social media

WeKnowWhatYoureDoing has gotten a lot of attention lately. This "experiment" by an 18-year-old programmer from England puts awkward Facebook status updates in the public spotlight -- as my CNET News colleague Amanda Kooser  (@akooser) so aptly put it last week. From her post:

We Know What You're Doing shakes out into four categories in the form of questions: Who wants to get fired? Who's hungover? Who's taking drugs? Who's got a new phone number?

All it takes to land in the spotlight is a fitting keyword and a failure to have your … Read more

Callum Haywood, an 18-year-old developer from England, is making waves in the Facebook privacy waters. His recently launched site, We Know What You're Doing, culls embarrassing status updates and catalogs them for the world to see.

We Know What You're Doing shakes out into four categories in the form of questions: Who wants to get fired? Who's hungover? Who's taking drugs? Who's got a new phone number?

All it takes to land in the spotlight is a fitting keyword and a failure to have your Facebook privacy settings locked down. Haywood pulls all the updates directly from Facebook's Graph API. For modesty's sake, all the new phone numbers given out over public updates are partially obscured.… Read more

Until a few years ago, the main way to show your support for a charity was to send in an annual check. As digital and social media evolved, the number of ways you could support your favorite charities has grown.

Sending money, of course, remains, the single most important way to support nonprofits. But social-media users have learned that you can also have an impact by paying with something else. Attention -- your own attention and your friends' attention.

Hitting "Like" or "Share" or retweeting a post from a nonprofit can bring awareness to new circles … Read more

DataSift, the company that gathers stats on social media trends and that took Twitter by storm, is now tracking trends on Wikipedia.

The company launched Wikistats today, a site that shows real-time data on which articles have been edited the most in the last 24 hours. The site identifies when changes were made and by how many different users. The data also shows how many lines were removed from articles and how many were added.

Most people forget that Wikipedia -- one of the largest crowd-sourced data repositories in the world and the sixth most popular Web site overall -- … Read more

Outspoken (which might be the gentlest thing anyone's said about him) Miami sports journalist Dan Le Batard has a show on ESPN2 (4:30 pm ET weekdays; back on the air Wednesday, June 20), "Dan Le Batard is Highly Questionable" and it consists of him answering sports questions from viewers. Nothing unusual so far, except for the title.

But it's unusual for a lot of reasons.

USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA: One of them is how well it uses social media. It was the first show I saw to display its Twitter hashtag, #DLHQ, on the screen … Read more

To say that the FBI had its work cut out for it after 9/11 is an understatement. As part of its anti-terrorism efforts, the agency cozied up to telecom companies, like Verizon and AT&T. The relationship was so tight that some telecom employees actually had offices at the FBI.

This convenient arrangement paved the way for FBI agents to ultimately hand post-it notes with phone numbers to their telecom pals to find out if those accounts were worth investigating. It's the sort of stuff that makes privacy advocates shudder. And it's what Jennifer Lynch, staff … Read more

The new Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display announced earlier this week just got an Editors' Choice review on CNET, but some die-hard tinkerers are upset about the lack of upgradeable components inside. According to iFixit.org, the latest MacBook Pro is the least reparable Apple laptop to date.

For starters, users are locked into the amount of RAM they choose at the purchase date, as the memory is actually soldered to the logic board. The proprietary solid-state hard drive is staying put as well, and watch out for a couple of booby traps concealed underneath the lithium-polymer battery! The laptop certainly remains incomparable in terms of display, I/O ports, and chassis, but keep in mind that your upgrade options down the line are severely limited if you go with this model.… Read more

It's become fashionable in some quarters to bash various aspects of social media. Whether it's the Facebook IPO, or mostly apocryphal stories about criminals using residents' status updates to rob empty homes, or complaints about users wasting time on different platforms. Most skeptics happen to be non-users (or light users) of social media, but I'm not using this post to push back against them.

Instead, I want to highlight an attribute of social media that is vastly overlooked by skeptics and most observers. That attribute: Generosity.

NOT JUST NARCISSISTS: Social media rightly has the reputation of being … Read more

Will Facebook suffer the same fate as MySpace in a few years? That's what one analyst predicts.

Speaking on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" program Monday, Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital, said that Facebook will lose its dominance as a social network in five to eight years.

In his forecast, Jackson cited Facebook's inability to crack the mobile market and the stock's 27 percent nosedive since the company's IPO.

"In five to eight years they are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared," Jackson said. "Yahoo … Read more