Just how much money are you willing to be paid to stop using Facebook altogether? Well, Paul Baier’s daughter was offered $200 (to be paid out in stages) to quit Facebook, and surprisingly, she said “Okay” to that deal, and will receive $50 this coming April, with the remaining $150 on June 26th. Why June 26th? Well, that particular date would mean the end of the school year, which translates to an entire five months of life without Facebook.

Just before you wonder whether Paul is being too harsh on his daughter, it was actually her idea to quit Facebook. Paul said, “She turns it on, she’ll have 30 to 40 — 50 little alerts things popping up too. She’s frustrated she can’t find babysitting jobs and she said, ‘Dad, would you pay me to get off Facebook?’ I thought she was joking.”

I guess this is where the wheat is separate from the chaff, considering how she’s an honors student. I’m also quite sure that there are other honors students out there who can still maintain a balance between Facebook and life, but to each his or her own, eh?

Via : www1.whdh

Intel and Acer announced a new Atom-powered Android smartphone at an event in Thailand. Dubbed Acer Liquid C1, the new device uses Intel’s latest mobile Intel Atom Z2420 chipset (codenamed Lexington) clocked at 1.2GHz, which was only recently announced at CES. In addition, it also comes with a 4.3-inch qHD (540×960 pixels) screen and 8-megapixel camera with auto-focus. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (rather than Jelly Bean) is running the show and we’re really not sure whether the Android 4.1 update will ever be released. As far as I can tell, this phone should be able to handle it, though you never know.

When it comes to the price, the Liquid C1 will go for 9,990 baht, which translates into some $335. Initially it will be available in Thailand, and later on in other South Asian countries. We don’t know whether it will ever be released in the West, though… and honestly, we’re not craving for it that much.

(Via: GSMarena)

Over the last week, several Instagram users began reporting that the photo-sharing app was locking them out of their accounts, and asking them to confirm their identity by showing photo ID

These incidents, which CNET first covered Tuesday, were reportedly a result of Instagram's new terms of service, which came into effect on Jan. 19.

At first, users were worried that their accounts were hacked. But Talking Points Memo confirmed Friday that the ID requests were actually legitimate, and came from Instagram and Facebook, which now owns the photo-sharing app.

"This is just a general practice for both Facebook and Instagram to request photo IDs for verification purposes depending on what type of violation may have occurred," a Facebook spokesperson told Talking Points Memo. "Unfortunately, I can’t share more with you beyond that as we don’t go into details beyond that."

Identification is requested in cases when the social networks suspect that their terms of services have been violated. It aims to confirm who's behind an account, and perhaps to determine whether a user is underage (the minimum age to use both services is 13).

As Instagram doesn't require users to provide their real names, it's unclear why the photo-sharing app would ask for official ID. Facebook, on the other hand, does ask for users' real names. The social-network giant declined to comment on the matter.

Instagram's terms of service give the company the right to "refuse access to the Service to anyone for any reason at any time."

For all the reasons that Facebook is a massive success, it has one card that trumps the likes of Twitter, Google and LinkedIn: it knows who your real-life friends are. Kindly, Facebook shares that data with third parties apps using its Social Graph API—but it seems that privilege might not be a given for much longer.

TechCrunch reported last week that Facebook is cutting off access to the API for "competing" apps that don't share much back with the Big Blue. It started with Voxer—don't worry, nobody else has heard of it—but was, the 'Crunch claimed, planning to extend the policy further.

Now, the Verge is reporting that Facebook seems to be refusing to authorize user requests to find friends on Vine. Doing so seems to throw up a message "Vine is not authorized to make this Facebook request", which suggests that the app doesn't have access to the Social Graph API.

If that's the case, it's obviously a massive bummer for Vine, which has been having problems straight outta the gate. And it does seem it could be the case: despite the fact that Vine is geared up for sharing with Facebook, it's run by Twitter which is— as we all know—a big Facebook competitor.

So, while we can't be certain that Facebook is locking down Social Graph, scraps of evidence are starting to point towards it. If it is the case, it will be interesting to see how Zuckerberg pushes forward with the policy: too much clamping down would leave Facebook as a walled garden; too little might give its competitors an edge it would rather not offer up. The ball is in Facebook's court.
 [TechCrunch and Verge]

Of all Facebook’s data sets, it’s the social graph that’s truly unique. It’s spent nine years getting you to confirm who you know, and apparently it’s sick of handing over your friend list to competitors. This week it cut off both Twitter’s new photo app Vine and messaging app Voxer from Find Friends, Facebook’s API that lets you connect with Facebook friends on other apps. But this could backfire.

Facebook knows who you are, what you’re interested in, where you go on the web, what apps you use, and more. However, other companies have bits and pieces of these data sets. LinkedIn knows your resume, Google knows your web searches, Twitter knows who you follow, Apple and Amazon have your credit card number, and your phone’s OS-maker knows what apps you’ve downloaded. Who your real-life friends are, though, is Facebook’s domain.
Facebook Social Graph

Reconfirming your social graph manually on other apps is awkward at worst and annoying at best. Think about it. If your Facebook account was reset and you had to send friend requests to all your old friends, how many do you think would confirm? Even your best friends might be too lazy to, and people who were glad to friend you when you met years ago probably wouldn’t bother if they remember you.

There’s plenty of noise in the Facebook’s social graph. Some people blindly accept most requests they get, others send them to anyone they meet once, and all the connections grow stale over the years. Still, if you want to jumpstart a social app, Facebook’s Find Friends feature is very valuable. It can be the difference between an empty feed and low retention, and a vibrant, addictive feed teeming with content from people you care about.
Find Friends ScreenshotFacebook has offered Find Friends for years. But those were years when it was a web-based social network. It’s more now, or at least it wants to be. Facebook hopes to host all the ways you communicate. That has pitted it against Apple, Google, and other companies in war for messaging that’s only just heating up.

Data portability first became a big issue in 2010 when Facebook blocked Twitter from using its Find Friends feature. Later that year it got into a spat with Google about exporting contact lists. Google was pissed Facebook was sucking in Gmail contacts but not exporting friend lists. Facebook eventually began offering Download Your Data, which included your Friend List, but only in plain text.

More recently though, Twitter may have awoken the dragon when it cut off Instagram’s access to Twitter’s own version of “Find Friends”. It was an understandable retaliation since Facebook had cut it off, and Twitter had wanted to buy Instagram too.

Now Facebook is coming out swinging, citing its Platform Policy that states “Competing social networks: (a) You may not use Facebook Platform to export user data into a competing social network without our permission.”


Last week it blocked voice messaging app Voxer’s access to the social graph. At the time, Facebook told me this was because Voxer qualified as a competing messaging, but also because Voxer wasn’t contributing much back to Facebook. Voxer only had a buried, and largely unnecessary ”share to Facebook” option. It got an email stating its Find Friends access would be revoked 48 hours later.

Then today Facebook shut off Find Friends for Twitter’s Vine, as spotted by Jeff Martines and reported by The Verge. That makes both more and less sense. More because Twitter is a real competitor. It has decent scale and mindshare, and competes for the same advertisers as Facebook. Twitter would love to know your Facebook social graph, which could help it refine its version, the “interest graph”, which powers its ad targeting.Vine Blocked.

It makes less sense because Vine had a prominent “share to Facebook” option. What happened to Facebook only going after apps that don’t contribute much back? Apparently that got overruled because Twitter is a more legitimate threat. So much so that Facebook employed its policy that “we reserve the right to take action against your app even before the end of this 48 hour period.” It didn’t want Twitter getting any social graph data.

Enforcement of these policies could create a moat around Facebook. It creates a barrier to engagement, retention, and growth for competing companies. It will force social apps to rely on other data sets, such as your phone’s contacts which may not have as complete of a social graph, though likely does include your closest friends whose numbers you have.

That advantage may not be worth it, though. The enforcement means Facebook is not an “open platform”. If companies are worried that Find Friends or other Facebook data access could be ripped away from them with little notice, it could cause a chilling effect on development on the Facebook platform. No one wants to build an app that relies on Facebook data if it could disappear.

 Facebook reaffirmed this fear this morning when it enforced its ban on exporting data for use in social networks. Russian search engine Yandex’s new social search mobile app Wonder got all of its API calls blocked just three hours after launch. That’s a lot of programming and product work down the drain.

Facebook is playing with fire. It could use policy enforcement to cook competitors and shine a light on its dominance of social networking. But if this enforcement scares off developers whose apps might otherwise provide content for that could be shown next to ads in the news feed and piped into Graph Search, Facebook could get burned badly.

Via techcrunch (Thanks)

Twitter rolled out its video-sharing app called Vine on Thursday morning, and by Thursday evening it already looks like your Facebook sharing options are limited. Perhaps we’ve moved from photo wars to video wars? It looks like users are no longer able to connect with friends on the “find friends” page of Vine through their Facebook social graph, even though a Facebook sign-in is one of several options to find new users on Twitter’s video-sharing network.

Twitter Vine video Facebook login Twitter declined to comment on the development, and Facebook hasn’t yet responded to our request for comment. But the competition is hardly surprising as the two companies compete for user attention. After all, the social graph is one of the most valuable products Facebook holds. But it’s a bummer if you’re looking for a nice video experience on Vine right off the bat.)

So far, you can still share videos out to Facebook, but with the relationship between Facebook’s Instagram and Twitter having recently deteriorated, a rocky Facebook/Vine relationship wouldn’t be surprising.

Twitter initially blocked Instagram users from finding friends through the micro-blogging service back in July. Instagram then removed support for Twitter cards in December, meaning users would have to head to Instagram to see their friends photos. And then Twitter rolled out its photo-editing features in direct competition with Instagram.