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This post is about an idea that Facebook is testing slowly in more and more countries as time goes by. Facebook is considering introducing "Promotions" to personal posts. What this means is basically that you can pay $7 to move your posts on facebook higher up in the news feed. This increases the chance of your friends seeing your post as it will be higher up in the news feed for a longer period of time. This is a test that is being used on facebook users with less than 5000 friends in the U.S. I find this strange, wouldn't it make more sense for facebook to test this feature on people with a higher number of friends? Moreover, I think that this is a bad idea coming from Facebook, because $7 dollars is likely more than the average annual revenue per individual user. For a multi-billion dollar company such as facebook, I think this is a greedy and unnecessary move on their behalf. They have more money than they could ever need, yet they want to charge $7 dollars to promote a post...This could work for business posts, however, to me it seems absurd for an individual to pay $7 dollars  to promote their post on facebook, which will likely only last near the top of the news feed for a couple of hours maximum.

New iPhone app lets you read recommendations of where to eat by some of the best chefs. Chef's Feed shows you what the best chefs in your city. You can search by chef, search by dish and see what chefs in your city are tweeting. Currently Chef's Feed only supports New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.  

Don't you always want to become famous and show other people around the world your photos? Now on facebook, you are now able to promote your posts on facebook.  This "Promote" button makes it able for you to put your photos or statuses at the top of all of your friends' new feed.  Of course you have to pay, just to have your posts higher in your friend's new feed, it only costs $71.  I believe that this is a waste of money because just because you have to pay facebook to have your posts higher on your friend's news feed and frankly not that many people actually care what you post most of the time.  The creators of facebook say "Sometimes a particular friend might not notice your post", if your certain friend wants to look at your posts you could just go to our profile and look at them and wouldn't that certain person be interested and look at your pictures instead of paying facebook.

My article is on Google's recent announcement that they will discontinue Google Reader, among other services. There was a strong response to this because there are many people who use it on a daily basis.  Google Reader is a RSS feed, or Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. Basically it is a technology that tracks websites for updates. Imagine you love to get your news from the Internet, and you like to go on The Verge, Wired, Lifehacker and Gawker. You visit all of those sites daily to get the news. But when you frequent a lot of websites, going to them all separately may start to take a lot of time. So here comes Google Reader, where you subscribe to all the various sites and get direct updates sent to just this one place, making it easier to absorb information. There are several different RSS feeds, but Google Reader is one of the more popular ones, and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people use this service daily. Google stated that over the years Google Reader's usage has declined, but that still means there are many people who rely on it go get all their information.  When Google announced its plan to discontinue the service, many people were lost as to why they would stop such a seemingly successful service and this has now lost the trust of Google by many people.  Regardless, it is clear that many people will have to find a new RSS feed or go back to visiting every website manually.

Why is it that so much happens with Facebook and we rarely hear about Twitter? not two weeks after Facebook launched their shiny, new "hybrid news feed" (deep announcer voice), impressions are down. I don't have Facebook, so I don't know what that is. But it sounds bad. On the bright side, comments are up by 21% and likes by 9%, so Facebook is on the rise again. Good going, Zuckerberg & co.

Our generation is filled with tons and tons of people who use the huge social network, facebook. Some of us realize that our parents are trying to jump into our social lives by creating their own facebook account. Some of us are really embarrassed if our parents add us as a friends and peek into out social feed. It's a good way for parents to try and dig deep into their children's lives but it can also cause a bit of trouble in children's lives because it can embarrass them if their parents peek into everything they do with their friends. This is related to privacy and security because basically this article is explaining how the parents are using facebook to dig their way into their children's social lives. this relates to eLifestyle since this can show how parents are accessing through facebook to get a closer relationship with us while invading our llives.

This article is about a location-aware Field Trip tour guide app for iOS. You can now download it from the apple app store. Previously, the app was only available for Android, arriving back in September 2012. Field Trip runs in the background on your phone, triangulating position via cell phone towers, and only notifies you when "get close to something interesting." This can include anything local businesses, historical facts, landmarks, art, or culture.You select the local feeds you like and the information pops up on your phone automatically as you move about. You can discover thousands of interesting places/experiences that fall under the following categories: Architecture, Historic Places & Events, Lifestyle, Offers & Deals, Food Drinks & Fun, Movie Locations, Outdoor Art and Obscure Places of Interest around you. Field Trip can detect when you're driving and automatically "talk" about interesting places and experience around you. I think that this is a cool app and should be used while you go on trips so that you can see all the places around you and choose where you want to go. 

Facebook is now offering the option to disallow all applications from sharing and/or accessing your information. Currently, there is a lot of talk about privacy on the internet and how a lot of people don't like having advertisements and notifications shoved into their face every time they use social networking sites or play games.  Nowadays a lot of games have 'share' options built into them that allows you to share useless achievements such as how many cows you bought or how much wheat you need to feed them. This annoys many people who use social networking sites to just talk with friends and get up-to-date information from pages they liked.  The 'nuclear' option will allow people who do not want to be bothered by friends' status updates on games and also people who don't want applications to share what they are doing to others without them knowing or without their consent. This may cause many game developers to change tactics on how they want to attract users from sites such as Facebook because they don't want to risk getting blocked by everyone. 

Homophobic words have become increasingly integrated into casual speech, more than one would like to admit. This problem has been amplified substantially with the use of social networking sites, in particular, Twitter. The University of Alberta's Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services launched the website www.nohomophobes.com on September 26, 2012, and has been tracking tweets containing the words 'faggot,' 'so gay,' 'no homo,' and 'dyke' since July. The site displays the numbers in current, weekly, and all-time charts, and updates in real time. A live feed lists the tweets containing the phrases as well.  As of 1:23pm on October 22, 2012, the number of tweets with the word 'faggot' broke 10,000. It is disheartening to see how such a hurtful word could be used so nonchalantly during the day. Since July 5, 2012, there have been about 3.27 million 'faggot' tweets, 1.16 million 'so gay' and 'no homo' tweets, and over 450,000 'dyke' tweets. As the site header reads, "Homophobic language isn't always meant to be hurtful, but how often do we use it without thinking?" This article is tagged under eLifestyle because our generation uses social networking sites daily. Although people may use these phrases without harmful intentions, they are still there for everyone to see on the internet. It is a real eye-opener to watch the numbers rise so quickly, from just one social network. As students and future leaders, we must give extra thought to what we post, and who it might harm when we use these social networks.

This article (by Emily Price) details a few interesting facts surrounding the social media giant 'Facebook', particularly around gaming. We are all familiar with social games, such as Mafia Wars and Farmville, and Facebook has been recently seeing most of their income from in-game advertisements and in-app purchases. Facebook has seen a 13% growth in gaming users since September 2011 (226 million - 251 million.) Facebook now has over 900 million users, and over 500 million users are utilizing Facebook via a mobile platform. Facebook says that games grow on the network in five different ways: App Center, Notifications, News Feed, Timeline, and games users have Bookmarked. 8 out of the 10 top iOS games have Facebook integrated, and the top two categories of games users play on Facebook are 'Simulation' and 'Games and Puzzles.' This relates to Portable Computing because Facebook has recently taken large steps to improve the user's mobile experience, understanding that most of their core audience is on smart devices. This relates to eLifestyle because we see these social networks like Facebook integrating gaming into the user's social feed, allowing them to spend more time on the site. This relates to Economics because as games become cheaper and more accesible, we see that most of the gaming market is taken by mobile games; no longer do we have to go to an electronics boutique to purchase a $60 triple-A game, when we can buy the $0.99 version of said game or another digitally. Mobile games are the consumer conscious choice because you get the most "bang for your buck." This relates to ICS20 because although most of us say that our time on Facebook is deteriorating, we still are entrenched in the social gaming environment; this is demonstrated by Facebook's 65 million user growth in 2012 alone.

This article is about how you can pay to tweet on your toilet paper. The service called "Shitter" allows you to take your feeds from twitter and put it on toilet paper. I found this really funny that people would actually pay for your tweets on your toilet paper. And the paper is actually really expensive if you think about it. Each sheet is about 8.5 cents. 

Facebook.....what did you do this time? The Timeline, which was supposed to be released "in a few weeks," but now it's two weeks late. Maybe, it's due to controversial feedback from early users. Many feel that Timeline is making them stay on Facebook for longer, and ultimately defeating the main reason they like it: to be able to quickly scan their news feed. However, Facebook has PROMISED to unveil the new Timeline, so all Facebook users will have it, whether they like it or not. Tough love. 

Cellphones play a huge factor in our everyday life.  Everybody uses cellphones nowadays.  However, the real question is, when should a child receive a cellphone?  Rather, when should a parent give their a child a cellphone?  Everybody is different, so they have their own opinion as to when they are ready to receive a cellphone/give a cellphone.  A recent report shows that nearly half of the teens surveyed say they can't live longer than a week without their phones, and 36% said they check their phones at least every 10 minutes.  Of course, these habits don't develop within a day of course.  An American research market company polled parents on what they thought the most appropriate age for a child to receive their first cellphone.  Twenty-two percent of parents polled said they thought 10 was the right age, while 43% of the parents fell within the 10 to 12 age range.  I find this ridiculous, because not even I have my own cell phone, nor will I be receiving one in the near future.   In today's society, a phone is like a miniature computer that you can take anywhere with you.  Phones were originally used for making phone calls and giving parents feel a sense of security knowing they can contact their kids whenever and wherever.  However phones can also be a whole set of challenges to a parent.  It is an Internet-enabled device with few parental controls, which could be one challenge.  It might also give a child access to inappropriate apps, the less-than-wholesome intentions of other people, from bullying to worse.   As a child's age increases, there comes many other challenges such as sexting or texting while driving. Personally, I feel the only time one can be ready for a phone, is when they prove that they are mature enough to handle such responsibility.  But that's just my side of the story.

 IPhone 5 is a the new phone that everybody wants. However is it actually everything we expected? Many IPhone 5 users are talking about how they have been noticing their phones flickering. The first reports were as soon as the device was launched. The main thread for the issue is over 12 pages long with reports of flickering screens. When people began investigating they realized that this issues seems to most frequently occur when a user accesses the virtual keyboard in the App Store. Because the users don't see flickering each time they use it , it only affects the virtual keyboard which means it is a software issue. My personal opinion on this topic is that if Apple doesn't want to lose the rank they have they need to fix this!  

As you all probably know, the new Apple maps available on iOS 6 is failing to live up to many expectations and requirements. Since coming out, it has had a lot of criticism and many apple customers were disappointed. There has even been a public apology from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who promised that Apple were hard  at work improving Apple Maps. In my opinion, it is embarrassing when such a prestigious company such as Apple develops something that receives this much criticism. I also think that this can hurt Apple's reputation, and even cause users to switch over to rival companies such as Samsung for phones. The big question, however, is whether or not Apple can match or even improve on the previously incorporated with Apple products, "Google Maps." Some say this is unlikely, as Google has much more experience in make map apps, and as Apple still has a long way to go until they can improve Apple Maps to a level where it could be considered decent.

A 16 year old teenage girl attracts the attention of her followers after her tweet claiming that there was someone in her house. The girl was supposedly kidnapped by the stranger in the house when she disappeared; however, after the investigation, the police confirmed that she left voluntarily. Within two days of searching for the lost teen, the police found her walking at the side of a highway. The police finalized that the teen faked her kidnapping.  After the teenage girl tweeted that there was someone in her house, more than 30,000 people retweeted and the local police department received over 6,000 calls about her frightening situation. This event shows how fast news travels through social networking sites and how messy the issue could become if what you post is untrue. The teen that was once known as the young lady who was kidnapped by an intruder, is now someone who has made poor choices and worried many people for reasons unknown.  

This article talks about our famous #firstworld problems jokes on Twitter and other Social Networking sites. They may seem funny to you, but DDB New York sees them as creating an online atmosphere of neither sensitivity nor awareness to deal with real social and worldwide problems. So DDB decided to team up with the non-profit organization called WATERisLIFE. Together they traveled to Haiti to film locals reading aloud a series of these "problems" to show how ridiculous they are in comparison to real problems that people face in third-world countries like Haiti. In addition to the video they tweeted some of the original authors of the #firstworld problems saying things like "I'm sorry you were awoken by your cleaning lady. I hope today is better" as well as a call to action to donate money to WATERisLIFE which helps create water solutions and rebuilding communities.  This article relates to eLifestyle and how those posts may be funny to us they can also be insensitive to real problems world-wide even though we don't always intend to be hurtful. This also relates because it shows how the internet can be such a positive or negative thing worldwide. In this case out of an insensitive tweet people were inspired to create awareness for bigger issues and a way to help through a video and a few tweets online.  I think this shows a positive side of the internet where people can take something and turn it into a way of helping people world-wide and getting word out faster and to more people all with the power of the internet.

Social media has exploded over the years and become a huge part of all of our lives. From facebook to twitter, from instagram to tumblr, everywhere we look there's some kind of social media being thrust in front of us. It has appeared so often that we have grown used to it. It's not unusual when someone stops to update their twitter or upload a picture of their lunch to instagram. There's that sense of excitement when your phone buzzes to tell you that you've been retweeted or your post has been liked. Social media has become part of our lifestyle and it's a great benefit to have. It allows you to keep in contact with relatives and friends and stay updated on the lives of those around you, but have we started to become too reliant on this advantage. This article had provided a look at various social media addicts, like 'the liker' and 'the constant checker' and despite the humorous aspect to it, you can still see a slightly more serious question behind it. This article brings to light an issue that we all knew existed, but never really paid much attention to. It had referred to the different types of reliance's on social media as addictions. It's a strong word to describe what most might usually think of as just small habits or pastimes, but maybe addiction is the right word to use. This post not only highlights the different types of social media addicts, but it also tells us the 'symptoms' and downfalls that can come out of each one and it raises some fair points. It draws attention to the fact that the addiction to social media can not only annoy those around us, but also hurt yourself and waste your valuable time. I mean, it becomes very hard to concentrate on the work at hand as soon as your phone or computer buzzes to tell you that someone has mentioned you in their tweet. Social media makes procrastinating so much easier, not that we wouldn't find our ways to without it. This article is just proof that the world around usis growing, especially the cyber world

This article touches on a very important topic about whether technology is helping the economy and job markets more or if it is in fact hurting it. The answer is they do both. The New York Times among others write that tech companies have created relatively few jobs compared to industries such as GM. However TechCrunch argues that technology has created a lot more indirect jobs due to technology. There are in fact new jobs created such as social media marketers online. Most of these jobs are part-time because they are online and connect employers and workers with no hassle. Their conclusion is that there are millions of jobs created with a high demand but an unprepared workforce. The jobs that are needed now are more technology based than ever before and our economy is moving so fast in that direction that some skills that were needed in the past are no longer needed now. Therefore people are losing jobs not because there are not enough jobs produced but because our job market is drastically changing.  Some companies are allowing people to step into job positions with just a bit of online training or courses. Startups like General assembly are creating programs that are accessible to everyone and helps address the needs of the labor market. The final verdict is we need better training tools to quickly acquire high demanded skills and help workers adapt to the change that technology brings to the labour market. This article relates to economics and eLifestyle mostly because it has to do with how our economy is growing from the jobs created by technology but also how our workers have to respond to this change. This article deals with the changes that the labour market is going through now and how the increase in technology is now changing our lives. Some of our old jobs are being replaced by new jobs that not enough people are qualified for, so certain careers are feeling a job decline making it seem like technology is replacing workers. But in fact these new tools a

We all know that voice recognition software exists having been created by companies like Apple, some of us thought that advanced technology would end at a computer recognizing words and responding to questions. However that is not the case. A company called Kimera Systems is developing a system that figuratively reads your mind. This isn't a software that literally reads what you are thinking and performs an action based on your thought since that would require an implant into your body. Rather, Kimera's system consisting of the Salience Engine and DigitalMe (or DMe) Smart Agents. The Salience Engine collects information from its users and uses this to understand human action better while the Smart Agents perform actions based on the user's preferences and the user's previous actions. For example, if a user sent out party invitations to friends and then went out to buy groceries, Kimera's system would automatically download a shopping app for the user because the system understands the user is going to the grocery store to buy select food items. This system, should it be implemented into future phones and devices could very well change society for the better and for worse. This system could make people's lives better by allowing decisions to be made by the system for the user so they can worry about other things while knowing Kimera's system will take care of tasks for them. This could negatively impact society though because since the system automatically makes decisions for the user, if they begin to rely on this system and lose their sense of judgement rendering them unable to decide without this system. Though automated technology is the dream of many, is an automated life really what we want? From this new technology Kimera is creating, other more advanced automated technologies could arise and eventually we could end up losing our humanity since everything we need to do is done for us by a computer. We would end up like the humans in the movie Wall-E who were