“3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!”

He also tweeted, asking a follower a question:

“free this week for a quick gossip/prep before I go destroy America? x”

Upon arrival to the states, the two were detained for extensive questioning. Van Bryan was held in a cell with immigrant drug peddlers, while Bunting was detained in a separate cell. Van Bryan explained to authorities that the term “destroy” was British vernacular for “party”. The two were later released and sent home on a plane.

Both Bunting and Van Bryan feel U.S. officials took their seemingly innocent tweets too far. They say they were simply on holiday to America and just wanted to have some fun.

With this recent news, do you feel government has taken security too far or do you feel that you can never be too careful? Let us know in the comments.

Using email data collected from nearly 1.5 million non-distribution list emails from 1,052 managers of a “typical professional services company that offers various forms of consulting to services and clients,” Wuchty and Uzzi were able to distinguish that variables such as response time and even quick assessments of emails reflected self-reported ties of “real life” social networks. Further, the study demonstrates that, despite what curmudgeons may drone on and on about, electronic communication really hasn’t changed the way we interact with each other at all.

Of key importance is the understanding that e-communication mirrors patterns of face-to-face communication in regard to different types of relationships while the availability of electronic communication channels drastically reduced communication costs and extended our potential number of and reach to contacts, the email dynamics we observed suggests that fundamental patterns of friendship and professional connections continue to operation in their classical fashion. How these dynamics aggregate to change human dynamics is putatively dependent on the contextual basis of our findings.

Another telling observation to come from this research is that, similar to the study that Facebook conducted, email reveals approximately a similar degree of separation between participants in the study:

Pretty fascinating stuff, given all the recent decries that email is outdated or, worse, dead.

Everyone’s heard of the “Six Degrees of Separation,” or maybe its more pop-culture oriented cousin Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Both of those theories state that any two humans on the planet are separated by only a few jumps. For instance, I could somehow connect myself to some random girl in Siberia through six degrees, or six people between us. This would result in about seven jumps, or connections.

Or, as my Uncle likes to tell during the holidays, his friend’s cousin’s kid takes a karate class with a guy who worked on Goodfellas with Robert de Niro.

Apparently, things are a little different when you look at the Facebook community. The Facebook Data Team has an interesting post about the connections that Facebook’s 721 million+ active users have across the network.

First off, the study found that Facebook’s 721 million+ active users have over 69 billion friendships represented. The average amount of friends that any given person has on the site is 190.

Using an algorithm developed at the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano, it was determined that folks on Facebook are closer to one another than the “six degrees” of common thought:

We found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users: While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops). And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74.

So it’s highly possible that you can pick any random person on Facebook and there would only be 4 people between you guys.

And if that person is in the same country as you, there’s probably an even smaller degree of separation – 3 people (4 jumps).

It’s a small world of social media, after all.

The Pew study looked at the way Facebook and other social network (SNS) users compare to non-SNS users when it comes to friends and relationships. What they found was that SNS participants, especially Facebook users, tend to have more close friends, more overall relationship ties and tend to be more trusting of other human beings.

First of all, the typical assumption that people have hundreds and hundreds of random friends on Facebook – ones that they just friend online and have never actually met – is a myth. According to the Pew study, only 7% of an average person’s Facebook friends are total strangers. A whopping 89% of Facebook friends are people who the user has met more than once.

The average Facebooker has around 229 friends. This ends up being about 48% of their real life social network. And the truly interesting thing is that Facebook users not only have more friends than non-Facebook users, but they tend to have more close friends, or “discussion partners,” as Pew calls them.

Discussion partners are the closest of the close according to Pew. The people who you really talk to about stuff. Basically, when it hits the fan, these are the people you’re going to call. Non-internet users only report an average of 1.75 people who fit this bill. Internet users as a whole report 2.27 people. Facebook users report an even higher amount, at 2.45 people.

And who are people’s friends on Facebook? Overwhelmingly high school buddies, followed by college buddies.

The study also found that internet users and especially Facebook users are more trusting, responding positively to the statement “most people can be trusted.” This year 41% of people overall said that most people can be trusted. That is up from 32% back in 2009.

Only 27% of non-internet users agree with that statement. 46% on internet users do. Apparently Facebook makes you a more trusting individual, but not Twitter, LinkedIn or Myspace -

Also, when we control for demographic factors and types of technology use, we find that there is a significant relationship between the use of SNS and trust, but only for those who use Facebook – not other SNS platforms. A Facebook user who uses the service multiple times per day is 43% more likely than other internet users, or three times (3.07x) more likely than a non-internet user, to feel that “most people can be trusted.”

Social networking isn’t killing our relationships, on the contrary is looks like it is helping them. The “likelihood of an American experiencing a deficit in social support” or “being disengaged from their community” is “unlikely to be a result of how they use technology” according to the study. So if you’re looking to blame the decline of American social culture on Facebook, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

With View Non-Mutuals you can click on the Friends tab, select View Non-Mutuals and Twellow will show you people who do not follow you back. (Please note you must be logged into Twellow to use this service)

Now to see the other side of this, you’ll want to click on Followers and select View Non-Mutuals. Twellow now shows you people who follow you, but you do not follow them.

Lead Twellow developer, Matthew Daines (@iematthew), had the following to say about the new feature…

"The Non-Mutuals feature of Twellow really gives you, the Twellow user, a simple way to see not only those Twitter users who aren’t following back, but it also shows people following you that you can review and say, "Hey, this is a great profile! Why am I not following this person"? It’s really a tool to link up with those who best match your needs."

It’s user-friendly additions like this that make Twellow one of the best "Twitter Tools" on the Internet.

Facebook is offering a virtual gift product that revolves around credits that you toss to your ‘friends’ in lieu of simply liking something they do. Kind of a pay for performance model of friendship. Talk about taking relationships to a new low. For just $1 you can purchase 100 credits that you can give to your ‘friends’ when they do something you like. I don’t know about you but I think that throwing money at my ‘friends’ when they do something I like is not something I consider regularly. I guess my ‘friends’ would like it but it seems pretty ridiculous to me. It’s like treating your ‘friends’ like performing seals. When they honk the horn on the stage by the pool you can throw them a fish and a sincere “Nice job. Atta boy!”

Well, it’s no more ridiculous when done on Facebook. In a not so transparent play to generate some revenue it looks as if the folks at “the ‘book” are thinking that if just a small percentage of their 200 million users are empty headed enough to spend a buck a month to throw credits at their buddies then they can generate some dollars. As TechCrunch put it

And it’s far better than having to return to the capital markets to raise money at what’s likely to be an embarrassing large discount from that ridiculous $15 billion valuation that Microsoft gave them in 2007. Maybe if enough users buy credits that can never be redeemed back for cash they can stretch their runway a little farther.

From a business perspective these are the kind of ideas that makes one wonder if Facebook’s management hasn’t jumped the shark. There has to be another way to pry a dollar out of the pockets of their users. I don’t have one personally but you have to figure that if a few smart people sat in a room over lunch they can come up with something that doesn’t require giving your ‘friends’ the equivalent of an online tip for their efforts.

Hey, if you comment here I’ll give you some credit. Doesn’t that feel good?

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The new “Everyone” level is in addition to previous levels of “Only Friends,” “Friends of Friends” and “My Networks and Friends.” You still have the option to customize who can and can’t see your profile information, too, as well as selecting exactly what categories of profile information “Everyone” can see.

Facebook explains the benefits of this feature:

By changing your Profile setting to “Everyone”, anyone who finds you through a search on Facebook or sees a post or comment you make can now click on your content and view the elements of your profile you’ve opted to make open. While some special rules remain in place about who can see your profile if you are a minor, people generally won’t need to be friends with you or share a common network in order to view your content if you choose the new “Everyone” setting.

In the past, searching for friends you haven’t seen in a while or someone who has a common name may have been difficult. You may have only been able to see their search listing and a small thumbnail version of a photo, if that. With this change, people can use the “Everyone” option and make it easier for you to find and connect to all the people you know.

I’m pretty sure you still have to be logged in to be able to see someone’s profile set to “Everyone,” and the public search results listing setting they already have will remain the same.

Almost a year ago, less than half of Facebook users were willing to share their profile with current or prospective employers, but we all know our bosses (or potential bosses) are checking us out online these days. Perhaps this level of access is a good place to create a “sanitized” version of your FB profile—one without access to your pictures or status updates, perhaps only with stuff you’d put on your résumé. Or is that what LinkedIn is for?

Will you be changing your info to give “Everyone” access? If so, what will you let “Everyone” see—and what will you keep hidden?

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You wouldn’t blog about it, tweet it or write on your wall about it. Would you?

No such worries for a woman juror in Burnley, UK, who ran a poll on Facebook asking her friends to vote on whether they thought the accused were guilty or not.

[…] The woman posted details of the child abduction and sex assault case on the website. Then she told friends: “I don’t know which way to go, so I’m holding a poll.”

Jurors are forbidden from discussing details of cases even with their closest family members. The woman was dismissed after a tip-off to Burnley Crown Court, Lancs. The trial continued with 11 jurors. It was thought she did not use privacy settings, meaning the Facebook posts could be read by anyone.

Last night a legal source said the juror could have been charged with contempt of court — and the trial scrapped. The expert added: “It defies belief. She obviously has no grasp of how the judicial process works in this country. She had been asking her mates what they thought — and some people came back with guilty verdicts.”

Amazing but true according to The Sun and lots of mainstream media reports, via BrandRepublic.

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