American Idol Adding Online Voting Via Facebook

Will you accept American Idol‘s friend request?

The Fox hit will soon announce that it’s adding online voting for the first time.

Here are the details: Users will be able to use their Facebook accounts to reach a dedicated Idol voting page that will include all the current contestants. Each fan will be able to vote 50 times during a telecast’s voting period. Viewers will still be able to vote via text messaging and toll-free phone calls as well.

The Idol plans have been in the works for awhile, though Fox hasn’t commented. Executive producer Nigel Lythgoe leaked plans to introduce a form of online voting earlier this week, followed by somebody leaking plans to introduce Facebook voting for next fall’s The X Factor.
Idol creator Simon Fuller has been pushing for the show to embrace online voting as part of its widespread overhaul of season 10. With Idol still dominating in the ratings and viewers embracing Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez as judges, the industry consensus seems to be that the show has managed to pull off something that many thought impossible — soldiering on successfully in the wake of Cowell’s departure.

This latest change, online voting, is expected to go into effect during the performance show on Tuesday, March 1th.

Facebook Cofounder Engaged to Boyfriend

Chris Hughes, cofounder of Facebook plans to marry longtime boyfriend Sean Eldridge, political director for Freedom To Marry, reports New York Post.

The Post reports Eldridge announced his engagement to Hughes at the New York City reception in Support of Freedom To Marry at the couple's SoHo loft before guests that included City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

"This is very timely for Chris and I to have you here tonight to celebrate marriage and work on marriage," Eldridge said. "We got engaged two weeks ago, so there is a real sense of urgency."

The two men haven't set a date, but Eldridge says they'll try to wait until gay marriage is legal in New York."As you know, we can't get married in New York, so there is more of an urgency to approve gay marriage, so we can get married here," Eldridge said. "We're going to get married in the next year or two for sure. We're hoping as soon as possible."

Hughes is now the founder and director of Jumo.com.

Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga and More Staging Digital Deaths for a Cause

Don't worry, Kim Kardashian is not really dead. But starting Wednesday, she won't be quite as lively on social media.

Kardashian, 30, is joining sister Khloe, Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Alicia Keys and other stars in signing off Facebook and Twitter beginning Wednesday, which is World AIDS Day, to draw attention to the disease.

The campaign, called Digital Life Sacrifice, includes ads that show Kardashian and others lying in coffins to symbolize their digital deaths. They will sign back on when the Keep a Child Alive charity – which Keys has been closely involved with – raises $1 million.

Other celebrities joining the campaign include Jennifer Hudson, Ryan Seacrest, Elijah Wood, Serena Williams and Keys's husband, Swizz Beatz.

Keep a Child Alive will accept donations via text message and bar-code technology embedded in the ads. The charity raises money for families affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India.

"We're trying to sort of make the remark: Why do we care so much about the death of one celebrity as opposed to millions and millions of people dying in the place that we're all from?" says Leigh Blake, co-founder of Keep a Child Alive. "It's about love and respect and human dignity."

Readers Choose Vin Diesel People's Sexiest Man Alive on Facebook

You like Vin Diesel. You really, really "Like" him.

The actor, 43, demolished the competition in People's first-ever Sexiest Man Alive on Facebook poll, earning 56 percent of the vote in a five-way race, with lots of help from his 18 million Facebook fans.

So, now Vin can brag that he's not just an attractive guy – he's the hottest man in social media.

Diesel vanquished four other guys who loom large on the world's biggest social network: most notably, Jersey Shore's Paul "Pauly D" DelVecchio, whose own grassroots campaigning made him the runner-up, with 28 percent of the vote.

Enrique Iglesias was third with 12 percent. Chad Ochocinco and Old Spice guy Isaiah Mustafa rounded out the pack with 2 percent each.

Gay Couples Wed on Zynga's Frontierville

The CEO of the online gaming company behind Facebook favorites like Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Frontierville said there are 650,000 same-sex marriages between Frontierville users internationally.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus touted recent successes by his expanding empire of 1,300 employees and 320 million overall users at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Speaking about the high number of gay and lesbian couples registered on Frontierville alone, he said, "That’s amazing, that’s probably more than any country in the whole world,” according to Tech Crunch.

The 2000 U.S. Census shows 594,391 gay and lesbian couples living together in the United States, but the census did not signify whether those couples were married, in domestic partnerships, or in civil unions.

Soap Star Thom Bierdz gets Recognized in the Most Unlikely Places

Thom Bierdz, a talented actor, artist and author returned to Young and the Restless last year after a 20 year absence not only from the soap, but from acting.

His presumed dead character of Phillip Chancellor III resurfaced with a storyline that mirrored Tom’s life in one way: he was openly gay. Phillip went off to Australia but here’s hoping he will return to Genoa City soon!

Anyway, Tom’s return to the soap has made for some unusual encounters like the one he shared on Facebook yesterday:

It’s been ages since anyone recognized me in the grocery store, but everytime i get tested at the clinic for HIV, all the workers (even in the mobile units) ask me questions from “how many partners have you had in the past 6 months?”, “what kind of sex do you have?,” and then, “is phillip coming back to the young and the restless?” talk about feeling exposed LOL after another HIV negative result last night, I treated myself to french fries.

Betty White's a Hit on Saturday Night Live

Betty White fans have another reason to appreciate Facebook. Not only did it provide the platform to petition for the TV icon to host Saturday Night Live, it became a hilarious punch line in her opening monologue.

"When I first heard about the campaign to get me to host Saturday Night Live, I didn't know what Facebook was," White said. "And now that I do know what it is, I have to say it sounds like a huge waste of time."

The jokes continued – "When I was young we didn't have Facebook, we had phone book," she said, "but you wouldn't waste an afternoon with it" – but White's Facebook fans can rest assured their online effort wasn't a waste. In fact, the actress, who appeared in every skit, is getting rave reviews.

"All it took to reinvigorate a 35-year-old comedy show was the presence of an 88-year-old woman," writes Dave Itzoff of the New York Times. "The only real disappointment of the night was when the clock struck 1 a.m. and Ms. White and the cast had to step on stage to wave their goodbyes."

Whether singing her muffins' praises on NPR or donning a black ski mask for a hardcore version of The Golden Girls theme song, White shined on a night when SNL welcomed back many of its female heavy hitters, including Molly Shannon, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch and Ana Gasteyer.

"Her comic delivery is still formidable," says the Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan. "The show would be smart to extend an open invitation to White to return as host any time, but given how in demand she is, who knows if she'd be able to make it back?"

And even musical guest Jay-Z seemed in awe of White. After his second song, "Young Forever," he dedicated the performance to "the most incredible Betty White."

Gay Men Can Be Outed by Their Facebook Profiles

Gay men can be outed by looking at their Facebook friends, a study has found.

According to researchers, the information can be found despite discretion and privacy settings.

Although many people set their profiles to private, they usually do not hide their friend lists and researchers say it is their friends' profiles which can reveal personal data such as sexuality.

The small study was carried out by students Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They developed software which looked at the gender and sexuality of a person's Facebook friends. It then used statistical analysis to make a prediction of someone's sexuality.

Although Jernigan and Mistree could not ascertain the sexuality of all the men they surveyed, the program gave 100 per cent correct results for a small control group.

However, it did not work on lesbians or bisexual people of either gender.

The study has not been published in any academic journal but has raised interesting questions about privacy and discretion on the web.

Kevin Bankston, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit digital rights group, told the Boston Globe: “Even if you don’t affirmatively post revealing information, simply publishing your friends’ list may reveal sensitive information about you, or it may lead people to make assumptions about you that are incorrect.

“Certainly if most or many of your friends are of a particular religious or political or sexual category, others may conclude you are part of the same category – even if you haven’t said so yourself.”

Social Networking Improves Productivity at Work

Sneaking in some Facebooking time at the office? Checking the tweets on Twitter in-between meetings? Don’t worry, it’s good for your work! Really.

A new study from the University of Melbourne revealed people who use the ‘workplace Internet for leisure browsing’ or WILB are 9 percent more productive than employees who do not.

Researchers believe the recreational WILB-ing actually refreshes employees and rejuvenates their concentration.

"Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos, using social networking sites or shopping online under the pretence that it costs millions in lost productivity," said a University Researcher. "That's not always the case."

But, before you friend your boss and let him see the dozens of updates to your feed as you comment your work day away, note there is a limit on productive WILB time.

The study found the improved productivity was greatest for people who spend less than 20 percent of their total time in the office engaging in WILB.

So, surf in moderation. Researchers cautioned, "those who behave with Internet addiction tendencies will have a lower productivity than those without.”

Facebook Doesn’t Own Your Info/Pictures

Yesterday, there was an outcry from thousands when Facebook changed its terms of service claiming ownership of anything uploaded to the social network.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has gone on the record to say that users will always own and control their information, not Facebook.

“Our philosophy that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant.” he wrote. “A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you. Over time we will continue to clarify our positions and make the terms simpler.”

A Facebook rep continues,” We are not claiming and have never claimed ownership of material that users upload. The new Terms were clarified to be more consistent with the behavior of the site. That is, if you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc…), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend). Furthermore, it is important to note that this license is made subject to the user’s privacy settings. So any limitations that a user puts on display of the relevant content (e.g. To specific friends) are respected by Facebook. Also, the license only allows us to use the info ‘in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.’ Users generally expect and understand this behavior as it has been a common practice for web services since the advent of webmail. For example, if you send a message to a friend on a webmail service, that service will not delete that message from your friend’s inbox if you delete your account.”

Facebook Turns 5!

Every generation that logs on thinks they invented the Internet. With Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg may actually have done it. His social network turned five yesterday, and in that time, it has actually changed the world.

Not necessarily for the better, and certainly not in ways Zuckerberg originally expected or intended. The party line on Facebook is that the site is merely a reflection of the real world, not a substitute for it.

Facebook was born on the campus of Harvard University, and restricted to Zuckerberg's fellow students there. Every user knew at least that much about anyone they encountered. Even as it spread to other Ivy League schools, then high schools and offices, and then the entire Internet, Facebook maintained that feeling of a close-knit community, where no one's a stranger.
Fakesters are possible, but not common. Spam, that plague of most communications media which reach critical mass, is pleasantly rare. Facebook has more than 150 million users. And yet one's News Feed, the running summary of friends' activity on the site and on other Facebook-connected websites, still reads like a small-town newspaper. All told, users spend more than 3 billion minutes a day on the site.

The one problem: Facebook lacks a financial engine that's growing quickly enough to match its user base. According to insiders' estimates, every 1 million users add $1 million in capital costs, as the company stacks up servers in datacenters to fulfill demand. Five years after their founding, the revenue streams of Yahoo, Amazon.com, Google, and eBay were firmly established. While Facebook is selling actual ads, its formats are ever-changing and its targeting inchoate. But that's the least of Zuckerberg's worries, really. Wherever an audience gathers, advertisers find a way of paying to be in front of it. What he should be more worried about it: Making sure Facebook remains firmly tied to the real world, rather than a cyberspace unto itself.

The result is addictive — sharing that turns to oversharing, conversations that turn in on themselves, and Ouroboros-like parade of online activity that ends up being more compelling than anything happening in the real world. For some vulnerable minds with not much to report back on from the real world, Facebook turns into a more entertaining pastime than actually going out and living.

Another danger: Just as 24-hour cable channels transformed the news cycle, Facebook's 24/7 reportage on your friends' moods could transmit groupthink faster than ever, and in so doing, endanger the world economy, by spreading panic more efficiently than ever before. Computers have previously accelerated the process of computation. How will things look when society itself is what they speed up?

As Facebook's algorithm rains down scientifically precise stimuli, we are the rats in Zuckerberg's maze. And we grow ever more eager for the pellets of computerized friendship he delivers. Who knows where this experiment will end?