Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook has long been getting criticism for its privacy practices on its users, and it looks like the CEO’s own sister is having issues of her own with the social networking giant. Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, complained on Twitter when a photo she posted that was meant to be set as private ended up being public somehow.

Randi, who is a former marketing director of Facebook, posted a photo to her Facebook page showing her family’s reaction to the new Poke app that was released last week, and According to Buzzfeed, a friend of a friend saw the photo and reposted it on Twitter, which turned a semi-private moment into a very public affair.

It turns out that Vox Media’s Callie Schweitzer is friends with one of Randi Zuckerberg’s friends and thought that the photo was a public Facebook post. Schweitzer ended up posting the adorable photo to Twitter, not meaning to cause any harm to Zuckerberg. However, Zuckerberg wasn’t too happy that the photo was made public and cried foul that her privacy had been violated.

Schweitzer immediately apologized and meant no harm, saying that the photo appeared at the top of her feed and “seemed public.” In the end, it turns out Randi Zuckerberg didn’t have her privacy settings tuned exactly how she wanted them, and didn’t know that a photo of hers was being posted to friends of friends, instead of just her friends. However, she ends up blaming the whole fiasco on social media etiquette, and that you should “always ask permission before posting a friend’s photo publicly. It’s not about privacy settings, it’s about human decency.”

[via Buzzfeed]

Mark Zuckerberg’s sister becomes victim of Facebook privacy issues is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Social media is ostensibly all rainbows and butterflies. It’s for “making connections” and “friending” people, blah blah blah. But do you ever follow people you really don’t like? Do you ever follow people because you don’t like them, and instead you like reading their updates while sighing loudly to yourself and those around you asking how anyone could really be that stupid? More »

Hot on the heels of a big performance update for the Facebook Android app yesterday, the social network has also released an update of their iPhone app today. The update brings a rebuilt timeline and a faster-loading news feed. The app is technically only an incremental update, but the speed improvement makes it feel like a brand-new app.

While iOS received a native version of Facebook on iOS a few months ago that increased the overall speed of the app, the news feed was one item that still felt a little sluggish. Now, the news feed definitely zips along and can keep up with my scrolling without any problems, and while I don’t visit Timelines too often on my iPhone, it’s nice to know that the speed is there when I need it.

The new update for iPhone also lets you designate which album photos are uploaded to, an add-on to the recently-launched Photo Sync feature, which allows users to have any photos taken with their phone uploaded to Facebook automatically, similar to Dropbox’s and even Google+’s automatic upload offerings.

With the Android update releasing yesterday, Facebook now has both of their popular apps running native versions, and both are as speedy, snappy, and responsive as it gets. Yesterday’s Android update saw an increase in performance that nearly doubled the speed of the old version, thanks to the ditching of HTML5 and using all native code.

Facebook updates iPhone app with rebuilt Timeline, promises faster speeds is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Millennials vs. Boomers cover both ends of the age spectrum. There’s an X and a Y in between, but according to
most authorities, a generation of folks is approximately 15 years apart,
where they are defined by their own uniquely similar characteristics.

Microsoft has opened its social networking site Socl to the general public, whereas before only a small subset of individuals had access as testers. The network is still in beta, however, so users need to keep that in mind when using it. The Socl social project was first launched back in December of 2011, where users had to receive an invitation to use it.

Socl is the by-product of Microsoft’s FuSE (Future Social Experiences) Labs, which has stated that Socl as it exists now is not how it originally existed, with the interface being altered to accommodate the way users were using it. Said FUSE’s General Manager Lili Cheng: “The way people were using Socl was different than we designed it.”

Users can sign in with either their Facebook account or their Microsoft account, depending on which social sphere one hangs out in most. It’s a bit odd to get the hang of when first using it, something more than a few users have expressed. After logging in with my Facebook account, I searched for “cats” and received two columns of results, with the left column being titled “Picasso” and full of Picasso images, and the right side being full of pictures of the grumpy cat. The Picasso results didn’t include anything cat-related, so I’m not sure why that turned up as one of the results.

Clicking an image then takes you to the URL where the photo is located; it might be an article, a blog, or a desktop background website, for example. Overall, Socl feels like some strange combination of Reddit, Pintrest, and Facebook all mashed up in a quasi-search engine. There’s no word yet one when Microsoft might push the social site into the mainstream; for now, it remains a project that is, apparently, broadening its horizons.

[via ZDnet]

Microsoft opens its Socl social network beta to the public is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.