Technology Info

Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled “Jail Bird.”

In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton’s drunken-driving case. (link)

Digital and electronic media consumption are up across the board. Teens spent an average of 12.5 hours online in a single week, up from 10.7 hours last year. Tweens are up to 6.5 hours from 5.2 last year. While teens said that e-mail is for “old people” two years ago, Youth Trends’ study cites e-mail, IM, and casual gaming at the top of the online activities list. YouTube, Facebook, Google, and MySpace are popular destinations for teens, while Webkinz, Nick, YouTube, and Disney adorn the bookmark lists of tweens.

Teens are watching slightly more TV this year, up to 11.9 hours per week from 11.6 last year. Strangely, tweens spent even more time than teens in front of the television with 12.2 hours per week, up from 11.8 last year.

Mobile phone ownership is up from 65 percent last year to 73 percent among teens, and 26 percent of tweens also owning a phone. Text messaging is cited as the primary activity, though it’s feasible that owning a phone may also contribute to time spent on the Internet with the new surge in mobile phone sites. (link)

Facebook has overtaken rival social network MySpace for the first time - provoking an angry outburst from the man who paid $580m for MySpace only three years ago.

Facebook had 123m unique visitors in May, an increase of 162% on May 2007, according to the latest Comscore figures.

By contrast, MySpace drew 114.6m uniques, with visitors growing by only 5% since May 2007.

It’s the first time Facebook has managed a significant lead over its chief rival, after the pair were almost level-pegging in Comscore’s April figures.

The news hasn’t gone down well with News Corp boss, Rupert Murdoch, whose company bought MySpace back in 2005. He claims Facebook has “done a great job of being flavour of the month the last six months of last year,” but that Facebook isn’t a real social network, claiming the site is “just a directory”. (link)

Facebook is the focus of a new complaint in Canada over its privacy policies and practices. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) filed the complaint this morning, asking the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to review what the CIPPIC believes are various violations of Canadian privacy law. There are 22 violations in all, says CIPPIC, making Facebook “a minefield of privacy invasion.”

Facebook’s policies and practices were analyzed by a “team of law students” over the winter, resulting in their discovery of what they believe to be numerous violations of the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Some of the issues raised in the complaint are a little benign: for example, CIPPIC takes issue with the fact that all of a user’s friends can see Wall posts (comments) left by other friends, and that it’s not easy to simply delete all Wall posts with a single click. Other issues, however, are more serious, like a user’s inability to easily delete his or her account and all the data associated with it. (Instead, users can choose to suspend their accounts, leaving their data dormant with Facebook—for potential reactivation—for an unspecified amount of time.) (ArsTechnica)

A new study across a wide range of social networks sheds more insight into the ways men and women approach these service. As it turns out, women are more likely to be in it for the socializing, while men are more likely to use these sites for business.

Social web search company Rapleaf performed a study of over 30 million users across sites like Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, Flickr, and more. Each user included in the study had at least one friend on one of these services, and Rapleaf broke its results down according to the number of connections users had: “Social Networkers” have 1-100 friends, “Connectors” have 100-1,000 friends, “Super Connectors” have 1,000-10,000 friends, and “Uber Connectors” have 10,000 friends or more.

Overall, 53.57 percent of Rapleaf’s massive study group were female, while 46.43 percent were male. Social Networkers with 1-100 friends made up about 80 percent of the study group, among which women had an average of 62 friends with men at 57. Rapleaf says women are more likely to be Social Networkers, but doesn’t offer exact numbers in that regard. (link)

The online social networking site Facebook says it has fixed a security loophole discovered by a Vancouver computer technician that allowed people to look at the private photos of users.

The news follows Facebook Inc.’s announcement last week that it was implementing tougher measures to allow members to restrict access to their personal profiles.

But Byron Ng, a Vancouver computer technician looking for flaws, was able to use computer coding to pull up private pictures of Facebook members and their friends. The private photos included those of Paris Hilton at the Emmy awards and of her brother Nicholas drinking a beer with friends. (link)

Facebook advocate Chris Avenir says he’ll be “a little more attentive to school policies” on matters like cheating from now on, even though the Ryerson student has no regrets about running an online homework group that nearly got him expelled.

In a landmark ruling on Internet use, a disciplinary panel at Ryerson has ruled the first-year engineering student should not be drummed out for helping run a Facebook study group in chemistry last fall, and ordered his passing mark in the course restored.

In a seven-page ruling, the engineering faculty appeals committee found no proof the Facebook site actually led to cheating by any of its 147 users, even though it invited them to “post solutions” to homework that was worth 10 per cent of the final mark. (link)

Study groups may be a virtual trademark of the Ivory Tower – but a virtual study group has been slammed as cheating by Ryerson University.

First-year student Chris Avenir is fighting charges of academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook last term, where 146 classmates swapped tips on homework questions that counted for 10 per cent of their mark.

The computer engineering student has been charged with one count of academic misconduct for helping run the group – called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions after the popular Ryerson basement study room engineering students dub The Dungeon – and another 146 counts, one for each classmate who used the site.

Avenir, 18, faces an expulsion hearing Tuesday before the engineering faculty appeals committee. If he loses that appeal, he can take his case to the university’s senate. (link)

Facebook Inc. has raided Google Inc. to hire a new chief operating officer, providing the popular online social network with more seasoned management and advertising savvy as it strives to make more money without alienating its audience.Sheryl Sandberg’s defection from Google, announced Tuesday, represents a coup for Facebook just three months after it suffered a humiliating setback in its effort to inject more commercialism into its fun-loving Web site.

As Google’s vice-president of global online sales and operations for the past six years, Sandberg helped build the Internet search leader into one of the world’s most prized companies. She also helped set up Google.org, the Mountain View-based company’s philanthropic arm.

Before joining Google, she served as the U.S. Treasury Department’s chief of staff during the Clinton administration. (link)

It’s true that young people prefer interactive systems to passive ones and that they are generally competent with technology, but it’s not true that students today are “expert searchers.” In fact, the report calls this “a dangerous myth.” Knowing how to use Facebook doesn’t make one an Internet search god, and the report concludes that a literature review shows no movement (either good or bad) in young people’s information skills over the last several decades. Choosing good search terms is a special problem for younger users. (link)