Internet’s future might be safe

The underlying technology that allows us to freely and quickly communicate these days might still be around after future ITU meetings might have finally adopted some decisions that could somehow restrict access to the internet as we know it today.

Google and Facebook are considering for quite some time now to relocate their servers, somewhere where no current authority can reach them. Possible locations are:

1). Out at see, in the international waters

2). At the South or North Pole (again, no jurisdiction around)

3). Or even in space, orbiting at some 20.000 m above (clearly beyond the reach of any government)

Still, all these locations are quite vulnerable to military attacks from whoever, so Google and Facebook should also build armies to defend their “no man’s land servers”.

1). Locations might seem to some extent the script of a Hollywood SF movie, but they are actually business plans. An old oil rig transformed into a server is not something very unrealistic. The rig could also provide it’s own power using underwater power turbines that are now available.

Another idea is to create mobile data center platforms out at sea by stacking containers filled with servers. More details here:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/googles-search-goes-out-to-sea/

2). The Arctic server relocation is even more feasible. The cool air around is the perfect natural cooler for immense data centers, that could also be powered by independent wind power sources. This is just an idea now, but steps towards it have been already taken by Facebook. Recently, Facebook inaugurated a location that still belongs to a certain country, but this might only be a good exercise for the ultimate data center situated somewhere in Antarctica.

More details here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8850575/Facebook-to-build-server-farm-on-edge-of-Arctic-Circle.html

3). Outer space servers might be the most SF idea, still PC was something unthinkable only some 40 years ago… Server-Satellites have advantages and also disadvantages. On one hand they should have more than enough solar power, being much closer to the Sun… On the other hand, it’s quite tricky to upgrade and service them, maybe Neil Armstrong could have done the job successfully, unfortunately he’s now dead… So much for the maintenance team…

Anyway, more details one can found here: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20091123/0010157045.shtml

The other day we learnt about Facebookistan. Googland and Facebookistan may very well have armies long before applying to UN… Who knows?!?

SNA could save innocent lives. Maybe…

Terrorism is a very tricky thing, especially when the bomber does not wear a big enough turban, so he could be spotted from miles away… It is very hard to be prevented. Sometimes it is impossible, because you always hear on the news: “…it was such a polite man, very respectful with older people…”, still he had just killed a dozen people…

This might have also been the case in the most recent school shooting in USA. It happened on Friday, Dec 16^th 2012, in Newtown, Conn, USA, where a gunman killed more than two dozen people, including 18 school kids. Unbelievable!

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/18-children-9-others-dead-in-school-shooting-ap-2012-12-14

Maybe, and I stress MAYBE, this incident could have been prevented by prior SNA constant monitoring, in case the shooter connected with people known to be fanatic or just completely crazy. Or maybe he was a constant reader of “Idiot’s guide to school shooting”… Or maybe he was a subscriber of “School shooting today” magazine… Maybe…

Of course, there is the problem with PRIVACY and whether or not our private life should remain private… But hadn’t you happily gave up your own privacy, if you only knew that this could have saved the lives of 18 school children?!?? Maybe some readers of this blog post are still nodding their heads thinking about privacy issues. Ask the parents of the dead kids… Are they still thinking about “privacy”?!??

There is of course the possibility that this individual’s reading or web-surfing behavior was not connected to his mental issues. Still, there are big chances that mental cases like this do not go crazy instantly…

There is also another issue, that the loss of privacy might be used for not so well intended purposes by “mean” governments…

But the fact remains: a wide and constant SNA might have prevented this from happening!

Facebook With Care: Social Networking Site Can Hurt Self-Esteem

Every coin has two sides. Take advantage of some social network tools, but don't over-estimate them. Attention!! Facebook also brings us some risks.

More details, just check:

http://www.livescience.com/18324-facebook-depression-social-comparison.html

5 Things You Need To Know About Chinese Social Media

By Huizhen Xu (M13)
Hi, everyone, I think maybe you would like to know something about the social media in China, since mainland China is somekind of "isolated" from the "facebook world". Here I found a passage from Forbes, which may help.

For me, I am a fans of sina weibo, which is more like twitter, but has more function than twitter, and it is updating technologically these days, thus become much user-friendly, I would like you to have a look, the link is http://weibo.com~ for I am also a former user of renren (http://renren.com) and kaixin (http://kaixin001.com), these two are more like facebook. For Kaixin, there are lots of online "social" games which can be played among your friends. Have a look if you have time and interested in social network, you may just need to register an account.

Below is the passage I recommend:

5 Things You Need To Know About Chinese Social Media

Guest post written by Henry Fong
(Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/10/25/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-chinese-social-media/)

(Henry Fong is CEO of Yodo1, a Beijing company that helps developers enter the China mobile gaming market.)

China probably has more social media users than Facebook has in the entire world combined, but to many of my Western colleagues, the market still remains a mystery. It’s very large, they acknowledge, but why should it interest them as developers or investors?

When answering that kind of question, here’s five points I usually make:

China’s Social Media Market: Nearly a Billion Users — Mostly on Mobile
With China’s entire population at 1.4 billion, this estimate of 1 billion Chinese social media users may seem exaggerated, until you do some basic math: QQ, one of China’s oldest social networks — born in the 90’s as a clone of ICQ and now the primary entry point for Qzone, a Facebook-style social network — was architected to work on any phone in China, even cheap models with 2G plans. Consequently, it’s difficult to find anyone in China without a QQ account. In July 2012, the company reported 700 million monthly active users on QQ, and 500 million monthly active users on Qzone.  Those are just the social network platforms of one company. Several others exceed 100 million users (see below). Just as notable, most Chinese social media activity happens on mobile: QQ is mainly accessed by phone, as is the second leading network, Sina Weibo, which boasts 60%+ mobile usage.

China Has Many 100 million+ User Social Networks For Many Purposes
Unlike Western-based social media, largely dominated by Facebook and Twitter, China has several networks which exceed 100 million active users. They can largely be categorized by their main usage modes; again, note that most are mobile-driven and becoming more so each day:

•The aforementioned QQ/QZone (owned by Tencent), with 700 million+ monthly active users, is the largest social gaming platform, and is the company’s main revenue source.
• The Twitter-like Sina Weibo (literally, “Sina microblog”) with some 400 million users, is largely a mobile-focused social network and mass communication platform often leveraged by celebrities, brands and industry experts through a Twitter-esque usage model.
• Tencent Weibo is very similar to Sina Weibo in terms of functionality and demographics, and has about 200-250 million users.
• WeiXin, a voicemail-based social networking service akin to WhatsApp, reported 100 million registered users this April.
• Douban is sort of a Chinese MySpace, popular with special interest groups and communities, and for networking around specific topics and has over 100 million users.
• Renren, formerly Xiaonei (literally, “schoolyard”), was born as a network for re-connecting friends from school years, and reported 100 million active users this June. RenRen pretty much looks, feels and does exactly what Facebook does.  Like Facebook, RenRen is trying to stay relevant in the fast-growing mobile space.

From an app developers’ perspective, this diversity of usage changes the calculus of social network integration – with so many huge social networks to choose from, it mainly depends on what you want your app to do.

Facebook and Twitter Will Never Dominate in China (Even If They Were Allowed There)
Mark Zuckerberg’s pre-IPO visits to China fueled rumors that his social network, now blocked by the government there, will finally be allowed into the country. But as I’ve written before, barring some dramatic change, Facebook will never, ever be a dominant force in China, even were it allowed into the country with the state’s full endorsement (highly unlikely in itself).

Facebook’s primary revenue model, advertising, is strictly regulated there, as is its second revenue stream, gaming. In fact, every core feature of Facebook would require several government licenses, each of which would likely take months to procure. It’s also possible that their activity in China would be frowned upon by their Western audience and regulators. (Most of these problems, as you might have guess, also apply to Twitter, making its successful entry into China equally unlikely.)

So without Facebook and Twitter, does that mean China’s social media users are unreachable by Western social networks?

Not exactly:
LinkedIn: A Bridge for the West and China’s Business Professionals
Linkedin enjoys some usage in China (last April, the company reported 2 million mainland Chinese users of its English language service) and the real number is probably a lot higher than what LinkedIn can track, since many Chinese users register their accounts from overseas.  As such, LinkedIn is probably the social media network with the most active Great FireWall crossover. (Here’s my own Linkedin account.) It’s a fairly good East-West business networking tool, but due to lack of China-specific functionality and content, its use as a business networking tool between Chinese people has been limited.  None of the LinkedIn “clones” in China have really gotten much traction yet, with Ushi being the latest in a string of start-ups trying to build the LinkedIn of China. Instead, Sina Weibo seems to be becoming the de facto standard for Chinese professionals looking to connect with other professionals online.

Western App Developer Advice: To Succeed in China, Find the Right Network, And Local Help
Since China’s social network ecosystem is so huge, the sheer number of options available for Western developers to leverage can sometimes be confounding. Fortunately, many of China’s leading social networks are becoming more open to integrating with app developers from the West: Mobile game devs interested in expanding to China should consider integrating Sina and Tencent Weibo into their titles, while Web games will do better on QQ’s QZone. Be warned, however, Qzone’s social network is still a relatively closed platform. By comparison, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo are relatively open, and offer open API integration to mobile developers.  That said, most of the API documentation is still in Chinese, so either having someone on staff or a Chinese partner who is fluent in Chinese tech lingo is the most effective way to get integrated.

Before coming to China, however, you probably want to consider working with a local partner who can handle regulations, help protect your IP, and manage promotion of your app, aspects I discuss at greater length on my company’s blog. Leveraging Chinese social networks is a great way for mobile apps and games developers to reach the Chinese consumers.  We’re seeing great startups like Handy Games (Germany), Defiant Development (Australia) and Robot Entertainment (U.S.) join us in this space. To be sure, it will take some time and patience for Western and Chinese companies to work well together. But with so many social network users in China, especially on mobile, the opportunity is too great to ignore.

Social network analysis as an aid to landscape-scale conservation

There is increasing agreement that protecting esteemed and ecologically vital components of the biosphere will require collaborative environmental management approaches focused at the landscape scale. A growing number of studies suggest that organizations like the Great Northern LCC play an important role in facilitating transformations to such co-management arrangements (by creating social networks wherein knowledge co-production, trust building, social learning, vertical and horizontal collaboration, and conflict resolution can occur). However, to date, tools for explicitly examining the efficacy of co-management arrangements in advancing socially and ecologically tenable landscape-scale conservation have not been forthcoming. Social Network Analysis----the formal study of social entities (e.g., conservation organizations), their relationships with other entities, and the patterns and implications of these interactions----helps address this limitation. This webinar presents the theoretical foundations, methods, and results of a recent social network analysis of the Great Northern LCC. Based on the study's findings, it will be suggested that Social Network Analysis can be an important tool for understanding and improving collaborative landscape-scale conservation efforts in the Great Northern region and beyond.

link: SNA as an aid to landscape-scale conservation

Very interesting article about the conference in Dubai!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/14/telecoms-treaty-internet-unregulated

E-Learning and Social Networking Handbook: Resources for Higher Education

Hi friends,

Now-a-days, Social networking is used as a learning tool. This will expand the eLearning segment and will give broader horizon to students and more sources to learn and discuss. Here is the Handbook related to this. Have a look!

E-Learning and Social Networking Handbook

Developing nations adopting social media quickly

As citizens in countries like Mexico, Brazil, Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, and India get access to the Internet, they join social networks at a high rate, according to a Pew report.

Not as many people in developing countries have access to the Internet as those in more developed areas of the world, but when they do get on the Web, they are more likely to join a social-networking site, according to a Pew Research Center report released today.

The report -- which looked at the state of social media globally based a survey of 21 nations -- found the majority of Internet users in Mexico, Brazil, Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, and India use social media.

"Once people in these countries are online, they generally become involved in social networks at high rates," the report reads.

This is compared with more economically-developed countries of Japan and Germany, where only half of Internet users are on social networks. The growth of social-networking sites in developing countries fall in line with the direction of companies like Facebook, which is putting efforts into countries where there is still a lot of opportunity for growth.

The Pew report shows how the adoption of cell phones have led the way for this growth. The median percent of the world's population who owns a cell phone was 87 percent, with 26 percent using the Internet on their phones. In 12 countries surveyed by pew, at least six in ten smartphone users go on social networks with their phones.

There are a ton of stats in the report about social media and smartphone use, but here are some of the highlights:

• The most talked about topics on social media are music and movies, but people also post about community issues, sports, and politics. In Arab countries, the skew is toward community issues and politics. In Egypt and Tunisia -- countries that had a major part in the Arab Spring, an event that was largely fueled by social media -- more than six in ten social network users share their political views, compared to a medium of 34 percent in other countries.

• In 19 of 21 countries, about three in ten or more adults use sites like Facebook, including about half in Britain, the U.S., Russia, Spain, and the Czech Republic. The only two countries with the percentage of adults on social media were India (6 percent) and Pakistan (4 percent).

• Smartphone users in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America are less likely to use their phones to gather information, except for those in India, Egypt and China. Sixty percent of smart phone users in India rely on their phones for information about their job. Sixty-five percent of Egyptians, and 48 percent of Chinese people are more likely to use their mobile phones to search about politics.

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

    

      Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.

     Yvette  Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.

The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.
   Here is the more information for this discussion for the whether we will feel more lonely from the social networking on line, you can read for this.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/

Where the internet lives?

For the first time, Google opens up its data centers. Through a 1:45 minutes video, we are able to understand the grade of complexity and the extraordinary dimensions of one of the biggest data centers in the World.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWgpFli-28o

For those who want to take a more detailed look into the data center; Google Maps provides now images of the facilities through the Street View mode.

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/streetview

How Social Media Has Revolutionized The Music Industry

"Social networks put the power of discovery into the hands of fans," says Dave Haynes of Soundcloud, a social network where artists can share music. "In the past, there were just a few gatekeepers to music, and you had a powerful network of labels, A&R men, radio and TV executives and magazines who decided what you should be listening to. Now, it's so much easier to find out what your friends are listening to or what other people who like the same music on the other side of the world are recommending."


(Via http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep/05/twitter-power-social-networking-music)

Today, you can discover music from across the world through Youtube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, OfficialFM etc and buy music directly from the artists, thereby bypassing record labels, firmly transferring control back into the bands of the artists.

The internet has revolutionized music sales, as can be observed from this really cool .gif image. From vinyl records to CDs to mp3 downloads with a recent small but significant resurgence of more physical music forms like LPs.

Additional reading:
http://www.indieandunsigned.com/what-is-the-future-of-the-music-industry-part-1/
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/05/28/why-social-networks-need-musicians/
http://socialmediatoday.com/vashon-60/200287/social-media-success-music-industry

Facebook to improve privacy controls

Facebook is to make sweeping changes to its privacy controls, making them easier to find and offering people the means to review every publicly available picture of them on the site.

The move follows repeated criticism that the site made it too hard to keep information private, and kept shifting default settings to open up more data.
The change is the biggest overhaul to its privacy settings in more than a year, and will begin appearing to the site's 1 billion registered users over the next few weeks.
Facebook has come under repeated fire from privacy advocates because it kept shifting the boundaries of where privacy ended and publicly visible data began, and made it hard to understand how to change those back.
For many younger users now, Facebook has become a record of who they are – but also a source of potential disruption in their first work interviews or careers. Getting rid, or hiding, photos that might show them in compromising or unpleasant situations may be a high priority

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/12/facebook-improve-privacy-controls-pictures-public

Human-computer interface designer: Jeff Han demos his breakthrough touchscreen at TED 2006

In the following video of the year 2006! Jeff Han shows off a cheap, scalable multi-touch and pressure-sensitive computer screen interface that may spell the end of point-and-click. After years of research on touch-driven computer displays, Jeff Han has created a simple, multi-touch, multi-user screen interface that just might herald the end of the point-and-click era.

The demo included a virtual lightbox, where he moved photos by fingertip - as if they were paper on a desk - flicking them across the screen and zooming in and out by pinching two fingers together, as well as a Google Earth-like map that he tilted and flew over with simple moves. When the demo hit the web, bloggers and YouTubers made him a bit of a megastar. (His video has been watched more than 600,000 times on YouTube alone).

This video seems to demonstrate prior art to Utility Patent 915, which was granted to Apple (as pointed out at http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-versus-samsung-2012-8) and was one of the patents that Samsung was found to have infringed on in a recent lawsuit. "Utility Patent 915: Distinguishes between single-touch and multi-touch gestures. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/65

Network Analysis in the Social Sciences - evolution

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest in network research across the physical and social sciences. One of the most potent ideas in the social sciences is the notion that individuals are embedded in thick webs of social relations and interactions. For social scientists, the theory of networks has been a gold mine, yielding explanations for social phenomena in a wide variety of disciplines from psychology to economics.  Social network theory provides an answer to a question that has preoccupied social philosophy since the time of Plato, namely, the problem of social order: how autonomous individuals can combine to create enduring, functioning societies. Network theory also provides explanations for a myriad of social phenomena, from individual creativity to corporate profitability. Network research is “hot” today, with the number of articles in the Web of Science on the topic of “social networks” nearly tripling in the past decade.The article below provides kinds of things that social scientists have tried to explain using social network analysis and provide a nutshell description of the basic assumptions, goals, and explanatory mechanisms prevalent in the field.

Full reading: Click here

What is the Internet, really?

Our relationship with the internet is an interesting one that we mostly take for granted. Our lives are increasingly interwoven into it. We shop, conduct financial transactions, watch TV, play games, read newspapers, connect with family and colleagues through skype, or through social networking sites. We are so accustomed to connectivity that we fret and are annoyed when a website is down or are unable to get online. Yet, when was the last time any of us thought about what the internet is really made up of? Not the many access points through which we connect such as webpages, cellphones, or laptops. But the physical internet. Surely it is not digital bits flying through the cloud? No pun intended. A year or so ago, I read a series of articles in Wired Magazine written by Andrew Blum about the physical internet. The internet you can physically touch which is made up of cable and fiber optic cables crisscrossing oceans and land. It is made up of routers and huge server farms that consume as much power as entire cities. For your viewing pleasure, a twelve minute TedTalk video geeking out on the internet: http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_blum_what_is_the_internet_really.html When you are watching the video, give some thought as to where the video physically resides and how you are able to view it from nearly anywhere in the world.

Untangling the social web

There is an old saying that a man is known by the company he keeps. Today, the company men and women keep is much easier known – or at least pieced together through online activity. It’s called a social network and, just as the adage states, your social network is a reflection on you. And this social network and the ability to analyze it is proving increasingly useful from retailing to counter-terrorism and this trend will only continue as it reveals deeper insights.

Some consumers may feel like they’re getting special treatment from their wireless phone provider. They may have been identified as “influencers” – people who potentially have the power to convince others to stay or switch phone service providers. Influencers get quick call backs, make long calls but receive short ones, receive more calls when social events are happening, and aren't afraid to call at inconvenient times, such as the middle of the night. Their sphere of influence is easy to identify through the records of whom they call and who calls them.

Everyone knows that networking is critical to business success. So when someone is applying for a loan for a new business, their social contacts are important. Banks may analyze a loan applicant’s social network to see if it includes contacts relevant to the business venture. They may combine that with an analysis of credit card transactions to look at travel or business interactions that are relevant to the new venture. The bank may even get a reduced premium on insurance on a loan for performing a more in-depth analysis that includes an applicant’s social network.

Speaking of insurance, if someone is making an insurance claim, it might make sense to check if their social circle includes people who might not always abide by the law.  Oops – one of their contacts previously shared an address with someone on parole – for insurance fraud. Perhaps that claim warrants some extra investigation?

For those who are already trouble-makers in the eyes of the law, chances are that police have done some analysis of their social network. Combine that with Facebook, Myspace and Twitter messages and they might be able to predict where the rowdiest parties will be. The Richmond, Virginia police department has saved $15,000 in overtime pay by more intelligently deploying extra police based on this sort of analysis.

For someone fortunate enough to have a chauffeur, his or her social network may reveal something about the person they are driving. In fact, identifying the hideout location of Saddam Hussein in 2003, which led to his capture, was primarily the result of analyzing the social networks of his chauffeurs and identifying the rural locations to which they were networked.

For detailed reading refer: This article in The economist

How to use SNA to target terrorists

A new algorithm from the West Point lab shows how to use centrality to dismantle terrorist groups. This is really interesting.

The battle for the future of the Internet starts today

Sponsored by the UN via the International Telecommunications Union (ITU,) the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) starts today in Dubai.  Sounds innocent enough, but at is heart lie deep divides over the future of the freedom of the 'net as we know it.  Freedoms of access, cost, and regulation are all to be debated, with over 900 new regulation changes, some of which are still "secret," proposed by 193 nations. Click on title for article covering the major point.

The outcome could affect all of us.  Stay tuned.