European SOCIAL Networking: Top 10 European Social Networking Sites

Here is a list of the Top 10 European Social Networking Sites, for and about Europeans networking around the world.

Read more: Top 10 European Social Networking Sites - American Vouchers [sponsored by Armis]

Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment - by William Hughes

Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state.

The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. It shows how Facebook data scientists tweaked the algorithm that determines which posts appear on users’ news feeds—specifically, researchers skewed the number of positive or negative terms seen by randomly selected users.

Facebook then analyzed the future postings of those users over the course of a week to see if people responded with increased positivity or negativity of their own, thus answering the question of whether emotional states can be transmitted across a social network. Result: They can! Which is great news for Facebook data scientists hoping to prove a point about modern psychology. It’s less great for the people having their emotions secretly manipulated.

In order to sign up for Facebook, users must click a box saying they agree to the Facebook Data Use Policy, giving the company the right to access and use the information posted on the site.

The policy lists a variety of potential uses for your data, most of them related to advertising, but there’s also a bit about “internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” In the study, the authors point out that they stayed within the data policy’s liberal constraints by using machine analysis to pick out positive and negative posts, meaning no user data containing personal information was actually viewed by human researchers.

And there was no need to ask study “participants” for consent, as they’d already given it by agreeing to Facebook’s terms of service in the first place.

Read more: Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment · Newswire · The A.V. Club

Social networking in the Netherlands - by Alexandra Gowling

Social networks are very popular in the Netherlands, with on average 85 per cent of the Dutch internet audience (10 million people) using one of them in recent months.

Of the various networks available, Facebook is the most popular, with just over half of the whole Dutch population using the world’s biggest social network. Second most popular is LinkedIn, with just under half that audience, followed closely by Twitter.

The Dutch social network Hyves is most popular with older users, with two-thirds of their users over 35, while half of Tumblr’s users are under 35. More people in the 45 to 55 age bracket use Twitter and LinkedIn, while the largest age group, surprisingly perhaps, for Facebook users are the over 55s.

According to Facebook Benelux, 6,1 million Dutch people log on to their accounts every day, which is unsurprising as the Dutch use the internet almost more than anyone else in Europe.

People in the Netherlands are also using smartphones more and more, as seen in the 77 per cent of Facebook users who check their account on their smartphone or tablet. Of these six million users, 4,6 million log in every day.

Read more: Social networking in the Netherlands | Dutch News

Facebook wants to turn your Android handset into a “Facebook phone" - by Alexandra Chang

Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn your Android phone into a simple sharing device. And by that, he means he wants to turn it into a Facebook phone.

Facebook just announced Facebook Home, which all but turns any Android handset into a “Facebook phone” by putting the social giant right there on the home screen and all of its products at the forefront of the UI. It isn’t a phone made by Facebook. It’s something better than that, and in some ways, more important: a deeply integrated application with its hooks set tightly into the Android platform. Think of it as an apperating system.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hinting at following this path for years, even as he fought back incessant Facebook phone rumors. A phone is “so clearly the wrong strategy for us,” he said last year. And he’s right. Facebook can’t take on Apple and Samsung, or even Microsoft and BlackBerry. Making hardware is a lot of work, and that kind of work doesn’t make sense for Facebook right now. Instead, the social network is ensuring it can be as front-and-center as possible on all the most popular platforms today.

“Today we’re finally going to talk about that Facebook phone. Or more accurately we’re going to talk about how you can turn your Android phone into a great social, simple device,” Zuckerberg said at the launch event in Menlo Park. He went on to describe how people most often use Facebook on their mobile devices and explain why Facebook chose to build an Android experience, rather than a phone. “A great phone might sell 10 or 20 million units at best. Our community as more than 1 billion people in it. Even if we did a good job selling a phone, we would only be serving 1 to 2 percent of our community and we want to do more than that.”

Note EU-Digest: this is all nice and dandy, but like it already is the case with Microsoft, the consumer, unfortunately, is now at a point where he or she is "force-fed" operating systems and apps on computers, tablets and smart-phones they buy . 

As a result the consumer in reality has less and less flexibility today when it comes to their personal choices and preferences in regards to the apps and operating systems which are already a part of the products they buy. 

 Read more: Facebook Home: Zuck’s Android Takeover | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Internet: What Would We Do If the Internet Crashed? - by Amanda Wills

Internet

In 1982, the Internet was a safe place where everyone trusted each other. The community was so small that every email address on the web could fit into one skinny "phone book" written in big font. If you made that same book today, it would be 25 miles thick.

Scientist Danny Hillis was one of the few people in that small digital community. In a recent TED Talk, Hillis says the Internet's current population exposes a new vulnerability. "The Internet was designed with the assumption that the communications links could not be trusted, but that the people that connected computers to the Internet were smart and trustworthy," Hillis tells Mashable via email. "Those assumptions no longer apply." We depend on the Internet for nearly everything, and we cannot imagine what would happen if it just quit working.

But with the influx of what Hillis describes as "bad and foolish people" who connect to the web, a massive breakdown may be in our future.
 
Hillis tells stories of gaping security holes that have already led to incidents of our exposed vulnerability because we are using the Internet in services for which it wasn't originally built. It now supports the basic infrastructure of our society: funds transfers, shipping of food and oil, transportation and even the telephone system.

"We're setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the [one] we had with the financial system, where we take a system that was basically built on trust — was basically built for a smaller scale system — and we've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to operate," Hillis explains in the video above.

Hillis says it's time to have a Plan B: an "alternative communications network that is entirely independent of the protocols of the Internet." As Hillis found out after his TED Talk, people are already working on these backup plans.

"Since this presentation, many people have told me those stories are only the tip of the iceberg," he says, noting that some of those people also told him about various efforts to fix these problems. "So, while I am concerned to hear that things are already worse than I assumed, I'm also heartened that smart minds are starting to focus on solutions," Hillis says. "Like so many other infrastructure problems, this one is likely to eventually get fixed. The question will be just how much pain we will have to accept before we fix it."

Read more: What Would We Do If the Internet Crashed?

Facebook matters more than your company website - by David Clarke

In this era of social media supremacy, it's imperative for a business to maximize its social media presence by focusing on designing and developing a Facebook page that clearly communicates the company's brand messaging.

A well-designed Facebook page may be the key to increasing your brand awareness, driving traffic to your company's website and engendering your customers' loyalty.
For the five reasons to consider Facebook first and a company website second click on the link below.

For more: Facebook matters more than your company website - Business Monday - MiamiHerald.com

From Holland with love: the facebook terminator - by David Colker

Like the computer in the movie "2001," Facebook is struggling to keep its profiles from virtual extinction at the hands of its arch enemy - the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.

The Suicide Machine is a clever web site out of the Netherlands that was designed to free users from their social network lives on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. You just pick one of the networks, start up the machine, and it graphically shows you unfriending your contacts, one by one, and eliminating all your other contacts with your profile. Forever.

Facebook is now fighting back. The Suicide Machine is reporting that Facebook has banned its IP address, thus foiling suicides.

For the report: Facebook fights back, disallows the Suicide Machine | Technology | Los Angeles Times