In this series titled Heroes: The Route of Exposure, sculptor Adrian Tranquilli shows us the rarely seen, vulnerable side of our favorite superheroes.
More pics at My Modern Metropolis.
The Facebook page “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!” is giving new credence to the lyrics “Thank you for being a friend” today, as People has confirmed that the Golden Girls star will be appearing on Saturday Night Live in the near future.
When asked at Elton John’s Oscar-viewing party last night whether she would be appearing on Saturday Night Live, the actress answered in the affirmative. We’re not sure in what capacity the comedienne will be taking the SNL stage — whether as host or as part of the “Women of Comedy” special we reported on a few weeks ago, but we’re certain that her nearly 500,000 fans will be pleased to hear the good news.
The page was started by ardent fan David Mathews back on December 30, 2009, and has since garnered its share of media attention. White was launched back into the public eye after appearing in a popular Super Bowl Snickers commercial and in the romantic comedy The Proposal, also starring Oscar-winner Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Twilight star Robert Pattinson even called her sexy – breaking the hearts of thousands of teen girls across the nation. It certainly has been a banner year for White so far.
So what’s next Mathews? “Betty White to Host the Oscars (please?)!” Why not? If you can dream it, you can do it, man.
Tags: betty white, facebook, saturday night live, television
Gabe Rivera and Megan McCarthy have just launched the latest Techmeme aggregation site, Mediagazer which will focus on media news.
Maya Baratz has more on the launch in SF Weekly’s All Shook Down.
This is a blog post from Laughing Squid, subscribe via RSS, Email, Twitter & Facebook.
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For the past couple weeks, the Static FBML application has been one of the fastest growing Facebook applications. The Static FBML application enabled Facebook Page administrators to customize tabs within their Facebook Page. So does that mean that Facebook Page use has jumped dramatically in the past couple weeks? It could.
While we’re waiting to hear back from Facebook about whether or not their Pages product has experienced a massive uptick, the Static FBML application tripled in traffic a week and a half ago. Between February 27th and March 2nd, the Static FBML application grew from 1.84 million to 5.87 million daily active users. The only reason for using this application is to customize your Facebook Page.
While the surge was only temporary, traffic has appeared to flatten at over 3 million daily users, almost double what it was before. While there are a lot of things we could derive from this increased usage, the primary thing I’d assume is that Facebook Pages just saw a large adoption by marketers following some sort of Facebook promotion. That promotion could have been on the homepage and displayed to all users who had yet to create a Facebook Page.
However the promotion took place, millions of people are now using Facebook Pages and customizing those pages through the Static FBML application.
In the years following U.S. troop deployments to Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, thousands of former soldiers, both men and women, have returned home to to continue their civilian lives. Some of these veterans return physically injured or paralyzed, others with psychological issues. As these veterans adjust to the civilian life, Facebook has become a tool for them to apply for federal benefits, return to college, search for work and find support from other veterans.
Searching for “vets” or “veterans” on Facebook yields dozens and dozens of Pages and groups, some official, but many simply begun by veterans or others wanting to use Facebook to express pride and support for the armed forces. These Pages and groups are used to share stories, some have formed tight-knit communities where people seem to interact on a regular basis, whereas others have become go-to resource forums.
Organizations and vets use an array of Facebook tools in these interactions, including Wall posts and comments, Groups, and Pages. Both offer discussion boards and ways of posting photos and videos — Groups are more focused on community topics, while Pages are intended to be public, and oriented around brands, organizations, and well-known people. As a result, Pages tend to help veterans make new and unexpected connections.
“I use Facebook while I’m deployed everyday, all day, through chat, messages, pictures and etc. I was on MySpace, but I rarely check it because I’m addicted to Facebook!” Army Sgt. Jose L. Aranda wrote us from his deployment in Iraq, noting that his family, wife and children, are still in Texas. Like many other active duty soldiers, Aranda uses Facebook as a lifeline to his loved ones while away from home.
Aranda, 27, is a native of McCamey, Texas, a town of about 1,600 in Upton County (population 3,149) about 285 miles east of El Paso. He stumbled upon and became a fan of the Upton County Vets Facebook Page, with 101 fans, photos of local vets and some information about the local courthouse; the Page formed late last year.
“I’m proud to say that I have family and friends in uniform besides me that came from where I grew up. Is it comforting? Yes, indeed!” he wrote us, noting that he’s found old friends there he didn’t even know had joined the armed services.
Veterans organizations have also taken advantage of Facebook to reach out to their membership. One such group with a strong Facebook presence was the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Page, which displays its latest public service announcements. The Wall is closed to its 67,824 fans, but posts generate dozens of comments where people ask each other questions, offer resources and have actual discussions, essentially functioning as a discussion board. The Page hosts many such conversations about everything from benefits to politics to job tips on the Wall, although a discussion thread about payments generated 108 comments. IAVA also uses Causes to raise money for their efforts to improve the lives of veterans from these wars and their families.
“Veterans need each other for support and now they’ve found a place where they can come find that — I’ve heard directly from people who’ve found other veterans that they served with 30 years ago and now they became Facebook friends,” said Joe Chenelly, spokesman for Disabled American Veterans, an organization 1.2 million strong with about 9,900 fans on Facebook.
Chenelly said DAV is incorporating Facebook into everything it does, but has also used MySpace (no longer active), LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Buzz. He notes that Facebook has been the most accessible media to their mostly-Vietnam era membership — people who didn’t grow up with the internet, who find the site easiest to use. DAV’s Facebook presence began as a group last spring, changed to a Page last summer, incorporated some unofficial pages and now Chenelly tells us that the “highest levels” of the organization’s leadership is interested in DAV’s Facebook presence.
“Members, fans, are really using it to talk to each other, about their problems and success and it’s been a great thing for camaraderie, doing a good job of bridging the generational gap,” he tells us, referencing the ages of Vietnam versus Iraq/Afghanistan veterans.
The Wall, in particular, has allowed veterans to help each other, ask for help, find fellow soldiers and ultimately create new connections on Facebook, Chenelly tells us. It has also helped the DAV stay connected to its members needs and get the word out about legislation and other issues.
Unofficial Pages, like the Operation Iraqi Freedom Vets with 611 fans, are also used by veterans and their supporters to gather for comfort and to share information. Veterans tell each other the names of their units, where and when they served, while others thank veterans for their service. The official Paralyzed Veterans of America Page with 3,473 fans, is also a place for veterans and their supporters to gather for comfort, but as the organization strives to improve the lives of paralyzed veterans, sharing resources becomes much more important. Here it’s interesting to note that the Share function, wherein fans can post items to their news feed, has been heavily used in cases of petitions for pertinent legislation, something that’s previously been done via email.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has a Facebook Page with more than 19,400 fans and the Wall is primarily used to diffuse information about veterans’ benefits, news stories, studies, resources, suicide prevention and other health-related information for veterans. Other federal agencies concerned with veterans also have official Pages, including the Veterans Benefits Administration (3,753 fans), Veterans Health Administration (10,700 fans) and the National Cemetery Administration (706 fans). Although fans cannot post to the Veterans Affairs Wall, comments on status updates and other items are active with discussion amongst fans about resources, politics and experiences.
It’s interesting to note that veterans have begun to use the medium of Facebook as a discussion board, largely moving their conversations onto the Wall via comments, as opposed to limiting themselves to structured discussion threads. Governmental Pages seem to be more imposing than organization or fan Pages, as communication appears to be one-way and more tightly-controlled. But on Pages where vets are given the freedom to engage, they are taking full advantage of Facebook’s features and it appears that very meaningful conversations result.
Bridge & Burn Spring Jackets. More at their website Bridge & Burn.
More at Bridge & Burn.
When discussing marketing and product strategies, I sometimes come across as a broken record! One of things I preach is the power of change. A button’s color, an ad’s call to action, or the placement of a marketing module can each have a profound impact on user interaction. Of course, the only way to understand is to test… and the only way to effectively test is to have proper tracking place (don’t yet? try KISSmetrics).
Here is yet another example of a relatively minor change that has had very significant impact. It should serve as motivation for web and product marketers to test, trial and iterate.
Facebook recently added a post-logout promotion for the Facebook iPhone app. Nothing fancy… and nothing that required real engineering effort:
The effect: in under a week, Facebook iPhone usage soared by 20% in under a week:
iamthetrend.com/2010/03/07/designkins-release-alice-in-wonderland-tee/
Read What I am the trend thinks of Designkins newest Movie Theme Tee.
iamthetrend.com/2010/03/07/designkins-release-alice-in-wonderland-tee/
Humans have been drinking for thousands of years, likely more than history itself can mark. It should come as no surprise, then, to see that designers have worked to enrich the drinking process with amazing tools and glassware and technology. To celebrate the high-design gadgetry of the home bar of the future, here are 10 amazing designer bar accessories for the modern home. More at TheCoolist.
This story isn’t for the weak of heart.
A convicted sex offender was today sentenced to life imprisonment after admitting the kidnap, rape and murder of an English teenager Ashleigh Hall he had met on Facebook.
Peter Chapman changed his plea to guilty this morning on the day he was due to face trial. He stood, almost as if he was confessing to a parking ticket, and said “I killed someone last night.”
Hall was just 17 and had met her murderer on Facebook after Chapman had posed as a teenage boy.
Det Insp Mick Callan, who lead the investigation, said: “The truth is he is a predatory sex offender who, through the tentacles of the internet, could reach out to the young and the vulnerable.
“He knows full well that using his real name and picture would not grab the attention of any young woman for a moment. But by using the picture of a good-looking young man as a cover he has woven a web of attraction and deceit that has sadly had a murderous ending.”
Hall’s mother, Andrea, warned parents to find out who their children were talking to on the internet. She said: “Just put the message out that please parents whose kids are on Facebook, please ask them to tell you who they’re talking to. You just don’t know who is behind that photo.”
Despite reports that users are more honest on Facebook than any other social network, we’re still far from days where we can take our safety, and those of our loved ones, for granted. Social networks are absolute havens for the sick of mind and where we may consider Facebook a means to remain connected, predators see it as merely a tool to deceive and eventually abuse, or in this case, murder.
Video can be watched by clicking the image below.
. Source: BBC
One of the men responsible for The Cove — 2010 Oscar winner for best documentary — used the Academy Awards stage to promote a web and mobile-based activism campaign tied to the film’s save-the-dolphins subject matter.
During the acceptance speech, dolphin activist Ric O’Barry held up a sign saying, “Text DOLPHIN to 44144.” The cameras cut away to the crowd for several seconds — possibly to avoid taking sides on the contentious issue of dolphin hunting.
Viewers who caught it and followed the sign’s instructions were subscribed to text updates and plugged into the larger social media campaign for the film and its cause.
Text messages and the web have increasingly played a significant part in activism lately. The American Red Cross ran a very successful text message donation campaign for relief efforts in Haiti, Twitter was used by protesters in Iran to make voices heard and to organize events, and websites like Change.org rally like-minded people around causes with more efficiency than was possible before the web.
The campaign is rooted in a Takepart.com page that links to several ways people can get involved, including the text campaign, a letter-writing campaign, and a Facebook Cause app page with more than 500,000 supporters. The Cove’s Facebook fan page has 115,000 fans at present, and Facebook has been used to organize live-streaming Q&A events with Ric O’Barry.
The Cove is also using Zannel to spread the word. The service helps users share videos and images related to the campaign with their friends on Facebook and Twitter.
While the impact of the social media campaign can’t be measured just yet, the film itself has caused a major uproar that has made things very difficult for the dolphin hunters who live and work in the Japanese cove that the film documents. Dolphin-hunting season was postponed more than a week after the film made inroads with the Japanese press.
When the film was shown at Australian film festivals, officials in an Australian sister city to the town where the dolphin hunting takes place voted unanimously to end the sister-city relationship, though the decision was later reversed.
We’ve embedded a brief clip of O’Barry’s texting banner below. Have you participated in campaigns like this? Do you think they do any good or do you believe they’re just preaching to the choir? Let us know in the comments.
Tags: academy awards, activism, Oscars, social media, texting, the cove
Filed under: Software, Developer, iPhone
TUAWEnter to win Trip Journal 4.0 for the iPhone DO NOT POST originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Filed under: Software, Developer, iPhone
TUAWEnter to win Trip Journal 4.0 for the iPhone DO NOT POST originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
RockYou has been running advertising for other applications on Facebook and social networks for years, but the social application developer is increasing its effort in this direction. It’s launching a monetization platform that includes its existing advertising and offers features, along with virtual currency options, local advertising, and more.
It has a lot of advertising inventory, with more than 121 million monthly users in the United States — spread across its own ad partner applications on Facebook, MySpace and other social networks — and 13 billion monthly global impressions. While most companies on Facebook have chosen to either focus on building applications or providing services, RockYou’s strategy is to do both.
Called the “RockYou Monetization Platform,” the features intended to include something for everyone — and they should be pretty familiar, as much of what the platform includes, like offers, have been available since at least last year. Developers with simple quiz apps, for example, tend to make their money through banner ads; developers with social games tend to make money on virtual currency. So RockYou is making it clearer than ever that it intends to take on the wide range of other companies also trying to serve applications.
We should also note that RockYou is quite active on Facebook, this platform is intended for developers across the web, around the world. For example, the first item below, RockYou game ads, is focused on Flash game developers — the company is running rotating banner ads within these widgets. The suite’s ad inventory mostly monetizes based on cost-per-impression (CPM). More, from the company:
Display advertising
Virtual currency marketplace:
Note that RockYou Offers, as a company spokesperson tells us, is actually a white-labeled version of Peanut Labs’ online local advertising service, Cherry Deals, which just launched last month. Peanut Labs’ sales team has gone out and sold what are essentially group-discounted local offers, so people can earn currency in an online game in exchange for receiving a coupon to a local business. Cherry Deals is the name of the product one the rest of the web. Through the partnership, RockYou will run these local ads as part of the platform on Facebook and other social networks, a company spokesperson tells us.
There’s also another feature, set to be announced later this week: in-game engagement ads. These ads will let a user do something like watch a video in exchange for virtual currency, similar to how offers work but focused on taking particular actions rather than buying something or taking a survey. We’ve been seeing more and more examples of these sorts of ads lately — Facebook has been running its own for a long time, but others, like SocialVibe, are starting to experiment with their own engagement ads for developers.
RockYou raised a $50 million fourth funding round last fall, and is rumored to have annual revenues of between $30 million and $40 million. It has also been busy building social games in the past few months, like Zoo World; today’s announcement shows that it is getting even more serious about monetization services.
The beauty of fractal / 4 new pieces
Last week, Twitter reached a milestone by hosting its 10 billionth tweet! Unfortunately, the world will never know what the tweet said, since the account holder keeps her account on the down low - as in, private. I'm very curious to see what this person was tweeting about, just like I was super excited to learn what the 10 billionth song download was on iTunes. Like Facebook, some people only want to let their closest friends in on their thoughts and info, but tell me - do you keep your Twitter account private?
Want to hang out with stormtroopers from the 501st, sword fighters from the medieval and Renaissance eras, MC Frontalot, and innocent bystanders attending the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas? Then come to our party!
SEE the clashing of swords! HEAR the nerdcore stylings of MC Frontalot! DRINK free booze!
Time Bender starts at 8 PM on March 13 and is 21+. No exceptions.
You won't want to miss the brief sword fighting demonstration at 9 PM, featuring fighters from the awe-inspiring High Fantasy Society, and Association for Renaissance Martial Arts. And you definitely won't want to miss MC Frontalot at 10 PM.
We'll be located at the lovely Pure Volume House, 504 Trinity St., Austin TX, and will be guarded by members of the local Texas garrison of the 501st Legion (of stormtroopers!).
You must RSVP - that's Texas law when there's an open bar. You can RSVP via Facebook, or by mailing sxsw@io9.com. The event is free and open to the public. Space will be limited so don't blame us if you get there late and there's a giant line.
