Enda Kenny makes the cover of TIME Magazine

The cover of Time Magazine which is usually saved for some of the most influential and successful people our our age has this week included Ireland’s Taoiseach/Prime Minister – Enda Kenny.
The green themed cover highlights the interview by Catherine Mayer with Enda Kenny in a feature titled “The Celtic Comeback”.

Enda Kenny Time Magazine

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First Check-in on Mars

So this is pretty cool… ‘Curiosity’ – Nasa’s Rover which is currently on Mars, checked-in on FourSquare today, making it the Mayor of Mars on FourSquare. Something tells us here at Digital Marketing Nerd that it’s unlikely that anyone will be ousting Curiosity as the Mayor for a very, very long time.

It’s also unlikely that when it checks in, it will receive tips and offers from nearby cafes unless some martians are looking to drive volume to their store.

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More Privacy Concerns for Facebook in Ireland

Following on from the post on digitalmarketingnerd.ie, more privacy issues have been raised amongst Facebook users- this time in Ireland. A number of Irish users have claimed that private messages from as far back as 2007 are showing up on their wall, and hence publicly visible.

Again, Facebook has denied these claims, stating that people are confusing what they used to post on eachother’s wall and what they exchanged via private chat. Again, this is fascinating from a consumer behaviour point of view- the way that we communicate on Facebook has changed so much over such a short period of time, that we don’t event recognise it anymore; or that we do recognise it but are absolutely convinced that this is not something that we would have put out in the public demesne.

We are much more careful on Facebook now; much more concerned with what people can see, but Facebook may have a problem if they can’t convince people that these messages have always been public because at the time, the user wasn’t as concerned about privacy.

 

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Why is Facebook making private messages public?

“Why is Facebook making private messages public?” is the question being asked by many Facebook users at the moment. You may have read somewhere in the past few days that your private chat messages from 2010 and before it are now on your timeline.

This would be dramatic; a huge scandal and would probably bring the company to its knees if it were to betray the hundreds of millions of users who have placed their trust in the platform.

The rumour is said to have started in France, where users reported that some of their private messages began to show up on their Timeline. Having such a huge audience, means that rumours like this can quickly spread and cause headaches for Facebook engineers and management.

The more likely explanation is that people don’t realise or remember that before the introduction of timeline, we communicated very differently on Facebook both in terms of tone and manner. Before Timeline, there was no ‘Like’ button on comments; we’d simply jump to our friend’s wall and post a comment which wouldn’t necessarily show up on our public feed. Therefore, the fascinating thing about this is that people are actually shocked about how they used to communicate publicly back then. In fact, they don’t even recognise this as something they would have put on in the public demesne.

So to all the people who are deleting Facebook profiles for fear of people reading your private messages- relax! They are not your private messages, they are the public messages that any of your friends could have seen for years.

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