The answer is that they are all in the news this week around the recently beleaguered social media site;
Facebook.
The big news is that Lady Gaga passed President Barack Obama with the number of fans on Facebook. In
reaction to hearing this news, Lady Gaga went to Twitter to thank her 4,796,663 Twitter fans for the honor.
However, she then promptly thanked her actual 11,065,406 Facebook friends as well.
President Barack Obama, has approximately 9,999,092 fans on Facebook and pop star Justin Bieber hit 6.7
Million Facebook fans this week. Texas Hold ‘Em Poker has passed 20 million fans, Michael Jackson, even
deceased has over 15 million fans and the game Mafia Wars has also more than10 million fans.
For comparison on the social media site Twitter, Britney Spears is at approximately 5,278,864 followers,
Ashton Kutcher is at approximately 5,204,397 and President Obama is at approximately 4,476,497
followers. Justin Bieber’s Twitter account is now at 3.5 million followers this week and rapidly growing.
However not everyone is a “fan” of social media, or more correctly how it is being used.
Canadian lawyer Tony Merchant has launched a class action lawsuit against Facebook for letting users’
private information to be sold for profit.
Specifically the lawsuit centers around the changing of Facebook’s privacy settings as explained in the 32-
page court papers which were filed in Winnipeg, Canada this week. Mr. Merchant believes that users are
deceived that private information is secure but, it has been claimed by others that the new Facebook
changes has made its users vulnerable to data mining and more advertisements.
Facebook’s privacy changes in question, were made in April, November and December of 2009. According
to these recent claims, this has caused the publicizing of private information and unauthorized sharing of
personal information with third-parties which include software companies and social media applications
like Farmville.
Canada is not alone in its concerns over privacy; Germany’s Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection
and Freedom of Information is asserting that Facebook is storing non-users’ personal data without their
permission.
This claim is around the address book sync feature which uploads data about non-users. The problem is
when Facebook stores this data because a significant portion of these individuals do not belong to
Facebook. This means they have not given permission for Facebook to use or save their private data.
Germany contends this data can contain phone numbers and even e-mail addresses, which they do not
believe that Facebook has a right to use, as it is essentially storing third party data without authorization.
In the wake of this suit, Britain and Switzerland are also reviewing Facebook’s third party data storage
policies.
Also scrutinizing Facebook is Google, but not to sue the social media site; Google wants to kill it.
Google is working on a new social network called “Google Me”.
Google is using YouTube Leanback, to turn YouTube into an all new way of experiencing media and online
networking; The idea is that when logging on, you will see HD video, full-screen, and as each video ends a
new one starts playing, much like a TV station, only this is based upon data harvested from your
preferences.
This move, they hope, will change the way people view social networks and lure users to Google’s
application.
Google Buzz already allows members to share links, photos, videos; to the careful observer, all of this seems
to point to the idea that Google is staging a takeover.
This may be too little, too late, given that Facebook recently lost 19 percent of its teenage audience to
“Facebook fatigue,” a new disorder gaining popularity where teenagers ditch Facebook.
However, YouTube is the second most popular social network among teens with two in three still using it.
MySpace has lost much of its popularity a while ago with approximately only two in five teens using it.
Twenty two percent of teens have left Myspace, and Twitter, which seems to be geared towards
professionals, was never as popular with teens in the first place
Twitter has only 20 percent of teens using it anyway.
Having said that, teens still spend 80 percent of their online time, or two hours each day on social media
sites.
The social media backlash may be closer than we think.
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