Not unlike the world created by George R.R. Martin in his series of books now being turned into the HBO series Game of Thrones, high school is a rough place full of evil people trying to get ahead at the expense of their fellow man (and even their closest friends). That’s why a Game of Thrones-set-in-high school short makes so much sense.
If you liked this episode, you’re in luck. The creators say that the next one will drop on March 17th.
Oh, and I’m sure you know this date like the back of your hand, but Game of Thrones Season 3 premieres on HBO March 31st.
You can post tons of pictures of your kids on Facebook. Sure, it’s annoying and it may get you unfriended, but it’s your right. You can create an account for your kid, if you want. Sure, it’s technically against Facebook’s rules, but what the hell -people do it for their dogs and cats all the time. You can even take videos of your kids playing and put them on Facebook or create an event for their birthday party.
These are examples of things that you can do that involve both your children and Facebook. Now here’s an example of something you can’t do.
An Oklahoma woman has been arrested on human trafficking charges after she attempted to sell her children on Facebook.
Sallisaw’s Misty Van Horn, 22, was taken in after it was discovered that she had been in negotiations with an Arkansas woman to sell her 10-month-old daughter for $1,000.
According to the report, one of the Facebook messages read,
“Just come to Sallisaw, it’s only 30 minutes away and I’ll give you all of her stuff and let y’all have her forever for $1,000.”
Apparently, she even offered her other child, aged 2, as part of a package deal. The asking price for both kids? $4,000.
Police says that they think Van Horn was trying to sell her kids in order to generate enough cash to post her boyfriend’s bond, who is currently in jail on an unknown charge. As of now, Van Horn is sitting in jail with her own $40,000 bond.
Apparently, people likes the Gmail for iOS UI revamp os much that Google wanted to expand the new look to its mobile web app.
“Since launching the rebooted Gmail app for iPhone and iPad in December, we’ve heard from many of you that you like the redesigned UI, along with new features such as improved search and integration with Google Calendar. Today we’re rolling out a similar refreshed look to the Gmail mobile web app as well as Gmail Offline that includes many of these same changes,” says Google’s Gmail team in a Google+ post.
Basically, your mobile web experience inside Gmail is going to look and feel a lot like the new iOS app. And that UI change affects quite a few Gmail users (as plenty of device rely on the mobile web experience).
Google launched v.2.0 of its Gmail iOS app back in December. It features an entirely updated look, plus improvements like Gmail profile pics in messages, new animations, and infinite scrolling.
It also added some new features to search within the client, like better automcplete and Google+ commenting.
There’s a lot of stupid going on in this story, so we’ll just start from the top.
A Dakota County, Minnesota man has been charged with solicitation of a minor and solicitation of a child via electronic communication after he tried to use nude photos of a 15-year-old girl as leverage to get her to have sex with him.
18-year-old Deuvontay Shelby Charles was released on $10,000 bail and is scheduled to appear in court next month.
According to the police report, Charles requested that the 15-year-old girl send him nude and sexually explicit photos – a request that was obliged. When he acquired the nude pictures, Chalres apparently told the girl that he would post them all over Facebook and Instagram unless she had sex with him.
Police say that Charles did end up posting at least one of the photos on a specially-created Facebook page.
And for his troubles, Charles is now facing multiple felonies. Shocking to hear how this one turned out.
Don’t ask for nudes from a minor. Also, don’t send nudes if you’re a minor. Don’t try to blackmail a minor for sex. And when things don’t go your way, don’t post child pornography on Facebook. These are some basic rules that if you follow, can help you to avoid becoming a story on the evening news. Yikes.
Today, Netflix unveiled their new ISP Speed Index website, which lets users browse the average performance of multiple ISPs across many of the countries in which Netflix in available.
As of now, Google Fiber is the clear winner with an average speed of 3.35Mbps. Second to Google Fiber is Sweden’s Ownit, which streams at 2.99Mbps on average.
Finnish Netflix users enjoy to fastest speeds overall, and Mexican users the lowest. In the U.S., Cablevison, SuddenLink, Cox and Verizon – FiOS round out the top 5.
Of course, these are averages and Netflix notes that the peak performances for the ISPs are much higher:
The Netflix ISP Speed Index is based on data from the more than 33 million Netflix members who view over 1 billion hours of TV shows and movies streaming from Netflix per month. The listed speeds reflect the average performance of all Netflix streams on each ISP’s network and are an indicator of the performance typically experienced across all users on an ISP network.
Note: the average performance is below the peak performance due to many factors including the variety of encodes Netflix uses to deliver the TV shows and movies as well as the variety of devices members use and home network conditions. These factors cancel out when comparing across ISPs.
Netflix first started releasing monthly ISP rankings back in December of last year, but this is the first time that they’ve aggregated all of their data into a slick little site. Google Fiber has taken the top spot on each month’s list since last November’s rankings.
Users tried to alert Powell that his account had been compromised, and eventually the page went down – presumably to fix the intrusion.
Once he regained control of the account, General Powell posted this message to his 81,000+ followers:
Dear Friends, as most of you realize, my fb page has obviously been hacked. I’m sorry you have to see all the stupid, obscene posts that are popping up. Please ignore as we are working with fb to take care of this problem. I appreciate your patience.
Reminder: Everyone has to be vigilant when it comes to password security, but if you’re a public figure you have to be extra cautious.
If you woke up this morning in a haze and needed an extra cup or four of coffee to get going, you can probably blame Daylight Saving Time. Or your hangover. But probably DST.
On Sunday morning at 2:00am our clocks jumped an hour ahead, forcing millions to lose out on a crucial hour of weekend sleep. If you think that the practice of springing forward and falling back is archaic and unnecessary, you’re not alone. And there’s a White House petition that I’d like to bring to your attention.
Hosted on the White House’s We The People online petition site, “Eliminate the bi-annual time change caused by Daylight Savings Time” has garnered over 19,000 signatures in less than a week. If it can get 100,000 by April 4th, it will warrant an official response from the Obama administration.
Here’s the argument proposed by creator C.D. from Loveland, Ohio:
Daylight Savings Time is an archaic practice in our modern society.
The original reasons for the policies are no longer applicable, and the most cited reason for keeping DST (energy savings) has never been shown to be true.
Some industries still like DST (like sporting equipment retailers), but there are many more who dislike the changed hours (like television).
The real issue, however is not the later hours or extra sunlight. Studies have shown that changing the clocks is responsible for health problems (including increased heart attack and vehicular accident risks) and leads to hundreds of thousands of hours of lost productivity in workplaces across the country. Also: It’s really annoying.
We should either eliminate DST or make it the year-round standard time for the whole country.
The L.A. Times calls today one of “the most dangerous days of the year,” according to numerous reports that say that the Monday after the start of Daylight Saving Time is a very bad day for most of the country. Different reports from various studies have tied the onset of DST to more heart attacks, more traffic accidents, more accidents in the workplace, and more.
You can believe that or not, it’s up to you. But I’m sure most of us can agree that losing an hour of your weekend around the beginning of Springtime each year is just plain annoying. What do you think?
In what is most likely a case of the ol’ personal vs. business Twitter account login switcheroo, Apple’s official iBookstore Twitter account retweeted and then quickly removed a tweet containing an obscene phrase.
Early Monday morning, the official @iBookstore account retweeted a tweet that said “Let me suck a dick and tell you how much I love introspective novels.”
The tweet, which was sent out to over 214,000 followers, was removed within minutes.
But not before some Twitter users had the chance to catch it. Apple’s iBookstore account has not referenced the tweet since.
Although the retweet mishap is pretty tame in the realm of NSFW social media mishaps, it just goes to show that employees who operate official business accounts need to make sure that they’re logged into their personal accounts before retweeting off-color posts.
If you’ve ever wondered just how much of a workout you’re getting at the office everyday by simply clicking your mouse, wonder no more. Someone has calculated it and put it in a publication.
The findings appeared in the recently published Convert Anything to Calories, which calculated the calorie counts in both food and common activities.
The calculation was based on an average human finger volume and weight of 10.8 cubic centimeters and 11.7 grams, respectively.
On average, 16.7 micromoles of ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) are consumed in moving one gram of muscle for one second. So, the total amount of ATP burned to move 11.7 grams of muscle in the index finger is approximately 195 micromoles (11.7g×16.7μ mol/g). There are 7.3 calories in one mole of ATP energy, so the number of calories burned in clicking the mouse equals about 1.42 (7.3/1000) X 195).
So, 1.42 calories every time you click that YouTube video link or send out that tweet. Well, kind of.
“The calculation assumes the muscle contracted completely, so the actual amount of calories used is a little less,” the authors specify. So, unless you’re really clicking your mouse with gusto, you’re probably not burning the full 1.42 calories per click.
So, long story short, you should probably get up and take a stroll around the office. Browsing reddit isn’t going to burn off that Quarter Pounder w/ cheese.
Twitter has just announced that they’ve expanded the reach of their archive service to 12 new languages: Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, & Spanish. Now, users using Twitter in those languages can download a full archive of all of their tweets.
Your Twitter Archive is now avail. in: Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, & Spanish.
After making promises for a few month, Twitter finally began to allow English-speaking users to download browsable tweet archives back in December. These “Twitter Archives” contain all types of outgoing communications including tweets and retweets – from the very beginning. “Tweet Zero,” if you will.
“We know lots of you would like to explore your Twitter past,” said Twitter last year.
In order to obtain your Twitter Archive, just go to your setting, scroll to the bottom, and click the “request your archive” button. Twitter will warn you that it may take a little while to prepare, but when it’s done they will email you a link.
YouTube, the leader in online video, is not without its fair share of serious competition coming from the likes of Vimeo, Hulu, and more. Now, it appears that its latest rival may come from someone who was once very close to the service.
In fact, the challenge may come from one of its co-founders. Speaking over the weekend at a Q&A session with Digg’s Kevin Rose, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley tipped that he was working on a new sort of video site – one more focused on creators and collaboration.
“I wish [SXSW] was a month later because I could unveil the new product,” said Hurley in a recent interview. He said that the new service will be “primarily video-based…and gives flexibility for people to work together and create content.”
Hurley made sure to say that he wasn’t looking to kill YouTube and that “there’s always going to be a place for YouTube.” His new site will simply focus on being a “platform better suited for collaboration.”
Hurley is the co-founder and former CEO of YouTube. IN 2006, he and Steve Chen sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion. He stepped down as CEO in 2010.
Today, Google is honoring English author Douglas Adams with a fun little interactive Doodle.
Adams began his writing career in the mid 1970s and soon got a break writing for Monty Python. Soon after this small job, Adams was forced to take on odd jobs as his writing career stalled. In the late 70s, Adams worked in radio and even became a producer for the BBC. He also worked writing for the TV series Doctor Who.
But of course, Adams is best-known for his breakthrough 1979 novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which actually started out as a radio comedy series. Hitchhiker’s Guide served as the first book in a “trilogy” that consisted of five novels, the last being published in 1992.
The Hitchhiker’s “trilogy” has sold over 15 million copies.
Adams is also know for the novels Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective AgencyThe Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.
Adams died of a heart attack on May 11, 2001 at the age of 49. Today’s Google Doodle honors what would have been Adams’ 61st birthday.
Fans of Adams’ work will be able to spot plenty of references inside today’s interactive Doodle.
Check out the video below for a look at the different animations in today’s Doodle.
Blogging site Storylane has just announced that they’ve been acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition is talent-based, as Storylane’s Jonathan Gheller says that Facebook will not be acquiring any of their data.
Storylane, a social-blogging site, billed itself a “story telling” network. It was founded two years ago and prompted people to share longer-form personal stories.
“The team from Storylane will be an incredible addition to Facebook,” said Facebook in a statement. “Their previous work showcasing real identity through sincere and meaningful content will make them a perfect fit at Facebook.”
Two years ago the team behind Storylane began working to help people connect in more fruitful and meaningful ways. We took on a mission – trying to help people better communicate who they are and what they care about, improve the way we do business with each other, find love and make new friendships. And at the heart of this work has always been our drive to build a more genuine online identity.
After a lot of discussions with Facebook about how our teams might work together to have even greater impact, we are announcing today that the Storylane team will be joining Facebook.
This is an exciting opportunity. Facebook’s mission of connecting the world has always been at the center of our work, and like our friends at Facebook, meaningful connections are what our team is most passionate about.
The beautiful stories you have decided to share with us are yours to keep and share in however way you want. We are building tools that will help you migrate the content to other services if you so desire. I will be in touch with you about those specific tools later, but I can confirm that Facebook is not acquiring any of your data; and we’re working to make sure you can migrate your content in a manageable way.
We want to give special thanks to our investors who supported us and encouraged us to dream big. It has been an absolute honor to work alongside such an outstanding group of people. Our journey as a young company was made possible by their commitment and patience. Without their guidance we would not be in a position to further our mission through Facebook.
Most of all, I want to thank our users. Your passion, sincerity and willingness to share, has made Storylane the incredible experience that exists today. We have learned so much from you. Your ideas and creativity will stay with us and inspire us on the next stage of our journey.
Best living comedian and creator of the brilliant show Louie, Louis C.K., has a new special debuting on HBO next month. HBO just released the first promo for it, and it’s dramatic as hell.
If you’re one of the lucky few that Facebook has chosen to give access to the new refresh of the news feed, you may notice that something’s missing.
Hey, where the hell is the ticker?
It’s gone. Pretty much. It’s not completely dead, but in the new news feed it’s been relegated to the bottom left-hand corner and some users don’t even have it at all.
Since Facebook’s news feed redesign is still in beta, the company is testing different versions of it with different users. This affects the Ticker in that some users have it and some users don’t. Even for the users who have it, the Ticker has been reduced down to a one-story-at-a-time blip at the bottom left under the chat list. If you have the new design and also have the ticker and don’t want it, you can disable it in your settings.
Here’s what Facebook has to say:
You can find ticker at the bottom of your sidebar. Ticker is sensitive to the amount of free space you have on your screen, so it only appears if there’s enough room for it. If you don’t see ticker, try using your browser in fullscreen mode or adjusting your screen size.
Whatever the case, there is one place that the Ticker is not anymore, and that’s on the right hand side of your homepage. And in its place are all the new content-specific news feeds that let you browse photos, music, and all friends with no pages and conversely all pages with no friends.
Facebook first launched the ticker back in September of 2011 to mixed but mostly negative reviews. The ticker, which allowed you to see all activity that was happening (likes, comments, open graph actions, etc.) was called “creepy,” “stalkerish,” and the “who gives a shit feed” by an unnamed writer.
Today, Facebook is announced nine new Open Graph actions for lifestyle (fitness, books, movies & TV) app.
Starting now, developers can start incorporating “run,” “walk,” and “bike” for fitness apps, “read,” “rate,” “quote,” and “want to read” for books apps, and “rate,” and “want to watch” for movies and TV apps.
Many popular apps in these categories have already added these Open Graph actions. They include Cyclemeter, Endomondo, Jawbone UP, Log Your Run, MapMyRun, Nike, Runkeeper, Runmeter, Runtastic, SPLIT Multisport GPS, Walkmeter, Bookshout!, GoodReads, Kobo, Random House Inc.’s BookScout, Rotten Tomatoes, Hulu, Flixster, Fandango, and Crackle.
“This improves developers’ ability to publish the types of activities that people want to share,” they say.
On Thursday, Facebook unveiled its huge news feed redesign that puts more emphasis on visuals and highlights big, bold stories inside the feed. Facebook says that they’ve created “beautiful” news feed stories to highlight these new actions.
“All apps that use these new actions will be reviewed to ensure they meet our quality criteria. Any apps that previously used custom actions to represent this type of sharing will need to move to these new actions by July 10, 2013,” says Dan Giambalvo in a Developer blog post.
Last month, Facebook initiated a huge cleanup on Open Graph actions in order to make the user experience more uniform and a little less spammy. In this cleanup, Facebook got rid of the ability for custom actions to automatically publish back to Facebook as people consume content. Now, Facebook only allows apps that use built-in actions (like, follow, listen, read, and watch) to automatically publish.
How much would it take for you to get a Netflix tattoo? Would you do it for a free year’s worth of the service?
If you think you love Netflix and their selection of streaming offerings, you don’t. Unless you’ve permanently inked the name “Netflix” on your body, you don’t really love Netflix. Yes, I know you watched all of House of Cards in three days. You still don’t really love Netflix.
Twitter user @TheRealMyron does. He loves Netflix a lot. TheRealMyron got a Netflix tattoo, and for his troubles received a free year of Netflix.
In case you were wondering, Netflix didn’t ask this guy to get a tatto in order to receive a free year. He just did it to show his love, tweeted the photo @Netflix and they responded with the offer. Social media done right? I guess?
@netflix thank you so much for the free year!!!! If you ever need me to do an ad I’m ready I’m a college student ready to work hard
Netflix’s streaming-only plan is $7.99 a month – so that means that TheRealMyron was awarded a prize worth $95.88 for his troubles. If Netflix decided to throw in unlimited DVDs too, that’s $191.76. And if they bumped him up to the Blu-Ray option, it means that his tattoo netted him $215.76
Yesterday, at an event at their Menlo Park headquarters, Facebook unveiled a radical redesign of their core product: the news feed. Unlike Graph Search or Gifts (two of the last big products that Facebook’s unveiled), the news feed is not an “extra,” if you will, in the film of Facebook. The news feed is the star of the Facebook experience. Sure, whenever Facebook announces a brand new product it’s a big deal, but when Facebook announces changes to the most vital part of the user experience, it’s a massive deal.
“Our mission is to make the world more open and connected,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Thursday’s event. “[And] news feed is one of the most important services that we build.”
“Our goal…is give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper.”
The new Facebook news feed is “designed to reduce clutter and focus more on stories from the people you care about,” says Facebook. “We’ve completely rebuilt each story to be much more vibrant and colorful and highlight the content that your friends are sharing. Photos, news articles, maps and events all look brighter and more beautiful.”
And that’s one of the main things that this news feed refresh is all about: an enhanced visual experience. Along with content-specific feeds that give users more freedom and mobile consistency, that makes up the three key points about the new news feed that Facebook hammered home on Thursday. Here’s what you need to know about what’s changing.
A More Visual User Experience
So, what’s going to change for the average user? Quite a bit, actually – both in how it looks and how you actually navigate around the network.
First, the desktop look. It’s cleaner, more visually stunning, and yes, it feels a bit more mobile-inspired. Everything is more photo-oriented, and those photos are given much more prominence inside the news feed. Photos that your friends post are huge, spanning all the way across the feed. Photo albums are also larger. Facebook says that they want to be able to make the story, as it appears in the news feed, more visually indicative of the experience. For instance, this story about a friend going to China gives a big, bold, photo-oriented snapshot of the trip:
And it’s not just photos from friends that are more visual. It’s shared articles, which feature larger images and more information like snippets and author & publication info:
And events:
And links that your friends share, which now feature profile cards on the left-hand side that show you exactly who has shared the same link. You can hover over each friend to see what they said about the link when they shared it:
Stories about your friends making new friends now feature snippets from Timelines:
Check-ins are also more visual with large map images, as is content from third-party sites like Pinterest. Overall, you’re going to see a news feed that doesn’t just highlight images, but is inundated with them. At Thursday’s event, Zuckerberg said that nearly half of the news feed already consists of photos and other visual content – so this redesign is simply an expression of the evolving face of the feed.
New Ways to Navigate
As expected, the new Facebook news feed will also sport content-specific news feeds. You’ll still have the classic news feed as the default, which will combine recent activity with “top posts.” You’ll also still have the opportunity to filter the feed by “most recent,” which will show you everything from both friends and pages in chronological order.
Facebook’s new, hyper-specific news feed options include “all friends,” which shows a stream of all activity from friends (nothing from pages or people that are simply “followed”). There are also specific feeds for photos, music, games, groups, and more.
The old “pages feed” has a new name: “Following.” It will unearth all the posts from pages and people that you follow (no friends).
In other words, Facebook is giving you more options for customizing your news feed experience.
Long story short, Facebook has given users a lot more choice in how they browse content on the site. And the prominent placement of the specific news feeds on the homepage nearly ensures that users are at least tempted to spend more time on the site. By delving into a specific content feeds like “music” or “photos,” users can unearth posts from the deep, dark, cavernous void of Facebook content that’s been cast aside by their ranking algorithms. When there’s more to explore, people typically choose to explore it – at least that’s Facebook’s hope. And more people spending more time on the site means more chances to serve ads.
The third tenet of Facebook’s news feed redesign is mobile consistency – meaning that your experience on the desktop, web, and apps across all platforms should feel fluid. As I mentioned before, the new Facebook desktop experience feels more mobile – at least more streamlined.
All of your Facebook extras, your events, messages, gifts, apps, and more, are now housed on the left-hand side inside cute little icons. Like mobile, this is accessible from anywhere you go on the desktop version. In fact, Facebook made a point at Thursday’s event to say that “now you can get to any page on Facebook to any other page on Facebook without going to your homepage.”
Facebook chat has also been resigned to the left in the new news feed. Facebook said that the reason for this is to get more people to see it. Some desktop users simply didn’t have the screen capabilities to see the chat information on the right-hand side.
Facebook’s mobile experience for the new news feed is going to look and feel just like the desktop experience. That’s the bottom line. With this refresh, Facebook is no longer allowing any light between the two. Your Facebook news feed is your Facebook news feed – it doesn’t matter how you access it.
It seems that this is what Facebook means when they say “goodbye clutter,” and that they want to get Facebook “out of the way” of the Facebook experience.
The Business of Business
So you know that with the new news feed, photos are both bigger and more prominent. You couldn’t have thought that ads were going to stay the same, right?
Yes, ads in your news feed will be getting bigger.
“We’re taking all the content you see in the feed and making it more immersive. So that goes across the board for everything, including ads,” said Facebook’s Julie Zhuo.
As a marketer, this presents plenty of new opportunities. Promoted Posts, Sponsored Stories, and Page promotion ads almost have to be visually impressive in order to flow with the rest of the news feed. If marketers didn’t see the advantage of developing striking, image-based ads before, this must surely be a wakeup call – that’s the future of ads on Facebook.
If you operate a Facebook Page, there are both good and bad aspects of Facebook’s news feed redesign. The good is that there’s a new “following”-only news feed option, so users have the opportunity to browse an unadulterated stream of content from business and interest pages. And the option to browse this specific feed is given prime placement on the homepage. In light of the recent hullabaloo of page owners accusing Facebook of decreasing post visibility to promote their Promoted Posts product, this feed option should be welcomed with open arms.
But it’s still just an option. And whether or not users choose to utilize that option remains to be seen.
Now for the bad: to compliment the “following” feed, there’s also an “all friends” feed that weeds out all page posts. Bummer.
Overall, the more visual news feed can only help business pages. Remember the aforementioned Timeline snippets that pop up when a user’s friend makes friends with another user? Well, that concept also applies to pages. When a user likes a new page, a visual snippet of that page’s Timeline will appear in the news feed. This gives pages a chance to make a bold first impression, increasing the likelihood that a user will choose to visit or like the page on the spot.
Facebook is suggesting that developers begin to optimize for high-res feed stories (on both desktop and mobile):
In the new design, the things people share through apps are larger and more engaging in News Feed. We’re also making it easier for people to access their game and music feeds, now accessible from the top right area. To take advantage of this new design, we encourage you to optimize for high-resolution feed stories on both web and mobile by providing 600X600 pixel images (minimum 200X200 px).
These images will be really important to game developers as Bookmarks will become more important in the news feed. Bookmarks are images that accompany a shared story about a game. The larger image size means may just be what it takes to convince new and returning players to check out your game.
“These ever-present bookmarks will also display the notification counter from the most recent game requests to help drive re-engagement with players,” says Facebook.
So, there you go. Facebook has just unveiled the most dramatic redesign of its most important product in years. All that’s left to know is the “when?”
Not soon, probably. At least for most of you. Facebook has said that this will be a slow, careful rollout so that they can get their ducks in a row. It’s a big change to a big product, and they want to make sure it’s right before handing it over to everyone in the world. This shouldn’t really surprise anyone, considering they’re currently doing the same sort of slow rollout with Graph Search.
“Well, Timmy, it’s because our cells stop replicating. And so that we’re not riddled with cancer by the age of two. Oh, and because I passed it down to you and you’re a ticking timebomb. Any more questions?”
