Iranian cleric calls Facebook 'un-Islamic', membership a 'sin'

FROM: http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/iranian-cleric-calls-facebook-un-islamic-membership-a-sin-1.405968

17 million Iranians have a Facebook account, despite heavy restrictions and filtering imposed by the government.

An Iranian ayatollah has said that the social networking service Facebook was un-Islamic and being a member of it a sin, the ISNA news agency reported Saturday.

In Iran, it is common for senior clerics to be asked about their stance on certain social issues and whether these issues are compatible with Islamic norms.

Their answers are regarded as a form of decree.

ISNA on Saturday broadcast coverage of the response of Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi-Golpaygani, a senior cleric, to the question about Facebook and Iranian membership in the social networking service.

"Basically, going to any website which propagates immoralities and could weaken the religious belief is un-Islamic and not allowed, and membership in it is therefore haram (a sin)," the ayatollah replied.

"Only the use of websites propagating religious criteria and not leading to any kind of ethical immoralities is of no problem," he added.

According to official figures released last October, 17 million Iranians have a Facebook account, despite heavy restrictions and filtering imposed by the government.

Due to the popularity of Facebook with younger generations, observers believe that the number of real Iranian Facebook users could be much higher than 17 million.

Iran has a population of 70 million, of which than 60 per cent is under the age of 30.

Over 5 million websites are reportedly blocked in Iran, but Iranians use proxy software and virtual private networks (VPN) to access them.

Iranian officials have, for over three decades, been waging what they call a "battle against the invasion of Western culture."

This has led to blockades of "immoral" internet sites and banned Western music and movies. However, pirated versions of those are easily available on the black market.

The country recently established a cyberpolice unit to better police the internet and even plans to introduce its own national internet, though this has been postponed several times.

The 31 Types of Facebook Users

FROM: http://www.splicetoday.com/digital/the-31-types-of-facebook-users

Raymond Cummings

Which one (or more) are (or aren’t) you?

The Insipid Ingratiator. No observation is too banal for you to share with the Facebook hive mind, which absolutely has to know that your son fell asleep eating honey-cheese curls and see the photograph that proves it. Why shouldn’t the world know that hot tea is soothing your sore throat? Why not tell everybody on your Friend list that you’re tickled pink by an unspecified decades-old Carol Burnett Show punch line?

The Non-Sequitur Enthusiast. You delight in posting specious in-jokes on other people’s Walls.

The Narcissist. You go to Facebook to post about stuff, and occasionally respond to folks who respond to your posts—and that’s it.

The Bashful Gourmet. You make meals, but before you consume them, you carefully photograph them and post the photographs.

The Milquetoast Gamer. Your Wall—and the Walls of your peeps—are littered with cutesy, colorful posts representative of incessant exchanges of virtual favors and digital currency. If any of you read Amusing Ourselves To Death, the book’s relevance to what you’re pretending is real life would go way, way over your heads.

The Archivist. You’re the Indiana Jones of under-the-radar musical treasures perpetually and unfairly flying under the Internet radar, and YouTube is your medium.

The Aspirationist. You desperately want other people to realize their goals, to find happiness and inner peace, and you’re not trying to sell anything.

The Bible Belter. Pretty much the same as above, only you’ve got a Holy Bible app on your iPhone instead of a Buddha Machine app.

The Shy Retirer. You know those people who loiter on the fringes of a party or conversation and contribute so little that they might as well not even be there? This type of Facebook user is even more of a non-entity, with weeks or months elapsing between blips of activity.

The Crusader. You’re hoping against hope that others will be willing to sign this petition or peruse that Amnesty International article, and there’s more where that came from.

The Musician. You’ve got a show coming up, or several, with other musicians.

The Loquacious Wonder. You hold forth more in a single, sustained comment string than you do with members of your own immediate family.

The Reveler. You faithfully wish every last Facebook friend a happy birthday, on the day, every year—including the Facebook friends you friended by mistake and the ones you don’t really even like and the ones who are, like, acquaintances of acquaintances whose hopes, dreams, and offline machinations are of no actual concern to you.

The Absentee Landlord. You created a Facebook account that you never, ever use.

The Slumlord. You created a Facebook account that you never, ever use, but you’ve got friends who post stuff on your Wall that you can’t be bothered to respond to.

The Friendster. Your Wall is a litany of you becoming friends with other Facebook users and nothing else whatsoever.

The Ghost. What profile? What recent posts? What are favorites?

The Bartlett’s Unfamiliar Inanities. You enjoy mad-libbing shopworn phrases into Dadaist nonsense.

The Mad Dog. In the 1980s, assholes flaunted Totally Gross Jokes books. In the 1990s and most of the 2000s, assholes buried email inboxes in misogynist, xenophobic mass forwards. Today, assholes run wild on Facebook. Don’t be an asshole.

The Dick. This world is so full of possibility; there are mountains to be climbed, books to be read and written, soup kitchens to volunteer at, adventures to embark on, dreams to realize, and so much more—and yet, thousands of people “like” entities at the polar opposite of their personal beliefs so they can spar vociferously about politics and stupid bullshit semi-anonymously online with people they’ll never meet. Comment-section flame wars: they’re not just for blogs.

The Borrower. You want to know if somebody can loan you something or give you a ride or recommend something, or if somebody knows someone else who can hook you up.

The Giver. You want to give something away, like tickets.

The Indifferent Misspeller. You’re of the opinion that a casual approach to grammar confers an authentic sincerity.

The On-Location Correspondent. You want everybody to know where you are eating or enjoying live music, and with whom, but you have precious little else to volunteer about what’s supposed to be so thrilling and fun that you had to tell everybody you were doing it.

The Cross-Platform Self-Promoter. You regularly update your blog, and you regularly post to Facebook for no other reason than to announce that you updated your blog.

The Pro Scribe. You write articles and interview notable personalities for online publications, and you occasionally post to Facebook for no other reason than to let people know that you’ve written a new article or interviewed a notable personage for one of these publications.

The Curator. Because there’s no reason that one’s Wall can’t double as a schizophrenic, temporally twisted art gallery, minus the Brie and white wine, you fill that void, continuously, obnoxiously, and obsessively.

The Town Crier. Airing private business in painfully pointed detail on Facebook feels cathartic for a couple seconds, until other people actually read it.

The Lothario. You caption all YouTube posts with “for a girl,” without bothering to say who the girl in question is.

The Provocateur. You post short, unspecific phrases or sentences that are designed to either provoke responses or relate to some recent-ish offline circumstance familiar to a privileged few.

The Machine-Gunning Serial Liker. Self-explanatory.

The Red Giant (Five Reasons Facebook is Over)

FROM:http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2012/01/02/the-red-giant-five-reasons-facebook-is-over/

Joshua M Brown, January 2nd, 2012

One of the biggest market events of the coming year will undoubtedly be the Facebook IPO. You will read seven million articles about it in the next three months (sorry about that). It will likely come public as one of the largest IPOs in history, with a starting valuation somewhere in the vicinity of $100 billion. It is a tech giant to be sure, one of the most important companies in world right now.

But there is a major difference between Facebook and the other tech giants of the past and present like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM, Yahoo, Netscape and Cisco. The difference is that Facebook will be the first tech giant to have come public after its growth rate peaks. it will be the first almost-mature tech giant to IPO at the end of it's biggest growth phase rather than in the early stages. The others offered public investors the chance to invest ahead of the Golden Age - but in this new era, the lion's share of valuation growth has been awarded to a relatively small handful of early stage investors and people need to accept that.

Facebook is a Red Giant, a star larger than the sun - but a dying star nonetheless. Red Giants are mid-sized stellar bodies that have already exhausted the hydrogen within their cores. They begin to live off the hydrogen surrounding them, burning it in a lower-intensity process called thermonuclear fusion. Similarly, Facebook is likely peaking right now in terms of new users, page views per user, engagement and so on - it will burn brightly off of the massive scale it's already built and that's pretty much it going forward.

This does not mean that the company won't become wildly profitable as they turn on the engines and monetize what's already there (which is obviously a huge amount of web real estate and mindshare at the moment). What it does mean is that, like the Red Giant, Facebook already is what it is. It is highly doubtful that the company's web presence and engagement can get any bigger or better.

In fact, it is more likely that:

1. Something new comes along - It is laughable how seamlessly, completely and quickly Facebook supplanted MySpace - let's not act like anything on the web is permanently dominant forever. Facebook is picking up major steam in countries like Indonesia and Brazil right now, the rate of new users signing up is breathtaking. But consider that they are pulling people from Google-owned network Orkut and that one day someone else will do the same to them.

2. Users lose interest in the faddish social games - The dirty secret of the early days of Web 1.0 is that pornography was the only revenue source that allowed companies to survive until real business models evolved. Social gaming has thus far provided the same service to Web 2.0. We are currently in an Air Pocket of Retardedness where kids and housewives have figured out how to submit their credit card information for utter stupidity like Farmville and Mafia Wars but haven't yet realized how dumb they are for having done so. It is only a matter of time before the spell wears off and people realize how utterly ridiculous it is to be buying virtual crops and power-ups with money that can otherwise be used in the physical world. Remember ringtones? How about The Sims? Or Garbage Pail Kids or Pogs or Pokemon or Texas Hold'em or Beanie Babies or any of the other "flush your money down the toilet" fads of the past 20 years? These things pass and we eventually laugh at ourselves. That moment is coming soon for social games that require continual charges on our credit cards.

3. Kids rebel against a social network that includes their dorky parents - Can you imagine being 15 years old and being involved in any kind of socializing that involved your parents and aunts and uncles and Sunday school teachers and god knows who else from the dark side? There is a Facebook hipness hourglass somewhere and it has already been turned over...it is only a matter of time before the grains of sand slipping from the top to the bottom become noticeable and the tide turns. The kids will be first, the advertisers will follow. In the end, Facebook will be comprised of dormant and inactive profiles with a majority of its "engagement" coming from people in their forties stalking their exes from high school in the late 80's. For the younger generation, talking about Facebook at all will become painfully lame. Every generation mocks the one that came before. This moment rapidly approaches, the emptying of that hipness hourglass is inexorable.

4. My life, my content - This will be the rallying cry of Gen Y, then the Millenials, then each successive generation after. People will wake up and realize that every minute spent in Zuckerberg's walled garden is a minute that they are creating content for "Facebook Inc" that they do not own themselves. And who the hell would do that other than people who have no choice? Eventually, Twitter and Instagram and Google Plus and Tumblr and WordPress and About.me and a host of other platforms and services become way more interesting. The initial appeal of creating a Facebook profile for the average person was that the ability to code or "understand" the web or HTML was completely unnecessary. Which was brilliant, it allowed users to generate a page with next to zero knowledge about the ways of the web. The problem is, as time marches on, ignorance turns into curiosity and then experience. The web is now a native environment to the kids born in the 1990's, they don't know a world without it. And their ability to create their own blogs, web pages and websites will place them at the vanguard of an eventual mass exodus from the closed-off, institutionalized Facebook.

5. Monetization will be both a blessing and curse - Facebook is going to make a sh*tload of money. Unfortunately, this monetization push will alienate the user base and involve more aggressive and invasive tactics as surely as night follows day. There is no way around it. Have you seen what Gmail looks like these days? There's not a centimeter of the page that isn't covered with advertisements of some kind. But I can't think of a single one I've ever noticed or clicked. Because like you, I've subconsciously trained myself not even to see them. I know they're there but I would wash my eyes out with bleach if I ever accidentally read one and would seek to have my mouse hand amputated should I ever - gasp - click one. And don't give me this bullsh*t about "contextually targeting the ads to each user". You don't know me, man. Facebook, like other web companies before it, will find new ways of monetizing. But don't you ever forget what the product is. It's you. As has been remarked before, if you aren't paying Facebook to use their service, then you aren't the customer - you're the product, homeboy.

***

So god bless the soon-to-be billionaires who got involved in Facebook early. They will win (and have won) regardless. But in terms of the IPO this spring, I can't find an answer to any of these five threats that would make me want to buy in at a $100 billion initial valuation.

Can you?

Will 2012 see the beginning of Facebook’s decline?

FROM: http://www.firstpost.com/tech/will-2102-see-the-beginning-of-facebooks-decline-169929.html

Tens of millions of people globally are still getting to grips with Facebook’s latest, and delayed, idea — the timeline.

A friend discovered that the social network had interpreted some past posts into a “significant” life event: the “death of a loved one”.

He was angry. Of course the death of someone special would be a “significant” life event, but for a computer to remind you of that fact is as cold and detached as, well, a computer.

But it warrants asking whether Facebook has now gone too far in trying to replicate our hearts and minds online, and control our information.

Facebook ads appearing down the right-hand side of the “newsfeed” once asked me if I was “feeling suicidal?” Where did it get that from? What thought did I offer to prompt an ad for help?

We’ve turned over a great deal of personal — DEEPLY personal — information to Facebook, Google and a host of others, but might the timeline idea have reflected that fact back to us so effectively that we turn away from the social media mirror?

This year will be, as last year, defined by the ongoing battle for information. People like Kapil Sibal and a court in Delhi want to preview and screen it in advance. Countries such as Syria and China want to limit its flow. And companies will fight tooth and nail just for your Twitter followers.

Individuals have largely given up control of their own information, whether voluntarily or otherwise. We provide our birth dates for everything, supply our most immediate opinions for anyone who will read them, and pictures of everything, including the inside of wombs when expecting children.

Home follows us on our phones to work, and work follows us home. Some companies have started to limit the all-pervasive flow of information, such as Volkswagen announcing last month that they would switch off Blackberry email after work hours. Employees didn’t want the constant presence of work, erasing any concept of the so-called “work-life balance”.

On social networking, it’s a clash between information offered to the websites, and websites interpreting and using that information. What we offer is unlimited. What computers can do is not.

Emotions and the core thoughts in your head — the pure ones before you attempt to formulate them into written words — are largely inaccessible to computers. Algorithms within sites such as Facebook instantly assess your status updates and change the ads to suit your thoughts. That’s not quite the same as emotion. Equations can’t sense satire. They have no sensitivity.

Look critically at the ads that appear when you make statements online, or even the order of Google search results. Consider what news is being presented to you on some websites and whether it is deciding for you what news you see.

Having recently been on holiday in Canada, the news presented by the BBC online is vastly different from when I’m based in Glasgow, Scotland. It knows where I am and presents me with US news first, above anything global. It judges what is important to my brain simply by location.

The timeline is a brilliant invention, sorting all the thoughts, photos and statements we throw online into a digital copy of ourselves. It’s not an album that you flip through, it’s a summary of your life. Except you can’t summarise a life. You can view snapshots from moments across a lifespan, but that’s not the same thing.

Maybe a younger generation can’t tell the difference between the digital snapshots we offer the world, and what’s still in our heads and hearts — something that’s infinitely more complex.

But even amongst a close circle of friends online, I sense a growing dissatisfaction with Facebook in particular. It isn’t about all the changes the site makes, constantly, or even the mistakes it’s made over the privacy controls on a profile. There’s a sense that Facebook is trying too hard to grab us by the throats and plug us in.

Google is trying it with “circles”, to mimic our real-world association with different groups of people. While useful in terms of how an individual offers thoughts and shared articles etc to others, it doesn’t really offer any great understanding of ourselves.

All Facebook and Google want really, is to understand what’s going through our heads so effectively that it can nail you to a wall with its advertising, and make money.

Will people leave Facebook in droves because of the timeline? No. As has been said before, with so many of our friends and family on the site, you’d need everyone to leave to another site with you to effectively stay in touch (unless of course your friends are all in the room with you currently). Facebook has us by the jugular, but increasing numbers of us don’t like the choking sensation.