This cartoon from Ted McCagg requires knowledge of one of the more irritating Facebook applications.

From the advertising and marketing blog Thought Gadgets, this post called “Sometimes it makes sense to ignore your customers,” which debunks the notion that customer feedback through social media will provide the answer to all business problems.

The advertising, marketing, and media blog Thought Gadgets posts on a dust-up between users on the Nestle fan page on Facebook and a company rep. The Nestle page has been the target of an online anti-deforestation campaign by Greenpeace, as described here by the site Web Strategy, which also lays out a response plan for [...]

Great Gawker article called “The Eight Types of People to Unfollow on Twitter or Defriend on Facebook” drew this user comment: I’m interested to know how many people were unfriended this week in the wake of the health care law passing. I’ve been seeing a lot of crossfire on my rss feeds lately! And yes, [...]

If you’re wondering why it’s so hard to get anything done politically– and who isn’t these day–one reason may be found in the data provided by an analysis of 210 million public profiles on Facebook. Earlier in the week we did a post on an interactive map that resulted from that project, and which draws [...]

The search technology blog PeteSearch has a fascinating post on the geographical connections of Facebook friends. The Pete in PeteSearch gathered data on 210 million public profiles on the ‘book and created an interactive map with lines drawn between areas that share a lot of friends. As Pete explains it, “For example, a lot of people in LA have friends in San Francisco, so there’s a line between them.”

The map has three tabs at the top, one each for connections between countries, U.S. states, and U.S. cities.

Some random results:

• California users have strong connections to the East Coast states of New York and Massachussetts, and to Washington D.C. But the state also has a line drawn to Texas and the state of Washington.
• Chicago users connect mostly to those in Los Angeles, New York, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Atlanta.
• U.S. users in the aggregate connect mostly to other English speaking countries, but also to the Philippines and Indonesia.

As described in our last post, the retailer H&M is suffering a public relations nightmare stemming from a New York grad student’s noticing on the street hundreds of unsold garments that it destroyed. Twitter, Facebook, and the blogs are all ablaze in condemning H&M for not donating the clothes to charity. The H&M Facebook page [...]

As we’ve already seen, courtesy of the health care debate: Ideologies are colliding within people’s very own Friends List on Facebook. Another such interaction:

Perhaps, in the middle of this national free-for-all of a health care debate, you’ve found yourself in an argument with friends, family, or a stranger on the Internet masquerading as the same avatar your 13-year old uses. Here is one such mini-drama, spied on Facebook. (Disclaimers: Certain emoticons have been changed to protect the innocent, [...]