Monthly Archives: April 2014

Business Manager from Facebook

5Now that the holiday is over we can get back to business with high stamina and low desire to stop. And so the big news this week is that Facebook presented its new Business Manager for entrepreneurs and marketers meant to ease up the work on different ad campaigns and even multiple pages from one account, a well received feature. Another feature of it, is that allows tasks for different users on the same project by adding or revoking permissions.

In order to use Business Manager  you have to first set up your account, which makes you a so called ‘a business ad man’ – a position in which you can modify all aspects of the business. Another new feature is that you can assign tasks even to people who are not your Facebook friends and you don’t know anymore that a work email.

Even though it seems like a very well intended tool TechCrunch tends to point out that it is a bit of a reachout for Facebook. Even considering this, the ability for small business owners, who don’t have big budgets, to be successful on Facebook will directly correlate to their ability to quickly manage their pages, content, and ads to drive engagement.
We can only hope that Facebook continues releasing tools that make it easy for small businesses (not just fortune 500 brands) to have success on the platform.

Twitter’s redesigned pages 101

If you’ve been active on twitter lately you may have noticed the major changes that happened on the micro-blogging platform. Since it has been founded, in 2006 twitter has distinguished itself from other platforms by revolutionized the way people communicate on the internet. It imposed that people should only deliver the essential of their message by setting up a 140 character limit and so it reinvented the wheel.

Now in the last few days twitter has implemented a new design for user’s profiles and it’s nothing of what we are used to. Instead of the regular plain customizable profile we we have a facebook-like page with the main picture and bio scaled to the left and significantly more real estate dedicated to the header photo. The new look has a greater focus on photos and content cards.

Also this change in looks brought a new category with it, called “out on the profile” , where you can view who you are following, followers, favorites and lists.

Major brands had not skipped the opportunity to promote along with this changes and had almost immediately responded by redesigning  their pages (in the photos:Samsung and Kia)

 

If the new profile hasn’t reached you yet it’s not to worry about because the changes will be slowly implemented to users in random manner so your turn will come up, only with more followers we hope.

Data encryption is the key for protection

edward snowden

 

Edward Snowden has come up once again to our attention when he featured as a speaker before two prominent technology conferences: SXSW and TED, this March. The world’s most famous whistleblower has said it before, but reiterated it for the SXSW crowd, that end-to-end encryption would go a long way towards protecting user data from both spying and attackers but it will never be completely effective, no matter how hard we would try.

He, once again regarded the data harvesting that happens against our willing in companies over our emails or files in order for us to be served with the best commercials. Normally the process of data encryption is used by many services at either end of communication but often companies decript once more the data along the transmission in order to interact with user’s feelings.

There are available on the web encryption tools like TOR and PGP (pretty good protection) but they are well known for the difficulties they impose to non technical people along installing and using them. On top of this it has been straight stated that if your government wants to investigate your data it can do so, encryption is only one inconvenience over mass data gathering over users.

In the end we remind you that Snowden revealed compromising data about the United States government, including about their mass data mining program known as PRISM whose purpose is to gather data from all media sources. It is approximated that PRISM is responsible for 91% of all the NSA’s traffic. Another program revealed was XKeyscore, initially used by the united states but previously shared with numerous other governments in order to have a worldwide look over the internet searches and traffic.