Bill banning employer Facebook snooping introduced in Congress
April 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
Two members of Congress have introduced a bill that would ban the practice of requiring job applicants, employees or students to provide their social networking information.
The Social Networking Online Protection Act, authored by Congressman Eliot Engel of New York and sponsored by Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, is in response to a growing number of reports of employers demanding their employees’ Facebook passwords as a condition of employment.
The bill seeks to block any employer from requiring current or potential employees to turn over login credentials to any person; online content can not be used as a condition of employment to “discriminate or deny employment to individuals, nor punish them for refusing to volunteer the information.” The bill would apply the same prohibitions to colleges, universities, and K-12 schools. Similar legislation being written by Senators Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut) and Chuck Schumer (New York), is expected to be introduced in the Senate later this year.
Facebook has already threatened legal action against organizations who require employees to reveal their Facebook passwords as policy. And the practice is a violation of existing law: the Electronic Communications Protection Act of 1986, which applies to all data stored electronically. But in testimony before Congress earlier this year, the Department of Justice indicated that there would be no prosecution of employers for enforcement of such polices.
Several states have taken up legislation to block the practice as well, following reports of the spread of the practice by the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times. Maryland was the first state to pass legislation banning employers from requiring employees to provide access to their social media; a second bill, which would have banned universities from requiring current and prospective students to provide their social network passwords, failed to pass. Illinois has also voted to protect job applicants from password demands from potential employers.
The Maryland law was driven largely by the controversy over a state agency’s own Facebook intrusions: in January of 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with Maryland’s Department of Public Safety on behalf of Robert Collins, a Maryland Department of Corrections officer who was ordered to turn over his Facebook login information during recertification for his position. Collins recounted the case in this ACLU video from February of 2011:
Article source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/bill-banning-employer-facebook-snooping-introduced-in-congress.ars?clicked=related_right
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Twitter sets its sights on 2 billion users
April 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News

“Everything we are doing is oriented around getting to 2 billion users.”
You might think that statement was from Mark Zuckerberg, as Facebook approaches 1 billion active users on its social network and focuses on the next billion. But it was Satya Patel, Twitter’s vice president of products, outlining the goal his company has set for itself.
With an estimated 140 million users today, producing 340 million tweets a day, 2 billion people using Twitter at least once a month isn’t a near-term goal. Based on its current growth rate, which is accelerating as hashtags and @ signs become more embedded in everyday life, Twitter will likely reach 200 million active users in August.
Patel wouldn’t tell me when he expected Twitter to reach 2 billion users, which today would include nearly everyone on the Internet around the world. But he knows what success would look like. “Success is if everybody in the world wakes up and checks Twitter,” he said.
“Get big as fast as you can” is the mantra of Silicon Valley — as well as any other valleys where technical innovation and opportunism meets venture capitalism. It may not be the ultimate road to immediate profit, but it’s a well worn road for those who want a chance to own a significant chunk of digital real estate. Google’s done as much in search, Facebook in the social web, Apple in mobile devices, Amazon in e-commerce, and Microsoft on the desktop.
Twitter handles and hashtags are becoming part of professional sports uniforms (Credit: NBA)
The path to becoming more mainstream and attracting 2 billion tweeters is making the product more approachable to mere mortals, Patel said.
“There is incredible awareness of Twitter, but the gap between awareness and ability to extract value is too great. We have to make it simpler for users to get close to what is most meaningful to them and easier to discover information.”
Twitter has focused on its Discovery feature as a way to attract users and help them become more fluent in the service. Discovery analyzes signals, such as who users follow as well as their interests and engagement on Twitter, to “personalize the experience and display stories without any user intervention,” Patel said.
Twitter’s Discovery feature surfaces content that it determines a user might have an interest in viewing, including from sources that a user doesn’t follow. Like many personalization features and applications, Twitter Discovery is hit and miss in separating the noise from the signals.
He acknowledged the challenge of keeping Twitter simple as the volume of feature requests escalates. As Twitter CEO Dick Costolo phrased Twitter’s goal, “We are going to offer simplicity in a world of complexity.”
“We add via subtraction and look at how to reduce the number of steps to get value from the product. Consistency across devices is also important — you shouldn’t have to relearn the product for each device,” Patel said.
Patel, who came to Twitter from Google, where he led the development of Google Ad Manager, also said that advertising has fit into the Twitter simplicity mold. Twitter’s main advertising vehicle, promoted tweets, “are just content…. and in some cases people want to pay so a broader audience can see them. It has to be built off of the organic nature of the platform,” he said.
In our conversation, Patel stressed that Twitter deals with a different use case than a social network like Facebook. “It’s a real-time public conversation, bringing everybody in the world closer to the people and topics they care about. It requires the conversation and information to be public. I think we do the best job in the world in addressing this single-use case,” he said.
But not everything on Twitter is public. The direct messaging feature allows Twitter users to have private conversations. Patel’s view is that direct messaging is “useful to a subset of users, but not core to the use case that will be most important to 2 billion people who use Twitter every day.” Nor does Twitter have any current plan in the works to offer real-time group chat.
Facebook is on the cusp of a billion users eight years after it launched. Six years into its existence, Twitter has around 140 million. Two billion is a long way off, but there isn’t much in the way, outside of being locked out of China, to prevent reaching that goal, eventually.
Article source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57423213-93/twitter-sets-its-sights-on-2-billion-users/
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Using #WeGotBinLaden to see what we believe on Twitter, and why
April 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
How do we separate fact from rumor on Twitter, and how do we decide which Tweeters to trust?
That question is at the heart of a study conducted by researchers at Georgia Tech. The study not only examines how news of Osama bin Laden’s death moved rapidly across the social media platform, but also looks at what led the Twitterverse to believe the news to be true, prior to mainstream media confirmation.
The Bin Laden news story was a perfect case study to choose for this research because it was a major news story that broke on Twitter.
As you may recall, U.S. Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, sometime between 4 and 4:30 p.m. EST, according to a timeline provided by The Guardian. At 7:01 p.m. the same day, President Obama was briefed that there was a “high probability” that Bin Laden had been killed, The New York Times reports.
Three and half hours later, news of Bin Laden’s death broke on Twitter when Keith Urbahn, aide to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and notably not a journalist) tweeted, “So I’m told by a reputable source that they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot Damn.”
Eight minutes later, a CBS producer (@jacksonjk) tweeted her own confirmation.
Then New York Times reporter Brian Stelter, who has a large Twitter following, retweeted both reports and the story went viral.
Much of this has already been reported elsewhere, but what the Georgia Tech team wanted to know was how many people trusted the news they had read on their Twitter feed, and how likely they were to share the news as if it were fact.
To find out, the researchers examined 400,000 tweets sent in a two-hour period starting just minutes before Urbahn’s infamous tweet.
They sorted the tweets into three categories — certain, uncertain and irrelevant.
What they found is that just minutes after Urbahn’s tweet, 50% of the people tweeting about the death of Osama bin Laden were tweeting about it as if it were a certain fact.
By the time the television stations started reporting on Bin Laden’s death, at 10:45 p.m., 80% of tweets on the subject were categorized as certain.
In an interview with The Times, Mengdie Hu, a PhD candidate in the School of Interactive Computing, said she was surprised by the number of people who sounded certain that Bin Laden was dead despite lack of mainstream media confirmation.
I asked Hu if her research shows that people will believe anything they read on Twitter, but she said she doesn’t think so.
“So on Twitter and on social media in general, there are lots of rumors, but also truths,” she said. “So how do we know if something is really true or not?”
“In this research the original people tweeting about Osama bin Laden’s death was a guy from the State Department and news reporters,” she added. “These are credible sources.”
And here’s one other insight the research provided: Hu found that the first journalists who tweeted news of Bin Laden’s death tweeted it through their personal Twitter accounts. “Rather than running to tell their bosses, they were running to tell their Twitter followers,” she said.
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Article source: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-osama-bin-laden-twitter-study-20120427,0,579296.story
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Poorly worded tweet nets IndyCar owner $25000 fine
April 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
By Nick Laham, Getty Images Panther Racing owner John Barnes is on probation until Dec. 31. Pictured is driver J.R. Hildenbrand.
Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/motor/indycar/story/2012-04-28/Disparaging-tweet-costs-Panther-Racing-owner/54601978/1
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Facebook offers East Palo Alto more than $1 million in benefits to avoid …
April 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
East Palo Alto will receive more than $1 million worth of benefits from Facebook in exchange for its promise not to sue over the company’s expansion plans in Menlo Park, according to an agreement the city council is to review Tuesday.
Facebook agreed to pay the city $650,000 for traffic mitigation measures including pedestrian and bicycle pathway improvements and $100,000 for planting trees and taking other measures to fight air pollution from increased traffic.
In addition, the social media giant will contribute $150,000 toward city efforts to preserve affordable housing.
The city also will benefit through a deal Facebook made earlier with Menlo Park. The company offered $500,000 to create a fund to support nonprofits that serve residents of East Palo Alto and Menlo Park’s Belle Haven neighborhood.
Facebook moved about 2,000 employees last year from Palo Alto to its new corporate home — the former 57-acre Sun Microsystems campus at the intersection of Bayfront Expressway and Willow Road. The company hopes to eventually employ as many as 6,600 people at the site, but needs Menlo Park’s permission to lift a 3,600-employee limit.
An environmental impact study released in December concluded that the additional employees would increase traffic on Marsh, Willow and Middlefield roads, as well as on highways 84 and 101. To reduce that impact, Facebook has said it will restrict the number of vehicles going to and from the campus
each day and encourage employees to share rides, take shuttles and walk or ride to work.
The Menlo Park City Council last week unanimously voted to accept the company’s offer of a myriad of benefits that add up to more than $14.5 million over 14 years.
In January, East Palo Alto officials wrote Menlo Park a letter expressing concern that their city also would suffer from the traffic congestion and possibly lose some affordable housing if Facebook’s employees move into the area.
In closed sessions, East Palo Alto council members had discussed a possible lawsuit against Facebook. But in early February the company contacted East Palo Alto to discuss public benefits if the city agrees not to sue, according to a memo for Tuesday’s council meeting.
Email Bonnie Eslinger at beslinger@dailynewsgroup.com.
Article source: http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_20501169/facebook-offers-east-palo-alto-more-than-1
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One Direction: Twitter campaign to get Louis Tomlinson back with 1st …
April 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
By
Larisa Brown and Lucy Buckland
18:18 EST, 27 April 2012
|
08:05 EST, 28 April 2012
New girlfriend: Louis Tomlinson has been dating Eleanor Calder for the past six months
Louis Tomlinson has been forced to speak out and defend his love life after a vicious Twitter campaign to get him back with his ex-girlfriend went viral.
The 20-year-old singer has ended up on the receiving end of a bizarre online campaign, with fans telling him he should break up with Eleanor Calder, 19, and go back to Hannah Walker, a primary school teaching assistant in his hometown of Doncaster.
Nearly 140,000 users are now following Miss Walker on Twitter.
They got the word ‘Louannah’ – an amalgamation of Louis and Hannah – trending on the site, posted messages praising Miss Walker and sent photographs of the former couple to Miss Calder.
When Tomlinson, one of five members of the boy band, split up with his childhood sweetheart, their break-up devastated fans, some of whom posted tributes ‘in memory’ of the popular couple on YouTube.
Although the singer is fiercely private the campaign has devastated him as he claims rumours he callously dumped Miss Walker to go out with Miss Calder are untrue.
Louis told MailOnline he is deeply upset with the Twitter campaign and wanted to set the record straight.
First Love: The One Direction star with his first love Hannah Walker
His spokesman added: ‘It’s upsetting
for Louis and Eleanor when Twitter campaigns like this start. I know
some of the fans will think it’s a bit of fun, but it’s unnecessary when
they are both very happy together.’
A source close to Louis told the MailOnline Louis broke up with his childhood sweetheart because it wasn’t working.
He then met Miss Calder two months later.
He began dating Miss Calder six months ago. She went to school in London, and is now in her second year at Manchester University studying politics and sociology.
She also works part-time as a model for clothing chain Hollister.
This week, supposedly in ‘celebration’ of Miss Walker’s 20th birthday, fans took to Twitter to urge Tomlinson to go back to his first love – infuriating the singer.
He tweeted: ‘Truth of the matter is it’s actually not funny in the slightest. I’m reading through some horrible tweets very ****ed off!’
Campaign: Tomlinson fans have been taking to Twitter to call fro him to get back former flame Hannah Walker
He returned to the UK with his bandmates on Tuesday after their hugely successful tour of the US, Australia and New Zealand, and Miss Calder met him at Heathrow.
But before he flew home, he sent her a series of reassuring tweets, saying ‘can’t wait to see you’ and ‘love YOU’.
Miss Walker started going out with Tomlinson after they performed together in a production of Grease at Hall Cross sixth form college in Doncaster.
He auditioned for The X Factor in 2010, and when he got through to the live finals as part of One Direction, Miss Walker travelled to London every week to support him.
Miss Walker, who now works as a learning mentor, said she feels no bitterness towards him.
Talking about the Twitter campaign, she told the Mail: ‘I felt terrible so I sent a text to Liam’s girlfriend [Liam Payne is another member of the band] Danielle saying to tell Eleanor that I’m sorry if I’ve offended her. I didn’t want to look like an evil ex-girlfriend.’
She added: ‘When I look at him on the television now I know him as two different people – one is the boy from Doncaster, and the other is Louis from One Direction.’


Louis’ loves: One Direction star Louis Tomlinson’s old flame Hannah Walker (left) and the new girl on the scene Eleanor Calder
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Share this article:
Here’s what other readers have said. Why not add your thoughts,
or debate this issue live on our message boards.
The comments below have been moderated in advance.
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Well, it’s Louis’ choice…
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Eleanor is so beautiful but Shes a floor model actually, they are basically sales assistants…
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He didn’t dump Hannah by the way, she ended it.
I loved Lou and Hannah together, but any fan that does this kind of stuff shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves a fan. You should all be happy that Lou has found a new girl that he loves and makes him happy.
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Bit odd.
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Not every fan out there goes along with the stupid trends within the fandom. Hannah is an amazing girl, she’s the reason Louis signed up for the X Factor, but Louis has his own life, and he is with Eleanor now. I’ve never sent either girl hate. Infact I’ve never sent any of their girlfriends hate. We aren’t all the same.
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This is why I’d never date a member of a boy band…
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..and a grip wih reality
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Some people need lives…
- tiyya, minnesota,usa, 28/4/2012 02:41
Some people also need help! I find the behaviour of the 1D fans a little strange at times.
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Some of the 1D fans really are pathetic, aren’t they!?
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I am baffled at the way people function these days. Why would Louis dump someone like Hannah? she is also a stunner. Look at Siva (from The Wanted), despite his fame, he is still with his long time girlfriend. Hats off to you Siva!! There should be more men like Siva!!!
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The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.
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Muamba thanks fans for support
April 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
Bolton midfielder Fabrice Muamba has taken to his Twitter account for the first time
since his cardiac arrest to thank fans for their support.
Muamba, who was unconscious for three days after collapsing
on the pitch during his team’s FA Cup quarter-final match against Tottenham last
month, has stunned medical professionals with his recovery.
And, after a surge of support from around the globe, the midfielder has written on his Twitter account: “Thank
u so much 4 ur prayers,love and support. Good 2 be back on twitter. Hoping £BWFC
pick up 3pts today, come on lads we can do this.”
Muamba’s heart stopped beating naturally for 78 minutes after his cardiac
arrest on March 17 at White Hart Lane.
While he was recovering at the London Chest Hospital, his fiance Shauna Magunda
reassured Muamba’s many fans by posting a photograph of the smiling footballer
on his Twitter page.
Before Saturday, the last message Muamba had written himself on Twitter was on the
day of his collapse, when he said he was just reaching the London football
stadium.
The devout Christian was fit enough to walk out of hospital just a month after
his ordeal, although it is not yet known if he will play professional football
again.
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Twisting tweets make hash of hashtag support for nuns
April 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
Hesitate before you launch a hashtag. The experiences of President Obama and Catholic priests prove the point this week as competing views from church and state made hash of their original Twitter intentions.
President Obama, riding the topic of rising student loan interest rates, announced a hashtag for collegians to lobby Congress: #dontdoublemyrate.
Conservatives switched that up in a hurry — using that very hashtag to complain about gas prices and unemployment or to lay the blame for the rate increase on the Democrats, according to The Washington Post.
Earlier in the week, another hashtag campaign took a U-turn.
There was an outcry by some Catholics when the Vatican issued a crackdown on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the umbrella group of U.S. women religious (nuns and sisters) and put them under what conservative theologian George Weigel called “ecclesiastical receivership.” Bishops have been assigned to run their show and steer them to focus more on promoting church doctrine and discipline on marriage and sexuality. Weigel and many others thought this was a fine idea and long overdue.
Weigel writes in the National Review:
Yes, many sisters continue to do many good works. On the other hand, almost none of the sisters in LCWR congregations wear religious habits; most have long since abandoned convent life for apartments and other domestic arrangements; their spiritual life is more likely to be influenced by the Enneagram and Deepak Chopra than by Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein; their notions of orthodoxy are, to put it gently, innovative; and their relationship to Church authority is best described as one of barely concealed contempt.
But Rev. James Martin, culture editor of the Jesuit magazine America, noted that what is really overdue is the expression of gratitude to the women who founded schools, hospitals and charities across the USA and the world. Martin wrote an ode to the social justice work by selfless sisters and launched #WhatSistersMeantoMe.
That was all swell and full of 140 character bouquets to saintly women — for the first 1,000 or so tweets. Then traditionalist Catholic blogging priest John Zuhlsdorf suggested a U-turn for the tweets. He notes that the Vatican’s
…reforming effort is far more about the fact that the queenpins of the Magisterium of Nuns style themselves as teachers about faith and morals over and against the bishops and Holy Father, and that they have even become defenders of abortion and homosexual acts.
Fr. Z suggests to his audience, every bit as lively and Catholic-committed as Martin’s, that if
…the defenders of the liberal nuns want people to tweet (on Twitter, of course) positive notes about the poor, male-oppressed nuns using the hashtag #WhatSistersMeanToMe, I suggest that you give them exactly what they are asking for! Do tweet and do use that tag.
But, he says, use it to link to his posts he dubs “Nuns gone wild” naming dozens of nuns and sisters, some deceased, who strayed from orthodoxy on public policy.
Now, Martin says, the Twitter column has been ..
… flooded with snotty comments about who were faithful sisters were and who were not. (Apparently the commenters were able to see within the souls of the unfaithful ones.)
Martin says he was
… taken aback when gratitude was seen as out of bounds, when praise was mistaken for dissent, and when an occasion to support elderly sisters was used as an opportunity to mock women who had given their lives to God.
For folks who might prefer more than 140-character views on the sisters and the Vatican, check out the thoughtful Judy Woodruff discussion at PBS.
HAVE YOU EVER HAD … a Twitter hashtag turn sour on you?
Article source: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2012/04/twitter-nuns-catholic-obama-student-loans/1
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Facebook, Under Fire For Lack Of Female Directors, Maybe Needs A List
April 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
Mark Zuckerberg at the 37th G8 Summit in Deauville (Photo credit: Guillaume Paumier)
Facebook, preparing an initial public offering that could value the social network as high as $100 billion, has plenty of options for adding women directors to its board, say women tech executives who have offered up candidates CEO Mark Zuckerberg might consider.
At the top of the list: Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s own chief operating officer.
Facebook, which filed for its IPO in February, has since been criticized by activist groups and shareholders for the lack of diversity on its board — most notably, the lack of a single women among its all male, all white directors. Those seven directors include Zuckerberg, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel, Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Co., Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix Inc. and Erskine Bowles, president emeritus of University of North Carolina and former White House Chief of Staff.
Facebook isn’t the only tech company without a women on its board. Longtime tech company Adobe Systems Inc. doesn’t have any women directors, and neither do some of the companies that went public in the past year, including Pandora, Zillow, Zynga and Splunk. Meanwhile, Apple, Groupon and LinkedIn have only one woman board member.
Ultraviolet, a community of women’s rights activists, protested outside Facebook’s New York headquarters this week and submitted a petition signed by 53,000 people (collected online in 48-hours) asking Zuckerberg to add a women to the board before the proposed IPO, which is expected sometime in the next two months and which may raise $5 billion. In February, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), the second-largest pension fund in the U.S., sent a letter to Facebook, chastising the company for failing to name a women director “when there is clear evidence that companies with diverse boards perform far better than companies with more homogenous boards.”
“We’re long past having to defend or explain why women should be on boards, given all the data that shows how companies with female as well as male directors perform better,” Anne Mulcahy, former CEO of Xerox Corp. and a director at Johnson Johnson, Target and The Washington Post Co., said in a February interview with Bloomberg News. “It’s unfortunate when companies with a large percentage of women constituents don’t reflect that in their boardrooms.”
According to a 2010 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 58 percent of Facebook users are women. Facebook now has more than 900 million users and said it generated $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011.
Katrina Garnett, a longtime software executive and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who is now CEO of social network My Little Swans, agrees the lack of women on Facebook’s board is troubling. “A lot of companies do the window-dressing board members before going public, and rarely do those kinds of members actually deliver on what you wanted as the CEO/founder,” says Garnett. “The pedigree folks like the prestige and ultimately just act as professional board members, but again, not probably adding the diversity, the value, the experience or the vision that a company like Facebook needs.”
And what they need is someone on the board who can represent more than half of their user base, said another Silicon Valley women tech executive, who asked not to be named. ”It is astonishing and unacceptable that they don’t have a woman on that board,” she said. “I feel they should have half women, not just one token woman. There are plenty of great women to invite, and they don’t need to be technologists, which is what I’ll bet is [Zuckerberg's] hang up.”
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. Image via CrunchBase
Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2012/04/27/facebook-under-fire-for-lack-of-women-directors-maybe-needs-a-list/
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Klouchebag Site Mocks Klout By Measuring Twitter ‘Asshattery’
April 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News

Tired of hearing colleagues and friends celebrate their Klout score? Well, now there’s a new site that might help put them in their place.
Londoner Tom Scott has come up with a parody spinoff to the social media scorecard, PC Magazine reports.
Dubbed “Klouchebag,” the site gives Twitter users a 1-100 score based on four metrics, including anger, retweet abuse, social apps and English misuse.
Within seconds, the site spits out a 1-100 score describing your online influence. The higher the score, the bigger jerk you are on Twitter.
The site also provides humorous phrases to describe online behavior, from “A Bit Of A Prat,” or for the less offensive, “Mostly Alright.”
Scott first got the idea after reading a Wired profile on Klout.
“I’d been annoyed with the idea of Klout for a while, and that [article] crystallized it,” he told the Huffington Post.
About 24 hours later, he’d registered the domain name and built the site in just a couple of hours.
While Klouchebag’s aim clearly isn’t to become a Klout rival, Scott hopes it will help people to stop putting so much thought into what he calls an “arbitrary” score and “ever-changing system.”
“Imagine if all that time went into actually making interesting things, or caring about the people around you,” he said.
In honor of the newly launched Klouchebag site, take a look at some entertaining tweets from users below.
















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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/27/klouchebag-mocks-klout-asshattery_n_1459763.html
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