Facebook Adoption

Image via CrunchBase

When you first started using Facebook you were excited to have access to a tool which helped communicate with present and long lost friends. Facebook makes it convenient for people to communicate with each other, streaming environment unlike the email. The tool does only inform you of other people’s lives unlike Twitter the broadcasting tool of all news.

I did a dissertation related to ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ for my final year at the University of Sunderland, business and product selected to test and explain the theory was Apple’s iPod’s. Now every product or service goes through this process and it is similar to the product life cycle.

The ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ however is different because it involves the rate of the social system at adopting an innovation.  For example with Apple’s iPod it was the loyal brand consumers and technology enthusiasts who were the innovators, early adopters were influenced by the exclusive product that the innovators carried around. Early adopters helped the product be a success by influencing others such as the early majority. The ‘rate of adoption’ can be slow or fast and every innovation is unique in that way, cooperation’s that have had previous success may see a fast ‘rate of adoption’ in the social system.

Everett Rogers popularised the theory in his book back in 1962 ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ and the 2010 edition is available now.

Back to the main topic, Facebook went through exactly the same process except it had no brand followers and it were ‘geeks’ and friends of the owner who were the innovators in the ‘rate of adoption’ model. As time went by it was adopted in the social system by the younger generation at first and then the older generation who are known as the late majority for now. Now from that Facebook changed and your experience changed as a user because it was not exclusive. Below is a list of the ‘type of people’ you may have on your Facebook account, parents and older relatives for example would not be on that list in 2007.

In order of importance to a majority on Facebook:

1. Relative
2. Intimate Relationship
3. Mutual Friend
4. Online Friend
5. Just a Facebook Number

Another blog post in the future will explain in detail the various types of ‘Facebook Friends’ that are listed above.

Virgin Media under investigation for broadband speed claims

Image via Wikipedia

Virgin Media’s claims of ‘the UK’s fastest broadband’ have brought a formal investigation by the Advertising Standard Authority.

Virgin Media is currently under investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority, following complaints over its claimed broadband speeds.

T3 was told by the ASA that it has an ongoing formal investigation into Virgin Media with regards to adverts which claim it provides ‘the UK’s fastest broadband.’

BT has challenged whether the claim is misleading and can be substantiated.

Matt Wilson from the ASA told us: “The outcome of an upheld ASA investigation, i.e. where an advertiser if found in breach of the Advertising Code is that the ad has to be withdrawn and is prohibited from appearing again. We have and will continue to clamp down on any advertiser that makes misleading advertising claims about its broadband services.”

The organisation will release its findings ‘imminently’.

We contacted Virgin Media for a comment, and a spokesperson told us: “Virgin Media delivers broadband speeds of up to 100Mb, soon to be 120Mb, more than 13 times faster than the UK’s average. And we deliver on the speeds we promise, consistently proven by Ofcom.”

The ASA has upheld complaints against Virgin’s broadband speed claims in the past. In 2009 B Sky B  challenged whether the claim “10 out of 10 homes with our fibre optic broadband can get 20Mb” was misleading, because it did not believe there was sufficient capacity in Virgin’s network to provide all customers with 20Mb at the same time.

And in 2011 BT challenged Virgin adverts which stated “Ofcom have proven our fibre optic broadband is around twice as fast as BT.”

Do you feel you are getting the speed of internet you were sold? Why not check out your current speeds at http://www.uswitch.com/broadband/speedtest/

Source: http://www.t3.com/news/virgin-media-under-investigation-for-broadband-speed-claims

#NewNewTwitter

Loss of Productivity due to Digital Interruptions

There is not much to write in this post as the images will display all the facts. What I can say is that many organisations need to consider new methods of monitoring how effective and efficient their employees are in the modern age of technology. For example for social networking a software could be installed on every computer to monitor the amount of time each employee spends on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and etc.

Web Browsers Vulnerable to Cyber Criminals

Vast number of users who are not keeping their computers and web browsers up-to-date with security patches are becoming easy pray for identity thieves and other hackers. This type of crime is costing consumers £3.1bn per year morever costing the economy £27bn, business have not escaped this targeted crime as they suffering from costs of £17bn.

A US security firm known as ‘Qualys’ conducted the research into browser vulnerability by collecting data from a scan of various browsers and their plug-ins. When plug-ins are excluded browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari are not very harmful to it’s users. Many of these that have been tested are automatically updated and keeps the user’s computer protected. However plug-ins and software add-ons that are installed as advanced features for the web such as video and interactivity are very often not automatically updated like the rest and leaves a user exposed to any sort of attack.

An established plug-in like Adobe’s Reader which allows PDF documents to be viewed by the user inside the browser window has 32 per cent of installations in need of security updates. Quicktime media player plug-in from Apple has unpatched vulnerabilities on 25 per cent of users machines.

The networking giant in January, Cisco had reported that vulnerabilities in the Java plug-in is the most fruitful for cyber criminals. Attackers who are successful on the plug-in gain remote control access of the browser and are able to steal sensitive data such internet banking details.

Cisco have said a series of new vulnerabilities publicly disclosed in the early period of 2010 had made plug-ins such as Java an easy target on a continuous basis because people were not worried about patching Java.
A Java update released in October patched 29 vulnerabilites that Oracle labelled “critical”.
Security experts hope the next generation of browsers and websites will help solve the problem, because the introductrion of HTML5 will mean many of the functions currently provided by plug-ins will be incorporated into automatically-updated browsers.

Google Vs Facebook for Twitter Access

Recent reports from newspapers such as The Telegraph and other major websites is that Facebook is now challenging Google for the throne to Internet domination.

Facebook as we know is a social networking website which we use to network with people who we might meet on a regular basis, other people may also be on our friend list because we interact with them online. Google with it’s search engine is still seen to be the major online corporation which dominates the industry it operates in, mobiles phones is another successful direction it is heading towards. We can’t cut out Facebook either as it is also considering the possibility of having its own phone in the mobile market, Facebook has already been integrated with the INQ Cloud Touch but it is not the official phone that Facebook personally released.

The new race for internet domination is between Google and Facebook who are both attempting to negotiate some kind of deal with Twitter. If Google has total access to Twitter’s data then it can make real-time information an integrated part of its organisation and be able to offer more than just an add-on, Google who are a giant search engine have been indexing Twitter users’ tweets since 2009 to add a real-time element to it’s search experience. It has been 18 months since Google began indexing Twitter and they are yet to create their own version of real-time search.

Facebook is aiming to become the social web within the web by buying Twitter and gaining full access to it’s rich data. If Facebook want to be the home to all of social interactions on the web then it has to consider owning Twitters platform or atleast enjoy a deep partnership.

Twitter is an information network and Facebook is a social network.
Clearly whoever negotiates with Twitter to gain full access to its rich data will be able to provide a better search experience.

Below is a link for further information – Why do Google and Facebook both want to buy Twitter?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8316026/Why-do-Google-and-Facebook-both-want-to-buy-Twitter.html

Web Explorers

Monday 31st January 2011 

Below is a list of various web explorers that have some good and bad points:

Internet Explorer
This is known to be the well recognised explorer but recent versions have so many problems. The latest explorer is very slow when starting up as usual and can freeze up whenever it feels like it even if your just trying to open your Gmail account.

However the good points are that many software applications run very well with Internet Explorer and it’s easier to use this explorer when downloading a certain software. This explorer will ask you where you want to save the file to and if you would like to run it because most explorers will not.
Can run Java, PDF but its very slow and can freeze moreover will close and recover the site you were on before.

Google Chrome
This is a fast explorer but Chrome is a new explorer and will probably need time before many of the bugs are solved. Downloading and then running a file is very difficult as it will download the file to a default destination and then sometimes it will not run it from the explorer’s download list. Bookmarking and setting websites as favorites is very easy.
Benefits of this explorer are that you are only one click away from Google or Facebook if set as favorites in the Bookmarks toolbar.
Somtimes has problems running PDF, Java and freezes and has to be restarted.

Mozilla Firefox
This web explorer is probably the only one that has many of the good features from other explorers. Explorer such as this may have some problems too but it has many good points which outweighs anything negative. Downloading, running Java and good surfing speed puts this as number one even though many people will download it and not use it as often as Chrome or IE.

Safari
This is a very fast and clean explorer which makes the Windows user feel as if they are using a Mac (Apple). Downloading is good but may take a new user time to adapt, social networking websites run very well with it. Java runs very well on this explorer but PDF viewing in the explorer can be an issue sometimes. Otherwise the explorer is no different to Mozilla Firefox.

Opera
Another fast explorer with a nice feature where you can stack up your tabs in different categories in its recent version of 2011. Excellent feature this explorer has is that you can still continue looking at one or more sites that you opened few days, weeks or months ago. Restarting opera after closing it or even restarting the computer will not change the tabs or website(s) you were looking at.
Problems are that web based PDF files will not open in this explorer however there are extensions that can be downloaded to help solve that issue.

NOTE: Do be aware that according to a BBC News Article by Darren Waters search engines such as Google or Bing do anonymise user data after 18 months however they have been criticised also to build a profile around a searcher all his/her life to develop new innovations.
Below is a link to the BBC News Article from 2008:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7335359.stm

I hope this has helped anyone who needed to know from my personal experience what probelms and benefits  some Explorers have moreover help decide what is the best explorer for them for certain situations and tasks.

Sincerely,

Naveed Ahmed