NOTHING PERSONAL



The Godfather...



It is just business

by Alex Hutchins

Facebook Inc. is buying Threadsy Inc., an online communications software provider that also operates Swaylo.com, a website that tracks a person’s influence within a social network.

Facebook, which announced in April it would buy photo- sharing provider Instragram, has been buying smaller companies that provide social network and information-sharing tools.

The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, was announced Friday by Threadsy’s Chief Executive Officer Rob Goldman via a blog on Swaylo’s website.  Ashley Zandy, a spokeswoman for Facebook, confirmed the deal.       

Meaningful exchanges constantly take place all over the social web on a variety of platforms, connecting people and enabling them to share, critique, and interact with content and with each other. People tend to talk about the things they care about/are most knowledgeable about with others who are interested in similar subjects.

Social influence occurs when a person’s thoughts, feelings, or actions are affected by others. Essentially, influence is the art of persuasion — the ability to cause a change in mindset or actions so someone thinks or behaves in a certain way.

In the world of social media marketing, influence is currency!

According to Yahoo Research, “…social ties between users play an important role in dictating their behavior. One of the ways this can happen is through social inuence, the phenomenon that the actions of a user can induce his/her friends to behave in a similar way. Online social networks are playing an ever-important role in shaping the behavior of users on the web.  The availability of such rich data at never-before seen scales makes it possible to analyze user actions at an individual level in order to understand user behavior at large…”

On the surface, social networks appear to be beneficial, however, The Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California is exploring ways to use social networks to control substance use (and of course abuse).

“Studies of human behavior have, by and large, focused on how individual attributes correlate and sometimes cause certain outcomes.  Social network analysis is a set of theories, methods, and techniques used to understand social relationships and how these relationships might influence individual and group behavior.”

Influencing individual and group behavior is one thing, but trying to control it is another.  Controlling American behavior by Americans is one thing, but having it being controlled by foreign country is scary.

Facespook...

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR)  has ordered three systems worth about US$1 million that will automatically spread information on the Internet.

The systems were ordered in a three separate tenders and the official client’s name is Military Unit 54939, but Kommersant Daily newspaper, which broke the news, writes that according to its sources this military unit belongs to the Foreign Intelligence Service’s structure.

The first system is called Dispute and is responsible for overall monitoring of the blogosphere and social networks in order to single out the centers where the information is created and the ways by which it is spread among the virtual society. It also looks at factors that affect the popularity of various reports among internet users.

The second system, Monitor-3, will develop the methods of organization and management of a “virtual community of attracted experts” – setting of tasks, control over work and regular reports on chosen issues.

The third, and probably most important, of the systems is Storm-12 – its task is to automatically spread the necessary information through the blogosphere, as well as “information support of operations with pre-prepared scenarios of influence on mass audience in social networks.”

The first two systems are to be ready by the end of 2012 and the third by 2013.

According to Kommersant, all three tenders were won by the company Iteranet, headed by a former deputy head of the Russian Cryptography Institute, Igor Matskevich, who previously worked on top secret state orders.

Holy Cryptography Batman,”

exclaimed Robin!

 “What does this mean?”