As Facebook continues to dominate the social media sphere, new competitors emerge to challenge the weaknesses apparent in its design. One of the most recent of this breed is the social networking site Pidder. Drawing on fears of data-mining and even “social media background checks”, Pidder focuses on privacy protection to a user-unfriendly extreme. After using Pidder we concluded [...]
The Iranian government, never a proponent of free expression, has ramped up its practice of filtering its citizens’ access to social networking websites following Friday’s election and the ensuing protests. For instance, the Iranian government has blocked access to Twitter from servers located in Iran. The Iranian government’s efforts, however, have been thwarted by a complicated network of non-Iranian proxy [...]
Interesting post on Slashdot about how social network groups influence tastes of the members. The article's by Bennett Haselton (the founder of peacefire.org). The article cites a study showing that: They also noted that in the "social influence" worlds where users could see each others' downloads, increasing download numbers had a snowball effect that widened the difference between the successful [...]