Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Facebook Updates News Feed To Display Top Stories Since You Last Visited

Posted on September 22nd, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments

The social network also adds a real-time “ticker” for instant comments and replies.

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Facebook Gratitude, Porsche-Style

Posted on February 20th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments

Porsche’s customized design honors the brand’s 1,000,000 loyal social media enthusiasts.

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Facebook Profiles Get a Facelift

Posted on December 6th, 2010 • Filed under Uncategorized • No Comments

A large percentage of net users’ online identities will be getting a facelift in the coming weeks as Facebook is rolling out a new profile page with more visual elements and, you guessed it, more pictures of faces.

The new design is currently opt-in, but Facebook says it will roll it out to the world by early 2011. Those who want it immediately can go to the new profile explainer, which will walk you through the new pages and let you adopt it now. But be cautioned, there’s no undoing the choice.

The top of the page will now include a basic intro to a user, such as location, job, school, partner, etc. And directly underneath that is a bar of photos that you have been “tagged” in, increasing the number of pictures of the person’s face you see on the page. In fact, the photo algorithm doesn’t just show the photos you are tagged in, but zooms in on your face to make it fill the small square.

Here’s hoping you are ready for your close-up. You can choose to remove photos by clicking on them, and the option remains to “untag” yourself from any photo, no matter who took it.

Nearly everything on the page gets the same, more visual treatment.

You can now add lists of friends, such as “Roommates,” “Touch Football Teammates,” “Best Friends,” “College Buddies”. This is done using the recently revamped “Groups” function, and is clearly intended to get more people to create groups — perhaps as a pre-emptive strike on Google’s upcoming social network service, which is rumored to rely heavily on segmenting your friends into sub-groups.

You can also now “see friendship,” a feature that shows things you have in common with a given friend, including “mutual friends” and similar interests.

The change also makes Facebook’s ads more prominent on the page, with all four ad units being visible even on small laptops without having to scroll.

The change is in keeping with Mark Zuckerberg’s ardent belief that people are hard-wired to look at faces, so now the page will be filled with them. The new system also turns things you like, such as a band or a company, into an images. Clearly Facebook is learning from becoming the net’s largest photo sharing site that people like to look at pictures.

Facebook has also expanded the number of things you can share on the site, including classes you are taking at school, projects you are working on at your job, turning Facebook into a LinkedIn, Jr. for the internship set. In keeping with the post-literacy theme, these get the visual treatment as well.

Facebook users seem to be divided on the change, as you can read in the comments on the announcement, but for once, at least, there’s no real privacy issue, other than more people will be seeing more photos of you.

But the redesign does re-emphasize one thing: Facebook, not you, controls your online identity, and whether they like the redesign or not, hundreds of millions will accept it and use the service daily.

Read the original post on Epicenter

 

Grades don’t drop for college Facebook fiends

Posted on July 16th, 2010 • Filed under Uncategorized • No Comments

Students who use social networking sites don’t seem to suffer academically, according to research out of Northwestern University. In a recent paper titled “Predictors and consequences of differentiated practices on social network sites,” researchers found that heavy use of sites like Facebook and MySpace doesn’t affect college students’ grade point averages. In fact, it’s the usual suspects such as gender, ethnic background, and parental education that appear to have more of a determining factor in GPA than any kind of Facebook addiction.

According to the researchers’ data, female students tend to have higher grades than male ones, and white students have higher grades than non-Hispanic African-American students. Students whose parents have college degrees have higher GPAs than those whose parents only have a high school diploma or lower.

The researchers then added in data about overall Internet use and social networking use, and found that there were no significant differences. “The most prevalent findings… are the persisting differences between respondents with different demographic backgrounds,” reads the paper.

Indeed, Internet and social network use didn’t affect the difference in GPAs between male and female or white and African American students. However, social network use did eliminate the difference in GPAs between students whose parents had differing levels of higher education. In fact, when controlling for certain demographics, the researchers found a positive relationship between Internet use and GPA.

“The positive relationship between web-use skills and GPA may illustrate that students who have better online skills can draw on their Internet savvy to aid in their schoolwork,” wrote the researchers. “[E]ngaging more intensely with [social networking sites], in particular, shows no relationship to our outcome variable of academic achievement.”

The researchers do acknowledge that students are perfectly capable of distracting themselves from their schoolwork and wasting time online. However, the positive effects seem to outweigh the negative ones for some students, or at least cancel each other out for others. So, the next time your mom accuses you of spending more time online than on your freshman projects, tell her you’re just connecting with your peers for better project collaboration.

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Read the original post on Ars Technica