technology meets charity!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/08/facebook.good.charity/index.html


Charities have teamed up with facebook to generate revenue for their causes. Facebook has made "gifts" available on their site for a small fee. This "fee" in turn is sent to the charity that sponsored the gift. Also, facebook plans to incorporate more charities into their site as the number of members grows rapidly. Personally, I think it's an amazing idea for facebook to try to include charities into their overwhelmingly popular site. This creates a voice for a lot of charities that go un-noticed. They need to create a safe and efficient way for members to pay directly to the charity, with the attempt of elimating the middle man. Overall, i approve. Way to go facebook!

twitter fail!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/04/03/moore.twitter.threat/index.html

As we all know, twitter is an up-and-coming social networking site. Celebs, politicians, and normal citizens have all jumped on the band wagon. So it's not surprising to hear that an interesting occurance dealing with twitter has hit the media. While Demmi Moore was in Fance, she received a tweet from a psychotic fan threatening suicide. Whaaaat???? Fans on her twitter noticed, as well as Demmi, and the police were dispatched to the location of the woman in trouble. Essetnailly they controlled the situation and took her into custody.
I'm surprised that this is the first fan to do something like this on a celeb's twitter feed. If you think about all the obsessed followers, is a personal twitter safe for a celebrity to possess? do you think that there will be more events like this as twitter becomes more popluar?

iphones!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/traveltips/03/02/phone.applications.travel/index.html#cnnSTCText

This article was featured on CNN.com. Essentially it summarizes the amazingness that is the iphone, as well as the applications that it possesses. It reviews what applications are the most popular and the most useful. For example, they talks about popular applications: Kindle, pandora, goodfood, and etc. As an iphone user, I do use pandora, but not the other ones. Apparently there are a lot more iphone applications are supposed to be coming out soon. There are a lot of good and smart applications that the iphone has. My person favorite is "shazam." It's the program where you can hold your phone up to the radio and it will tell you what song is playing. I use that, my facebook app, my email app, and my gaming apps the most. I hope they come out with more apps that allow the user to send a recieve picture messages. What are the next generation of app's going to do for the user?

My favorite things

these are a few of my favorite things!

• Kenny Powers


• hippies


• peace


• post secret


• boys


• failblog
  

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2005/08/23/whatissmartphone.html

Our assignment this week is to choose a source from out annotated bibliogrpahy and talk about it further in our IMS blog. I chose the o'reilly site to expound upon. Essentially, this website describes what a smart phone is. It talks about the different types of smart phones (PDA’s, mobile phones, and etc.) Also, it talks about the development and the emergence of smart phones into the public eye. Lastly, it asks and answers the question: What is a smart phone? This article seems to be reliable and useful to the general public. I found this via cnn.com. Also, this seemed to be a helpful website.
I know those of us who have smart phones cannot and will not live without them. Personally, I am fully addicted to my iphone. I enjoy getting emails as soon as they come in, facebook when I'm bored in class, and etc. Basically smart phones are our future. The main focus is impoving the network connection and creating impecible software for the users. My hopes are that they begin to reduce the price once smart phones become even more popular.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/27/facebook.democracy/index.html

Facebook, the popular social networking website, is causing problems! Fab! They changes their "terms of use and agreement" or whatever it's called. Essentially they were saying that facebook now "owns" all of the content that you have put onto your page. This was basically removing all privacy rights that were previous stated and agreed to by users. With this being said, this caused a huge uproar within the facebook community. People were sending emails, petitions, and deleting their accounts in protest of the changes. Facebook responds to this by allowing users to have a certain imput on the terms of use before they change it.
It's interesting to see how the public responds to something like this. People were genuinely afraid of what facebook could do with their private information. Personally, I believe that facebook has no right to my own information. Yes, I have chosen to put it on their site, but it is my information, not theirs. When I signed up for facebook, my understanding was that my friends and I were going to be the only ones looking at my page. I think facebook did have the intention of using it in the corporate world. For example, before someone (a company) hires you, they want to dig into your closet to see if you have any serious skeletons. They do this by hacking into your facebook account. Now, is this okay? Is it their business anyway? My facebook page is completely different than how I act in the professional world and at school. Therefore, I do not think it is a relevant and necessary act for someone to see my page.
This new development makes me unhappy. I will admit, a lot of my pictures do have alcohol in them. But, alcohol is legal at the age of 21, so I do not see a point to their investigations. Yes, corporate america, I do go out on the weekends and drink.