It's been a busy week in social media, with new ways to display what you've been doing on Twitter with #FollowMe and Facebook revealing how law enforcement has tried to follow what you're doing by disclosing information requests on its users from local and federal law enforcement. Also this week, Facebook opened a server near the Arctic Circle and is ditching sponsored ads, Twitter started testing how to give users more use of analytics, and Foursquare maps your life.
The biggest story of this week came late Friday, when Facebook disclosed some data on requests from law enforcement for information about its 1.1 billion users. Over six months ending on December 31, 2012, there were somewhere between 9,000 to 10,000 requests from local, state, and federal law enforcement for data about Facebook's users. These requests range from local police looking for a missing child or investigating an assault to national security agencies tracking terrorist threats. In those six months, data was requested on almost 19,000 Facebook user accounts.
In this time of revelations about NSA tracking billions of pieces of metadata, Facebook is claiming it is trying to be transparent and protect its users' information whenever it can. The social media giant says in a release that they "aggressively protect [their] users' data when confronted with such requests" and "frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested."
The same week, Facebook announced a new 290,000 square-foot data center it constructed in Lulea, Sweden, near the edge of the arctic circle. The facility takes advantage of the cold Nordic air to keep servers cool and uses a more environmentally friendly energy source than most from a hydro-electric plant. The company also moved to simplify its advertising platform, by announcing the end of so called "sponsored results" to Facebook searches - the search results near the top of a user's search that are paid for by companies looking for customers. The company will still allow mobile app install ads and page post link ads, but is looking to streamline its advertising scheme.
This week, as other internet companies were worrying about revelations about the government accessing its users' metadata, Twitter decided to let users use their metadata to create something of their own. On Thursday, Twitter announced a partnership with Vizify that will bring a new feature to the 140 character-based social media site. The project is called #FollowMe, and it's being touted as a way to create a 40 second video Twitter bio. When you sign up for the service, Vizify will access your Twitter account and make a video based on your tweets, your media, like photos and Vine videos, as well as metadata like your most frequent interactions and most active followers.
The company also said that it is testing a simplified version of its analytics functions, which companies use in order to target ads on Twitter, in order to give users a better picture of data like what type of people follow them, which tweets generated the most number of favorites or retweets, the most common geographic location of a user's followers, the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site, and other data in that vein. "We've been experimenting giving the analytics feature to a small group of users outside our advertising clients," said Twitter in a statement.
Foursquare
Finally, this week, Foursquare announced that it had a new feature called Time Machine. Teaming up with Samsung, the location-based social media site, based on "checking in" from various locations, will visualize your personal check-ins from your past. Much like Foursquare's aggregated videos of all users' check-ins, Time Machine also breaks down the locations by the type of place they are.
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