Rounds Brings Engaging Video Chat to Facebook

Rounds (formerly 6rounds.com) has announced the launch of an interactive video chat platform for Facebook Platform. Users have already been using Rounds to video chat in real time while engaging in various social activities and real-time games. Offering it for Facebook obviously opens up the door for a great deal more use, given that Facebook has half a billion users.

"We created Rounds to give online social networking and social gaming more of a real-time, fun, and collaborative feeling," Dany Fishel, co-founder and CEO of Rounds tells WebProNews. "Rounds bridges the gap between real life and the online world by helping people feel close to one another no matter how far apart they are geographically."

Rounds was founded in 2008 and has raised $2 million in venture capital funding from Rhodium and Startup Factory investment groups. "Social networking and social gaming continue to grow in popularity, but with Rounds, social networking just got a lot more social," Guy Weltsch, Managing Director at Rhodium tells us. "We were attracted to Rounds because its technology is unlike anything on the market today. Rounds will help take social networking to the next level."



As Rounds prepared its Facebook launch, Facebook launched its own Facebook Live video channel. "Seems like Facebook is trying to dial up the engagement level through video and Rounds definitely ties into this trend," a company rep says.

With the Rounds Facebook app, users can participate in video chats with no download requirements. The company suggests the following use cases: take snapshots of yourself and share them on Facebook, jointly browse Facebook content with friends, watch YouTube videos together, play real-time multi-user social games, Collaborate on virtual whiteboards, or co-browse with Google Maps. source: webpronews.com/topnews/

Will Google Buzz Change the Social Media Game?

Buzz has gotten off to a great start in terms of attracting users. Google said in a blog post yesterday that over 9 million posts and comments had been created, and they were seeing over 200 posts per minute. Both numbers have likely grown since then.

In the post, Google addresses some of the privacy concerns people have been having, and improvements they're making based on user feedback.

Update: Google has uploaded the entire Google Buzz launch event. If you are interested in seeing the new product unveiled, you can watch it below:



Article starts: Google held a press event to announce the most "buzzed" topic of the week - Google Buzz. This is Google's new product, which is being compared to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It is integrated with Gmail and other Google products, and appears to be one of the missing links in tying Google together as a social network, a concept we've discussed repatedly.

Editor's Note: The bulk of this article was written before the announcement was made and has been adjusted to reflect the announcement itself, after liveblogging the press event.



Google says Buzz has five key elements:

1. Auto Following
2. Rich, Fast Sharing experience...
3. Support for public and private sharing....
4. In-box integration
5. Just the good stuff...



Buzz will show a thumbnail of a YouTube video and make it easy to play in line. With photos, they will show thumbnails, but Google built a custom photo viewer, which lets you flip through pictures and see them "big and fast". If you share links, it will automatically fetch headlines and photos from the post (similar to Facebook). You can "like" and "unlike" stuff, and expand comments. It works with keyword shortcuts from Gmail.

Public/Private sharing - The post box will let you post updates publicly or privately. If it's public, it will go to your Google profile, and is indexed by Google's real-time search. You can share privately, and it will let you send to groups and custom groups.

In your in-box, you will see buzz notifications that contain real-time comments. It sits in the same in-box as your regular email, but you can move between your regular in-box and your Buzz stuff. It integrates it right into Gmail.You can also use "@" for replies like with Twitter.

While Google Buzz is presented as a Gmail feature, it goes well beyond Gmail. For one, all public updates you post will be posted to your Google profile page, (which is searchable). In addition, Google launched three new mobile products for Buzz:

1. The ability to use Buzz from www.Google.com on iPhone/Android
2. Brand new app at buzz.google.com
3. Maps Update for Nokia Symbian/ Android.

Mobile could be one of the biggest keys to the success of this product. Google says Google.com is the world's most popular mobile home page, and Buzz can be accessed from there on iPhone and Android devices. Android's popularity is growing quickly too.



Buzz will find your location (if you let it) and snap your updates to that location. With the Google Maps feature, you can see what people are saying based on location. You can even use voice recognition to post buzz updates by voice.

Do Facebook and Twitter Threaten or Compliment the News Industry?

Five reporters from radio stations in in Canada, France, Belgium, and Switzerland are going to spend five days locked in a French farmhouse with only Twitter and Facebook to get their news. It's not a lame reality show, but an experiment looking at the quality of news from social media.

This experiment may be flawed from the start. One can almost imagine that people will purposely put out false information via Twitter and Facebook just to mess with these people (they can be followed on Twitter [updates in French]). Reporting on this story, AFP's Marie-Dominique Follain asks if social media is really a serious threat to established media.

It appears that the credibility of social media as a way to get news is what is coming into question (not that this is the first time that has happened). "People tweet about fake events. Social media is rife with hoaxes," people will say. Yes, that's true.

People do put out false information, but what seems to be overlooked is that Facebook and Twitter are just the platforms for people posting their updates. They often are accompanied by links to blogs and traditional news sources. While the group have agreed to only connect to the outside world through Facebook and Twitter, and no web surfing, they are reportedly still allowed to follow links to outside sites from these social networks. With the 140-character limit of Twitter in particular, linking out is often very necessary in getting the whole story across, or at least gaining access to that story from the reader's perspective.

Maybe I will be proven wrong, but I don't see any possible result coming from this experiment that indicates social media is not useful for finding news. I don't believe social media threatens traditional media. It compliments it, in a variety of ways.


Sometimes stories break there before they are reported by a traditional source...that's a source for that traditional channel. It could just as easily come from someone saying something in a crowded bar. If it's newsworthy, it might be worth covering, but it might be a lie, and facts are worth checking. It's just that with channels like Facebook and Twitter, those bars are as big as the entire world, and the patrons aren't all there to relax, drink, and have a good time (though some of them certainly are).
Not all news breaks on social media (although the ever-increasing accessibility to social media through mobile seems to be greatly narrowing the margin), but social media is always there for open discussion about the news, which tends to make for a more rounded outlook on any particular event. It doesn't eliminate the bias, but it provides a means for all biases to come together to form a more complete view of the story. Open discussion allows for points to be made that wouldn't necessarily be made by a traditional news outlet because maybe that outlet does have some kind of bias, even if it strives not to. Some say everyone has some bias.

The fact that people do turn to social media for news emphasizes the fact that they do want a look at the whole picture, and do want to have open discussion on matters. True, some of that is pointless noise, but strewn throughout that are often important facts and otherwise unconsidered viewpoints.
source from : www.webpronews.com

Facebook Protects User's Data In Civil Case

Privacy advocates who are in the habit of protesting Facebook's policies may owe the social network an apology. When an airline subpoenaed a user's data, and even after fines were later levied, Facebook refused to hand anything over.

For better or for worse, we'll never know whether Facebook would have been willing to send armies of lawyers to the Supreme Court; the matter came to an anticlimactic end when the Virginia Workers' Compensation Commission backed down and the woman at the center of things agreed to release the data, anyway.

Still, here's the story. Shana Hensley hurt her back while working for Colgan Airlines and began to collect disability benefits. Then, as Declan McCullagh reports, "After about 18 months . . . Colgan Air claimed that Hensley was not cooperating with its efforts to find her a desk job and appears to have concluded that Hensley's holiday vacation photos posted on her Facebook account would demonstrate that any back problems were not severe."

Hensley's Facebook info was subpoenaed, Facebook stood its ground, the Workers' Compensation Commission enacted a $200-per-day fine, and when Facebook cited the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, everybody backed down.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt explained his company's actions to Peter Bacque by stating, "Facebook is built on trust and users rely on us to enforce their privacy settings."
source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/09/15/facebook-protects-users-data-in-civil-case

Tips for Getting Found in Real-Time Searches

Real-time search is still an emerging concept. At this point, using a real-time search engine will bring you results by time/date. This doesn’t always cater to relevancy, which is why there is still a lot of work to be done in this field.

So, if real-time results are based upon time/date, and the user’s query, it stands to reason that time and those queries are the most important components in getting your content found in these types of searches.

1. Use Keywords

This seems obvious, but use keywords in not only your content, but in your titles, and your updates. If you’re writing an article, you have to consider what people are going to include in their updates if they share it on a social network, whether this be Facebook, Twitter, or anything else.

More often than not, they are going to include the title. If the right keywords are in the title, then those keywords are also more likely to appear in any ensuing tweets, Facebook updates, etc. If someone searches for those keywords, they will be more likely to find your content in a real-time search.

The same goes for your own Tweets/status updates. Even if you are not sharing an article, if you want your update to be found, use relevant keywords. Again, obvious, but true.

2. Talk About Timely Events

Simply mentioning events that are current will put you directly into the results for any searches having to do with that topic, provided the right keywords are in play. This is a method that could and (surely is) being exploited by spammers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t provide legitimate conversation and simply put yourself on more people’s radars, without throwing links at them every time.

3. Have a Lot of Followers

If you have a lot of followers or friends on social networks, or even just readers of your blog, you are going to get more people sharing your content. The more people sharing your content, the more impressions of your content will be making their way into real time searches.

There is no easy way to instantly get a bunch of legitimate readers/followers. It will take some promotion. Provide useful content that people will link to and it will spread virally. Provide clear ways for them to follow you (like links to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts on your blog).

4. Promote Conversation

Whether on your blog or on a social network, spark conversations. Talk about topics that people are interested in. This is tied to number 2. The more conversations you are involved with, the more retweets (and equivalents on other networks) you are likely to get. And again, this means more impressions in real times searches.

5. Include Calls to Engagement

I recently talked about why there is more to retweeting than meets the eye for businesses. I mentioned the use of buttons like Tweetmeme’s and Digg’s. These are buttons you can put on articles that show the amount of retweets/diggs that article has. They kind of act as a meter for engagement.

These buttons are certainly not all-encompassing. They only represent the conversation on 2 channels, and not the web in general. I’m sure there are other buttons that can be used in addition.

More importantly though, they provide a “call to action” to share the content. People can digg or retweet a story with a simple click, and you’re one step closer to being found in somebody’s real-time search.

Wrapping Up

Real-time search is much more basic (at least so far) than say, Google Search. You’re not ranking for relevancy. Really, you could hardly call it ranking it all. It’s about visibility. That means, you have to get people talking about your content/updates.

Social media by nature is viral. Real-time search is nothing more than putting things in chronological order. You have to keep people talking to stay relevant to “right now.”

source: http://www.webpronews.com/

Facebook Pages to Get Click Through Rates

If you are the owner or an admin of a Facebook page, you are probably familiar with Facebook's Insights. This is Facebook's analytical offering that lets page admins see how fans are engaging.

BuzzMarketing Daily discovered that there is a blurb in the Fan Interaction Dashboard, which you can get to by clicking "learn more" from the Facebook Insights page, which talks about a couple of new metrics that are on the way (via Inside Facebook).

The new metrics are Click Through Rate and Engagement Rate for content that appears in the Facebook news feed. As described in the blurb, if a user clicks on one of your posts, it will be counted as "Stream CTR" and if a user likes or comments on a post, it will be counted under Stream ETR.

One knock against social media marketing has historically been its lack of measurable success. Metrics like this should be able to go a long way toward curing that.

With Facebook's Insights, you can already look at interactions (numbers of comments, wall posts, and likes), Interactions Per Post (average number of comments, wall posts and likes for each piece of content), Post Quality (score measuring engagement), Discussion Posts (number of discussion topics created on your page), and Reviews (number of times fans use the Reviews app to rate you page).

Suffice it to say, there are a number of things you can look at to gauge the success you are having with your Facebook page, and depending on what areas you are lacking in, you can take the necessary steps to try and improve - just like with any other analytics program.
source: http://www.webpronews.com/

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Intel Launches Facebook App For Research

Intel has launched a Facebook application that allows people to donate their PC's unused processor power to research diseases and study climate change.

Intel developed the app called Progress Thru Processors, which allows Facebook users to choose to contribute their extra processing power to research efforts of Climateprediction.net and Africa@home. Climatepredicition.net is focused on understanding global climate change by predicting the Earth's climate testing the accuracy of climate models.

Africa@home is focused on finding strategies to fight malaria by studying simulation models of how the disease spreads and the potential impact of new anti-malarial drugs and vaccines.

In addition, Progress Thru Processors also allows users to contribute to Rossetta@home, which is focused on finding cures for cancer and other diseases such as HIV and Alzheimer's.

"Progress Thru Processors underscores our belief that small contributions made by individuals can collectively have a far-reaching impact on our world," said Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager, Corporate Marketing Group.

"By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers working to make the world a better place."

Launched in public beta, the application activates only when a PC's performance is not being fully utilized. The application runs automatically as a background process and will not affect performance.

For Progress Thru Processors, Intel partnered with GridRepublic, a not -for-profit volunteer computing organization.
source

Facebook Offers A Username Mulligan

Just last month, Facebook announced that they would allow users to choose a custom username, a.k.a. vanity URL, for their Facebook profile. A post on the Facebook blog warned users to:

"Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it's been selected, you won't be able to change or transfer it."

Well, that's not true anymore. You can now change your username, but only once. At the time of this writing there is no official announcement from Facebook about the username change option.






It's unclear when Facebook added this new option, but we're sure some Facebookers will appreciate it, as ReadWriteWeb points out. If you wish to change your username, go to the "Settings" tab at the top of your profile and click on "Account Settings". The second option down is "Username", just press "Change" and pick your new username.

Last month, Mashable put together a pretty comical list of the "15 Silliest Facebook Vanity URLs", maybe some of those users would like a mulligan on their initial username choice.

source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/07/23/facebook-offers-a-username-mulligan