Internet

Facebook's influencers nod shows murky side of campaign ads

Facebook's green light for political campaigns to pay prominent social media users to spread their messages is highlighting the difficulties around setting rules for the fast-changing world of online political campaigning.

Computer Sciences

A way to spot computer-generated faces

A small team of researchers from The State University of New York at Albany, the State University of New York at Buffalo and Keya Medical has found a common flaw in computer-generated faces by which they can be identified. ...

Software

Google Authenticator app susceptible to malware attacks

New research indicates the Google Authenticator app on Android devices is vulnerable to a form of malware known as Cerberus. According to financial cyber security specialist ThreatFabric, this banking Trojan can steal one-time ...

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Social network service

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people.

While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services, the idea of proprietary encapsulated services has gained popular uptake recently.

The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook widely used worldwide; MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America; Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, Hi5, StudiVZ (mostly in Germany), Decayenne, Tagged, XING;, Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America; and Friendster, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands.

There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the Open Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about privacy.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA