Update: Both issues seem to have been resolved; Twitter lists and tweet counts are now back to normal.
Reports are pouring in that Twitter lists as well as tweet counts are currently malfunctioning for some users.
This has been going on for several hours, and Twitter is aware of the issue. According to a message on Twitter’s status blog, Twitter is working on the problem; the company estimates that lists and tweet counts will be restored by 6 a.m. PDT.
If you really need to see your total number of tweets right now, you should still be able to do so on your profile page.
Among all of the weird characters you can encounter on popular random video chat service Chatroulette, pretty girls are a breath of fresh air, right? Well, it depends: for users who’ve stumbled upon the viral video campaign from Lionsgate, promoting their latest horror movie The Last Exorcism, what started as a pleasant chat ended very… unexpectedly.
We won’t spoil it for you — check out the video below (be advised, it contains strong words and unpleasant imagery) to see the best reactions of Chatroulette users.
Interestingly, this is not the first viral video campaign for the movie; a couple of weeks ago a website called Church of Saint Marks appeared with “information” on exorcism. What the site actually featured was one of the main characters from the movie, Reverend Cotton Marcus.
Earlier this evening, Facebook formally announced its geolocation component, Facebook Places, and it has already sparked concerns from a major privacy advocate.
The ACLU of Northern California has issued its preliminary response to the features and is taking issue with the granularity and visibility of some of the new location-based user controls.
Tagging, a feature that has made Facebook Photos such a success, is a key part of Facebook Places. Just as you can tag friends in photos you find or upload, you will also be able to tag individuals when you check in at a new location.
But while Facebook makes it easy for users to allow their friends to check them in, the ACLU says that opting out of that feature is more difficult. For example, the feature lets users select a “not now” option when friends attempt to check them in, but not a “never” option to prevent friends from attempting to do so in the future. Further, if you’re already a Places user, friends can just check you in automatically.
The ACLU also takes issue with the “Here Now” feature, which displays users that have recently checked in at a given Place. The problem, according to the ACLU, is that this list is accessible to anyone else who is checked-in to the same place. The ACLU has already put together a resource page dedicated to helping users lock down more of their information.
It will likely take a few days of real world Facebook Places use to digest all of the privacy implications, but initially it seems that the biggest problem may not be with controlling what information an individual shares but what information others can share about them. Further, as the service becomes available and third-party apps start to work with the APIs, we’ll get a better idea of what this all really means.
Right now, the only thing that seems really clear is that no matter how much Facebook may want to skirt the privacy issues it faced this spring, the company likely to face some serious questions from its users with this new product. After all, the potential for a location-based social graph is enormous, but so too are the real-world opportunities for privacy breaches.
It’s official: Facebook has jumped into the geolocation game with Facebook Places. The question is: will Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users embrace it?
Facebook Places is a checkin service that’s quite similar to Foursquare or Gowalla on the surface — it allows you to checkin to places. What differentiates it is its tagging features, which allow you to tag friends that are with you at a location. There is also a focus on Facebook Place Pages, which house the checkin history of a given place on the web.
Now that the details surrounding Facebook’s Places platform have been revealed, we wanted to find out what you, the readers, think. Is Facebook Places something you will use? Or will you continue to use services like Foursquare or Gowalla instead?
We want to know your thoughts, so please vote in the poll below and don’t hesitate to explain or defend your choice in our comments section below!
As the world’s largest social network, Facebook is a fascinating place to find out what’s hot, what’s news, and discover the latest meme.
Despite recent improvements, Facebook’s (
) in-site search doesn’t necessarily offer the best way to see such data. However, there are various services that provide a dedicated way to either search Facebook’s 500 million-strong data stream (at least what’s made public), or see what’s “trending” on the site in a way that’s similar to Twitter (
).While we can’t overlook the fact that search engines like Google (
) and Bing (
) have begun offering “social search,” we think the five services listed below offer a more useful way to find out what people are saying about a particular topic, or even find out what’s being “Liked” in your social circle.1. Kurrently
Kurrently’s great selling point is that the search results continue to refresh after you’ve looked up a word or phrase, so you can experience the kind of auto-updating hashtag search we’re already familiar with on Twitter.
Kurrently’s programmer Gilbert Leung said he started the site because he wanted to get a sense of the global sentiment on a certain issue.
“Twitter Search was the obvious tool at the time,” says Leung, “but my immediate question was, ‘What about Facebook?’ Why am I searching through a community of around 60 million when a network of around 500 million exists?’”
2. It’s Trending
Giving you a new way to see hot topics across categories (video, news, sports, tech, gaming, comedy, etc) and across popular sites (Cracked, YouTube, Vimeo (
), DailyMotion, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, NY Times, CNN and yes, Mashable ()) it’s a good-looking service that has big plans for the future — so definitely one to watch.3. Openbook
Also worth mentioning for marketeers or researchers is Openbook’s unique ability to see search results from just male or female Facebookers — something that’s an incredibly useful tool if you need to narrow down data on a gender basis.
4. Booshaka
Main channel topics include news, music, sports, politics, gossip, TV, fashion, movies, deals, travel, brands and games (with each broken down into further sub-topics). Clicking on one of these will give you a stream of updates from relevant accounts.
Once you’ve carried out a topic search, you can see how many “Likes” and comments a Facebook post has received, and narrow down the results by what’s trending now, what’s most popular, what’s most recent, and what has the biggest “buzz.”
These further options could potentially help identify up-and-coming trends, as well as find out what folks are saying about established ones.
5. Facepinch
While there’s no data to be gleaned from it, you can also browse recently updated profile pics with a gallery of random Facebook users’ names and thumbnails. The site’s default is the U.S., but you can select specific countries if you’ve an interest in a particular geographical area.
The service’s creator, London-based Andrew Webb, states that besides the more obvious voyeuristic uses, he sees value in the site for brands:
“[C]ompanies and marketing professionals [can] see an unfiltered glimpse of how their products are being really perceived by the public.”
BONUS: Like Button
) right now.”If you’re signed in via Facebook, you can see what your buddies have “Liked” on popular pre-loaded sites such as YouTube (
), CNN, The Huffington Post, etc, and via categories including news, social media, tech, Apple, etc. But there is the infinitely useful option to add sites of your choosing too, making the Like Button site a personalized social window on the web.You can also click to view a brief overview of what’s hot on Facebook with the nine top trends displayed and refreshed every 15 minutes.
In addition, and on the fun side of things, Like Button lets you create your very own “Like” and “Dislike” buttons, the former of which looks like this when posted to your Facebook wall: