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Facebook’s share of the UK online usage has fallen by more than seven percentage points in the last year- raising concerns that it may have hit saturation point.The social network – which is expected to make an initial public offering (IPO) this year – still attracted significantly more online time than its nearest competitor, accounting for 52.6pc of all visits to social networks in December.

However, Facebook has lost substantial ground since the previous December, when it took a 58.5pc share of the UK’s social networking market, according to data from Experian Hitwise.

It slipped 1.3 percentage points last month alone.

The decline has raised concerns that Facebook is running out of steam in the markets where it is best established, whilst its competitors gain ground.

“Facebook’s growth is levelling out,” said James Murray, market research analyst at Experian. “Because Facebook had such a clear lead, it was always going to be difficult for Facebook to maintain [its position]. It has probably reached near enough its maximum growth.”

The figures will come as a blow to the company, which has been investing heavily in extending its reach and enticing users to click on its adverts, ahead of its long-awaited IPO. Facebook is expected to float with a possible valuation of  £65 billion ($100 billion)- the biggest technology IPO ever.

By contrast, YouTube, the user-generated video site owned by Google, grew its traffic by 45pc last year.

It accounted for just over a quarter of all UK visits to social networks in December, putting it 7.4 percentage points ahead of the previous year.

“We’re expecting video to be even more influential as a marketing channel, and marketers will have to adapt their strategies to incorporate a multi-channel approach in order to secure customers both on and offline,” said Mr Murray.

Twitter and Yahoo! Answers also made gains, but remained tiny by comparison, with 3pc and 2pc of all visits to social networks respectively.

Google’s social network, Google +, did not register in the top 10 most visited social networks at all.

However, Google grew its share of search engine usage market in the UK, edging up from a 91.3pc share of the market to 91.8pc.

Microsoft, its nearest competitor, was a minnow by comparison. Its suite of sites accountted for 3.6pc of all search engine visits in the UK in December, whilst Yahoo!’s popularity for searches fell nearly a percentage point to 2.5pc.

Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding Company has announced a £200 million investment in Twitter.The investment follows “several months of negotiations”, a company statement to the Saudi stock exchange said.

The prince, who is one of the world’s richest men, owns stakes in many well-known companies, including News Corporation.

He also has investments in a number of media groups in the Arab world.

“Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability in identifying suitable opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact,” Prince Alwaleed said.

Western business have been slower at adopting social networks such as Facebook and Twitter than their rivals in developing countries, according to a report by KPMG.The report found firms in China, India and Brazil were 20-30% more likely to use social media than companies in developed countries such as the UK.

KPMG surveyed 1,850 managers and 2,016 employees from 10 countries.

On average, it found that 70% of companies now use social media.

“The emerging markets seem to be quickly finding that social networks offer a relatively low-cost opportunity to leapfrog the competition in developed markets,” said Tudor Aw, KPMG’s head of technology, Europe.

“The rapid adoption of social media in emerging market countries may also be attributed to a lower dependence on ‘legacy systems’,” such as email, he added.

The KPMG report also found that many employees are being banned by their employers from using these networks- but that they often use them anyway.

One third of employees surveyed whose firm had blocked access used workarounds to get onto social network sites.

KPMG’s survey found that 98% managers at firms in China and 95% of managers in Brazil said they use social media at least several times a week, compared with 80% of managers in the UK.

Only 48% of UK companies use networks such as Twitter and Facebook to communicate with suppliers, clients and customers.

That compares with 72% in the US and 83% in China.

However, the report found that UK firms had fewer problems using the internet for social purposes compared with their rivals overseas.

Facebook has outlined plans to encourage users to share more of the media they consume – including music and movies with friends- as well as once again changing their users’ security options.Its founder Mark Zuckerberg also unveiled a dramatic redesign to the website, replacing user profiles with an audio visual timeline of their life.

The updates were revealed at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference.

A wave of new features in recent weeks have been welcomed by some users and caused annoyance to many others.

Facebook’s latest changes point to a desire to keep users engaged through new features, in the midst of rapid innovation from social networking rivals.

The site’s application platform has been redesigned to allow users to share what they are consuming on streaming music services such as Spotify, and the movie rental site Netflix.

Depending on privacy settings, users will be able to see what friends are doing – for example, playing a song – then listen-in themselves.

Mr Zuckerberg said he wanted to create, what he called, “real time serendipity”.

“Being able to click on someone’s music is a great experience, but knowing you helped a friend discover something new and they liked your taste in music, and that you now have that in common is awesome,” he added.

Facebook said that users would only be able to do as much on the site as its media partners allowed in each country, so free music sharing through streaming apps would only work where that service was already available outside Facebook.

Alongside the deeper integration of media content, the restyling of Facebook’s profile pages is also likely to prove a hot topic among users.

Identities will now be defined through a densely packed vertical timeline of major life events, made up of photos, videos and other items. The level of detail diminishes the further down a reader scrolls.

Profile pages had previously been limited to basic information along with a stream of every single item posted by a user.

Facebook stressed that all of its new offerings could be controlled by members using its recently simplified privacy controls.

In particular, it stressed that timeline items could be modified within the new “activity log”, allowing users to limit who can view certain events from their past.

The updates are expected to start appearing on users’ computers in coming weeks.

The millions of tweets posted on Twitter are being analysed by hedge fund managers to predict share price patterns.Traders have used an awareness of the population’s collective emotions to predict price movements for years.

However, experts found that the instant nature of Twitter meant that those emotions could be gauged more accurately.

Previously, it had been thought that a drop in the markets led to more negative feelings but it proved to be the other way around.

Analysts at Derwent Capital Markets in Mayfair, central London, have launched a £25m fund that makes its investments by evaluating whether people are generally happy, sad, anxious or tired, because they believe it will predict whether the market will move up or down.

The program was originally designed by Johan Bollen, professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University.

It takes a random 10% of all Twitter feeds and uses two methods to collate the data.

One compares positive with negative comments and the other uses a program designed by Google to define six moods calm, alert, sure, vital, kind and happy.

In a study published last October, Bollen used the social networking site to predict the direction of the movement of the Dow Jones in New York with 87.6% accuracy.

Mr Bollen’s algorithms flag up key emotive words when they appear in a certain order.

He told the Sunday Times: “We recorded the sentiment of the online community, but we couldn’t prove if it was correct. So we looked at the Dow Jones to see if there was a correlation. We believed that if the markets fell, then the mood of people on Twitter would fall.

“But we realised it was the other way round — that a drop in the mood or sentiment of the online community would precede a fall in the market. That was a eureka moment.  It meant we could predict the change in the market and that gives you a considerable edge.”

Paul Hawtin, Derwent’s founder and fund manager, has an exclusive contract with Bollen to use his technology.

Mr Hawtin told the newspaper: “Investors have always accepted that markets are driven by sentiment, mainly fear and greed. When people are greedy the markets go up and when they are fearful they go down.

“When sentiment dropped, and people tweeted about feeling tight on money, were worried or anxious, the markets would crash two or three days later.”

It is not the only such tool on the market.

WiseWindow, a data provider in California, boils down the online input of 100m social networking comments every month for its clients.

Twitter has said that the number of active users have passed the 100 million mark.The company’s chief executive told a news conference it was preparing to increase its business range by broadening the areas of its service where adverts appear.

But Dick Costolo also said he wanted the business to remain independent.

He said active users, who log on at least once a month, rose 82% this year. Half of these 100 million log on at least once a day.

Twitter raised £250 million in venture capital funding this summer.

Mr Costolo said: “We want to be able to remain independent, grow the business the way we want to, and not be beholden to public markets until we feel like we want to be.”

The company began showing adverts in limited areas of its service in 2010. But it is concerned that commercialisation sometimes alienates users of social media.

Mr Costolo said the results had exceeded Twitter’s expectations: “We now feel that based on the engagement rates we’re seeing… that we’re ready to expand this further.”

Twitter plans to allow adverts on its service known as promoted tweets.

Previously, promoted tweets, such as a message promoting a coffee chain, would only appear if the user already followed that particular company.

Mr Costolo said the business could work relying solely on advertising income: “It’s our firm belief that our advertising platform is the only revenue component that we need to have in the market in order to be a huge independent business.”

There are two inevitable privacy-related consequences of the current spate of riots and civil disorder across the UK. The first is that technology such as social media and mobile networks will feel the heat of condemnation for facilitating the chaos. The second is that there will be a renewed attempt to implement new surveillance and law enforcement measures.

The blame game has already started. Inevitably, it begins with parents.

They should be keeping their children under control – or at least keeping them at home. Parents should certainly be turning their children over to the police if looted items are discovered under the bed.

This, for the moment, is the cross-party line being held by police, government and Opposition. However, as with previous city-wide disturbances elsewhere – including Paris – this fantasy is unlikely to hold viability for long, and so the blame will need to become more specific.

The MP for Ealing – one of the affected trouble spots – told the BBC that the riots are being organised on social media sites, while Twitter is a conduit for disinformation intended to confuse police operations planning. “Something”, she declared, must be done.

For example, the Home Office’s Interception Modernisation Programme – rebranded as the “Communications Capabilities Development Programme” – will almost certainly be presented as a crucial tool for crime prevention.

That project aims to technologically infiltrate social networks on a mass scale but until recently it had been abandoned in the wake of the Coalition government’s commitment to place limits on the extent of State surveillance. The Home Office will at some point argue that the scheme should be escalated and expanded.

Private briefings to journalists by police and Home Office officials claim that ringleaders are using “clandestine” and more private communications methods such as BlackBerry Messaging – methods that officials argue are largely immune from open scrutiny by police. Law enforcement by this reasoning is being outflanked by systems that are intentionally designed for private communications.

Now technology commentators are being wheeled into television studios with a remarkably similar analysis: new technologies are gifts to criminals.

The consequent media reporting is confused. One BBC report today holds encryption responsible for the cloak of criminal secrecy offered by Blackberry.

This, despite a public statement by the company that it continues to cooperate fully with authorities.

Notably, no government MP has so far pinned blame for the riots on the decimation of police budgets and resources over the past eighteen months. Of equal note, few MP’s have so far pinned blame on failed fiscal policy, a generation of institutional racial abuse by police or the collapse of support for community and family support programmes.

Needless to say, no-one has dared question the quality of media reporting and its’ possible role in the chain of events. Remarkably, little has been said of the role of computer games, though that link will emerge (the acting Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police gave it away when he stated “this is not just a game”).

Where does all this leave us? Clearly new technologies are an easy target for blame, just as monarchs of centuries ago would blame coffee houses as the cause of social disorder and treason.

It remains a mystery why police continue to claim that they have been taken by surprise by the nature of these events. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of actions inspired through 4-Chan would understand that the ground rules changed years ago. To hold information networks liable would be a dangerously short sighted position.

If there was ever a need for an evidence based approach to a social problem, this is it. When Parliament meets to discuss the riots it should demand evidence to back up any claim of blame, and it should institute a rigorous process to ensure that any response is justified, lawful, viable and fair.
This article was origonally at: https://www.privacyinternational.org/blog/privacy-consequences-uk-riots

More than a third of teachers have been subject to online abuse, according to a survey conducted by Plymouth University.The majority of the abuse – 72% – came via pupils but over a quarter was initiated by parents.

The majority of teachers claiming online abuse were women.

Much of the abuse is via chat on social networks but the study also found that many were setting up Facebook groups specifically to abuse teachers.

In some cases, people posted videos of teachers in action on YouTube while others put abusive comments on ratemyteacher.com.

In total, 35% of teachers questioned said they had been the victim of some form of online abuse. Of these, 60% were women.

Perhaps surprisingly, 26% of the abuse came from parents.

“This parental abuse is something we haven’t come across before,” said Prof Andy Phippen, the author of the report. “Sometimes they are abusing other children at the school as well. Schools need to clamp down on it, or it will increase in prevalence,” he warned.

The cases of children suffering online bullying have been well-documented but the issue of teachers being abused is less well known.

But it is a growing problem. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said that it receives calls every week from teachers who believe they have been cyberbullied.

The study took testimony from more than 300 professionals in an anonymous internet-based survey and followed up with a handful of in-depth interviews.

Many of these revealed the human cost such cyberbullying was having.

The guidance service referred to is the Professional Online Safety Helpline, a new initiative from the Safer Internet Centre.

For Prof Phippen the phenomenon illustrates a shift in how parents and children address issues at school.

“It seems to a subset of the population the teacher is no longer viewed as someone who should be supported in developing their child’s education, but a person whom it is acceptable to abuse if they dislike what is happening in the classroom,” said Prof Phippen.

“Clearly some people are viewing social media as a bypass to the traditional routes (head teacher, board of governors) of discussing dissatisfaction with the school,” he added.

News Corporation has seen its quarterly profits fall 22% on the back of losses caused by the sale of the MySpace social media website.The company, whose UK subsidiary News International has been rocked by the phone hacking scandal, made £ 423 million ($683 million) net profit in the three months to 30 June – down from $875m last year.

News Corp sold MySpace in June for only £21.8 million having paid £362 million for it in 2005.

Chairman Rupert Murdoch said he had the backing of his board. “The board and I believe I should continue in my current role as chairman and CEO,” he said.

Mr Murdoch admitted the recent phone-hacking scandal that resulted in the company closing its News of the World newspaper had caused News Corporation difficulty, although its revenues rose 11% to £5.6 billion.

“Make no mistake, Chase Carey and I run this company as a team, and the strength of that partnership is reflected in our improved results,” he said.

“While it has been a good quarter from a financial point of view, our company has faced challenges in recent weeks relating to our London tabloid, News of the World.  We are acting decisively in the matter and will do whatever is necessary to prevent something like this from ever occurring again.”

The scandal also resulted in the departure of senior News Corp executive Les Hinton, who was chief executive of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones, and News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks.

And last month Mr Murdoch and his son James, News International chairman and News Corporation deputy chief operating officer, were forced to appear before MPs in London to answer questions about the scandal.

Investors will have to wait until News Corporation’s next quarterly results for more information on how the closure of News of the World has affected its profits, as the title’s final edition was on 10 July, 10 days after the three months covered in the company’s latest financial results.

However, News International only provides a very small proportion of News Corporation’s revenues and profits.

Its other main businesses include Hollywood film studio 20th Century Fox, US television network Fox Broadcasting and publisher Harper Collins. It also owns the Wall Street Journal.

And News Corporation’s 39% share of UK-based satellite broadcaster BSkyB proves highly lucrative, however, last month it was forced to abandon its bid to buy the remainder of BSkyB following the hacking scandal.

One in five children have been victims of cyber-bullying, which experts warn can cause more psychological damage than traditional forms of bullying.
Hate emails, threatening texts and humiliating images posted on social networking sites are twice as likely to be targeted at girls as boys, according to new research by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU).

Cyber-victims can suffer more because they feel unable to escape from online and mobile phone threats.

The hidden identities of cyber-bullies as well as the ability for messages and images to “go viral” within minutes, amplifies the threat, said Steve Walker, the study’s co-author and principle lecturer in child and adolescent mental health at ARU.

The potentially devastating consequences of cyber-bullying were highlighted by the suicide of Holly Grogan, 15, in 2009. The schoolgirl jumped to her death after enduring a torrent of abusive messages on her Facebook page.

The ARU survey of nearly 500 10- to 19-year-olds found that half of those bullied said their mental health had suffered as a result. More than a quarter had missed classes and more than a third stopped socialising outside school because they felt scared or embarrassed by the bullying. The online survey was followed by two focus groups which analysed in more depth the experiences and fears of 17 youngsters in London and Leeds.

Mr Walker said: “They cannot come home from school, shut their bedroom door and feel safe, because as soon as they switch on the computer or receive a text, the potential is there. It is much harder to avoid than traditional bullying because avoiding the internet and mobile phones just isn’t an option; these are as much part of a young person’s life as brushing their teeth.”

He added: “Anti-bullying campaigns and professionals working with young people need to be smarter and more in tune with technology so they pick it up, because cyber-bullying poses a serious public health problem.”

Research by Beatbullying found that cyber-victims were often targeted in person as well. However, Richard Piggin, Beatbullying’s deputy chief executive, said perpetrators tended to underestimate the impact of cyber-bullying because they could not see the distress they caused.

The charity’s cyber-mentor scheme has provided real-time peer support for 1.2 million young people since 2009. It wants the social networking industry to show greater responsibility and quickly take down abusive content.

The ARU study found that intimidating messages and images circulated on social networking sites such as Bebo were the most common forms of cyber-bullying, followed by texts.