Turkey’s Social Gaming Grows as Country Moves Online
Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) — Bloomberg’s Lara Setrakian reports on Turkey’s social-gaming and Internet retailing industries. (Source: Bloomberg) (Bloomberg)
via Turkey’s Social Gaming Grows as Country Moves Online – The Washington Post.
A group of Muslim businessmen unveiled plans in Turkey on Thursday for a Facebook-style social networking site with “healthy values” for a young, Islamic audience. SalamWorld.com, which will make its internet debut next year, “will seek to unify the youth in a common vision and the
healthy values of Islam while attempting to not diffuse any unhealthy information,” said Akhmed Azimov, the initiative’s vice-president.
Based in Istanbul, with offices in Moscow and Cairo and coordinators in 30 countries, the site hopes to attract 50 million users within three years, Azimov told about 150 journalists from Muslim countries at the company’s luxurious Istanbul offices.
“The heart of the project is to create a network without any content that is prohibited by religion,” said Azimov, a Dagestan native. “To achieve this, we will have a big team of moderators and there will be filters.
“We also count on users to moderate themselves and to filter the contents.”
Azimov declined to discuss funding details but said “there’s no problem with that,” adding the investors were a group of businessmen from the Muslim world.
Beyond user-generated content, the site will offer services such as theological consultations and city guides that list mosque locations and halal food stores. “We’re going to try to create an online encyclopedia, a sort of Islamic Wikipedia,” Azimov said.
via Coming soon: ‘Facebook’ for Muslims – Hindustan Times.
Photographed by AFP
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A new, Islamic social networking website is set to launch in Istanbul, Turkey. It is funded by prominent Muslim businessmen, according to Hurriyet Daily News, a Turkish newspaper.
“No politics, no bans, no limits,” reads the motto of the website, which the newspaper says will be streamed in 15 languages.
Salam World is owned by Russians and Turks who plan to invest US$15 million to open branches in 16 countries with large Muslim populations, according to asiancorrespondent.com, an Indonesian tech-blog, which revealed that the new website will have an office in Indonesia.
According to Hurriyet, SalamWorld will also open branches in Cairo, London, Moscow, Dubai and New York.
SalamWorld (Arabic for ‘”hello world”) is not the first attempt to establish an Islamic website that would compete with social networking giant Facebook.
In 2010, a group of Pakistanis established millatfacebook.com. The initiative came in response to an offending Facebook page that had enraged Muslim users by running a competition for cartoons mocking Prophet Mohamed. The page prompted Pakistani authorities to temporarily block access to website in the country.
via Islamic social networking site to launch in Istanbul | Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today’s News from Egypt.
Turkey compiles list of 174 Israelis, topped by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who were directly or indirectly involved in 2010 raid on Gaza-bound ship. Intelligence officials used social networks to track down participants, Sabah newspaper reports
Turkish intelligence officials have submitted to the state prosecution a list of 174 Israelis, mostly soldiers, who were involved in the 2010 raid on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara ship, the Turkish newspaper Sabah reported Monday.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tops the list as the “primary responsible party.”
According to the report, the Israelis were identified from photographs and various media sources.
“Almost all of the Israeli soldiers who killed nine Turkish citizens and injured 30 others have been identified,” the report claimed.
It was stated that Israel’s government has not responded to the Turkish Justice Ministry’s demand to release a list of the individuals who took part in the operation, prompting the intelligence officials to pour over records of the raid. Facebook and Twitter were used later in the hunt for information.
The fact-finding team examined the names of the commandos ofShayetet 13 – the Navy unit that took over the Gaza-bound vessel – and matched them up with the numerous photos used in the media.
Furthermore, the officials reviewed correspondence written by soldiers whom they believed took part in the raid in order to confirm their participation. Names submitted by the IHHmovement, which organized the flotilla, were used in the search as well.
According to the report, the Turkish prosecution intends to request the Israeli authorities to verify whether the people on the list, which includes 140 photos of 174 Israelis who directly or indirectly participated in the raid, were indeed ivolved.
Officials who allegedly contributed to the decision and issued the order to stop the Mavi Marmara, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, made it to the top of the list as well.
“All of the Israeli Cabinet ministers were responsible for the order,” the report read.
The list also includes former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, former Israel Navy Commander Eliezer Marom, former Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin and a variety of other high- and low-ranking officers. Moreover, it includes 10 photographs of soldiers who are yet to be identified.
Ynetnews
By Emma Barnett, Digital Media Editor
At f8, Facebook’s annual developers conference in San Francisco, an increasingly polished and media savvy Zuckerberg took to stage to explain the site’s latest makeover – after a little aside in which he told the crowd that the site had managed to attract half a billion users in a single day.
After the cheers and whooping, which have become customary at these American live-streamed tech bonanzas, Zuckerberg introduced the ‘Timeline’.
The concept of Timeline, is that users put their entire lives on Facebook, organized by days, months and years. And then they can fill in the blanks – right back to their births.
Scan in baby pictures, upload old home movies, load in maps to chart memorable journeys – Facebook wants everyone’s life story loaded into its system.
Facebook members can edit the ‘Timeline’, erasing or adding chapters as they go. Boyfriends can be deleted and new ones added – it’s your life and therefore your story.
And there are some lovely additions – such as the large background photo behind the profile picture – which makes each user’s page look more like a personalized website, rather than a subsection of Facebook.
Interestingly Timeline looks a little like the Flipboard, the social media magazine iPad app, but instead of aggregating and displaying media content beautifully, it shows off each user’s personal content.
Then came the announcement of media and content arriving onto Facebook. Partnerships with the likes of Spotify, The Washington Post and Netflix finally take Facebook into a world of content. Until now the users have had to bring the content to Facebook and after that, they have had to leave the site to see the material or listen to the song.
Now this ‘new breed of content apps’ will all appear in the Facebook News Feed and be watched, listened to or read, without leaving the site.
Facebook has just moved one step closer to becoming a web within the web – and certainly even nearer to becoming the social platform of the whole web – in spite of Google’s best efforts with Google+.
But what will be interesting to watch is whether people really do engage with their Timelines, filling in their past and charting their future through the various filters on offer.
Will fears about privacy and what is happening to our data stop users from taking these extra steps? Or has Zuckerberg created another form of behaviour, digitally scrapbooking our whole lives, that people didn’t yet know they would want to do until Facebook suggested it?
Certainly the intensely private Zuckerberg was practicing what he preached last night – by showing everyone his Timeline – including a photo of him and his girlfriend, Priscilla, on their first road trip.
However, despite all the changes, there has been very little noise about how the site’s advertising will alter to fit in around the new app-heavy News Feed and beautiful Timeline profiles.
A Facebook spokesman said there was nothing new to announce around the commercial side of the business – but a clear benefit of getting more and more of people’s data, going right back to their births, is exploiting for commercial gain when selling advertising solutions.
Nate Elliott, principal analyst at Forrester Research, still doesn’t think Facebook has this part of its strategy sorted.
“Facebook needs to focus on becoming useful to people who aren’t on Facebook.com – by adding social relevance and connections to the sites where all two billion global internet users spend time. Getting traffic to Facebook.com and monetizing that traffic with a self-serving advertising platform is pretty small thinking.
“The big thinking has to be about using their data to make the web richer to users on other sites, and monetizing that data in other ways other than simple little on-site ads.”
Facebook wants to host everyone’s life story, from start to finish, mixed with the web’s best content. Will Facebook’s seven hundred and fifty million users join in?
www.telegraph.co.uk, 23 Sep 2011
As Facebook continues to hire current and former White House employees to enhance its lobby in state structures, concerns over the privacy policies and security practices of the world’s largest social networking site are on the rise.
The man behind the US $750 million site, Mark Zuckerberg, appears to be hatching a fresh scheme to establish reliable links with both the Congress and the White House, dropping any pretence of party preferences.
A whole team of advisors from Republican and Democrat camps have joined the ranks of Zuckerberg’s army ready to push, pull and protect the company’s interests at any given level of the American bureaucratic hierarchy.
At first, hirings of former top civil servants were few and far between, occurring only about once a year. This was the deal back in September 2008 when Ted Ulloyt, a George W. Bush loyalist, was appointed to vice president and general counsel, reports The Washington Post.
Two years later in June 2010, Marne Levine, a member of President Barack Obama’s staff, was hired to guide the social network’s policy issues from Washington.
The current year has been seen a remarkable number of prominent government figures entering the Facebook corporation.
In May 2011, Facebook called a former aide to President George W. Bush – the Republican Joel Kaplan – to head its Washington office.
In June this year, a former spokesman for President Bill Clinton’s administration, Joe Lockhart, was recruited to head Facebook’s communications team.
President Obama’s special assistant for legislative affairs (who was also Vice President Biden’s former deputy chief of staff) Louisa Terrel is now to define Facebook’s public policy, a job she once did for Yahoo.
Sheryl Sandberg, who used to work in the Treasury Department under Barack Obama’s Economic Adviser Lawrence Summers, is now employed as Faceboook’s chief operating officer.
A new senior policy adviser and director of privacy, Erin Egan, will come to Facebook in October. She is currently co-chair at Covington & Burling’s global privacy and data security, a company ranked as being in the top ten for its privacy practices.
Only last week, Zuckerberg introduced President Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, to Facebook’s board.
All these people are to ensure that Facebook remains the industry leader, obsessed with the data security and privacy safety of its hundreds of millions of clients.
At the same time, to an unbiased observer, the processes going on in the internet technology giant cannot but resemble putting a highly-successful company under full governmental control.
Considering the unprecedented prospects the project opens in the field of global data collection, it appears only natural that the American government should promote its top people to key positions of responsibility with regard to Facebook’s data security.
But RT guest Steve Rambam, founder and CEO of Pallorium Inc., an international online investigative service, has stated openly that companies like Facebook, Google or MySpace are “aggregating data on each of us bit by bit and before you know it, your entire life is on a disk.”
In Europe, Facebook’s position appears somewhat shaky after it emerged that it had been used to organize some of the violence that erupted in London at the beginning of August.
Despite active lobbying – the company hired former MEP Erika Mann as spokesperson for all EU institutions – the American giant is to appear before a British Home Affairs Select Committee on “policing large-scale disorder.”
Facebook will not be alone: Twitter and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion will stand alongside it to face the music over riots in the UK and the role these three technology companies played in the disorder, allegedly providing rioters with the means to organize and plan choreographed disorder and looting.
But as predicted in August, the rioters’ trust in BlackBerry’s encrypted messaging has already backfired. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion appears to be fully co-operating with British detectives investigating the disorder and there is little doubt that Facebook and Twitter will follow suit.
www.rt.com, 14 September, 2011
