his site (built in 24 hours from concept to product) picked up 300,000 unique visitors, a million pageviews, “and the servers didn’t even go down”! It’s further proof of our thesis that early adopters are using Google+ as just another social media status symbol.

But when we checked out the top 20 users on SocialStatistics page this afternoon, we noticed a different–but familiar!– face up there with the ranks of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry, and Sergey. The grainy photo… the plain white t-shirt… the chicken scratch on the white board… the awkward head turn. Tom from MySpace, is that you??! Read More

By Guest Post 7/11/11 11:44am

Antisocial Media

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Google+ Circles? More Like a Hole

This is a guest post by Brooklyn-based writer,  editor, and programmer Paul Ford, originally published on his blog, Ftrain.com.

People call me a lot and say: What is this new thing? You’re a nerd. Explain it immediately.

I know it’s confusing. But this is their competitor to Facebook basically. Except you can list your friends. That’s the circles. But it’s easier to remember if you call them holes. Like I could have a friend hole and an acquaintance hole and a K-hole. And they give you a list of friends and you stuff them in the hole, like Silence of the Lambs, except you are sending them images and text messages and hanging out with them on video chats. One of the things that can happen, according to the press, is that you can, if you are very lucky, talk with one of the founders of Google, because he’s hanging out using the service too. And you can ask him about user experience, and show him your cat. Which sounds horrifying, like having to pee next to Steve Jobs or playing touch football with Arnold Schwarzenegger. People rich enough to place phone calls to order bodily organs, people who can afford to hide families, make me nervous. The only thing they could want me for is harvesting. Read More

By Ben Popper 6/30/11 2:42pm

Antisocial Media

diaspora

Google Just Stole Diaspora’s Thunder

There was a great New York tech moment back in 2010, when one of Facebook’s many privacy backlashes allowed a group of hackers from NYU to raise more than $200,000 on Kickstarter to build an open, distributed social network.

At the time Diaspora’s plan to build a platform where users could control their own data, and take it with them if they wanted to leave, was unique and appealing in contrast to Facebook.

Now Google+, which has massive resources and a built in user base of hundreds of millions is offering the same thing via Google+ checkout.

And as John Henshaw points out over at the Raven Blog, Google+’s main features, Circles, looks very similar to Diaspora’s central feature, Aspects. Both are aimed at making it easier to manage private and public sharing of social data. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 6/03/11 12:31pm

Antisocial Media

diaspora

Diaspora Is Back, and More Ambitious

Here’s another way to get to half a billion friends–launch the anti-Facebook.

On the day the four NYU students behind Diaspora moved into their office in San Francisco, they were recognized on the street by a subway commuter who recognized them by sight: “Go get ‘em, guys! Kill Facebook!” In San Francisco, internet famous is famous. Read More

By Ben Popper 5/12/11 9:24am

Antisocial Media

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Smear Story Source Speaks: Facebook Wanted to Stab Google in the Back

Privacy advocate Christopher Soghoian broke open the story of how Facebook tried to use global PR giant Burson-Marsteller to smear Google in the press. He was pitched to ghost-write the op-ed, but posted the email exchange online instead.

In his first interview since the story broke, he describes the strange chain of events, the laughable notion of Facebook criticizing anyone on privacy and how USA Today almost got the story wrong. Read More