Silicon Valley takes on TikTok with knockoffs, censorship scare

SAN FRANCISCO — Teenagers are gaga for TikTok. That’s why Silicon Valley is so worried about it.

TikTok, which is run by a seven-year-old company in Beijing called ByteDance, allows people to create short, snappy videos and share them around the world. That simple concept has fueled its rise to quickly become one of the world’s largest social networks and mount the most direct incursion yet by a Chinese company into Silicon Valley’s turf.

Now US internet companies are pushing back. Through knockoffs, potential acquisitions and not-so-subtle references to Chinese censorship, TikTok’s competitors have been trying to protect their home turf from the service’s advancement. They haven’t had much luck so far.

Over the past 12 months, TikTok’s app has been downloaded more than 750 million times, compared with 715 million for Facebook, 450 million for Instagram, 300 million for YouTube and 275 million for Snapchat, according to the research firm Sensor Tower.

But TikTok’s US competitors could still get some help from their government. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal panel that reviews foreign acquisitions of US firms, is now reviewing ByteDance’s two-year-old acquisition of Musical.ly, the US company that became TikTok, The New York Times and Reuters reported Friday. Members of Congress had asked for a review last month.

A government intervention would probably be welcome news to TikTok’s competitors, who have been working from their usual crush-the-upstart playbook.

Late last year, Facebook launched a TikTok clone called Lasso. That app has been downloaded fewer than 500,000 times, mostly in Mexico, according to Sensor Tower. While many videos in TikTok’s endless feed of 15- to 60-second clips have hundreds of thousands of “likes,” the videos in Lasso’s nearly identical feed typically have a few dozen.

At YouTube, executives are also considering ways to imitate TikTok, including adding similar video-editing software within the YouTube app, according to a person familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans are private.

Google, which owns YouTube, also held acquisition talks with Firework, a TikTok imitator that is aiming for older users, according to three people close to the talks who requested anonymity because the negotiations were confidential. One of those people said Google decided against acquiring Firework.

Firework, which has less than 3 million downloads, has also received interest from Baidu, China’s biggest search engine company, and Weibo, which runs the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, according to two people close to the talks. The Wall Street Journal first reported Google’s and Weibo’s interest in Firework.

“They see that TikTok right now is having a moment, and they have natural concern when any other app gains share in attention,” Eugene Wei, a longtime tech and media executive who now tracks the industries, said of the big tech companies. “And we haven’t seen another consumer app make that much headway in attention market share in recent history.”

At Snap, which some analysts believe is most threatened by TikTok’s rise because both target young people, the chief executive, Evan Spiegel, has argued that the companies don’t compete.

TikTok largely gives people entertainment from strangers while Snapchat connects friends, he said. When asked by an analyst during an earnings call last month whether TikTok is a “friend or foe,” he responded that TikTok advertises on Snapchat and has also built services for the app. “I think at a high level, looking at TikTok, we definitely consider them a friend,” he said.

In April, Snap began listing TikTok as a competitor in its regulatory filings.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, told employees in July that TikTok “is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world,” according to a transcript of the meeting published by The Verge.

He noted that it was popular with young Americans and had surpassed Instagram in India. “It’s a very interesting phenomenon,” he said. “So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this.”

Lasso isn’t Facebook’s only hedge against TikTok. In September, an app researcher in Hong Kong named Jane Manchun Wong noticed some computer code in Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, that revealed the app was testing a feature called Clips. The feature allows users to edit videos much like TikTok, splicing clips together and adding music.

Copying fast-growing upstarts has been a successful playbook for Facebook. Instagram’s popular “Stories” feature, which lets users post short, ephemeral videos, closely resembles Snapchat’s main function.

Zuckerberg suggested those short “Stories” videos are a way Facebook can compete. In response to a question about Facebook’s “plan of attack” against TikTok, Zuckerberg told employees in the July meeting that Facebook was making Stories an even more central part of Instagram.

And last month, Zuckerberg seized on TikTok’s Chinese roots to criticize it publicly. In a speech at Georgetown University in which he promoted Facebook as a US company eager to protect free speech, he said, “China is building its own internet focused on very different values and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries.”

As evidence, he cited reports that there were few signs of the Hong Kong protests on TikTok.

“While our services, like WhatsApp, are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these protests are censored, even in the U.S.,” he said. “Is that the internet we want?”

Josh Gartner, a ByteDance spokesman, said that the Chinese government does not request that TikTok censor content and that the app’s content policies are led by a team in the United States and are not influenced by any government.

“We have said clearly that these accusations are false,” he said in a statement. “This is an unfortunate attempt by Mark Zuckerberg to redirect scrutiny onto a competitor that he’s failed to copy.”

Tiktok’s has faced earlier scrutiny. In February, ByteDance agreed to pay a $5.7 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission to settle allegations that Musical.ly illegally collected information on users under the age of 13.

While they plot to take on TikTok, tech executives have also tried to play down the threat. Zuckerberg told employees in July that Facebook research shows TikTok is spending a lot to acquire users, who then don’t stick around for long.

Independent estimates suggest TikTok does retain fewer users than rivals. In June, about 26 percent of new TikTok users were still using the app a week later, according to estimates from App Annie, an app data firm. Facebook’s retention rate was 45 percent, Instagram’s was 44 percent and Snapchat’s 32 percent. By September, TikTok’s rate had risen to 39 percent.

“It is growing, but they’re spending a huge amount of money promoting it. What we’ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising,” Zuckerberg said. “So the space is still fairly nascent, and there’s time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do.”


2019 The New York Times Company

source: news.abs-cbn.com

What does Facebook's plan to hire journalists mean for media industry?

NEW YORK -- Facebook's plan to hire professional journalists instead of relying solely on algorithms to deliver news is a positive step but is unlikely to shake up an embattled media industry, analysts say.

The social media giant said Tuesday it would build a small team of journalists to select the top national news of the day "to ensure we're highlighting the right stories."

It comes as the US media landscape is plagued by job losses and newspaper closures, with organizations trying to figure out how to record profits in the age of free news.

Stories will appear in a section called the "news tab," which will be separate from the traditional news feed that displays updates and content from users' friends and relatives.

"In theory I see this as a really positive development. It is something quite promising," Danna Young, a communications professor at the University of Delaware, told AFP.

Facebook's journalists will be curating stories from news sites and won't be editing headlines or writing content.

The California-based company has consistently said it does not want to be considered a media organization that makes major editorial decisions, and this announcement does little to change that, experts add.

"It's not transformative because it's not going to change necessarily the behavior of individuals who are referencing stories on their feeds," said Young.

"That's where the power comes from -- individuals you know and trust putting their tacit stamp of approval on stories by sharing them," she added.

'PERSONALIZED'

The tab will be the site's first news feature using human moderators since it shut down its ill-fated "trending topics" section last year after a scandal over allegations workers had suppressed stories about conservative issues.

Articles not deemed top news stories will still be collated using algorithms based on the user's history, such as pages they follow, publications they subscribe to and news they have already interacted with.

"Our goal with the news tab is to provide a personalized, highly relevant experience for people," Facebook head of news partnerships Campbell Brown told AFP in San Francisco Tuesday.

The news tab feature comes as Facebook embarks on a series of initiatives to boost journalism, with traditional media organizations accusing it of benefiting financially from their hard work.

Internet platforms are dominating the internet advertising space making it difficult for established news organizations to transition what were very profitable print advertisements online.

Facebook announced in January that it would invest $300 million over 3 years to support journalism, particularly local news organizations.

It has also funded fact-checking projects around the world, including one in partnership with AFP.

Facebook will reportedly pay some publishers to license news content for the tab but Mathew Ingram, who writes about digital media for the Columbia Journalism Review, doesn't expect that to trickle down to hard-up organizations that need it the most.

"The companies they are going to choose are ones already doing well I assume. It might give them a little extra cash but I don't see it driving a huge amount of traffic," he told AFP.

'DESTRUCTIVE'

Print journalism in the US is in free-fall as social media overtakes newspapers as the main news source for Americans.

Around 2,000 American newspapers closed in the past 15 years, according to the University of North Carolina, leaving millions of residents without reporters keeping track of what their local authorities are up to.

"The death of local news has such destructive effects for democracy. It's a complex issue that Facebook alone cannot fix," said Young.

The number of journalists working at US newspapers slumped by 47 percent from 2008 to 2018, according to a Pew Research Center survey released last year.

The total number of journalists in newsrooms fell by 25 percent, the group found, while consultancy firm Challenger Gray & Christmas says this is going to be the worst year for layoffs since 2009.

It's a difficult time for Stephen Groves, who recently earned a master's in journalism at New York University, to be looking for work. When he heard about Facebook's plans, he was skeptical.

"Facebook is not a journalism company and so before working for Facebook I would want to see their commitment to ethical, robust journalism," the 30-year-old told AFP.

The digital sector is also in trouble.

When Buzzfeed cut 200 jobs in January, 29-year-old Emily Tamkin was let go from a position she had held for just a few months.

"I'm personally not cheered by the fact that Facebook is swooping in and hiring journalists. If that's the silver lining then we have a very big cloud here," she told AFP.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

How Facebook is changing to deal with scrutiny of its power

SAN FRANCISCO — Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called for the breakup of big tech companies like Facebook. Regulators have opened investigations into Facebook’s power in social networking. Even one of Facebook’s own founders has laid out a case for why the company needs to be split up.

Now the world’s biggest social network has started to modify its behavior — in both preemptive and defensive ways — to deal with those threats.

Late last year, Facebook halted acquisition talks with Houseparty, a video-focused social network in Silicon Valley, for fear of inciting antitrust concerns, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Acquiring another social network after Facebook was already such a dominant player in that market was too risky, said the people, who spoke on the condition they not be identified because the discussions were confidential.

Facebook has also begun internal changes that make itself harder to break up. The company has been knitting together the messaging systems of Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp and has reorganized the departments so that Facebook is more clearly in charge, said two people briefed on the matter. Executives have also worked on rebranding Instagram and WhatsApp to more prominently associate them with Facebook.

The social network’s changes are now prompting a debate about whether a more knitted-together Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram is just smart business or helps strengthen potential anti-competitive practices. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, has repeatedly said his company faces competition on all sides and is loath to accept a fragmented version of the social giant. He does not want to lose Instagram and WhatsApp, which are enormous and have the ability to continue fueling Facebook’s $56 billion business.

“The big question is, is this a logical business plan?” said Gene Kimmelman, a former antitrust official in the Obama administration and senior adviser to Public Knowledge, a nonprofit think tank in Washington. “For a social network with enormous growth in photos and messaging, there’s probably significant business justification for combining the units.”

But Rep. David Cicilline, (Democrat, Rhode Island), chairman of the House antitrust subcommittee, said Facebook’s moves needed to be scrutinized.

“The combination of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp into the single largest communications platform in history is a clear attempt to evade effective antitrust enforcement by making it harder for the company to be broken up,” he said. “We need to hit the pause button.”

Facebook has pushed back on the idea that the company’s moves — particularly in private messaging — are in anticipation of a potential breakup.

“Building more ways for people to communicate through our messaging apps has always been about creating benefits for people — plain and simple,” said Stan Chudnovsky, a vice president at Facebook overseeing messaging. “People want to be able to reach as many people as they can with the messaging app they choose.”

In Washington, Facebook has its eye particularly on the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that is now investigating it for anti-competitive practices, said two of the people with knowledge of the social network.

The FTC became interested in looking at Facebook and its power last year when the agency’s investigators were separately examining the company for privacy violations, said two people close to the process. At the time, the FTC’s investigators uncovered internal Facebook documents that prompted concerns around how the company was acquiring rivals, they said.

Facebook’s long string of acquisitions — it bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, among many others — have been targeted by academics and policymakers for reducing competition. They have argued that the company engaged in “serial defensive acquisitions” to protect its dominant position in social networking.

This year, the FTC sought clearance from the Justice Department to open an antitrust investigation into potentially anti-competitive behavior at Facebook, the people close to the process said. The FTC was cleared to do so, and notified Facebook in June. By late July, the agency had contacted at least a half-dozen founders of companies that Facebook had bought over the past 15 years for information on its acquisition practices, said four people with knowledge of the outreach.

Around the time that the FTC activity on Facebook ramped up, the company also stepped back on at least one potential acquisition.

Last December, Facebook executives were in advanced discussions to buy Houseparty, a social networking app that lets multiple people video chat on their mobile phones at once, said two people with knowledge of the talks. Houseparty, founded in 2016 by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Ben Rubin, was especially popular with audiences under the age of 24. Facebook, whose members are getting older, has coveted younger users.

But weeks into the discussions, Facebook’s corporate development team killed the talks with Houseparty, the people said. Houseparty’s executives were told that a deal would draw unwelcome federal government scrutiny to Facebook, they said. Houseparty was later purchased by Epic Games, the makers of the video game Fortnite.

Facebook’s changes that appear to make a breakup of its apps more difficult began more than a year ago. Zuckerberg focused on combining the underlying infrastructure of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. The project, called “interoperability,” requires years of deeply technical and difficult engineering work.

The aim, in part, was to create less of a hodgepodge of companies and more of a unified network, said people briefed on the strategy. Publicly, Zuckerberg has said the initiative will help build a more “private” version of Facebook so customers can “communicate across networks easily and securely,” as users flock to messaging services en masse. People will also get a better and more streamlined user experience, he has said. Zuckerberg has added that a unified messaging system would better lend itself to moneymaking efforts on WhatsApp, which today brings in little revenue.

But the idea of “interoperability” was a departure for Facebook. Though Facebook and Instagram have long shared much of the same infrastructure, its different messaging products generally operated independently.

Though employees at Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are in separate physical buildings, executives have also pushed for them to share more internal resources and have reorganized their reporting lines. In one instance, Facebook executives ordered a change in the messaging teams, two of the people said, requiring the Instagram messenger division to report to the leaders at Facebook’s Messenger app. Bloomberg earlier reported on the internal reorganization.

Last year, Facebook also began a rebranding project, tapping at least one outside agency for help, said three people familiar with the initiative. The agency, Prophet Brand Strategy, was asked to make Facebook into a “branded house,” where Facebook’s moniker always preceded the names of WhatsApp and Instagram, they said. The mandate came from Zuckerberg and Antonio Lucio, Facebook’s chief marketing officer, they said.

In March, Jane Manchun Wong, an independent security researcher, spotted the new branding — “Instagram from Facebook” — in some unreleased lines of code.

Employees at both Instagram and WhatsApp, who have been accustomed to greater autonomy, have chafed at the coming changes, said three people familiar with the divisions.

In hindsight, Facebook had quietly signaled that unification was afoot more than a year ago. In June 2018, the company introduced a combined metric that drew attention away from any individual product. Later, Facebook said it planned to stop releasing individual user numbers for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in its quarterly financial reports.

The name of the new metric? Facebook’s Family of apps.


2019 The New York Times Company

source: news.abs-cbn.com

LinkedIn stays 'professional' to repel social media venom

MANILA -- Twitter helps the powerful discover their worst selves and leaves everyone else vulnerable. Facebook brings people together only to subject them to marketing and manipulation. Our social feeds aren’t ready for the 2020 election. None of them are even ready for today. In recent months, they have faced serious scrutiny from Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike.

Except one. Is there anything the rest of the internet can learn from LinkedIn?

The site arrived in 2003 as an alternative to job-listing databases and steadily established itself as the professional sector of the social web. Like other networks, LinkedIn was, in its early years, a place to keep up with the people and institutions you had connected with there. In 2010, with the success of Twitter and Facebook’s social feeds as a backdrop, the service carved out its own space for sharing news and life updates. By 2016, when it was purchased by Microsoft, LinkedIn had affirmed its dual identity: It was a networking site for hiring and getting hired, but also a place for “professionals” (i.e. anyone with a LinkedIn account) to share links and thoughts, or what they thought other people might want to read and hear.

Today, a Facebook-style news feed, complete with like, comment and share buttons, is often the first thing users see when they open LinkedIn. The company’s internal editorial team, which writes and curates business content, has a staff of 65. They’re flanked by a massive slate of influencers — business leaders, subject-area experts and marketing gurus — who post regularly, the most popular of whom have millions of followers apiece.

At the end of 2018, the company said that, in one day, “over 2 million posts, videos and articles course through the LinkedIn feed.” Now LinkedIn claims to have more than 645 million users, 180 million of them residing in North America. Last year, it produced more than $5.3 billion in revenue for Microsoft. (For scale, that’s about one-tenth the revenue of Facebook Inc., about half of Instagram’s and almost twice Twitter’s.)

Considering its size and social footprint, LinkedIn has been a notably minor character in major narratives about the hazards of social media. The site hasn’t proved especially useful for mainstreaming disinformation, for example, nor is it an obvious staging ground for organized harassment campaigns. It is unique among its social media peers in that it has not spent the last five years in a state of wrenching crisis.

And perhaps even more importantly, LinkedIn is not, in the popular imagination, a force for radicalization, a threat to democracy, a haven for predators, an environment that encourages mob behavior, or even a meeting place for pot stirrers.

“You talk on LinkedIn the same way you talk in the office,” said Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief. “There are certain boundaries around what is acceptable.” Criticism of other users’ posts, he said, tends to be measured — “there’s a certain range in the voice,” he said — and users will often make the platform’s numerous implicit norms explicit, when they feel it’s necessary. “If you read the comments,” Roth said, “when someone goes out of bounds, you have other members saying, ‘Hey, bring this back.’”

“This is something that your boss sees, your future boss, people you want to work with in the future,” Roth said. “It’s as close to your permanent record as you can get.”

In the context of social media, this may sound slightly menacing. In the context of the modern office, it’s perfectly familiar.

“We bring implicit theories, or rules, to how we behave at work,” said Amy C. Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied workplace communication. These ideas about how to speak and behave in an office can be valuable but also mistaken, and sometimes individually and institutionally counterproductive. (A workplace where nobody speaks up is a workplace where little will change.) “Everyone at work has two jobs, and the other is the job of looking good,” she said. “These rules are largely oriented toward the second job.”

Scaling job two — looking good at work — up to a social network creates a new sort of venue: a non-office office, with thousands of bosses, none of them yours, all of them potentially watching.

The overwhelming incentive, as a job seeker, is toward caution. Likewise, there is little reason, as a boss, to tangle with especially difficult subjects. LinkedIn is plainly not a place to organize a union. Its mission is to mediate and facilitate a fundamentally unequal process. Topics that can be risky for rank-and-file workers to bring up in an office, such as pay inequality, diversity or workplace harassment, tend to unfold on LinkedIn in the manner of an event organized by human resources.

“These kinds of sensitive conversations will start from people at the top of companies,” Roth said, citing the announcement of Nielsen’s chief executive, David Kenny, that he would assume the additional title of chief diversity officer as an example. “When it’s a CEO talking about it, you can speak in a more authoritative way.”

Nicholas Thompson, editor-in-chief of Wired, is what you might call a LinkedIn power user. He publishes a daily video about technology to his more than 1.3 million followers on the site. Spicier material? He saves that for Twitter.

“It’s much harder to be a dissident on LinkedIn, or to spread awareness about autocracy,” Thompson said. Business stories do well, as do posts about his own work and the media industry in general. Gun violence? Not so much. “You don’t want to post an Andy Borowitz cartoon,” Thompson, formerly an editor at The New Yorker, said. “People respond badly.”

Thompson also estimates that his American followers on LinkedIn are more evenly distributed along the political spectrum, compared with his followings on Twitter or Facebook, where they tilt liberal. But, he said, “filter bubbles aren’t as strong, in part because people aren’t posting as much about politics.” The 2020 field of candidates is doing plenty of hiring on LinkedIn, but don’t expect campaigning there. Political ads are banned on the platform. In 2017, the last year outside analytics firms could track such things, Forbes.com was the most popular source of news posted to the site, according to NewsWhip. (The majority of posts tend to deal in the genres of self-help, motivation and marketing.) Of the top 10 stories of the second half of 2017, nine were explicitly about work, and one was about a solar farm in China that is shaped like a panda.

“The risk on Facebook is becoming too toxic,” Thompson said. “The risk on LinkedIn is becoming too cheesy.”

As a platform that depends on its users to be careful and calculated in their self expression, LinkedIn proposes and exemplifies a brutally honest vision for social media. Sure, the platform studiously avoids “politics,” but the ideology of corporate America seeps out through its every user notification. There is no illusion of a level playing field — it’s a service that works better if you pay for it.

Like Facebook and Twitter, it’s a private space that is ultimately subject to the desires of its owners and their customers. Unlike Facebook and Twitter — and perhaps more like the workplace you report to every day — it never pretended to be anything else.

LinkedIn was never meant to “connect the world,” at least not without a caveat and a reason: it was built to connect “the world's professionals,” and specifically “to make them more productive and successful.” Any debate about “free speech” on LinkedIn has to square with the fact that it’s a place where you have to pay to message people with whom you aren’t already connected. If Facebook or Instagram sent a notification every time you looked at another’s user’s profile, it would be a scandal; on LinkedIn, it’s a core feature of the platform. On other social media platforms, users might be careful in case employers see evidence of their lives outside of work. The identities performed on LinkedIn are contrived with employers in mind.

“There are hundreds of thousands of bosses, and tens of millions of people who want to please these bosses,” said John Hickey, who started using LinkedIn when he began working in advertising and now runs @BestofLinkedIn, a Twitter account that pokes fun at the site’s culture. “It’s insulated circles of people patting each other on the back, and it goes around and around and around.”

Hickey also posts a range of aberrant material — a particularly popular strain, he said, is people attributing business wisdom to their children. (He labels the posts, “Made Up Kid Monday.”) His followers send him more: blustery #MAGA posts met with awkward silence; unprofessional meltdowns; clearly fabricated office stories; misattributed quotes; cringeworthy attempts at flattery. Finally, there are the truly mistaken.

“Some people,” Hickey said, “think LinkedIn is Facebook.”


2019 The New York Times Company

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Algeria blocks social networks to prevent exam fraud

Algiers, Algeria - Algeria temporarily blocked access to social networks on Sunday to prevent cheating after leaked papers forced hundred of thousands of students to resit high school final exams.

Facebook and Twitter have been blocked since late Saturday and are to remain inaccessible to millions of Algerians until after the last test on Thursday, a telecom source told AFP.

The decision "is directly linked to the baccalaureate" and aimed at "protecting students from falling prey to fake questions" posted online, the source said.

More than 500,000 students out of the 800,000 who had sat the exams known as the "baccalaureate" this month were being re-tested Sunday, the education ministry said.

It said most of the leaks cover science subjects and mathematics.

"The authorities have chosen the simplest solution," said information technology expert Younes Grar.

He said the risk of fraud could have been prevented if the authorities had chosen to encrypt the exam questions and printed them at exam centers instead of transporting hard copies across the country.

"The decision to block social networks penalizes millions of Internet users," he said.

According to official estimates, 18 million Algerians out of a population of 40 million are active on the Internet and social networks.

On Sunday some users said they faced difficulties accessing websites, including Google, although authorities had said only social networks would be blocked.

Dozens of people, including the heads of national exam centres and teachers, were arrested this month on suspicions of leaking the final exam papers.

The leaks have sparked outrage in the oil-rich country.

Education Minister Nouria Benghebrit broke down in tears in public this month when she was told of the leak.

A police statement carried by Algeria's APS news agency on June 7 said cybercrime investigators had identified individuals who had "published (exam) material on social networks" as well as those who facilitated the leak.

Egypt also reported cheating this year at high school exams.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Google buys travel guide app startup Jetpac

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google confirmed Monday it has bought the startup behind a Jetpac mobile application that creates insightful travel guides by analyzing pictures from social networks such as Instagram.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jetpac said that its application would be removed from Apple's online App Store in the days ahead and that it would stop supporting the software in the middle of September.

"We look forward to working on exciting projects with our colleagues at Google," Jetpac said in an online post.

Jetpac mines publicly shared pictures for visual clues to insights such as "bars where women go, the best views, or where the hipsters are" and then presents users with city guides suggesting spots that might be of interest.

Jetpac boasts visual guides recommending local haunts in about 6,000 cities "from San Francisco to Kathmandu."

Google did not comment on its plans for Jetpac, which could be woven into the California-based Internet titan's own social network, mapping service, or personalized recommendation features.

Jetpac was founded about three years ago and is based in San Francisco.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Click, unfriend: women more likely to do it than men

WASHINGTON - Women are more likely than men to delete friends from their online social networks and tend to choose more restrictive privacy settings, according to a study published on Friday.

The study by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project also found that men were nearly twice as likely as women to have posted content online that they later regret.

Sixty-three percent of social network users have deleted people from their friend lists, according to the study, up from 56 percent in 2009.

Sixty-seven percent of women who maintain a social networking profile said they have deleted friends compared with 58 percent of men.

When it comes to privacy, 58 percent of social network users set their profile to private so that only friends can see it.

Nineteen percent allow friends of friends to view their profile and 20 percent keep their profile public.

Women are significantly more likely than men -- by a 67 percent to 48 percent margin -- to set their profile to private, the study said.

As for the ease of using privacy controls, those surveyed were evenly divided.

source: interaksyon.com

India won’t censor social media: minister

MUMBAI — India does not intend to censor online social networks such as Facebook, a minister said Tuesday, but he demanded that they obey the same rules governing the press and other media.

“I want to say once and for all, without any obfuscation, no government in India will ever censor social media,” Telecoms Minister Kapil Sibal said at an IT summit in Mumbai.
,
“I never wanted to censor social media and no government wants to do so. But like the print and electronic media, they have to obey the laws of the country,” Sibal told the gathering.

Sibal held a number of meetings with leading Internet companies late last year in which he asked about the possibility of pre-screening content posted online by users.

He reportedly showed executives examples of obscene images found on the Internet that risked offending Muslims or defaming politicians, including the boss of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi.

Since then, 19 Internet firms including Google, Yahoo! and Facebook have been targeted in criminal and civil cases lodged in lower New Delhi courts, holding them responsible for content posted by users of their platforms.

The Indian government has given its sanction for the firms to be tried for serious crimes such as fomenting religious hatred and spreading social discord, offences that could land company directors in prison.

Google and Facebook said earlier this month that they had removed the allegedly offensive content used as evidence in the court cases.

The groups have appealed to the Delhi High Court asking for the cases against them to be quashed on the basis that they cannot be held responsible for the actions of their clients.

The comments of a judge hearing the case raised further fears that freedom of expression online could be restricted.

“You must have a stringent check. Otherwise, like in China, we may pass orders banning all such websites,” the judge said during a hearing in January.


source: interaksyon.com