Blog for Youth

By sharing their exact location through a new smartphone feature, users of Facebook in Britain can get access to shop discounts and restaurant “bargain deals“.

The Places Deals service is aimed at logging the location of members and then finding money-off deals in their local area.

From in.finance.yahoo.com:

“Friend deals” depend on tagging a number of friends to share savings while “loyalty deals” require multiple check-ins, similar to a traditional punch card.

The application, which is part of Facebook Places, was launched in the US in November, and Starbucks, Debenhams and Argos have all developed offers in conjunction with the social networking site.

Now rewards will also be available in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and each special offer will be unique to Facebook users.

“Facebook is built around people and sharing personal experiences and Deals is a great extension of this,” the Daily Mail quoted Joanna Shields, vice president of the company in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as saying.

There are a many reasons why someone might be hesitant to use the feature, according to Dan Olds, an analyst at The Gabriel Consulting Group.

Individuals from Asia, Europe, and Latin America have joined hands through Twitter and Facebook to introduce ”Jana Sanskriti”, a forum of people’s theatre, to give voice to the economically oppressed.

Last week 138 of them converged to attend a theatre festival of the ”Jana Sanskriti” where performances staged centered on themes ranging from sexual harassment to domestic violence to communal harmony and environmental perils.

From in.news.yahoo.com:

Two participants, Heman and Shela from Germany, told PTI that they had participated in a five-day workshop at Badu village for the ”Good vs evil” puppet show at the festival, drawn from Indian mythology.

“Despite not understanding the lyrics, the beat and rhythm of the show are so beautiful that we had no difficulty in matching steps with our rural artiste friends,” the two said.

They said that the colourful puppet show, which symbolised the vanquishing of demon ”Mahisasura”, had been derived from puppet motiffs from an anti-Nazi rally organised in Frankfurt recently.

They said the large puppets were brought from Germany and their costumes hand-crafted here. “It proves people’s art has no barriers.”

A patron of the movement, celebrated percussionist Tanmoy Bose said he believed there should be positive vibes between the artistes and the audience in performing arts in the people’s domain.

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After Angstro, Google now acquires Social Deck to strengthen their network. The online games social networking site Social Deck has formerly announced its acquisition by Google at an undisclosed amount.

From timesofindia.indiatimes.com

NEW YORK: Internet search giant Google has acquired social games website SocialDeck for an undisclosed amount, in a move to strengthen its social networking service.

The transaction comes within days of Google’s acquisition of Angstro, which makes applications to discover new photos on Facebook and create a real-time social address book.

Going by reports, the deal is one of several acquisitions in the past month through which Google is hoping to build a social-networking service to counter rival Facebook.

SocialDeck has announced on its website that it has been acquired by Google.

“SocialDeck has been acquired and we have joined the Google team. We started this company with the goal of connecting friends through social games on all kinds of exciting new mobile devices,” the company stated on its website.

SocialDeck, a Canadian start-up, has launched several games titles for Facebook, Apple’s iPhone and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices.

The firm’s games platform technology enables simultaneous game play across multiple mobile devices and social networks.

Earlier in the month, Google had bought social widgets maker Slide Inc in a deal that would give the search giant a team of developers with vast experience in social networking.

This step by Google was an attempt to compete with Facebook. Social Deck basically connects to the mobile devices and online networks through social games and forms a network of friends.

Facebook recently teamed up with 50 wireless operators for offering a stripped-down version of the social networking site to cellphone users. This facility will allow users to access without incurring data charges.

This new site, dubbed 0.facebook.com, can be termed as a text-only version of flagship internet site of Facebook and is particularly designed for mobile phones with limited bandwidth Internet connections.

From in.news.yahoo.com:

The new site will be available beginning on Tuesday in 40 different countries, including Brazil, India, Indonesia and Turkey from a variety of carriers.

The new site comes as the world’s largest Internet social network continues to grow its base and looks for ways to increase the amount of time Web surfers spend using its service.

At the company’s annual developer’s conference last month, Facebook introduced new technology that allows third-party Web sites to integrate Facebook features directly.

Roughly one quarter of Facebook’s 400 million users access the site on mobile devices, according to the company.

But Facebook wants to make the service more accessible to cell phone users who do not own high-end smartphones such as Apple Inc’s iPhone, or phones based on Google Inc’s Android software.

“We are targeting people whose major barrier is they have little experience on the mobile Internet. They want to try it, they want something super simple, super fast. And they are potentially afraid of browsing costs,” said Henri Moissinac, who heads Facebook’s mobile business. “If you take an iPhone user in San Francisco, that’s not his problem.”

Among the carriers partnering with Facebook are Reliance and Videocon in India (with Tata Docomo coming soon), T-Mobile in Hungary and Vodafone in Greece.

Henri Moissinac, who heads Facebook’s mobile business, said though this service is presently not available in the United States, the same is expected in the near future.

In order to discuss child safety issues, executives from Facebook are due for a meeting with a senior UK police offer Monday in Washington.

It is important to note here that the popular social networking site was recently criticized by UK child experts and police officials for not doing much for making it easier for children to report incidents of sexual abuse or bullying.

From Edition.CNN.com:

A Ceop spokeswoman told CNN the agency had received 253 complaints about Facebook in the first quarter of this year and that only one of these had come “through the Facebook environment.”

“We have been trying to engage with Facebook for some time, this meeting is happening after a long build-up.

“More and more children are using Facebook and a panic button would allow them to report potential threats directly. We have experts who can respond immediately.”

Ceop says there is an urgent need to install the button and that it will help both children and parents.

A Facebook spokeswoman told CNN: “We will be discussing many issues, there are lots of initiatives.”

Facebook that claims of having more than 400 million users worldwide has said that it has a “robust” reporting system in place but recent incidents of sexual abuse seem to have “nullified” the claims.

Social networking sites such as Facebook have reached every corner of the world. More and more people are becoming members of these sites and engaging themselves in social networking. Let us discuss if this is good or bad for all of us.

Nothing in this world can be completely safe and without any negative effects. Social networking is no exception.

In today’s web-dominated world, it is surprising to see how social networking sites have managed to change habits of people across the globe, who are not reluctant any more to share some words with complete strangers or develop new relationships in no time.

Let us now move to the topic of our blog to find an amicable solution.

There is nothing wrong with social networking sites as long as they do not intervene in personal and professional lives. But, this is not the case. In many countries of the world, they have reduced employees’ time on the work seat to a considerable level. Personal relationships have also taken a backseat such is the power of social networking today.

However, things are as perceived. Many people have gained all and lost nothing by using social networking. It is important to note that making use of social sites should not be habitual but purposeful. Things start going the wrong way when habits ride over the purpose.

If used in the right sense, social networking can reduce the gap between nations and their citizens to a considerable extent. Business owners can explore new markets, customers, and what not. Customers can get the feel of market and the best places to buy besides getting lucrative purchase deals. Economy can gain from these gains and this will also result in distribution of gains to all of us over a period of time.

The underlying point is – let the better sense prevail when you switch on the PC to visit a social networking site.