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Virurl Integrates RSS Into Its Sponsored Content Platform

Virurl has launched a new feature that it says will make it even easier for publishers to promote articles and videos through its platform.

The feature is called RSS Ads, and it offers another way to convert articles into advertising — when a new article gets posted to a publisher’s RSS feed, it automatically becomes an ad, which can then be promoted through the content widget displayed on Virurl’s partner sites, as well as through the social influencers who get paid to share Virurl content. In the press release announcing the new feature, co-founder and CEO Francisco Diaz-Mitoma said that it allows advertisers to “stay focused on what they do best — creating valuable content.” The company also argues that by allowing publishers to promote, more content, it will increase clickthrough rates.

In addition to RSS ads, Virurl is announcing that since it launched in 2011, it has been used to distribute 4 million stories, including 3 million in the last six months. Publishers who use Virurl to promote their content include Sports Illustrated, VICE, Funny Or Die, and StyleCaster.

There are, however, plenty of other companies offering to transform content into ads — earlier this month, for example, I wrote about the launch of OneSpot. Diaz-Mitoma told me via email that what sets Virurl apart is the completely customizability of its ad units.

“Virurl’s tools coupled with our high quality content network allows our publishers and advertisers to get as close as possible to the ‘native advertising’ unicorn,” he said.

The company raised $1.2 million in seed funding earlier this year.

A Short History of Facebook Privacy Failure

Like many of us, Randi Zuckerberg posted a family snap to Facebook this Christmas. As with many of our snaps, it was funny in context, but a little too candid; you might not want it shared widely beyond your family. Unlike many of our snaps, it contained a billionaire brother in the background

Randi was outraged when the snap got broadcast to subscribers, who proceeded to share it on other social networks. She got outraged on Twitter. As a result, the photo she was talking about became widely disseminated. And there you have it: even the greatest luminaries on her brother's billion-strong network cannot always navigate their way in the choppy waters of social media privacy.

A Whimsical Seasonal Greeting From A Human Camera

One of the stranger things I came across while in Tokyo last month was a digital artist who built a human camera that requires touch from another person to snap photos.

It is artist Eric Siu’s bit of rebellion against an increasingly technology-dependent world that distances people from real-life interactions. This effect is especially pronounced where Siu lives in Japan, as the Internet has allowed “Hikikomori” and “Otaku” sub-cultures to thrive. In “Hikikomori” culture, teens actually shut themselves in from interaction with the outside world.

As social networking, e-mail and other forms of digital communication replace or squeeze out time for face-to-face meetings, Siu wanted to create a piece of technology that required the opposite — real human touch.

The Touchy Camera, which he built using off-the-shelf parts for a few hundred dollars, is a wearable camera that requires another person to touch the wearer in order for it to work. Otherwise, the wearer is blind because the camera’s shutter doesn’t open without contact from someone else (see the GIF I made below).

If you touch him for 10 seconds or longer, that camera snaps a photo that’s viewable from an LCD screen on the back of the his head.

We walked around with it one morning in the Roppongi Hills area in Tokyo. And to make an understatement, the effect on bystanders was a bit magical. Some people would run away if they saw us come close, while others started asking questions. When some of them touched him and the shutters in front of his eyes opened, they gasped and smiled.

The camera works when human touch completes a simple circuit. Siu hands you something that looks like a lightbulb to hold in one hand, and when you touch him with the other, it completes a basic low-voltage circuit.

Siu only has one version of the Touchy camera, although people have asked him before about buying one as a toy. Since releasing it earlier this year, he’s performed all around mainland China and Asia and actually has gotten a bit of interest in it as a product. He says he would be open to making others if there was demand.

He and his partner, another character named Margaret Toucha, just made a holiday video (above) filled with boxers, pole dancers and some meandering around downtown Tokyo.

What Happens to Your Social Media Life When You Die?

San Francisco resident Sarah Buhr's friend Tiffany passed away a couple of months ago but Buhr still hears from her on Facebook

Tiffany's Likes, and other people's comments on Tiffany's profile, push her information onto Buhr's newsfeed, offering a frequent reminder that her friend is gone. Buhr says she felt she had to unfriend Tiffany because it was too difficult to be reminded of the loss nearly everyday

Jeff Lutz has a similar story. His beloved grandfather's wife, Laurel Lutz, passed away in 2011. Her side of the family must have continued to operate Laurel's Facebook page because Lutz said he continued to see updates and Likes.

Facebook in 2012: A Billion Users and Counting

Facebook is the most popular social network on the planet. It celebrated its eighth birthday on Feb. 4, 2012. Although Facebook has only been around since 2004, it certainly seems like much longer

For many of us, it feels like we've grown up habitually checking to see who has liked our photos and commented on our status updates. We love to use it. Sometimes we hate ourselves for loving it so much. We complain about it. We use it to complain about almost everything else. It's a revolution and an addiction. In many ways it's like a chair, but in other ways it's not like a chair at all.

Facebook: Please Send Your New Year Greetings Now

What are you going to be doing at the stroke of midnight next Tuesday, as 2012 shuffles off the stage and 2013 bursts upon the scene?

Well, if Facebook has anything to do with it, you'll be sending out congratulatory New Year's messages to all your friends. But they don't mean to see you tapping sadly at your smartphone while everyone else at the party is singing "Auld Lang Syne."

The social network has set up an automated system that will let you write your New Year's greetings now, and they'll be sent automatically when 2013 arrives in your friends' time zones

Imprisoned Sex Offenders Banned From Facebook

Several Facebook accounts belonging to convicted sex offenders in a Northern England prison have finally been shut down.

An investigation from the Yorkshire Evening Post revealed that up to five prisoners housed in a Wakefield maximum security jail created Facebook accounts with in the past year — a violation of prison rules. The newspaper obtained the information via the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Due to data protection issues, the prisoners' names couldn't be publically identified. Nor could the number of Facebook accounts created. But the jail did confirm that its prisoners have been violating the rules.

Inside Snapchat, The Little Photo-Sharing App That Launched A Sexting Scare

It started with an assumption, really. Snapchat, a photo-sharing application that auto-destroys images seconds after being opened, launched in September 2011 with zero media coverage. A homegrown product, built by two Stanford guys, grew to now see over 50 million snaps per day today. In fact, Facebook launched a clone of the app just Friday.

It wasn’t until the company made its first milestone announcement, nine months after launch, that the media picked up the story. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton whipped out all this cute PEW research on sexting in adults and teens, and referenced “suggestive” marketing materials and even pointed out the app’s “mild sexual content or nudity” warning.

From that moment on, whether in milestone achievements, feature and expansion announcements, or stories about Facebook’s new Snapchat clone, Snapchat was branded a sexting app.

The Myth

Snapchat is a lot like Pinterest. Coverage of the service came way later than its troves of users.

Being late, and of a different generation than the majority of the app’s users, many members of the media jumped on the click-happy sexting story instead of the truth.

“We were worried that usage and growth would decrease if the sexting publicity made Snapchatters feel uncomfortable,” said co-founder Evan Spiegel. “In hindsight we shouldn’t have underestimated the loyalty and creativity of our community. The uptake has been remarkable.”

And it has been. Snapchat is currently sending over 50 million snaps per day, with over 1 billion sent in total. Plus, word on the street is that Snapchat is raising a round of funding between $8 and $10 million. And up until this Friday, there were also rumors that Facebook was launching a clone, and it did.

Snapchat suddenly became a huge deal, and the urge to understand it (and explain its success) became important. And in the mind of tech reporters, the blogosphere, and the general media, there’s only one explanation for using an app that sends and then destroys self-portraits: sexting.

And the app’s marketing materials and app user warning didn’t help. The original screenshots on display in the App Store were of pretty girls in bikinis. The app warned of “Mature/Suggestive Themes” and “Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity.”

“To be fair, our early marketing materials were a bit amateurish. I took those photos on the beach with friends,” said Spiegel. “They were fun and playful at the time, but didn’t represent how the app was actually being used.”

The Conspiracy

Whatever Spiegel’s intentions, the media ran with the sexting story. After all, in a media that loves turning a sclerotic eye on made-up teenage perversity (“rainbow parties,” “jenkem”), Snapchat was solid gold.

Best of all, this Snap-sex trend was lining up with the evidence. There was even a Tumblr site called Snapchat Sluts documenting one man’s sexting rampage.

The confusion is understandable, given the nature of the app and its self-destructing pictures. The media are a generation of tech users that are incredibly obsessed with privacy. We would make this logical leap in the wake of Anthony Weiner and every teenage girl who’s ended up with a nude pic on the internet.

In any case, story after story popped up about Snapchat, all of which mentioned it’s popularity among sexting teens.

Turns out, almost every reporter to use both the words Snapchat and sexting in an article is a user on Snapchat. I know this because Buzzfeed discovered Snapchat has public user profiles on the internet, showing users top three most frequently snapped-with friends and their Snapchat score (a count of Snaps sent and received on the platform).

These writers fall into two categories: real users who are active on the platform (which is clear from their scores), and users who downloaded the app , used it once or twice to better understand it, and then wrote a story on it.

I learned that the former group is predominantly chatting with each other. For example, Katie Notopolous of BuzzFeed, who wrote this story about Snapchat’s super risky public profiles, chats with Gawker’s Max Read (who wrote this) and with a Gizmodo writer Sam Biddle. Sam snaps occasionally with less active user Joel Johnson, longtime Gizmodo employee.

Then there’s the folks who’ve written about Snapchat being the sexting app, but barely ever use it, like Gizmodo’s Adrian Covert (story), GigaOm’s Eliza Kern (story), CNET’s Jason Parker (story), and the NYT’s Nick Bilton (story). Yep, the same guy who started the myth doesn’t even use the app.

There are two conclusions we can make. The first is that the same folks who serve you a round of tech news with your morning coffee and bagel are also in a Snapchat sexting ring. The second option is that the very same people who have repeatedly assumed that Snapchat is for sexting, and propagated that myth, don’t use Snapchat for sexting at all.

Weird, huh?

The Facts

“Social media has generally relied on surveillance as the mechanism for stimulating feelings of connectedness,” Spiegel explained. “We’ve found that using Snapchat to live and share in the moment can make you feel like you’re face-to-face with a friend even if they’re on another continent.”

Truth is, there can never be any evidence that Snapchat is used primarily for sexting because the service deletes photos immediately after they’re opened, both from the recipient’s phone and from their servers. This means that there can not be any real evidence for or against sexting on Snapchat.

And you know what? By a very small percentage of users, Snapchat probably is used for sexting for a very small percentage of the time.

When you’re sending over 50 million snaps a day, a few of them are bound to be of naughty bits. But 80 percent of those snaps are sent during the day, with a spike during school hours. Whatever the sexting stats may be, they’re more likely using Snapchat to cheat on tests than to sext.

Snapchat wasn’t built for sexting, which seems clear from the fact that pictures self-destruct in less time than it takes to fully enjoy a nude pic. But some see this as a security feature for sexting, which is a matter of opinion.

However, the UI (which is actually quite amateur) doesn’t really suggest “Let’s Get It On,” with lots of yellow and bubbly blue and a friendly ghost for a mascot. Valid, but still an opinion, and one which opponents can argue is meant to lure young demographics to the sexting platform. Let’s, instead, focus on the evidence.

The user warning on the app, referenced in many Snapchat articles, means nothing. Every photo sharing app has one like it. Check out Instagram’s.

Also often referenced, the “suggestive” marketing images (which have since been swapped for new ones) were a mistake, but not one worth crucifying the app for.

And let’s not forget that Facebook just cloned this app with Poke. Is Facebook really trying to tap into teen sexting? Probably not. They’re tapping into something much bigger than that.

The Real Story

There is a big difference between the way a 24-year-old and a 19-year-old see social networking. It seems like a small gap, but some crucial changes happened during this time that has most certainly differentiated today’s teenager from yesterday’s.

The first was the release of the iPhone in 2007, which changed photo-sharing as we know it. People take photos of anything and everything now, because their camera is in their pocket, and uploading those photos to the internet takes three clicks, tops.

The second crucial change was the public opening of Facebook in 2006.

My sister is 19 and I am 24. I was 19 when the iPhone came out, and I was a senior in high school when I first got Facebook, a year before it launched publicly.

My sister was 14 when the iPhone came out, first got on Facebook at age 13. Unlike myself, her friends have had smartphones (and have been taking pictures with them) throughout their entire high school (and now college) career. And many of them are now documented neatly on her Timeline.

The pressure to maintain an appropriate, attractive presence on the Internet has weighed on me since college. It’s been with her for her entire life.

This is the difference between the people writing about Snapchat and the people using it.

My sister is one of the biggest Snapchat users I know, and the pictures she sends me of herself are awful. That’s not the usual for her. She’s 19, and will force our family to stand in 100-degree weather for hours to get the perfect shot of her smile.

The snaps she sends me could be called ugly — her on the porch, in the dark, with a goofy look on her face. If she was posting this on Facebook, or Instagram, or even sending it to me on MMS, it wouldn’t be the same picture. It wouldn’t be so ugly.

But there’s an intimacy that comes with Snapchat that makes those pictures safe, and much more enjoyable than seeing yet another perfect picture of my sister on Facebook. I see her as she really is.

It’s about as real as you can get in a world where everything happens through an all-seeing eye of 1′s and 0′s.

Randi Zuckerberg Not Happy About Facebook Photo Privacy Breach

Lovers of irony take note: Mark Zuckerberg's sister Randi has complained about a Facebook privacy breach.

Randi, the former head of marketing for Facebook and the executive producer of Bravo's reality series Silicon Valley, complained when Callie Schweitzer, director of marketing and projects at VoxMedia, posted a photo of Randi and her family (including Mark) reacting to the new Poke app. Randi originally circulated the photo on Facebook to her friends, but Schweitzer posted it publicly on Twitter:

'WTF?! I Wanted a White iPhone' Entitled Christmas Tweets Exposed Again

Every Christmas, people take to Twitter to talk about the gifts they received. Some folks -- intentionally or not -- come off as spoiled brats, complaining about getting the wrong gadget, the wrong color gadget, or not enough gadgets

And just like last year, comedy writer Jon Hendren (@fart) is retweeting entitled tweets, most of them being from people complaining they want an iPhone in a different color.

"My mom went directly against me. she asked me if I wanted the black or white iPad. I said white, of course. tell me why mine is black," tweeted one user. "I hate my white iPhone ... I just wanted to have my black one," tweeted another.