Social Media

In a Disaster Area? Facebook Safety Check Tells Friends and Family You’re Okay

October 16, 2014 By Julie Morse 1 Comment

Facebook adds new Safety Check feature to let people know you're okay in a disaster area

Fortunate enough to escape the tornado or hurricane that just hit your town? Facebook has just released Safety Check, a new feature that lets concerned people know you’re okay.

Back in 2011, after the Japanese tsunami killed 15,884 people, Facebook’s message board was an incredibly useful tool for people to locate displaced family and friends. Safety Check was created as a supplementary feature to it’s Disaster Message Board. You might be thinking, why not just send a message to a few friends telling them you’re fine? Or give them a call? The problem is if you’re in a disaster or an emergency area, lines could be down and you might not be able to make calls. Or if you’re in a sheltered sanctuary with lots of other people, your 4G could be lagging. Safety Check’s quick click makes it incredibly easy to let everyone know immediately that you’re safe and unharmed.

Facebook can detect your location and is aware of your proximity to a natural disaster. Upon unlocking your phone, Facebook will ask you “Are you okay? Looks like you’re in the area affected by [specific natural disaster] let friends know if you’re safe.” You’re then prompted to click “I’m safe” or “I’m not in the area”. In turn, Facebook will specifically notify all friends that you are “marked safe.” You can also view which of your friends in the area have marked themselves safe or affected. You can even comment on friends’ safety statuses.

Social media can be most critical form of dialogue during disasters or times of emergency. Zuckerberg sees Safety Check as an integral auxiliary to ensuring communication in the midst of danger. In a Facebook post he laid out his reasoning for the new feature writing, “Over the last few years there have been many disasters and crises where people have turned to the Internet for help. Each time, we see people use Facebook to check on their loved ones and see if they’re safe. Connecting with people is always valuable, but these are the moments when it matters most. Safety Check is our way of helping our community during natural disasters and gives you an easy and simple way to say you’re safe and check on all your friends and family in one place.”

Safety Check will no doubt be incredibly useful to get word out that all is fine in the initial panic and confusion which follows any natural disaster, but it’ll never replace the relief that comes with hearing a voice on the other end of the phone to confirm safety to close friends and family.

Facebook’s New Advertising Feature Knows Exactly Where You’ve Been

October 8, 2014 By Julie Morse 2 Comments

Facebook introduces local awareness ads for local businesses

Is Facebook getting creepier or cooler? On Tuesday the social media site released “Local Awareness Ads,” a new feature that advertises local businesses to users depending if they’ve been physically near that specific venue. The ad may show up on your news feed right as you’re walking by or several hours later. This, after they have been testing buy buttons for small businesses as well.

Facebook’s constantly morphing algorithms make it difficult for businesses to know what kind of pages and products they should be promoting. In recent months, many businesses have noticed that their advertising efforts on Facebook have been futile. Eat24, a food delivery service, cancelled their marketing account with Facebook, and penned an open “breakup” letter to them saying, “We give you text posts, delicious food photos, coupons, restaurant recommendations… and what do you do in return? You take them and you hide them from all our friends.” It’s not just Eat24 that’s been complaining, from mom-and-pop stores to mega online clothing stores, many businesses have been frustrated with the little bang they’re getting for their buck in Facebook marketing fees.

The Local Awareness Ads are meant to help small businesses that have been struggling to get the exposure they’ve wanted on Facebook. Promotions are generated purely through GPS services. Businesses give Facebook their physical address and precise geographic radius of where they want to advertise. Subsequently, Facebook targets individuals who are near or are within that radius. Establishments can then adjust their target audience by specifying demographics such as age and gender.

Sometimes it takes us months or years to notice certain shops and restaurants that are in our own neighborhood. Local Awareness Ads are meant to rectify this issue. Facebook isn’t the first company to implement GPS-relevant ads. One of Google AdWords’ main strategies is to target web surfers who are in the physical vicinity of advertisers.

The catch is most people aren’t even aware that they have released information on their physical whereabouts to Facebook. Facebook likely extrapolates data from its GPS tools such as “Nearby Friends” to determine the exact geographic points of its users. For those who find Facebook tracking where they are a bit creepy, with a little digital elbow grease you can modify and delete the data in your location history under the settings feature. Mobile platforms such as iOS, Android, and Windows also enable users to adjust their GPS privacy settings so it will be more difficult for Facebook to track your exact location.

(Photo courtesy of Bhupinder Nayyar)

Facebook Wants You to Trust Them with Your Healthcare

October 4, 2014 By Kendra Smith 1 Comment

Facebook wants to be your destination for healthcare information

While it may seem that Facebook has already infiltrated every aspect of our lives, there is one area which has conspicuously been missing, but that may not be the case much longer. Facebook is taking steps to dive into the controversial world of healthcare as reported by multiple anonymous sources from Reuters. As there is a continuous rise in online support groups and websites, Facebook is taking a similar approach as Apple and Google, and they’ll attempt to create online communities for those afflicted with diseases.

Looking at some of the policies that Facebook has changed over the years, specifically the recent decision that users no longer have to use their real name on site, shows the site has taken steps to provide extra anonymity for those afflicted with health problems they may want to share with others without expressly identifying themselvs. Many in the healthcare industry feel this anonymity would be necessary to make many of those looking for their support on the app more comfortable.

Despite these changes, there are still a lot of hurdles facing Facebook. The company as a whole has received continued criticism in recent years for widening its scope on privacy policies. In an effort to gain users’ trust, they hinted that their healthcare app may be launched with different branding, as in the case of Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, to quelch its composition.

When dealing with a company that is generally directed toward its own agenda, it has demonstrated that agenda rarely includes its users or the public at large. One can see where this would make any user uneasy. It causes deep concern that users’ personal health information will be shared with pharmaceutical companies among others for the purposes of direct advertising, as well as on their personal profiles. Neither of these are things that most of those afflicted with health issues would appreciate.

“Any advertising built around the health initiatives would not be as targeted as it could be on television or other media. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are prohibited from using Facebook to promote the sale of prescription drugs, in part because of concerns surrounding disclosures,” noted Christina Farr and Alexai Oreskovic in their Reuters article.

The social media giant claims they have wanted to go into healthcare for many years, but the idea has been tabled for other, more pressing or current ideas. It made its first move in that direction when they acquired the the fitness app Moves. Not surprisingly, the app changed its privacy policies in line with those of Facebook shortly thereafter.

Since this is still in the development phase, it remains to be seen if Facebook healthcare is actually launched. One thing users can count on, if you see a new healthcare app surface, make sure you know which company it’s related to. And don’t forget to read every line of its privacy policies.

(Photo courtesy of Poster Boy)

TwitPic to Close Over Twitter Trademark Dispute

September 6, 2014 By Jeffrey Strain 5 Comments

TwitPic to close over trademark dispute with Twitter

TwitPic, once the dominant photo sharing resource for Twitter, is closing its doors on September 25, 2014, due to troubles with their trademark and Twitter. The announcement came on their blog and indicated they would put in place a system where users could download and save all the photos and videos they had uploaded to the service.

TwitPic founder Noah Everett says the closing is due demands from Twitter to cease its trademark application with a threat of losing access to Twitter’s API if they failed to do so. The Twitter API is the code which allows those using TwitPic to access their Twitter account to share the pictures and videos. If the API access were to be taken away, TwitPic wouldn’t be able to function.

Although Everett believes that TwitPic is in the right on the trademark dispute, the company simply doesn’t have the money to fight the issue through the court system. As he stated, “Unfortunately we do not have the resources to fend off a large company like Twitter to maintain our mark which we believe whole heartedly is rightfully ours. Therefore, we have decided to shut down TwitPic.”

TwitPic was one of the first sites which allowed users to share photos over Twitter, something which was in high demand over the social network in the early days. As Twitter grew, it added features including the ability to share photos within the main website. This move made TwitPic much less relevant and made it difficult for them to gain new users, but they still had a large number of users who remained.

Twitter, on its end, says they had no desire to put TwitPic out of business, only to protect their trademark. They indicated they were more than willing to let the service continue and keep their name as it had done so for many years without the trademark. As a spokesperson for Twitter said, “We’re sad to see TwitPic is shutting down. We encourage developers to build on top of the Twitter service, as TwitPic has done for years, and we made it clear that they could operate using the TwitPic name. Of course, we also have to protect our brand, and that includes trademarks tied to the brand.”

For those TwitPic users who don’t want to lose their photos and videos, they will need to download them back to their computer before the site closes for good on September 25.

(Photo courtesy of Rosaura Ochoa)