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The simple act of posting a status update on Facebook can make you feel more connected, researchers have found — even if no one pays attention to your update.

The study, conducted by the Universitat Berlin, focused on the Facebook posts of 100 student volunteers at the University of Arizona over the course of a week.

The students were asked to do two things: fill out forms assessing their mental health and well-being throughout the week, and post to Facebook more than they normally would. A control group wrote exactly their regular amount of updates.

Now if you're expecting some sort of cathartic, joyful end to the experiment, you're going to be disappointed. The students posting more Facebook updates were still as cheerful or as depressed at the end of the week as they were at the beginning.

But they did feel less lonely than the control group, experiencing a shift in their sense of connectedness. Whether those posts got any Likes or comments didn't seem to matter. Simply posting more frequently reduced the students' alienation, regardless of how much real social interaction they'd had during the week.

Seeking to explain this phenomenon, the researchers compared posting quick Facebook updates to quick hits of food. "Similar to a snack temporarily reducing hunger until the next meal, social snacking may help tolerate the lack of 'real' social interaction for a certain amount of time," the Berlin team wrote in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

 

Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users' photographs without payment or notification, a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry.
The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.

Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world's largest stock photo agency. One irked Twitter user quipped that "Instagram is now the new iStockPhoto, except they won't have to pay you anything to use your images."
"It's asking people to agree to unspecified future commercial use of their photos," says Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That makes it challenging for someone to give informed consent to that deal."
That means that a hotel in Hawaii, for instance, could write a check to Facebook to license photos taken at its resort and use them on its Web site, in TV ads, in glossy brochures, and so on -- without paying any money to the Instagram user who took the photo. The language would include not only photos of picturesque sunsets on Waikiki, but also images of young children frolicking on the beach, a result that parents might not expect, and which could trigger state privacy laws.
Facebook did not respond to repeated queries from CNET this afternoon. We'll update the article if we receive a response.
Another policy pitfall: If Instagram users continue to upload photos after January 16, 2013, and subsequently delete their account after the deadline, they may have granted Facebook an irrevocable right to sell those images in perpetuity. There's no obvious language that says deleting an account terminates Facebook's rights, EFF's Opsahl said.
Facebook's new rights to sell Instagram users' photos come from two additions to its terms of use policy. One section deletes the current phrase "limited license" and, by inserting the words "transferable" and "sub-licensable," allows Facebook to license users' photos to any other organization.
A second section allows Facebook to charge money. It says that "a business or other entity may pay us to display your... photos... in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you." That language does not exist in the current terms of use.
Google's policy, by contrast, is far narrower and does not permit the company to sell photographs uploaded through Picasa or Google+. Its policy generally tracks the soon-to-be-replaced Instagram policy by saying: "The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our services." Yahoo's policies service for Flickr are similar, saying the company can use the images "solely for the purpose for which such content was submitted or made available."
Reginald Braithwaite, an author and software developer, posted a tongue-in-cheek "translation" of the new Instagram policy today: "You are not our customers, you are the cattle we drive to market and auction off to the highest bidder. Enjoy your feed and keep producing the milk."
One Instagram user dubbed the policy change "Instagram's suicide note." The PopPhoto.com photography site summarized the situation by saying: "The service itself is still a fun one, but that's a lot of red marks that have shown up over the past couple weeks. Many shooters -- even the casual ones -- probably aren't that excited to have a giant corporation out there selling their photos without being paid or even notified about it."

As many brands have come to realize, Facebook promotions are a great way to increase engagement, fan counts, and (if done correctly) positive sentiment. Creating these promotions has become relatively simple, but ensuring that they are successful can be more of a challenge. If you are going to run a Facebook promotion, it is important to have an idea of what success looks like and how to achieve it.

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.

The Midnight Delivery service, which you can set up here, is part of "Facebook stories," a relatively new magazine-like area of the site the company started back in August.

As competition between the two ramps up, Foursquare has announced that it will expand recommendations to include suggestions made by users’ Facebook friends who have also signed up for the location-based discovery service. The move means that if you have connected your Facebook and Foursquare accounts, your Facebook contacts’ public activity on Foursquare will influence the recommendations you see in Explore, even if you aren’t connected to them on the app.

Foursquare says that this will allow it to provide “better personalized insights.” It made sure to add, however, that check-ins will still only be shared with your friends who are also on the app and will not be posted to Facebook without permission.

Facebook began rolling out new privacy controls Wednesday morning while also taking away your option to hide from its search engine.

Facebook and Apple deepened their alliance today, as Facebook Gifts is starting to sell iTunes digital gift certificates. Upon purchase, Facebook users can suggest what music, video, or apps their friends should spend their $10, $15, $25, or $50 credit on. By adding one of the world’s most popular presents to its Gifts store, Facebook Gifts could boost sales and split the 30% margins with Apple.

What the actual revenue split is remains a secret. We do know there’s no shipping costs for either partner to pay for, and Apple typically taxes content and app creators a 30% to be sold in iTunes.

This is the latest move tying Facebook and Apple together after the social network was baked into iOS 6, and Facebook sharing buttons and social context (friends’ faces next to things they bought) were added to iTunes. If today’s integration is a success, it could create a virtuous loop where Facebookers buy iTunes credits for friends, who buy media or apps and share news of their purchases back to Facebook.

On Thursday afternoon, Facebook confirmed that a "coordinated spam attack" has been sending a torrent of hardcore porn and gore into Facebook users' news feeds. It's not pretty. Scattered reports say that images of everything from besitaliality to graphic violence and dead babies to Justin Bieber have been taking over entire feeds for the past two days. Facebook says it's managed to contain the damage. Next, the company plans on crushing the hackers who caused it in court.

Tech billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he is fed up with Facebook and will take his business elsewhere. He's sick of getting hit with huge fees to send messages to his team's fans and followers.

Two weeks ago Cuban tweeted out a screen grab of an offer he'd received from Facebook. The social network wanted to charge him $3,000 to reach 1 million people. Along with the screen grab, Cuban wrote, "FB is blowing it? This is the first step. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new MySpace as primary site."