Hasta La Gadget!

Let people in the real world know how popular you are in real life with Fliike. It’s a physical counter that shows off how many “Likes” your page has received on Facebook in real time.

The Fliike was created by Smiirl, which is a design studio start-up based in France.

The Fliike basically connects to your Facebook page via Wi-Fi and transmits every “like” that you’ve received onto the flipboard-like counter. Personal pages won’t have much use for it, but pages for commercial purposes might, just so that establishment can show people that they’ve got a strong virtual presence.

A limited number of Fliikes are available for pre-order for $390(USD) (yes, $390!) If you’re more popular than 99,999 likes, Smiirl can add an extra numerical column to your Fliike to accommodate your massive popularity. The first batch ships out this November.

[via C|NET]

When you ‘like’ something on Facebook, it stays on your feed longer and sometimes appears on the news feeds of other people in your network. By ‘liking’ something, you make it stay visible for a longer period of time as it circulates on social networks.

The “Like to Death” online art project, on the other hand, works oppositely. Instead of staying visible longer, the piece disappears instead.

Like to Death is a collaboration for Adidas Originals by digital artist Geoffrey Lillemon and Stooki, an independent UK-based brand that also happens to be an art collective. The project’s site greets visitors with the following message: “Social media is the fifth dimension that fabricates our online existence. Imagine a life without it, if you can’t you have been possessed. Break the curse, like it to death.”

That statement has a point, but to some people, not being on social media would make them feel like they didn’t exist anymore in real life.

As more people like the interactive work, the ominous figure is slowly engulfed in flames. When it hits 20,000 likes, it’s supposed to disappear. You can check it out for yourself here.

[via C|NET]

Promoted content, sponsored posts, and other forms of advertisements are nothing new on social media websites, but services like Facebook and Twitter are constantly finding new ways to bring advertisements to their sites. Case in point: Twitter announced today that it will begin experimenting with ways to post promoted content from brands without showing more ads than there already are.

Specifically, Twitter says that they will be “experimenting with a way to make ads on Twitter more useful” to US users “by displaying promoted content from brands and businesses” that you show interest in. Twitter has assured us that users won’t see more ads on the social media site, but instead they’ll see “better ones.”

To get promoted tweets to show up for those who may be interested in the content, businesses can share a scrambled, unreadable email address with Twitter, or even browser-related information such as a browser cookie. Twitter can then match that information to Twitter accounts in order to show a “Promoted Tweet” to users who may find it useful.

Twitter says they “don’t give advertisers any additional user information,” and they’re allowing users to opt out of this new feature as well. Users can uncheck “Promoted content” in account settings, and from there, the social media service won’t include your information to other companies for catered advertisements.

Twitter also mentioned their support for Do Not Track, so Twitter will not collect any browser-related information if users have Do Not Track enabled in their web browser. We should be seeing more and more in-line advertisements come to social networks, Facebook is already filled with them. While ad blocker add-ons for web browsers block a lot of the ads, companies are getting smarter and bypassing ad blockers with in-line content instead, providing a slightly more intrusive experience. However, we don’t see that slowing down anytime soon.

Twitter to promote content from brands, promises not to show more ads is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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