From a fellow 202er:
Sorry about last night's loss, well somewhat. You have to admit it was a pretty intense game the whole way through. Anyways, yesterday at the end of lecture I mentioned a few New York Times articles about Facebook, and Facebook security.
The first article I just noticed today is discussing how Facebook has somehow managed to track "Gross National Happiness" and is all dependent upon words used in user's statuses. What will they think of next?
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/10/05/05readwriteweb-facebook-now-tracking-gross-national-happin-27977.html
The other article is 5 easy steps to stay safe on Facebook. This reiterates what we discussed in our lab section about safe-proofing our Facebooks. I thought you might be interested!
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/09/16/16readwriteweb-5-easy-steps-to-stay-safe-and-private-on-fac-6393.html?em
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Facebook tracking and security
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3 comments:
I thought the Gross National Happiness was a very clever idea. I would love to get into the brains of the people behind Facebook who come up with all these ideas because I love the concepst they come up with! While we can all have all these different profile pages, groups and pictures and can branch off all over into the Web realm, we can be united in traditional commonalities like holidays that takes us back to our non-digital roots. I bet this will be fun to watch if it develops into something bigger.
I read an article a few months ago that talked about a similar project with Twitter (I wish I remembered the link to share with all of you).
The main point I remembered from the article was that these systems is that they have a large flaw- they do not understand cultural idioms and phrases. For examples, the system may link the word "wretched" with sad/negative feelings. This is an issue when the word would be used in a sentence that has a positive/uplifting/happy tone. If I was to say "say goodbye to the wretched Madison weather", the system would see this as a negative statement instead of a positive statements.
Although there may be a few flaws, I think the overall idea of tracking the GNH is quite interesting and may be helpful for sociologists and individuals studying feelings.
Gross National Happiness was a waste of time. why spend money on an application that is so ridiculous!?! i mean isn't it common sense that people would be sad when heath died but happy on holidays?! and i also went on my fb page and fixed my privacy settings after reading that article! :) it was actually very helpful. However if too many people get their hands on that article, the "news" that comes out of such accidents will deplete and then we will be left with (shock, gasp) REAL NEWS!
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