Facebook blames a bug for the disappearance of posts about same-sex marriage

Some recent cases of news articles about same-sex marriage disappearing from the newspaper page on Facebook appear to have been caused by a bug and not a policy violation, the social network said.

Several regional daily newspapers, such as The Mercury serving Pottstown, Pennsylvania, started seeing in late July that stories covering developments on the issue of same-sex marriage were mysteriously disappearing from their pages on Facebook. A post Friday at the website for the Poynter Institute, a journalism education and training center, called attention to the issue.

"In all likelihood this was a bug and not a policy violation," a Facebook spokeswoman said Friday, referring specifically to The Mercury's issues. If it had been a policy violation, the page administrators would have received a notification of the article removals, which they did not, Facebook said.

The circumstances surrounding some of the posts' disappearances are a bit odd. At The Mercury, for instance, online editor Eileen Faust noticed the trend when a local county began issuing licenses to same-sex couples on July 24. Roughly five to six articles disappeared from Facebook after they were posted, she said, but no stories covering other topics disappeared in a similar way.

The articles that disappeared covered news dng with both support and opposition to same-sex marriage, she said.

The paper has not experienced any major issues with articles disappearing since then, but that may only be because The Mercury has not been posting as many articles on same-sex marriage, Faust said.

"We're going to keep an eye on this," she added in an interview.

The Mercury's posts on same-sex marriage have since been restored to the paper's page on Facebook, the social network said.

Other regional newspaper companies, such as 21st Century Media papers in the Philadelphia region and papers owned by the Los Angeles News Group, have also noticed that their stories on same-sex marriage have disappeared from their Facebook pages, The Mercury reported in its coverage of the issue.

21st Century Media and the Los Angeles News Group could not be immediately reached to comment.

Though The Mercury paper's issues were probably caused by a bug or some kind of glitch, Facebook said, the issue did arise just before the company announced an aggressive new strategy to better detect controversial content on its site that may be violent, graphic or sexual in nature.

Facebook has a complicated way for classifying what is offensive content and what is not. In terms of graphic content, "We understand that graphic imagery is a regular component of current events, but must balance the needs of a diverse community," the site says in its community standards.

The Mercury's Faust said she would like to have a more direct contact at Facebook to communicate with when issues occur. "We can't easily connect or get a response from them," she said.

http://www.freeprwebdirectory.com/business_and_economy/law/

Facebook embedded posts good for business

Facebook announced a new program this week that lets websites post public Facebook posts to their sites. And that could be a boon for businesses, says industry analysts.

“This could be very attractive to Facebook’s business users,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “With this, they might be able to capture positive customer comments and append them to their webpages or other marketing material. Since the post retains the Facebook formatting, I think it conveys a greater sense that the statement is genuine and unsolicited.”

On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it was launching the embedded posts program.

The embedded post will show any pictures or video attached to it, as well as the number of likes, shares, and comments that the post has, according to the social network. Only public posts from Facebook Pages and profiles can be embedded.

“Embedding posts will let people using your website see the same rich information that is shown on Facebook.com, and they will enable people to follow or like content authors or Pages directly from the embed,” the company noted in a blog post.

At this point, the program is only available to what Facebook calls a “handful” of news publishers. A broader rollout is being planned.

This embedded program will help Facebook reach beyond its own site and get even more eyeballs on Facebook content, noted Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy.

But this isn’t just good for Facebook. It’s also good for enterprises that want to show off what users are saying about them on the world’s biggest social network.

“This could improve the Web experience for these sites by enabling real-time content and interactions with their customers,” said Moorhead. “This increases stickiness [on their websites] and increases the chances users won’t bail out.”

Any business, like Ford Motor Company or JetBlue Airways or even a small mom-and-pop shop, eventually will be able to sift through Facebook to find complimentary posts from consumers, and then use the posts on their websites and in their online sales and marketing materials.

As usual though, this could be a double-edge sword.

Olds noted that while one company could be embedding positive posts about itself, its competitor could be embedding negative posts about it on its own site.

However, Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research, said there are far more upsides to this for businesses.

“If I’m JetBlue and I had a user rave about a JetBlue flight, I could grab the post and put it on my site,” he said. “It gives the same look and feel of Facebook. It’s familiar to people.” “It’s like having a bunch of mini Facebooks all over the place,” Kerravala said.

Samsung posts record profit, but mobile slips despite Galaxy S4 launch

Samsung Electronics said sales and profits soared in the second quarter from a year ago, but increasing competition in smartphones hurt performance in its core mobile division.

The company said it booked a net profit of 7.77 trillion won (US$6.89 billion) during the April-June period, up 50 percent from a year earlier. Sales were up 21 percent to 57.5 trillion won.

The strong showings were marked by strong quarterly gains in every division except its core mobile business. Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S4 in April with a massive global marketing campaign, after introducing it at an event in New York City's Radio City Music Hall. The company said increased marketing costs and competition hurt its profitability during the period, pulling operating profit down 3 percent even as its sales increased.

Executives hinted in an earnings conference call that new high-end phones are on the way, noting that the product cycle of smartphones is now about a year and its component business expected a boost from new advanced handsets in the second half of the year. Jeeho Baek, an executive in Samsung's semiconductor business, said he expected more demand due to the company's "planned launch of a flagship smartphone model."

The company said that the recent explosive growth of smartphones is due to cool off in the near future.

"Although we expect the smartphone market to sustain growth in the third quarter, it is possible the pace of growth may slow down slightly," said Hyunjoon Kim, an executive in Samsung's mobile division.

Samsung is a dominant manufacturer of display panels, NAND flash memory and other components, but the vast majority of its sales and profit now comes from its mobile division. The company said the Galaxy S4 sold more than 10 million units less than a month after launch, but has been quiet about the phone's performance since. In some markets, such as Japan, the phone has been sharply outsold by rivals.

Samsung's earnings reported Friday were in line with the forecast it made earlier this month. Investors have been disappointed with the company despite the strong showing, and the company's shares are down nearly 15 percent over the last two months. A survey of analysts by Bloomberg taken before the earnings report predicted second-quarter net profit to be about 6 percent higher than reported.

Earlier this week, main rival Apple said profits were down 22 percent during the quarter, but analysts expected the decline as the company did not have a major product launch during the period. Apple CEO Tim Cook said new products will be released later this year.

The company said it booked strong sales in its chip business, and expects demand for DRAMs used in graphics to spike over the second half of the year due to demand from new gaming consoles. Both Microsoft and Sony are gearing up to release new game versions of their consoles.

Guest blog posts drawing scrutiny from Google

When it comes to blogging, the conventional wisdom says that you should get your name and material out there as liberally as possible. Any place you can stuff a backlink to your business’s website is great, particularly if it’s on a noteworthy or popular site. Guest posts have long been thought to be a great way to do that: You get to reach a broader audience and link back to your own website, improving your search engine rankings while sharing your expertise. Meanwhile, the website owner gets free content. It’s win-win.
But that conventional wisdom is changing, as many are questioning whether guest blogging may actually lead to penalties rather than better placement in search results.

For the website owner who’s hosting the guest posts, the problem is relatively easy to see. Because you have limited control over the content of the guest post, you’re taking a leap of faith that you’re going to get quality work. Any links embedded in that post are also potentially troublesome. A guest blogger (who is rarely someone you actually know) may embed what looks like an innocuous link in the post, only to redirect it later to a less than savory site. And if your website links to a spam site—whether you or a guest writer does the linking—you can be subject to Google penalties and see your search ranking plummet.

But what about the writer of the guest blog post? Well, there’s trouble emerging there, too. Posting your good work, name, and link on a questionable site can subject you to the exact same penalties as described above. And once Google starts to associate you with the gray areas of the Web, it can be hard to break that association. In fact, today, Google’s own advice is that if you do write a guest post for another site, you should include “nofollow” tags on your own backlinks in order to avoid penalties.

But wait, isn’t building followable backlinks the whole idea of guest posting? It sure is, and that’s why many are wondering if guest posting is a dying idea. If the guest post is well-written and relevant, and if the site it’s posted to is high-quality and authoritative, then there’s no problem. The trouble is that almost never happens. Either the guest post is low-grade or the site hosting it is. Rarely do both sides of that equation ever add up to anything you’d consider “quality.”

Guest posting can still be done successfully, as long as it’s done sparingly and intelligently. But doing the job right is more important than ever. If you want to host a guest post on your business’s blog—or write one for someone else—follow these key tips.

Guest posts need to be relevant for both sides. If you run an online shoe sales site, you shouldn’t be hosting guest posts about plumbing.Quality is key. If you can’t ensure top-notch quality of a guest post, don’t accept it.Check out who you’re dealing with? Good guest posts will come from those with authority on the subject matter they’re writing about. Check their social networking accounts to ensure that they promote material they write, including guest posts on other people’s websites.Length is still important—300 words is widely considered the “minimum” word count for a webpage to be included in Google’s index.Limit backlinks

Infosys posts strong revenue growth as markets recover

Infosys posted strong revenue growth in the second quarter as demand picked up in key markets including the U.S.

However, the Indian outsourcer’s net profit grew only 0.5 percent year on year as the company increased salaries for staff in India and elsewhere.

Profit was also affected by currency fluctuations, particularly the depreciation of the Australian dollar, and low staff utilization, said Ashok Vemuri, Infosys’ head of Americas, on Friday.

Revenue was close to $2 billion in the quarter, up by 13.6 percent year-on-year. Net profit for the quarter was $418 million.

Infosys has also maintained its earlier forecast for revenue growth of 6 to 10 percent for its fiscal year to March 31, 2014. The forecast does not, however, factor in an immigration bill in the U.S., which if passed in its current form could increase costs for outsourcers and lead to more work getting done offshore, Vemuri said.

The bill would among other things prevent companies with more than 15 percent of their U.S.-based staff on H-1B visas from placing those employees to work on-site for U.S. companies. It was passed by the U.S. Senate, but has encountered difficulties in the House of Representatives.

The strong revenue growth comes after a quarter when Infosys saw its revenue grow 9.4 percent, but profit decline by about 4 percent. Once the darling of investors, Infosys was seeing lackluster growth in revenue and profit compared to Indian competitors such as Tata Consultancy Services. This led Infosys’ co-founder and first CEO N. R. Narayana Murthy to return to the company as executive chairman on June 1.

In the U.S., Infosys benefited during the quarter from a recovery in the economy, and saw its business from the automotive sector grow strongly as car sales picked up, Vemuri said. Growth from financial services in the U.S. is still not as strong, while demand from Europe is still slow, he added.

The outlook is good for the company, as many large outsourcing deals come up for renewal in the industry, Vemuri said. The company’s “Infosys 3.0” strategy, which aims at a greater focus on reusable platforms and products, and high value services like consulting and systems integration, is paying off, he said. “In spite of an environment where discretionary spend continues to be challenged, we continue to grow our consulting and systems integration,” Vemuri added.

Infosys added 575 staff in the quarter, taking the total to 157,263 employees as on June 30. It also added 66 clients in the quarter.

Pogue’s Posts Blog: A Better Google Maps App for Apple and Android Devices

Google Map’s new directory buttons.
Our story so far: Last September, Apple decided to dump the Google Maps app that had been on the iPhone for years. Apple replaced it with its own Maps app — software with so many problems that Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, apologized and even recommended that people use other apps until Apple could fix its own one.

In December — incredibly quickly — Google responded by introducing its own Maps app for iPhone. It’s a spectacular app, among the best apps ever written. It’s fast, beautiful and so good at guessing what you mean when you start typing a destination, it’s almost mind reading. You can read the details here.

Today, that delightful news gets even better. Not only has Google improved Google Maps for iPhone, it’s also brought that same free app to three machines that never had it: the iPad, Android phones and Android tablets. (The Android versions are available for download today; it requires the Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean version of Android — recent versions, in other words. The iOS versions will be available shortly.)

For Androidians, the biggest news is the design of the app itself. It’s modeled on the iPhone app, the one that’s simple and fast and elegant. It’s also uncluttered by the morass of menus that have always plagued the existing Maps app for Android.

But for practitioners of all religions — tablet, phone, iOS, Android — the other news is the new features that today’s new version brings. They include:

* Greater speed. All app versions are faster than before.

* Better place information. Half the time, you don’t even need navigation instructions; you just use Google Maps as the world’s smartest Yellow Pages, to find a nearby restaurant, movie theater, drugstore or whatever.

The details for found places now include a one-line description (“Chinese restaurant famous for dim sum”); a five-star rating system (including a decimal — “4.3,” for example — because, let’s face it, almost everything these days winds up with a four-star rating); the ability to upload your own photos of a place; and a more complete integration of the Zagat guides, which Google bought.

* Greater emphasis on exploration. Google Maps has always excelled at getting you to a known destination. But Google now wants the app to help you choose a restaurant, bar, store, recreation center or hotel, at least in major United States and European cities.

If you tap in the Search box without typing anything, new, photographic buttons appear: Eat, Drink, Shop, Play, Sleep. Each opens lists of corresponding facilities, sorted by criteria like Local Favorites, Popular with Tourists and so on. (Google says that these recommendations are never paid placement.)

* Traffic incidents and auto-rerouting. At last: Google Maps shows more than colored lines indicating current traffic speeds on major roads. Now it also displays tiny icons that represent accidents and construction. Tap one to read the details: “Right lane blocked on 680,” for example. (In case you were wondering, the information on traffic incidents doesn’t come from Waze, the traffic-incident app that Google recently bought. That data has yet to be incorporated into Maps.)

Better yet: Maps now looks ahead for traffic jams on your route, and interrupts your drive with a dialog box that offers to route you around it (if the new path would be quicker, of course). On its own.

* Offline maps. This feature is something of an Easter egg. It’s undocumented, a feature inserted by Google engineers simply because they wanted it. You can access it only if you know the secret. But wow, is it worth it.

This feature memorizes the map data for whatever area is displayed on your screen right now (up to a whole city in size). That way, you can use Google Maps even when you’re overseas and don’t want to turn on data roaming (because that’s insanely expensive), or when you’re in an area where there’s no cell reception. It’s very handy.

To capture a map snapshot like this, tap in the Search box. Use the speech-recognition button and say, “OK Maps.” (It’s a riff on the command “OK Glass” that prepares Google Glass, the company’s “smart headband,” for voice commands.)

A message quietly lets you know you’ve successfully stored the displayed area.

*Nice tablet layouts. On a tablet, Maps really shines. The app smartly reformats itself to take best advantage of whatever screen shape you have: two or three columns of place listings, for example, and luxuriously displayed photos and reviews for each business.

This new, improved Maps app works identically on both major flavors of phone and tablet. You know what? I don’t care how much you distrust Google and its motives. This is crazy good software, some of the best work Google has ever done.

Pogue's Posts: Photoshop’s New Rental Program, and the Outrage Factor

My review of Photoshop CC on Thursday — especially its availability only as a rental, with a monthly or yearly subscription fee — generated a lot of reader feedback. Some of it was astonishing.

Here’s a sampling, with my responses.

Can you rent for a few months, stop for a couple of months, resume as needed, stop as desired? That could have advantages for non-pros.

Yes, you can. That’s the purpose of the month-to-month rental programs ($30 a month for a single program, like Photoshop). Of course, having the software is much less expensive if you agree to rent for an entire year ($240 a year instead of $360).

There is an alternative to Photoshop you didn’t mention: GIMP. It has one big advantage: it is free.

Many readers wondered why I didn’t mention the free GIMP program. It does indeed do most of what Photoshop does. I’ve found it to be even more dense and complex than Photoshop. But since it’s free, everyone who’s unhappy with Adobe’s new rental program for Photoshop should definitely give it a try.

Good article but you fail to mention what happens with plug in programs. Many of us find programs like the Nik series to be much better at doing some adjustments than Photoshop. How does CC handle this?

Exactly the same way. Remember: Photoshop CC is a program that you download to your computer and run from there — exactly like previous Photoshop versions. Nothing changes in the way it works with plug-ins.

Does Adobe actually pay you for mindlessly reprinting their press releases and calling it “news”? An actual journalist would have at least mentioned that huge numbers of Photoshop users are FURIOUS about this sleazy move by Adobe and are refusing to go along with it. More than 35,000 people have signed a Change.org petition to demand the restoration of the perpetual license. Lots of people are going to be seriously hurt by your journalistic malpractice.

I was stunned by the number of readers who came away from my column thinking that I am a fan of Adobe’s new rental-only program. In fact, I thought that I had written a 1,300-word condemnation of this practice.

“You have to pay $30 a month, or $240 a year, for the privilege of using the latest Photoshop version,” I wrote. “Adobe isn’t offering the rental plan — it’s dictating it. The 800-pound gorilla of the creative world has become the 1,600-pound gorilla.”

I then listed alternatives to Photoshop, and concluded: “Nobody knows what improvements Adobe plans to add, how many, how often, or what the subscription rates will be next year or the year after that. Adobe is just saying, ‘Trust us.’”

As for the Change.org petition with 35,000 signatures: Somehow my readers managed to miss this paragraph in my column:

“The switch to a rental-only plan may sound like a rotten deal for many creative people, especially small operators on a budget. And, indeed, many of them are horrified by the switcheroo. A touching but entirely hopeless petition (http://j.mp/1aynMtK) has 35,000 signatures so far. (‘We want you to restart development for Adobe Creative Suite 7 and all future Creative Suites,’ it says. ‘Do it for the freelancers. For the small businesses. For the average consumer.’)”

It’s possible that what angered these readers so much is my reference to the petition as “touching but entirely hopeless.” This is not a put-down of the petition. This is a simple acknowledgment that companies like Adobe have already factored in the anger.

Remember when Netflix raised the price of its most popular DVD rental/streaming-movie price by 60 percent? A million people canceled their Netflix subscriptions.

An employee told me at the time that, incredibly, Netflix’s spreadsheets showed that the company would still come out ahead, even with the mass defections. Netflix had already factored the anger into its business plan.

And that’s exactly what Adobe’s spreadsheets show. Even if the predicted number of angry customers abandon Photoshop, the total annual revenue for Photoshop will increase as a result of the rental-only program.

That’s why the petition is utterly hopeless. Adobe won’t change its course, because Adobe doesn’t care about those people. It already considers them a lost cause.

It’s very clearly a case where customer happiness is being sacrificed for more profit. And that’s the most upsetting part of all.

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl