Social networking

You may not have slept lately for worrying what Sean Parker has done for our environment.

Yes, in being one of the originals at Facebook, he helped create a world in which our noses permanently point downward, our friends are permanently virtual and our eyes must watch carefully over every word written by the company in small letters.

But I wasn't thinking about that.

I was thinking about the mounds of kerfuffle created after details were revealed about his wedding.

It was bad enough that he was said to be spending vast numbers on his nuptials. But then the Atlantic suggested … Read more

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Facebook wants to make it less confusing for marketers to advertise on the social network, so it's killing some ad units and consolidating others, the company announced Thursday.

"What we want to do is take the guesswork out of the process," Fidji Simo, a product manager for ads, said during a press event at Facebook's headquarters. The company is rolling out several changes in the next couple of months to its 27 types of advertising, including the elimination of Facebook questions, online local offers, and the individual page posts ads.

The simplified … Read more

It can't be easy being a handsome state senator's wife.

You've seen what happens to those who reach even higher office and you count the number of wives some of them have had.

The mathematical odds don't look so good.

So please offer an ululation of support for Heather McGill, wife of Alabama state Sen. Shadrack McGill, who has decided to get her retaliation in first.

Tired of predatory women's carnal desires directed at her husband, she has taken to Facebook to tell them that she's ready to shame them into oblivion.

As if … Read more

Fearing that enemy forces are gathering information on Israeli soldiers from social media, the Israel Defense Forces has decided to ban social network from some high-ranking soldiers and severely limit it for others.

The IDF is in the middle of drafting a "social networking code of ethics" that will ban the use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media for all highly classified units, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Other sensitive units, like pilots and intelligence officers, will be allowed to have social media accounts but won't be able to say they're soldiers or upload … Read more

This is perhaps an even greater philosophical question than: "Why do some people consider cheerleading a sport?"

For today we must consider how to hold a baby and watch the NBA Finals at the same time.

Should we turn on our televisions and hold the baby with both arms? Or does modern man hold his large-screened cell phone in one hand, while cradling baby in the other?

Samsung has a position on this. For its new Galaxy S4 ad insists on the latter pose as the ideal for both man and baby.

This ad, a follow-up to one released on Monday … Read more

Let's role play.

You're a school bus driver at Haralson County Middle School in Georgia. A 6th-grader gets on your bus and complains he's hungry.

You ask him why he's hungry. The kid says he was 40 cents short on his lunch card, so he was denied food.

When this scenario played out for bus driver Johnny Cook, he took to his Facebook page to express his shock and offer to help any child who is short of lunch money.

However, as CBS Atlanta reports, the school wasn't too pleased with this expression of concern. … Read more

I had always thought that technology was freeing burdened souls from having to follow ancient rules. The cherished principle of disruption has taken an ax to any supposed truth that's more than seven years old.

Yet some still want to preserve old ways. Grammarians, for example.

What use is grammar, really? You know what someone's trying to say when they tweet: "LOL. SKOOL SUX!!!!" -- even if the grammar gods might feel the bile rising toward their vocal chords.

Surely the most important thing about communication is the communicating part, not the following-some-old-Englishman's-rules part.

And yet there is an app called Grammarly, whose sole existence is predicated on preserving linguistic decorum.

In order to prove its alleged worth, Grammarly decided to analyze the tweets of the famous to see just how terminal grammar skills had become.… Read more

Those of you who use TweetDeck on the Web to access your Twitter account will find a new design the next time you launch the page.

The top bar has been moved to the left side of the screen where it offers virtually all of the commands you'd use on a regular basis. The New Tweet button appears at the top of the bar with an icon for Search directly underneath. Icons for all of your current columns then appear under Search so you can easily navigate from one to another, especially if all of your columns don't … Read more

Twitter suffered its largest outage in some time Monday following an error in a "routine change" to the microblogging site.

In a statement, the company said the site was not available from 1:08 p.m. to 1:33 p.m. PT. A mere 25 minutes. For the 200 million Twitter users, that was a while, at least since the days of the regular "fail whale."

But now that Bloomberg terminals -- the computers that Wall Street analysts, financial types, and traders use -- have tweets flowing through them, there's a greater onus of responsibility … Read more