Facebook Revamps Ads to Compete With Google - NYTimes.com

Facebook Revamps Ads to Compete With Google - NYTimes.com

Last June, Facebook released a tracking pixel, a snippet of code that allows advertisers to track customers who come to their websites from Facebook ads. For Amy Norman, co-chief executive officer of Little Passports, the pixel was a game-changer.

Ms. Norman, whose San Francisco company sends children a monthly package to introduce them to geography and history, began testing ads on Facebook to see which ones brought in more customers. In June, Little Passports spent about $30,000 on Facebook ads and the company’s revenue for the month was about $130,000. By the end of the year, the company’s monthly advertising spending on Facebook had grown to as much as $150,000 and its revenue for December was $700,000.

Social Media in Indian Politics - NYTimes.com

Social Media in Indian Politics - NYTimes.com

Social media are playing an important new role in Indian democracy. A social media campaign by the Electoral Commission drew record levels of voter registration and turnout in elections held in four Indian states, including the capital, New Delhi, in November and December.

Of 790 million eligible Indian voters, about 160 million are first-time voters between the ages of 18 and 24 years old. Political parties are also embracing social media to reach voters, including cellphone messaging. Social media are credited with helping the new Common Man party and its candidate, Arvind Kejriwal, win a surprise victory in Delhi against the Congress and Bharatiya Janata parties.

World of Spycraft - NYTimes.com

"Today we learned that the N.S.A. and its British soul mate, Government Communications Headquarters, have been infiltrating online video games, hunting for secret bands of terrorists posing as Worgen and warlocks in World of Warcraft, snipers and sappers in Xbox games, or supermodels in Second Life. The forces of evil, the N.S.A. reasoned in the latest document from the Edward Snowden cache, could be using those games for clandestine meetings and recruitment, or even money transfers."

More at, http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/world-of-spycraft/?emc=edit_tnt_20131210&tntemail0=y

Retailers Seek Partners in Social Networks - NYTimes.com

Retailers Seek Partners in Social Networks - NYTimes.com

Lions go digital: The Internet’s transformative potential in Africa | McKinsey & Company

Lions go digital: The Internet’s transformative potential in Africa | McKinsey & Company

The report projects implications of the Internet’s transformative potential to Africa’s financial services, education, health, e-commerce, agriculture, and government sectors.

Africa’s digital development is accelerating. A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute says the Internet could account for $300 billion of GDP by 2025.

Researchers Draw Romantic Insights From Maps of Facebook Networks - NYTimes.com

Researchers Draw Romantic Insights From Maps of Facebook Networks - NYTimes.com

So says a new research paper written by Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University, and Lars Backstrom, a senior engineer at Facebook. The paper, posted online on Sunday, will be presented at a conference on social computing in February.

The pair used a hefty data set from Facebook as their lab: 1.3 million Facebook users, selected randomly from among all users who are at least 20 years old, with from 50 to 2,000 friends, who list a spouse or relationship partner in their profile. That makes for a lot of social connections to analyze, roughly 379 million nodes and 8.6 billion links. The data was used anonymously.


Their key finding was that the total number of mutual friends two people share — embeddedness, in social networking terms — is actually a fairly weak indicator of romantic relationships. Far better, they found, was a network measure that they call dispersion.


“A spouse or romantic partner is a bridge between a person’s different social worlds,” Mr. Kleinberg explained in an interview on Sunday.

Girls Tweeting (Not Twerking) Their Way to Power - NYTimes.com

Girls Tweeting (Not Twerking) Their Way to Power - NYTimes.com

A variety of organizations now support girls and women in creating online campaigns to counter widespread problems like sexual violence.