Facebook is allowing status messages upto 63,206 characters now!

The social network giant Facebook With roughly 800 million users has raised its character limits on status updates to a rather precise 63,206 characters. 
On 1^st December, Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook Journalist Program Manager has announced that Facebook users can now post Facebook status updates that are more than 60,000 characters in length.

Lavrusik wrote, “For a reference, a novel has roughly 500,000 characters. This could be shared in 9 posts,”  

Facebook has been constantly increasing the character limits for status updates. In the beginning, the social networking site allowed 160 characters and in 2009, this character limit was extended to 420 spaces. 500 characters in July 2011, and 5,000 in September 2011.
 While People can literally blog on Google Plus without worrying about the length of the post content! As it limits its posts to 100,000 characters. At the other end is Twitter, where the maximum limit is 140.

Is it a good idea to post 60000 characters long updates and annoy your friends?

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Cloud TV now in India – Thanks to Star TV

Star TV has decided to upgrade Television entertainment experience in India by uploading its contents on the cloud. As all the leading companies are doing what they can to move its data on cloud, the Star India is not behind the race. Star India is all set to offer Cloud TV to its Indian viewers, being the first player in India to shift all its operations to the cloud.

As Star is going to move itself on cloud, it has decided to shoot all its contents in HD and upload it on cloud after processing. This will fairly allow to stream its programmes on devices with an Internet connection and an Internet browser. Not to mention explicitly that these contents will be in HD. The contents such as movies, serials, shows will remain the same while the new entertainments like game, social networks are expected to enhance user’s digital experience.

As the new technologies always overrode the old ones, the cloud TV is expected to downtrend current TV technologies like cable TV or satellite in course of its time.
Star India owns popular channels like : Star Plus, Star One, Star World, Star News, Star Movies, Star Gold, Channel V and Star Pravah. And Star India joins the ranks of Apple, Google, Hulu, Netflix and Amazon to become the content provider on the cloud.

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Anna Hazare and the social networks

Anna Hazare the social activist, is the superpower of India's fight against corruption. He has challenged the government at the highest level for the implementation of the Jan Lokpal Bill, the anti-corruption bill drafted by his team of reformists. The common man and well-known personalities likewise, are supporting him in the hundreds swelling to the thousands and now to the millions. And of course every sincere citizen of India will support Anna on their own ways.

The social media is playing big role in motivating young people and social networking addicts towards the fight against corruption. Practically speaking, More than 150 Facebook pages related to 'Anna Hazare' and 'India Against Corruption' have emerged in the last few months. And amazingly majority of these pages are not owned by any of the Anna Hazare's official team members.

The official 'India Against Corruption' page (facebook.com/IndiACor) has more than 360000 fans and its ticking every now and then.

Analysis of the official fan page has below stats.
India Against Corruption page analytics
  Page Name   → India Against Corruption
  URL of Page → India Against Corruption
  Number of fans → 363,140
  Today's fans → 21,238
  Today's interactions → 9,838
  Today's unique interactions → 8,453
( Source: buzzref.com on 18-08-2011)

The non official pages are not behind in numbers. For instance, one of the page titled, 'Join Anna Hazare's Fast To Bring the Jan Lokpal Bill' (Facebook.com/joinanna), created by a Facebook user, is followed/liked by more than 44,000 users.


The similar momentum can be seen on Twitter too. Thousands of tweets have mentioned Anna Hazare and the fight against corruption. The hashtag #isupportannahazare  is mentioned in over 15,000 tweets (As per topsy.com on  18-08-2011).

The influential power of official Twitter account/handle of the movement (Twitter.com/Janlokpal) has notably jumped by six points in the past two days. The Klout score of @janlokpal went up from 68 on August 15 to 75.6 on August 18. For the uninitiated, Klout.com determines the influential power of a Twitter handle.

The numbers keeps ticking......

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Generic top-level domains - now its "www.abc.anything"

Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)

Are you one of those people who are desperate to have their domain name with .com/.net/.org/.biz suffix and pressed down by someone who has already registered the same? Do not worry now. The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has approved to bring the remarkable change to the Internet's Domain Name System, which will allow new "dot.anything" web variations ranging from .movies to .clips and .computers to .calculators - at a price of $185,000.

ICANN, the international organization that issues domain names has took this step to witness the upcoming rush in domain name registration process. The new system is called generic top-level domains (gTLDs). This move by ICANN increases the number of domains drastically from 22 ( current available suffixes) to a big number. The new system would allow companies and organizations to apply for their own suffixes, which could be anything from a brand like .coke to something more broad like .cars. Or even one can think about the name of the city too. Names will also be allowed in native scripts such as Hindi or Chinese.

Rod Beckstrom, The President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN said, "ICANN has opened the Internet's naming system to unleash the global human imagination. Today's decision respects the rights of groups to create new Top Level Domains in any language or script"

The gTLDs may drag companies in confusion to choose the best possible choice. The new system would encourage companies and businesses to customize their website. Reuters reports that the Japanese company Canon already has its plans to use .canon. Soon we will be searching .apple , .fedora , .man.

ICANN will take applications starting January 12, 2012 through April 12, 2012 to operate these domain names. The registration would cost you $185,000 ,plus an additional $25,000 annually to operate the registry.

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Facebook and Psychology - Everything matters

Next time you feel like broadcasting some gloomy tale of woe on Facebook, you might want to think twice. Your friends could catch your feelings.

Psychologists have long known that emotions, just like germs, are contagious. People exposed to a person experiencing strong emotions may experience similar feelings, catching them through facial expressions, tones of voice or some other means. But now there is a new means of transmission -- social media.

Facebook data scientist Adam D.I. Kramer analyzed postings by about 1 million English speakers and their roughly 150 million friends in multiple countries on the social network to show that the words people use in their status updates drive the emotions of their online friends, even days later. Kramer found people who used emotionally loaded words like "happy," "hug," "sick," and "vile" in their status updates sparked similar emotions in later Facebook postings by their friends.

"Up to three days later, for people who use more negative words, their friends will also use more negative words," Kramer said. "If people are using more positive words, not only are their friends using more positive words, their friends also will use fewer negative words."

Kramer's analysis is not just an academic study of the vast amounts of data that underlie Facebook's social web. His work is related to Facebook's fast-growing social products and the advertising that powers them.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg studied psychology at Harvard and often talks about the psychological underpinnings of Facebook's business model, saying, for example, its photo-sharing service became tops on the Internet not because of software wizardry, but because Facebook filled a basic human need by allowing people to "tag" photos of their friends and share them. To build on that, Facebook has assembled a data science team that mines the vast amount of information contained in the relationships and profiles of the social network's more than 600 million users.

Kramer's study on emotional "contagion," which he presented at the 2011 annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, is an example of how people's online social interactions are increasingly important sources and tools for social research.

Other companies are pouring through data, too. Yahoo (YHOO), for example, has been using social sites like Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace that matches freelance jobs with people looking for work, to study questions such as whether better paid people produce better quality work.

Facebook now tracks the emotional states not just of people, but of nations. Kramer also developed Facebook's "Gross National Happiness" index, based on a computer analysis of emotion-laden words used by more than 400 million Facebook users since 2007. The ongoing fluctuations in that multinational index, following events like the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, hint at the social bonds between societies.

"During the earthquake in Japan, many Asian countries showed a dip in their overall happiness," Kramer said, "whereas many Western countries were unaffected -- except for Chile, which just had a catastrophic earthquake" last year.

Kramer, 30, stands out as brainy even by Facebook standards. After growing up in a small town in western Massachusetts, he studied computer science as an undergrad and graduate student before getting a doctorate in social and personality psychology. His thesis was on "decisional procrastination," or why it can sometimes be good to put off decisions.

Psychologists still don't know, Kramer said, whether a person who feels sad upon hearing their friend Joe say his dog has died feels sad for Joe, sad for the dog, or is just mirroring Joe's feelings. But Kramer said emotion transmitted through status updates could not be mirroring, because that requires one-to-one communication.

The study found that for every negative word such as "sick," "petty" or "lame" Facebook members used in a status update, their friends used 28 percent more negative words on the following day than would be expected, based on their pattern of speech at other times.

One key finding, Kramer said, is that emotional states are not mutually exclusive opposites.

"You're not either sad, or you're happy," he said, of the mixed emotions people feel at any moment. "There are bittersweet emotions."
 
Facebook data scientists used an anonymous computer program to scan the status updates of about 1 million English speakers, searching for positive words including "thanks," "wonderful," "cute" and "sunshine"; and negative words including "angry," "worst" and "sucks." They then scanned the status updates of those people's roughly 150 million friends, to see whether the emotions were echoed by others, and discovered a pattern where negative and positive feelings were transmitted to friends for the following three days. Facebook's Gross National Happiness index is at apps.facebook.com/gnh_index.

Tag this blog if you like it. 

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