Latest Gear Live Videos
Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom responds to backlash
Posted by John Kilhefner Categories: Legal, News, Social Networks
.jpg)
Instagram wants you to know that it hears your concerns and its doing its best to alleviate the symptoms of change. Accordingly, the photo-sharing service has altered the parts of its new Terms of Service.
Earlier, we reported that many people were leaving the service for Flickr and the like, because people took the new ToS to mean the community's photos would be unfairly monetized for Instagram's gain. Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, has since made it clear that is not the case. Systrom states that Instagram wants "to experiment with innovative advertising." Which according to Systrom means allowing Instagram access to people you follow, and who they follow, for businesses to use in order to better promote its business.
Systrom also claimed that users still own their content and that his company won't sell user photos to advertisers.
Read More 
| Instagram Blog
Advertisement
Twitter Partners with Nielsen to Create Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings
Posted by John Kilhefner Categories: Corporate News, News, Partnerships, Social Media
Nielsen and Twitter are joining forces to create Nielsen Twitter TV Rating. Twitter, as we all know, is a social media platform that sees more than a billion tweets every 2.5 days on an inexhaustible list of topics. Nielsen specializes in information, particularly what consumers watch and buy. With Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, the two companies hope to find a standardized way of measuring the conversations happening around TV shows.
The ratings will be commercially available Fall 2013, and, according to Twitter's blog, will function as "one common benchmark from which to measure the engagement of their programming." The new rating system will set in place measures to quantify the people discussing the TV shows, as well as the people who were exposed to the conversation. The goal will be to provide "the precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming."
This is not the two companies first pairing, as both came together earlier this year to measure the impact of brand advertising campaigns using Twitter surveys.
Read More | Twitter Blog
New algorithm attempts to debunk false information on Twitter
Posted by John Kilhefner Categories: News, Social Networks, Startups
While Twitter has been described as a "self-cleaning oven" and a "truth machine," rumors do slip through and cause confusion, if briefly. A new study building on research done in 2010, analyzing tweets surrounding the Chile 8.8 earthquake, is currently researching the possibilities of sussing out the true tweets from the false ones.
The study uses 16 features to identify whether a tweet is credible or not. It seems reliable information tends to be longer and include URLs, as well as come from people with a lot of followers. The true tweets also tend to be negative in nature, and do not contain exclamation points or question marks.
A new paper by those behind the Chile earthquake study, Carlos Castillo, Marcelo Mendoza and Barbara Poblete, will appear in the journal Internet Research next month with what look to be encouraging results. Their algorithm had an AUC of 0.86, meaning that when it's presented with a false tweet and a true tweet, it would label the true tweet more credible 86 percent of the time.
It's not perfect, and actual people would probably fair better in determining which tweet was more credible. Probably. In any case, it's nice to see we're making strides toward making the Internet a more credible place. My only concern is the escalation factor; that is, the people behind the deliberately false information will only adopt better practices to fool such truth-seeking algorithms.
Read More | Slate
Instagram sees massive backlash for new terms of service
Posted by John Kilhefner Categories: Corporate News, Legal, Social Networks
Instagram users are flocking to greener pastures after the photo-sharing service posted new Terms of Service this week. With the new TOS, users are required to consent to allowing the Facebook-owned service license their public photos to companies, organizations and advertisers. As CNET puts it, this could make Instagram a stock photo service in itself, without paying out to photographers.
More than likely, however, the new TOS are for Instagram users would be used in promotional images, rather than as stock photos that cheat the photographers out of money. It's the fact that the latter is a possibility that is causing some users to embark on an exodus to Flickr, Hipstamatic or Twitter.
The Verge reports that searching for Instagram on Twitter brings up several instructions for how to export your Instagram pics and cancel your account. There are also several tweets spreading about which photo-sharing services make a good Instagram replacement, such as the article Fast Company posted.
The change in its Terms of Services coincides not only with the unwelcome change in photo-cropping functionality, but also as Twitter adds its own photo filters, and Flickr releases version 2.0 of its iOS client. It may be a temporary setback for Instagram, or it could spell the beginning of the end if the service doesn't do something fast to appease its users.
Read More | CNET via The Verge
Facebook encouraging employees to switch to Android
Posted by John Kilhefner Categories: Corporate News, Social Networks
.jpg)
Facebook wants more of its employees carrying Android devices, employing vaguely propagandistic posters around its Menlo Park campus. The posters outline the growing lead Android has over iOS, projecting that lead to double by 2016. The goal is to get Facebook employees using devices that the majority of their app users use, or "Droidfooding," as the campaign is casually known.
“In the early days we gave employees iPhones primarily”, a Facebook spokesperson said to TechCrunch. This recent shift to a more Android OS orientated workplace is part of an effort to make it as simple as possible to test future Facebook For Android and Facebook Messenger apps.
“We’ve created more awareness that Android devices are available” Facebook says. "There's plenty of people here carrying around both devices, and not just engineers and not just mobile people.”
Read More | TechCrunch
Twitter allegedly attempted to buy Instagram for $525 million
Posted by John Kilhefner Categories: Acquisitions, Corporate News, Rumors, Social Networks, Startups
Way before Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, Twitter apparently made an offering of its own, to which Instagram initially agreed to.
The offer from Twitter, according to The New York Times, was for $525 million. Instagram's CEO, Kevin Systrom, agreed to the buy-out, but changed his mind before selling Instagram to Facebook without allowing Twitter to make a counter offer.
What's interesting is that Systrom had stated while under oath to the California Corporations Department that Instagram had never received another formal offer. None of the parties have commented on the Times article that brought this information to life, but it could mean we might be in the throes of an intense legal battle shortly.
Read More | NY TImes
Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac giveaway!
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Features, PC / Laptop, Software
If you've been checking out the Gear Live Twitter and Facebook pages, then you've likely been looking forward to our next giveaway, featuring Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac. Well, the time is now!
Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac brings a bunch of power to the popular virtual machine software, letting you run Windows 8 right on your Mac in a variety of ways. In fact, if you are running Mountain Lion, you get your Windows 8 notifications right in Notification Center. Even if you aren't looking to throw Windows on your Mac, Parallels will let you run multiple instances of OS X and Linux as well. Imagine running Windows 8, Windows 7, OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Snow Leopard Server, all at once, all on your Mac. That's the power that Parallels offers.
Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac sells for $80, but we've got a bunch of codes to give away to Gear Live readers that'll let you download it for free! We have multiple ways to enter:
- Follow the Gear Live Twitter account and post this exact tweet: “Hey @gearlive hook me up with @ParallelsMac! #Parallels8 http://gear.lv/e-parallels8” (Click here to tweet this now)
- Like Gear Live on Facebook and leave a comment on our wall
- Subscribe to the Gear Live YouTube Channel
- Leave a comment on this post
- Do all four, and your entries are doubled!
Do that, and you're in! At the end of this week, we will pick five winners randomly from all valid entries. The winner must be over 18 year old. Contest ends at 12:00am on October 19th!
Twitter bird logo gets a new design
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Design, Social Networks
If you visit the Twitter Web site, you'll see a refreshed bird logo waiting for you. Today the company unveiled a modified, sleeker (if you can call it that) version of it's iconic Twitter bird. The head feathers have been removed, and the bird now seems to be flying upwards instead of forward. It's also a darker shade of blue. We're guessing that if no one told you that the logo was new, that you probably wouldn't even notice the change. It's definitely different, but definitely subtle.
Click to continue reading Twitter bird logo gets a new design
Read More | Twitter Blog
Video: Google+ gets massive redesign
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Design, Social Media, Social Networks
Google just released a massive redesign for its Google+ social network, the majority of which you can check out in the walkthrough video above. Our thoughts? Lots of whitespace, but we'll play with it for a bit before final judgment.
Nokia Lumia 800 and Monster Purity Headphones giveaway!
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Accessories, Cell Phones, Features, Music
If you've been checking out the Gear Live Twitter and Facebook pages, then you've likely been looking forward to our next giveaway, featuring the Nokia Lumia 800 and Monster Purity Headphones. Well, the time is now!
The Nokia Lumia 800 is a super-sexy Windows Phone device for AT&T that features a 3.7-inch 800x480 ClearBlack AMOLED display, 1.4 GHz processor, Carl Zeiss 8 megapixel wide angle lens with dual LED flash, and a seamless, curved glass one-piece body design.
The Purity HD stereo headphones from Monster feature Windows Phone playback controls, as well as ControlTalk Universal. This means you can control both your media and phone calls hands-free. It's also got a tangle-resistant cable, and comes with a hard shell carrying case. The best part? The headphone color matches the color of your Lumia 800!
Microsoft only sells the Lumia 800 as part of an $899 bundle here in the US, but we're giving you the opportunity to win the smartphone and Purity HD headphones right here, for free! Here's how to enter:
- Follow the Gear Live Twitter account and post this exact tweet: “Hey @gearlive hook me up with that @Nokia Lumia 800! #PuritybyMonster http://gear.lv/e-lumia800” (Click here to tweet this now)
- Use the hashtag #PuritybyMonster in your tweets over the next week
Do that, and you're in! Now here is the fun part - you can enter as many times as you'd like by including the hashtag #PuritybyMonster in your tweets next seven days. At the end, we will pick a winner randomly from all valid entries. If you use Twitter regularly, just throw #PuritybyMonster into your tweets over the next week, and you could walk away with this awesome prize. The winner must be over 18, and must have a mailing address within the US to be eligible. Contest ends at 12:00am on April 12th!
Recent Galleries
Advertisement
© Gear Live Media, LLC. 2007 – User-posted content, unless source is quoted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain License. Gear Live graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, videos, articles, blogs, forums, scripts and other service names are the trademarks of Gear Live Inc.
