Social Round-up #34

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social media snippets, follow her on @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

This week: Facebook's Daily Mail showdown; Chatroulette's tables turned; and OK Go, er... go.

Read on here ...







THE HEADLINES ...

“The Internet” has been put forward for a Nobel Peace Prize – alongside a record 237 further nominations. The secretive Nobel panel doesn’t publish a list of those it’s considering, but nominators (who are themselves a select band of former laureates, government ministers and select academics) can reveal their choices if they wish – and both 2003’s winner Shirin Ebadi and Nicholas Negroponte have revealed that they’ve nominated the Net. The prize, while hugely prestigious, is not simply a question of big-ups from statesmen and pats on the back from world leaders – there’s a not-inconsiderable prize of $1.4m for the worthy winner. BBC news reports, with an admirably straight face: “It is unclear who would accept the prize if the internet were to win.”

The horrific case of Peter Chapman, who used a fake Facebook profile to lure 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall to her death, drew to a close this week. Chapman, who was a convicted sex offender, was sentenced to at least 35 years in prison. The conclusion of the case brought new calls for Facebook to adopt a ‘panic button’, which connects worried children directly to Ceop — the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. Both MSN Live Messenger and Bebo have already adopted the widget, but Facebook claims that there are still question-marks over its effectiveness in combating internet grooming.

And Facebook is clearly keeping a gimlet eye on its reputation with regard to child safety: the Guardian reports that the network is threatening to sue the Daily Mail, over an article which claimed that 14-year-old girls who create Facebook profiles could be contacted "within seconds" by paedophiles who "wanted to perform a sex act" in front of them.The researcher behind the article (despite appearances, not the author) says the paper inserted the claim into the story, even though he told them that the site he tested was not in fact Facebook.

After Owen Van Natta’s precipitous departure last month, the two remaining members of MySpace’s ruling triumvirate have announced a major relaunch for the ailing social network. Following predictably poor Nielsen figures for MySpace in January – it now trails Facebook in the US by a factor of 1:2 – co-presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschorn plan a rapid roll-out of new content-discovery and sharing features, which they hope will lure back users and reverse the site’s continuing decline.

Hot on the heels of the hoo-ha over Apple’s ban on ‘adult’ apps, comes news that another category has been abruptly yanked from iTunes. Wifi-detecting applications allow users to bypass the pesky necessity of ‘paying for 3G’ – but they’ve now been unceremoniously dumped with the barest word of explanation, leaving developers confuzzled and bewildered as to what’s on, and what’s not. Critics are grumbling at what they see as Apple’s increasingly high-handed demeanour towards developers, and some warn that their inconsistent approval strategy is suffocating the app market.

In the latest bout in the ongoing brawl over which platform will dominate the future news landscape, CNN’s president John KIein has acknowledged that he has far more to fear from Facebook than from his broadcast media competitors. Speaking to BusinessWeek, the news network’s head honcho rather disarmingly admitted, “I’m more worried about the 500 million or so people on Facebook versus the 2 million on Fox.”

Meanwhile Google’s Chief Economist gave what amounted to an ‘it was already broke, Ma!’ defence of his company’s impact on print media, claiming that ‘newspapers have never made much money from news’, and that the biggest chunk of their income has always come from ad revenue in special interest sections, like Motoring and Travel.

An intriguing new element has emerged in these ongoing paid-content shenanigans – film critic Roger Ebert has paywalled – well, himself. For five bucks a year, members of "The Ebert Club" will be able to access his blog, a private chat forum, and Ebert’s protected Tweets – as well as his Web Report, which the critic rather charmingly describes as a compilation of "unexpected and delightful Web discoveries."


Seems the celebrated – and at between £10m and £15m apiece, bleedin’ pricey - foray by Google and others into real-time search has been a dampish sort of a squib. The Guardian quotes Dave Winer’s analysis of the fundamental flaw in the system: when you search, you’re looking for detail – and 140 characters can only really ever furnish headlines that you’ve likely already seen.


THE LOWDOWN ...

A twist in the OK Go! story: the pop-viral sensations have mustered an astonishing 7m YouTube hits for their soul-stirring, spirit-lifting (and self-funded) video This Too Shall Pass. Trouble is, there’s a vast lacuna between that figure and the sales stats for their latest album, which languish at a measly 30,000. The band are now parting ways with their label EMI, whom they claim have hindered sales by disabling the embedding of OK Go’s previous videos: it appears that YouTube hits on an earlier promo crashed as soon as embedding was turned off. The cheerful chaps now hope to resolve their predicament by self-releasing on their own label Paracadute Recordings; meanwhile, Mashable elucidates the ticklish topic of video embedding here.

Twitter has at last boarded the location-train, with the roll-out of a small icon which will now be attached to those tweets sent via applications that support geo-location, like Foursquare and Tweetie. Users who click on the icon will get a Google Map showing where in the world the tweet originated.

Various commentators are noting that geo-location looks set to be the tech-tool darling of 2010 – and as if to prove them right, here comes ChatRouletteMap, a jolly useful mash-up which pinpoints the precise position of the site’s least wholesome users, and – super-satisfyingly - lets them know that they’ve been tracked. Ooh, a whole new way to enjoy Chatroulette!

On which unsavoury note, the most expensive domain-name auction in history kicks off later this month. Sex.com - which was picked up in 2006 for a reported $14m - is back on the market, after its owners defaulted on loan payments. Bidding begins low, at $1million, but the winning amount is expected to top the $16m reportedly shelled out for Insure.com last year.

Social game Pet Society is the cat who got the cream this week, having landed 136,000 new Facebook fans with a competition in which players recreated celebrated scenes from famous movies, using their virtual pets. Amongst the winners: ‘The Shining’, performed by twin kitties sporting blonde wigs. Watch, and marvel – it’s genuinely rather sinister.


IN OTHER NEWS ...

A Treasury study has found that those in rural areas or on very low incomes are most likely to be locked out of the coming generation of high-speed broadband. The government is worried that rural businesses will be crippled by the emergence of what the Prince of Wales called ‘broadband deserts’ in country areas – and as set up a new group, calledBroadband Delivery UK, to address the problem.

Meanwhile, 80% of adults worldwide believe that Web access is a fundamental human right, with the Chinese and South Koreans feeling particularly strongly that access to the Net is a vital freedom. The BBC World Service polled 27,000 people across 26 countries – half of whom felt that the Internet should not be regulated.

A new report by Forrester predicts that British e-commerce is set to grow at a compound rate of 10 percent annually for the next five years, according to NetImperative.

Google is testing a feature that would allow TV viewers to search for web videos and broadcast-TV content on set-top boxes “using elements of Google’s Android operating system”, reports paidContent.

Domino’s has begun a trial of a digital marketing tool which would let anyone with a personal web-space – whether blog, or social network page - to earn ad revenue from brands.

Meanwhile developer RockYou has launched their solution to Facebook’s ban on app spam – a promo they’ve called Deal of the Day, in which social game-players can move forward in-game, in exchange for engaging with ads.


That’s all folks!