Social Media | Saqib Imran

2Jul

Google Now Aims For Social Networking

After a failed attempt of initiating its own social networking platform (Google Buzz) Google has now once again launched another of its social media tool entitled Google+. It seems that Google has not yet forgotten the bitter memories of its previous letdown and has merely proclaimed Google + as a test trial version or more modestly a testing project.

MC Siegler at Tech Crunch stated:

Google+ is easily already the most compelling social project Google has ever done. The most appealing of the new launch can be listed as:

Circles — online places users create to socialize and interact with different groups of people, not everyone. They’re private to anyone who isn’t designated to participate. So Jake can share openly with his Tea Party friends without alienating his Clinton-era Democratic parents.
Hangouts — Hangout will allow users to do video or text chat with anyone willing to do so. It’s multi-person video calling.
Mobile — Group messaging, location services and photo and video uploads and sharing.
Sparks — Sparks will allow users to access the content in which they are interested from across the web through Google.

Many people and analysts are of the opinion that Facebook which has over 600 million members now has to face a competitor, although no such statement has been given from Google’s platform.
Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post expressed her views over Google+ as:
Google Plus isn’t the new Facebook. It’s the grown-up Facebook. Perhaps this makes it the anti-Facebook.
Deciding that Google+ will takeover Facebook is quite a pre-mature decision at present as Google has not yet drawn curtains over all features and secrets that in store for its users. Facebook on the other hand has massive number of users and applications, and surpassing them all will be hard nut to crack for Google. Only upcoming time will decide as to which of the titans captures the social media platform in future.

SEGA’s online system hacked!

SEGA- the world renowned gaming organization’s online system has been hacked. The company
has been a leading pioneer in the business of gaming and is known to be amongst the very best.
Unfortunately, the main site announced that the system has been hacked and so it has been
shut down until the problem can be rectified and the hackers are found.

The SEGA Pass system was hacked on Thursday, 16th June and the mighty gaming site has been
shut down ever since. The passwords and emails of the members have been compromised but
the higher authority of the Company have made instant corrections by resetting the passwords
and have advised all those who have not yet done it to change their passwords soon so as to
save themselves from any unnecessary disasters.

No hacker group has yet come forward to take the blame but the LulzSec are suspected
because they have only recently claimed responsibility for hacking the servers of Sony and
Nintendo. To protect themselves from the blame, the hacker group LulzSec has said on the
early morning of Friday that “We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We
love the Dreamcast, these people are going down.”

The Company sends its gamers this message as a warning

“As you may be aware, the SEGA Pass system has been offline since yesterday,
Thursday 16 June. Over the last 24 hours we have identified that unauthorized entry was
gained to our SEGA Pass database. We immediately took the appropriate action to protect our
consumers’ data and isolate the location of the breach. We have launched an investigation into
the extent of the breach of our public systems. We have identified that a subset of SEGA Pass
members’ emails addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords were obtained. To stress,
none of the passwords obtained were stored in plain text.

Please note that no personal payment information was stored by SEGA as we use external
payment providers, meaning your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion. If you
use the same login information for other websites and/or services as you do for SEGA Pass, you
should change that information immediately. We have also reset your password and all access to
SEGA Pass has been temporarily suspended.

Additionally we recommend you please take extra caution if you should receive
suspicious emails that ask for personal or sensitive information. Therefore please do not attempt
to login to SEGA Pass at present, we will communicate when the service becomes available. We
sincerely apologize for this incident and regret any inconvenience caused. We are contacting all
our members with these recommendations.

If you have any further questions please contact SEGA customer support on
csescalations@sega.com.”

How do women use Social Media?

Tags: Facebook, social media, social sites, women and social media

“The world’s gone social. And women are more social than men.” –Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Nowadays it is an open secret that social media sites are dramatically changing the way we live and conduct our lives online. But the role played by women in it is commonly overlooked. Perhaps surprisingly, women are online and interacting on social sites just as much if not, more than their male counterparts. Hence, it is important to understand how women use social networks and the powerful effects of social media sites on their sites.

It’s no shock that men and women act differently online, just as they do in everyday life .Men use social media forums and sites as means to gather information and increase their status. In contrast to this, women often use online social networking tools to make connections and share items from their personal lives. “We’re women–we like to talk about things. Women use social media as a way to connect,” says Jodi Kahn, the head of iVillage.

Furthermore, men are active blog participant. They are more likely to read, write and post comments to blogs. Surprisingly, both men and women report that their most common blog topic is “my life,” she says. However, the second most popular topic for men is business and career, and food and fashion are tied in second place for women.
A summary of how women use social media can be listed as follows:

53% of adult females use social media at least on a weekly basis.
Their top interests are entertainment, food, health/wellness, and recipes/cooking. Fashion/beauty/shopping comes in fifth.
34% of women use social networks to get information.
20% of women are looking for advice and recommendations.

The above analysis shows that women are increasing using social media platforms to find answers to their queries, connect to friends and family and play online games. Therefore in the future social media developers must focus on this up-coming trend and develop applications and sites that focus feminine audience.