Battle to control social networking heats up
July 22, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
A battle for the top position in internet business has broken out as rival alliances are going face-to-face with one another. The alliance of Facebook, Microsoft, Nokia and Skype has joined forces against internet giant Google, which has allied itself with Apple and microblogging service Twitter.
The battleground is online services that network users share with one another. The current king of this “social internet” is Facebook, but Google is building up a challenge in the form of its own online network, Google+.
But Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t seem too worried. During the introduction of Facebook’s latest product – video calling with Skype – he casually mentioned that Facebook has passed 750 million users .
“We did not report 750 million because we do not believe it is the metric,” said Zuckerberg. He added that in the future you will not base things on who has the most users but on what you can do with the services.
Zuckerberg also said there is no doubt that social networks have become a part of people’s lives.
One just has to look at the volume of content that an average Facebook user shares over the internet, which has been doubling every year.
Zuckerberg mapped out his vision years ago with Facebook as a “social class” running through the entire life of its members. Communication, meeting friends, sharing hobbies, film or restaurant recommendations, fashion taste – all of those are issues that people share with one another. And they need a community, which the internet provides.
The 26-year-old brushed up against privacy advocates and some of his own customers with his second assumption – that people want to make public even more private information.
Zuckerberg has learned to be more patient. One function showing purchases made by a user was quickly stopped after an outcry by Facebook members. Since then, Facebook users have a myriad of control settings to keep their privacy. Yet Facebook users are adding more and more pictures, videos and private information about their daily lives.
The yield of this social boom is data: mountains of information about what interests people, what they like, with whom they are communicating, where they like to go. Data is what turned Google into an internet giant – the company still makes billions with advertisements tailored to the search requests of its users.
Information is the fuel needed to be successful in the internet business. Google boss Eric Schmidt appealed to Google users that if they supplied more information, the search engine giant can offer better search results. But more and more of the valuable user data is landing in the silos of Facebook. And the online network is keeping a lid on it, under the watchful eye of privacy advocates.
After all, the members were promised that the information would not be shared with others. An anonymous evaluation of the information would be a gold-mine for advertising companies who could approach a specific target group with their advertising.
Google has come up with an alternative to Facebook with Google+ and promises a better control of privacy. Users can sort their friends into different “circles” – friends, relatives, acquaintances, work colleagues – and then limit who can see their photos and messages.
This is Google’s first attempt to combine all of its services in a “social network” – bringing together YouTube with the Picasa photo service and translation function Google Translate among others. All that fuelled by the technical power of Google computer centres and flanked by Android as a leading smartphone operating system.
But Google is arriving quite late to the social networking party. With 750 million users, Facebook has a pretty big head start.
- AAP
Share and Enjoy
Too hot? Use these tips to stay ugly
July 22, 2011 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
With temperatures reaching more than 100 degrees Fahrenhoweveryourspellthis, it is important to note that newspapers all over the hot regions will tell you how hot it is, because they think you are too stupid to notice.
So let’s repurpose the best tips that we’ve found in several condescending newspaper articles and let us share with you tips that will make you want to say: What a waste of time!
• Drink plenty of water. The more dehydrated you are, the more your body temperature rises. And don’t drink coffee, alcohol, sugary drinks or any of the other things that we are drinking while we write this column.
• Eat hot food. Chili has capsaicin, a chemical that makes you sweat — and thus, it cools you off. It also helps people laugh at your suffering.
• Eat a salad. You will get all slow and sluggish if you eat heavy, but that’s also because you’re fat (yeah, you look it in those pants, too).
• Don’t get angry. If people tell you that the heat is proof of global warming, slap them in the face with a hot chili (see tip above). Note that the same applies in winter when it’s too cold and people says it’s proof there’s no global warming.
• Ditch the socks. Keep your feet cool by looking ridiculous in your business suit.
• Use well known tricks from desert people. Actually, don’t. They live in the desert. Not too smart.
Yet, you might want do as they do and hang a damp cloth from an open window when the air is cooler outside, which works great because the air is cooled as it goes in and because nobody has to look at your naked, sweaty behind.
• Move to Wassilla, Ala. It’s cool — and we hear you can see Russia from there.
• Make your own air conditioner! Put a bowl of ice in front of a fan and show everyone how broke you are because you don’t have money for an air conditioner.
• Make yourself wet. Use a spray bottle to cool off from the fact that you were thinking something else when you started reading this paragraph.
• Fan out. If your house is hotter than outside, flip the fan and suck the hot air out of your house. You also get to share your nasty smells with your neighbor.
• Use a fan and the air conditioner at the same time. Put your air conditioner in the lowest setting and have a fan running. Show a guest how cheap you are. It is important to note that fans do not cool rooms, so there’s no need to keep them running when you are not home. It is also important to note that this tip could’ve come handy a month and a half ago when we started leaving the fan running when not at home.
• Buy a newspaper! Use it as a fan and keep us in business. Bonus: We’ll tell you how hot is is outside and give you bad cooling tips.
• Shut down the computer. Do you really need to log in to Facebook to tell other people how hot it is because you have a hot laptop in your lap?
• Do not dry your clothes in the dryer. Use a clothesline. It’s environmentally friendly; it shows your neighbors that you’ve got holes on your SpongeBob SquarePants underwear; and it will make your clothes smell like the barbecue your next door neighbor had when you hanged them out to dry. Mmmmm, chicken.
• Cool your bed. Fill a sock with rice, tie it and put it in the freezer. Then put it in your bed and watch your cat destroy the thing and spread rice all over your room. Cool!
• Get out of town. No, seriously, do us a favor and get out. We’ve got enough sweaty behinds around here.
- Return to Paging Mode