Technology Slice Blog

Fired over Facebook - How many times have you updated your Facebook status to say "…is bored at work"? Probably at least once, though statistically that number averages at 3.4 times a week.* (*Not a real statistic.) But can you imagine getting fired for it? Because that's what happened to Briton teen, Kimberly Swann. She was summarily sacked after her boss learned -- via her updated status -- that she was "bored at work." In this hilarious CNN segment, a journalist does a search for the terms "bored" and "work" on Facebook and Twitter, and finds that Swann certainly isn't alone. (Further research would no doubt dig up folks saying far worse things about their place of employment). Her boss, meanwhile, says Swann's admission of boredom revealed that "she just wasn't happy here" and thus "it wasn't going to work out." We're no experts, but why was the boss perusing Facebook on company time? Was he, p...

AFL Photo Scandal on FaceBook - AFL St Kilda captain Nick Riewoldt says he is shocked and hurt that a photo of him naked, taken by a teammate in Miami, has appeared on Facebook. Riewoldt told a press conference in Melbourne he did not know the teenager who posted the photo of him and fellow players Zac Dawson and Nick Dal Santo on the internet, and found her action incomprehensible and distressing. The Federal Court yesterday issued an order restraining the unnamed teenager from posting photos on Facebook until a second hearing on December 23. However she said today she would post more photos once she opens a new Facebook page. “Yeah definitely, once I make a new Facebook page ... who's going to stop me?” she told ABC radio. AFL Photo Scandal on FaceBook Riewoldt said the photo was taken by teammate Sam Gilbert as Riewoldt got out of bed while on holidays in Miami 12 months ago. Riewoldt said he had asked Gilbert to delete the photograph and was disappointed he hadn’...

Facebook Crash - Social network website Facebook was down for about 30 minutes today, with the company saying it was experiencing "sitewide issues". Facebook published a statement on its Platform Live Status page that read: "We are currently investigating sitewide issues that will affect Facebook Platform. We apologise for any inconvenience and will post here with updates." According to tech blog Mashable, the outage stemmed from a Facebook rollout of new features, including redesigned brand Pages and the ability for users to switch accounts for managing different Facebook Pages without having to log out and log back in. Facebook Crash

Bing Facebook Search - Can search engines effectively move into the social realm? Bing things so. The search engine will soon show which links have been “liked” by the internet surfer’s friends, Microsoft announced today at the Bing Search event in San Francisco, Calif. Since October, Bing has integrated “liked” content from Facebook into its search results in a separate content area that says “Liked by your Facebook friends.” Side note: For us, the special Facebook “like” results didn’t show up all the time—but did show up when we searched “tech” and “social media.” Coming soon, Bing says they’ll show U.S. users which individual page/URLS have been liked by their Facebook friends as a part of the regular search results. Therefore, Facebook “liked” results will no longer be relegated to a special box, rather it will be matriculated into the regular search area. Bing Facebook Search

Facebook Login Problems - Had trouble getting on Facebook earlier today? You weren't alone. Facebook was down for many users at around 4:00PM ET on Thursday. Facebook explained the outage after the site was back up and running: For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were accidentally exposed to people externally. As a result, we disabled the site for a few minutes. It's back up, and we apologize for the inconvenience. Mashable confirms that the outage took place around 4:15 p.m. (ET), around the same time the site began rolling out redesigned brand Pages, a new Photos section and a new Page management feature. Facebook Login Problems

Why Isn't Facebook Working Right Now - Call it odd coincidence: earlier, I wrote a blog post about Facebook launching a new “off-site registration tool.” Just hours later, in the early afternoon (Pacific time), Facebook went offline for around 20-30 minutes. My original post on the registration tool saw a lot of traffic as a result, but I’m guessing most readers were there to learn about the Facebook outage rather than some new tool. So I figured that I owe it to you to point you in the direction of the real story. See my colleague Mike Isaac’s post Facebook Down In Wake Of Pages Update for the whole story, where Facebook went offline due to the work around “internal prototypes”. Cheers, and while you’re here, feel free to vent your frustration about Facebook outage in the comments below. Did the Facebook outage inconvenience you? Or did it free you to go out and form in-person connections, if just for that half hour? Or did you go onto Twitter to read/post snark on how Time...

Facebook Not Working - Facebook apologized for a brief outage today, citing a technical glitch that prompted the company to take the site offline for a short while. "For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were made public to a number of people externally," a Facebook spokesman said this afternoon when asked for comment. "As a result, we took the site down for a few minutes. It's back up, and we apologize for the inconvenience." It was unclear how widespread the outage was, how long it lasted and if it was related to the rollout of new brand pages on the site. A Facebook spokeswoman provided this comment when asked additional questions: "We do not comment on future products and have nothing to announce at this time." Numerous reports surfaced on Twitter earlier today about a Facebook outage, though it appeared to remain accessible for some users. Facebook tweeted this comment before issuing a statement: "Facebook is available ...

Facebook Down December 16 - Facebook, the online social network used by more than 500 million people around the world, went down briefly on Thursday after the website miscued the introduction of some new features. "For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were made public to a number of people externally," a spokeswoman for the company said. "As a result, we took the site down for a few minutes. It's back up, and we apologize for the inconvenience." Messages on Twitter and technology blogs put the outage at about 15 minutes, around 1.30 pm U.S. Pacific time. Downtime for Facebook, which is relatively rare, not only affects users, but can hurt other sites and advertisers dependent on traffic from links in Facebook. Facebook Down December 16

What's Wrong with Facebook - Facebook was down. And now Facebook is back up again. According to reps for the social networking site, the outage last only a few minutes, and was a direct result of updates to the Facebook interface. But five minutes is an eternity in the Web world, and plenty of shut-out Facebook users took to Twitter to commiserate about their shared inability to aimlessly browse their pals's profiles. What's Wrong with Facebook "#Facebook is down. Half the world population had suddenly become productive. The other half of the population is using #Twitter," read one widely-circulated tweet, according to PCMag.com. Other Twitterers were less bothered by the outage. "I think I am the only person on the planet not bothered by fact that Facebook went down," one user wrote. Facebook, for its part, blamed the black-out on a sweeping update to Facebook Pages. “For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were made public to a nu...

Is Facebook Down Today - Many of Facebook's more than 550 million members found they could no longer log on to the social networking website for approximately 30 minutes earlier today starting at about 4:15 p.m. ET due to a leak of internal prototypes to the public, which caused the company to take the site down for a short time. The outage occurred just as Facebook began debuting several new features, including redesigned brand pages, a new photo section and the ability to go back and forth between different accounts without having to log in and out, reports Mashable. Numerous Facebook users discovered only a blank white screen when they tried to visit the website. Is Facebook Down Today CenterNetworks reports that Like buttons were not loading. Currently, Facebook is up and running with the following status message from developers: "We are currently investigating sitewide issues that will affect Facebook Platform. We apologize for any inconvenience and will post ...

Mark Zuckerberg is Time Person of the Year - Breathe, eat, drink, sleep, defecate, and check Facebook: these make up a significant portion of a very short list of daily activities that you have in common with a quarter of a billion other humans. One item on this list is somewhat different from the rest. There are half a billion active Facebook users. Half of those log on daily. Facebook reached 500 million in July 2010, up from 250 million in July 2009. Try to think of something comparable. Good luck. Mark Zuckerberg is Time Person of the Year This isn’t just a change in format, like when we all gave up our cassette collections and resigned ourselves to re-buy everything on CD. This is a new kind of thing in the world and in our lives. That might sound like an extreme claim—after all, friendship and conversation and social groups certainly aren’t new—but in a very real sense, Facebook is not just a new way of doing old things, but a new way for things to be. That’s probably why ...

Chipotle Cat Facebook Page - Chipotle Mexican Grill claims on its Facebook page that a hacker approved a post on an employee’s page saying she ran over a cat. We have obtained a copy of the original thread that has since been deleted. Both the employee and the company have posted the same statement on their respective profile and page. The version on Chipotle’s page has garnered hundreds of likes and direct replies, that continue as we post this: Chipotle Cat Facebook Page The statement about the cat is completely false. Someone hacked into our employee’s account and posted that update without her knowledge. We at Chipotle respect all animals and would not joke about something like that. We are working with local authorities and hope for a quick resolution. We also ask that you be respectful as this is a difficult situation for our employee. We appreciate your patience. The post that offended cat lovers had gone up on the Chipotle employee’s profile last Thursday and appears t...

New Facebook Scam Spreading Fast - Curious to see who views your Facebook profile page? You're out of luck. Status updates, Facebook groups, and pages claiming to let users see who has viewed their Facebook profile pages are scams, often linking users to ad-filled sites. In recent days, for instance, you may have seen your Facebook friends speaking in bizarrely adolescent chatroom vernacular: "OMG OMG OMG... I cant believe this actually works! Now you really can see who viewed your profile! on [LINK]." "If you're tempted to click on the link, you're taken to a webpage that encourages you to go a little deeper and permit an application to have access to your Facebook profile," wrote Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, in a blog post. According to Sophos, over 60,000 people clicked into the claim in a few hours. But as Facebook noted in July, there is no way anyone can see who has viewed their profile, and no way others ca...

Facebook NSPCC Campaign - There are great ideas behind social causes and Facebook is a place where people can easily organize the cause of their choice with a viral push behind it. The latest, in case you haven’t noticed all of your friends turning into cartoon characters, is a campaign to raise awareness against child abuse. The idea is simple — change your picture to draw attention to the fact of child abuse. It’s supposed to serve as a reminder with the hope that you’ll then donate to the child protection service or organization of your choice. To us, the all-caps message looks like something that you’d see in a spammy, forwarded email promising you money for continuing to forward it. However, our investigation of the source behind the campaign leaves us a bit stumped. Though the NSPCC has backed the original campaign, there is no information about who started it or where it’s from. Now that the rumor mill has started, others are fighting hard to spread whichever side they ha...

Cartoon Characters On Facebook - Popular characters from the animated world are invading Facebook. Like the last celebrity doppelganger craze, members of the massive social networking site are replacing their profile pictures with images from their favorite childhood cartoons. "Change your profile picture to your favorite cartoon from when you were a kid," it says on the note that is being passed around between friends. "The goal of this game is not to see a human picture on Facebook, but an invasion of childhood memories until Monday. PLAY AND PASS ALONG!" Based on trending Google searches on Friday, the new practice is picking up ground. Popular search terms include "cartoon characters from the 80s," "Rainbow Brite," "Smurfs," "Ren and Stimpy," "Rugrats, " and "Doug." According to the note, the new Facebook meme has a charitable purpose. "From now until December 7, change your profile pict...

George Bush On Facebook - Former President George W. Bush has pledged not to publicly criticize his successor, Barack Obama, but he did offer some praise Monday during a live broadcast on Facebook to promote his new book. Bush participated in an hour-long discussion on Facebook Live with the site's founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and was asked what he thought the current administration was handling well. The former president responded that he liked Obama's policy on Afghanistan. "I think the idea of putting more troops in was something that I can applaud," Bush said. "I also appreciate some of the education position. As I understand it they do believe strongly that accountability is necessary in order to achieve excellence in the classrooms." As the discussion started, Zuckerberg asked Bush why he decided to appear on Facebook. Bush quipped: "Because you've got a lot of people paying attention to us, and I'm trying to sell boo...

Facebook Is The New Myspace - While the battle may have been won some time ago, MySpace seems to be calling "uncle" in its competition with Facebook. On Thursday, MySpace unveiled what the company is calling a "Mashup with Facebook." The mashup basically is a connection across the two sites that will enable users to port their likes and interests from their Facebook profiles and have that information populate the content on their MySpace pages. The feature is billed as allowing MySpace users to create a personalized stream of entertainment content. The new feature begins rolling out worldwide today. With these steps, MySpace is giving up on being a social network. While MySpace was an Internet pioneer, it was eclipsed by Facebook . In mid-2009, online researcher ComScore reported that then-five-year-old Facebook attracted 70.278 million unique visitors in the U.S., just ahead of MySpace's total of 70.237 million. In April, MySpace had nearly 71 million ...

FaceBook Email To Launch Soon - Facebook will, by many media accounts, launch its own email service. The addresses for the accounts are likely to be xxxx@facebook.com. Facebook has 500 million users worldwide -- well over 100 million of them living in the U.S. The companies that stand to lose the most if the service is popular are Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), AOL (AOL) and Yahoo! (YHOO), all of which have huge numbers of email subscribers. Some of the portal companies get a large portion of their page views, and therefore a large amount of advertising, from email accounts. Facebook has already hurt the portals by selling ads at CPMs (cost per mille) below previously established market prices. This has tended to bring down what portals can charge in a competitive ad industry. But Facebook's new email service has just as much chance of failing. Email users keep the addresses of their contacts. In some cases, that may be hundreds if not thousands of email addresses. To mi...

FaceBook Font Size Shrinks - Facebook's font size setting for its users’ News Feeds got smaller this week, and some users have taken to Twitter and Facebook Groups to express their displeasure regarding the change. Facebook did not publicly announce the font size change, but CNN speculates that the actual font contraction happened sometime between Tuesday night to Wednesday morning. “Either the font on Facebook got smaller or my computer grew bigger,” wrote Twitter user bobbyhundreds, with his message retweeted more than 70 times. “Dear Facebook,I'm going to go blind trying to read your tiny font!!” wrote Pisces__Dreamer. On Facebook, a few groups popped up lamenting the font change, including one titled “Is it me or does facebook font think im Stevie Wonder ?” However, some users wondered why the font change was such a big deal, when text sizes could be changed in one’s browser. “Facebook font size. Whatever. I am amazed that people don't know how to change th...

Facebook's New Facebook Deals - Facebook has released a new Deals service for Facebook Mobile, which will adapt the "social graph" into something a little more down-to-earth, money. How does it work? We were given a walkthrough at Facebook's mobile event at its Palo Alto, headquarters, where the company also introduced its single sign-in process and enhancements to its location API. Facebook's new Deals program is tied closely to its mobile application. "Obviously, mobile is huge, location is huge," Erick Tseng, Facebook's mobile chief said in an interview following the press conference. Facebook employees demonstrated the new Deals on an iPhone, although the service should be available on both Android and iOS devices. When a user checks in to Facebook, he or she can look for a list of "nearby places," some of which may or may not have a yellow price tag or sticky to the right of them. That's a deal, and you can click on it to ...