Clues to avoid getting 'unfriended' on Facebook

Washington: Want to avoid being "unfriended" by your friends on Facebook? Then, just start responding to posts on your wall, researchers say.

Researchers at Arizona State University in the US found that following some simple but unspoken rules - such as responding to messages, avoiding disrespecting people and not posting controversial pictures, can help one stay in friends' good graces always on social networking sites.

Study researcher Erin Bryant and her colleague Jennifer Marmo said many of the "rules" people live by on Facebook are designed to prevent possible awkward situations, LiveScience reported.

It may seem that maintaining a bit of discretion on Facebook is a no-brainer, but in fact, it's these sorts of unspoken rules that make the social world go round, they said.

For their study, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, the researchers created a focus group of 44 students, aged between 19 and 24, who averaged about 200 friends each on Facebook and spent nearly 40 minutes a day on the site.

The focus groups came up with 36 rules big and small, from "don't post anything that will hurt a friend's image" to "monitor your photos to make sure they are flattering."

Facebook adds 'life-saving' organ donor feature

New York: Facebook wants to help you share your organs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says US and UK users will be able to enroll as organ donors via links on the world's biggest social networking site.

Facebook users who are already organ donors can add that information to their Facebook Timelines. And those, who are not organ donors, can find links to official organ donation registries and instantly enroll.

"We want to make it simple," said Zuckerberg. "You just put in the state or country that you are from, so that we can help link you to the official registries."

Zuckerberg announced the organ donor update to Facebook on "Good Morning America" Tuesday. "Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories… We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that’s out there," Zuckerberg told ABC's Robin Roberts in an exclusive interview at the company’s headquarters.

China's search engine market reaches $877 million

Beijing: The size of China's search engine market hit 5.53 billion yuan ($877 million) in the first quarter of 2012, according to new statistics.

The figure represents a 70.4 per cent year-on-year increase, but a 4.7 per cent decline compared to the last quarter of 2011, showed the statistics from Analysys International, a Beijing-based tech and internet information provider.

Dong Xu, an analyst with the firm, attributed the quarter-on-quarter decline to the traditional seasonality of Internet use.

Thanks to its good overall performance, however, the keyword section has attracted steady advertising budgets, Xinhua quoted Dong as saying.

Keyword advertising also meets the needs of brand marketing with advertisers, who are gradually recognizing its promotional value. Therefore, China's search engine market will keep a stable development, he added.

Google's 'Zerg Rush' Easter Egg game kills search results

New Delhi: If you love surprises from Google in the form of Easter Eggs, then here is something new for you to play with. Google's new Easter Egg has now come to the notice, which is quite interactive. It's more of a game that lets you hit and collect scores.

No matter what you are doing, you are suggested to go to the Google home page and search for the keywords "Zerg Rush". The search results will appear, but those links/results won't be clickable. Immediately after the search results appear, a chunk of little Os from the Google logo will start dropping from the top of the screen.

Now here the real fun starts! Use your mouse to click and destroy the Os - or zerglings - before they wipe out your search results, and form two large Gs on the page.

As the game ends, users are allowed to share their scores via Google+, thereby letting their followers know that how many zerglings they managed to target.

This Easter Egg is said to be a reference to a strategy used in the real-time strategy game StarCraft, which was developed by Blizzard Entertainment.

Google's new Easter Egg is so interesting that it went viral this morning in a short time frame, and also started trending on the micro-blogging site Twitter.

Yahoo India launches new Flickr Uploadr version for PC and Mac

New Delhi: Yahoo India announced the launch of Flickr Uploadr, a new feature that enables simpler, easier, and faster upload of photographs on Flickr. The feature available for both Pro and Free users on the photo storage and sharing service, currently supports Firefox 8, Safari 5, and Chrome 6 browsers.

The new Flickr Uploadr runs on an advanced HTML 5 browser technology. Uploadr simplifies the process of adding photos by allowing drag-and-drop. It provides preview thumbnails, so that users can use the intuitive drag and drop interface to manage and re-order photos before adding it to the Photostream. Photographs can be zoomed, rotated and sorted by title.

While the Uploadr feature has been around for some time now, this new, updated version makes adding photos to your collection just a little be easier.

Flickr is a key component of Yahoo!'s overall product strategy and the photo-sharing site continues to develop across multiple devices and platforms.

The Flickr Uploadr is the third in the series of updates, which began with the Justified Layout launch and addition of the embedded photo editing tool by Aviary. The new feature allows users to add titles, descriptions, tags, and organise photos in different sets.

Airtel launches e-commerce portal 'Airtel Shop'

New Delhi: Airtel's online shop offers products and services like mobile phones, mobile and broadband plans, Digital TV services etc.

Airtel has launched its new e-commerce portal, called Airtel Shop, which will offer deals on mobile handsets, digital TV, and broadband connections at http://shop.airtel.com.

Users will be able to buy Airtel plans for mobile, broadband and DTH service through the website. We expect that Airtel users will get special offers through this site.

The teleco claims to offer up to 33 per cent off on mobile devices with exclusive Airtel plans, up to Rs 500 cash back on new broadband connections and Rs 250 cash back on new digital TV connections.

However, mobile phones sold through the site will be made available and delivered by NSI Infinium Global, a courier service provider, with which Airtel has formed a partnership.

10 GB for your emails: Google adds 2.5 GB to your Gmail storage

New Delhi: Google launched Gmail as an invitation-only beta on April 1, 2004 and it has gradually over a span of eight years increased the storage from 1 GB to 7.5 GB.

Now to celebrate the launch of its much anticipated Google Drive cloud storage and sync product Google has announced that it is giving Gmail users 2.5 GB of additional storage.

In a post on the official Gmail blog, Nicholas Behrens, software engineer at Google's Gmail team, said, "Today, we're happy to announce that we're increasing everyone's free storage in Gmail from 7.5 GB to 10 GB (and counting) to celebrate today's launch of Google Drive."

Your Gmail storage counter will not immediately jump up by two-and-a-half gigs but is expected to happen gradually.

Gmail storage is not fixed and keeps gradually increasing. On its first anniversary Gmail had announced that it would "keep giving people more space forever." This means that your 10 GB will also also keep increasing, albeit at a slow pace.

Google celebrates Earth Day 2012 with animated flowers doodle

New Delhi: To mark the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day, Google has posted a flower-themed Google Doodle on its home page.

As you open the Google homepage, you will be greeted with a colourful doodle that features an animated image of blooming flowers in purple, red and yellow colours that spell Google. The doodle beautifully portrays the flowers blooming out of the shurbs to form the Google logo.

Earth Day is celebrated every year on April 22 after it was first held on April 22, 1970. US Senator Gaylord Nelson is credited for the genesis of Earth Day as he conceived it as a tool to raise ecological awareness after witnessing a huge oil spill in Santa Barbara, California in 1969.

The original Earth Day was attended by about 20 million Americans.

The Earth Day movement went global in 1990 and is now celebrated in over 175 countries across the globe. April 22 was officially designated as the international Earth Day by the United Nations in 2009.

Social media is a reality: Salman Khurshid

Kolkata: A central minister said that social media like Facebook and Twitter were now a reality and had become a fact of life and not an 'embarrassment'.

"The issue is not of embarrassment. The issue is that social media has become a reality and has become a fact of life." union law minister Salman Khurshid said here when told that social media like Facebook and Twitter were causing embarrassment to governments, particularly in the context of a recent controversy in West Bengal.

"Americans could not impose restrictions on Wikileaks, so we have to take the social media in our stride. It has become a fact of life", he noted.

The minister said, "we have in the past come up with matters that we had to address. Sometimes we met with success and sometimes not", he said.

"There are very restricted opportunities to impose constraints on social media. I am not saying that there is no law in place," he told reporters at an Indian Chamber of Commerce interaction here.

"There is no conflict between social media and us...but a lot of stuff said or shown is unwholesome for children and vulnerable sections of the society", he added.

Google co-founder Brin donates $500,000 to Wikipedia

Moscow: The co-founder of Google, Sergei Brin, has donated $500,000 to Wikipedia's foundation, Wikimedia, the foundation said on its web site Saturday. Brin granted $500,000 from The Brin Wojcicki Foundation, the charity fund run by him and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, reported RIA Novosti.

The money however will not cover all Wikipedia's annual budget of $28.3 million. This week Wikipedia started its annual fund-rising campaign that is due to last until January, with the personal appeal from its founder Jimmy Wales, who created the world's biggest user-created encyclopaedia in 2001. Wales has repeatedly said that there would not be any advertising on Wikipedia.

"Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia," Wales said in its latest address. Last year's campaign raised $16 million to Wikimedia foundation.

Wikipedia was ranked the fifth most popular web-site in Internet with over 470 million unique visitors every month, comScore said in its October's report.

60 per cent of Wikipedia entries have factual errors

Washington: Sixty percent of Wikipedia articles about companies contain factual errors, according to a new research, which warned people not to rely on the website for accurate and balanced information.

"It does not surprise me that so many Wikipedia entries contain factual errors," said Marcia W DiStaso, assistant professor of public relations at Penn State University, who conducted the research.

"A high amount of factual errors doesn't work for anyone, especially the public, which relies on Wikipedia for accurate, balanced information," says DiStaso.

DiStaso surveyed 1,284 professionals from Public Relations Society of America, the International Association of Business Communicators, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, the Institute for Public Relations and the National Investor Relations Institute to assess their working relationship with Wikipedia, the Public Relations Journal reports.

Results of the survey indicate a gap exists between public relations professionals and Wikipedia concerning the proper protocol for editing entries, according to a Penn statement.

The real threat to the open web lies with the opaque elite who run it

Google's Serge Brin has expressed concern about rival Facebook fencing off the internet, but the search company itself has never been 'open'. Photograph: Robin Beckham/Beepstock/Alamy

As Google co-founder Serge Brin pointed out in an interview with the Guardian, the future of the "open web" is under threat. The billionaire laid out his concerns that a combination of repressive governments and companies like Google's arch rivals, Apple and Facebook, are seeking to fence off or stifle the power of the internet.

Brin's contention that censorship and "walled gardens", such as Apple's operating systems and Facebook's world of applications, will throttle the world of free and linked information on which Google has built its fortune may be right. But it is also the case that many see Google's credibility and reliability as a standard bearer for the open web as increasingly compromised.

Google Plus gets a major makeover

New Delhi: Almost 10 months and 170 million users later Google's fledgeling social networking initiative Google Plus has gone for its first major makeover.

The most recent changes seems to have been triggered by the fact that in spite of its large user base, people spend very less time on Google Plus as compared to other leading social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Google says the new Google Plus is more functional and flexible. Instead of static icons at the top, Google has created a dynamic ribbon of applications on the left, on which users can drag apps up or down, hover over certain apps to reveal a set of quick actions and show or hide apps by moving them in and out of 'More'.

Google has also made the photo display on Google Plus larger than before and also created conversation 'cards' to make it easier to scan and join discussions. There is also a dedicated Hangouts page, as well a new a new Explore page across the Google Plus network.

Anonymous plans more attacks against China sites

Shanghai: The activist hacker group Anonymous plans to launch further attacks on Chinese government websites in a bid to uncover corruption and lobby for human rights, a member of the group said on Monday.

Anonymous, a loosely knit group that has attacked financial and government websites around the world, hacked into Chinese government websites last week, defacing several, media reports said.

The group used the Twitter account "Anonymous China" to publicise the attacks, posting links to data files that contained passwords and other personal information from the hacked websites. (twitter.com/#!/AnonymousChina)

"First we want to alert the Chinese government that we aren't afraid, and we are going to show the truth and fight for justice," Anonymous hacker "f0ws3r" told Reuters.

The hacker, who declined to provide any personal details, was contacted through Anonymous China's Twitter page. F0ws3r said the group planned more serious attacks against Chinese websites.

Twitter goes to court to fight spammers

San Francisco: Twitter filed a lawsuit in a US court against five websites that it accuses of creating tools for spamming, as the social media firm battles a wave of automated tweets barraging real users with anything from Viagra ads to virus-ridden links.

Often billed as a service to help a Twitter account gain followers, websites can take control of an account, known as a bot, that follows or sends automated tweets at real users in the hope that some will follow the bot back or click through links the bot has sent out.

"As our engineers continue to combat spammers with strong safeguards and technical efforts, today we're adding another weapon to our arsenal: the law," Twitter said in a blog post.

Twitter now claims 140 million active users. As its user base has grown, so have bots and spam, emerging as a problem that Twitter fears could dilute the online conversation and irk bona fide users.

Litigation isn't a novel approach: both Facebookand Google have taken spammers to court in recent years with success.

The defendants listed in the suit filed in the US Federal Court in San Franciso are TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, TweetBuddy, James Lucero of justinlover.info and Garland E Harris of troption.com.

The defendants could not immediately be reached for comment by Reuters.

Facebook plans to add 'Hate' button

New Delhi: People on Facebook generally hit the like button whenever they come across something of their interest, but what about posts and updates that turn them off? What actually they do in such cases?

Many a time, people simply ignore when they do not like something on Facebook. But what if you find a hate button next to the like button? Interesting.

According to a report from TechCrunch, a technology website, Facebook is considering a "Hate" button. It said, "According to Facebook’s S-1 filing, users are now generating 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day. With the Hate button, Facebook expects to at least double that."

Six Filipino boys in trouble over Facebook kiss photos

Manila: A Philippine Catholic school is witholding the diplomas of six high school boys who uploaded Facebook photos that appear to show them kissing each other, an education official said Friday.

A day earlier, a Philippine court rejected another Catholic school's decision to bar five girls from graduation ceremonies because they had posed in bikinis for photos posted on Facebook. The cases test the limits of privacy in a conservative Catholic nation that is also among the world's most prolific users of social networking sites.

Department of Education officer Samuel Mergenio said in a interview that the six boys told him they had taken prank photos to make it appear that their lips touched. One of the boys uploaded the pictures on Facebook and mistakenly made them available to others, Mergenio said.

The pictures were not taken at the boys' school, Infant Jesus Academy in the Manila suburb of Marikina, but the students were wearing school uniforms, he said.

Mergenio said the school's chancellor informed the department late Thursday that the boys will be allowed to participate in the graduation ceremonies but "the release of their diplomas will be delayed." He said the school did not say when the diplomas will be handed over and that he was awaiting a formal written report from the school.

The school chancellor was not immediately available for comment Friday.

On Thursday, a judge in central Cebu city issued a restraining order against St. Theresa's College High School, ordering it to allow the five students who appeared in the bikini photos to take part in Friday afternoon's graduation ceremonies.

The school, which declined to comment to The Associated Press, asked the court to reconsider. The girls' lawyer, Cornelio Mercado, said Friday that the school was still insisting on banning the students while its motion for reconsideration is pending.

Mercado said one Facebook photo at issue showed a girl holding a cigarette and a liquor bottle, while others showed all five girls wearing bikinis at a beach party early this year.

School officials took action against the girls for what they called "engaging in immoral, indecent, obscene or lewd acts," according to court records. They said the students would graduate but could not participate in activities or ceremonies.

Earlier this month, the five girls were summoned by the principal and other school officials, "dressed down" and called "sluts" for their Facebook pictures, Mercado said.

The judge, Wilfredo Navarro of the Regional Trial Court, castigated school officials for calling the girls "inappropriate names" and said the students had gone through "a psychologically and emotionally devastating experience." He said not allowing them to participate in graduation activities "would indeed be most un-Christian if not entirely inhuman."

The mother of one girl had petitioned the court on behalf of her daughter. Mercado said the ruling applied to all five.

He said the families on Friday filed charges of "grave oral defamation" and illegal use of photos showing minors against the school and school officials. He alleged that the school officials had illegally obtained the pictures because they were not Facebook "friends" of the girls and were not allowed access.

Facebook offers Rs 1.34 cr package to Allahabad student

Allahabad: Social networking giant Facebook has hired an engineering student for a fat annual pay package of Rs 1.34 crore, one of the biggest offers made to alumnus of any technical institution of the country.

According to P Chakravarti, Director of the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology (MNNIT), a B.Tech student from the institute, who has requested that his name be withheld for "security reasons", received a letter on March 27 from Facebook confirming his appointment and the annual pay package on offer was stated to be $262,500 (around Rs 1.34 crore).

Interestingly, the MNNIT Director said the recruitment process began with a mail from Facebook "in October last year which was followed by nine rounds of telephonic interviews" before he was finally selected for the plush job which would require the student, who hails from Kanpur, to move to Menlo Park in California after finishing his software engineering course at the institute.

"Many students from our institute have bagged lucrative jobs. We have knowledge of at least 30 of our alumni getting selected with packages of more than Rs 10 lakh from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe etc", Chakravarti said.

"However, this one has been unprecedented and we are sure that no other student from any of the other institutions in the city or the more than two dozen National Institutes of Technology across the country has so far been offered such an awesome pay package", he added.

Google offers new way to track usage of services

San Francisco: Google is offering to provide a monthly report to people who want to keep track of their activities on some of its most popular services.

The tool unveiled Wednesday includes a breakdown of Gmail correspondences and search requests entered while logged in. The summary also lists the Web browsers and operating systems used during logged-in sessions. Google Inc. also is reporting the countries where logins originated.

These details could help flag unauthorised account usage.

The monthly activity report will be sent by email to those who sign up for it. It's an offshoot of another tool called Google Dashboard, which provides an even more extensive look at how people use Google products.

Google recently changed its privacy policy so it can link more data collected from its various services.

Facebook halts secondary market trading, plans for May IPO

San Francisco: Social-networking site Facebook is halting the sale of its shares on secondary markets effective next week as the company prepares to hold its initial public offering in May, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Facebook recently asked firms that arrange trading of its privately held shares to stop doing so, a move intended to reduce churn in its valuation that could complicate matters as it sets an IPO price, according to another person familiar with the matter.

Facebook is planning to raise $5 billion in an offering that could value the company at up to $100 billion, making it the largest IPO in Silicon Valley history.

The May time frame for the high-profile IPO is dependent on the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring the company's prospectus effective, the first source noted. Facebook has amended its prospectus three times since filing paperwork to go public in early February.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.

The company has said it wants its shares to trade under the ticker FB, but has yet to announce which exchange it will list its shares on.

With more than 845 million users, Facebook is the world's No.1 social networking service and is challenging established Web companies such as Google Inc and Yahoo Inc, which compete with Facebook for users' time online and for advertising dollars.

As Facebook moves towards its IPO, some investors are raising concerns about Facebook's dual-class share structure, which will give Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg control of 56.9 percent of the company's post-IPO voting shares. At a recent meeting with financial analysts and investors, Facebook executives suggested that Zuckerberg will not be very involved with Wall Street.

Despite the criticisms, investor demand for equity in Facebook has burned strong for years, with shares of Facebook trading briskly in special secondary markets for private company stock.

SharesPost Financial, a firm that facilitates trading shares of privately held companies such as Facebook, announced on Wednesday that it would cease facilitating transactions in Facebook as of the end of day on Friday "to help ensure the company's orderly transition into the public markets."

SecondMarket, another firm that arranges trading in private shares, declined to comment. Bloomberg reported the news earlier Wednesday.