social networks

See where Tim Cook sits on list of employees’ fave CEOs

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A survey ranked Tim Cook fourth most-popular CEO, according to employees.
A survey ranked Tim Cook fourth most-popular CEO, according to employees.
Image: Canva

Apple CEO Tim Cook place fourth on a list ranking CEOs by popularity according to employees. Blind Workplace Insights released it this week.

Tech, e-commerce and finance leaders dominated the high end of the Blind professional social network’s list. But tech firms were no stranger to the low end, either.

Today in Apple history: Ping social network fails to strike a chord

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Ping iTunes
Apple's music social network starts strong but fails fast.
Photo: Apple

September 1: Today in Apple history: Apple's Ping social network fails to strike a chord September 1, 2010: Apple’s new music-focused social network, Ping, ships as part of iTunes 10. Apple says the service will let users discover new music and more easily follow their favorite artists.

Ping racks up 1 million signups in the first 48 hours. Nevertheless, Apple’s social network is doomed from the start.

4 tips for making life easier on Mastodon

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Quit Twitter in style
Moving to Mastodon is made easier with these top tips.
Image: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

I have four top tips for Mastodon users after spending a few months on the hot new social media platform. There’s a healthy community of Apple writers, developers, creators and fans — even Phil Schiller — who have all jumped ship from Twitter.

I’ve previously written a detailed guide to getting started. I’ll start with some brief advice on picking an instance and move on to the pro tips I’ve picked up.

Micro.blog now lets you post videos

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This video is going to look great on your Micro.blog.
This video is going to look great on your Micro.blog.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

If you’re sick of YouTube’s ever-shifting terms, or you don’t like how lame Instagram has become, and you just want somewhere to post your videos without interference, then why not post them on your own microblog? Thanks to an update to Micro.blog, you can now do just that, as easily as posting a photo.

Riffr is like getting voicemails from strangers

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Riffr has some good audio tools built in.V
Riffr has some good audio tools built in.
Photo: Cult of Mac

Riffr is yet another social network, this one based around audio snippets. And maybe it’ll actually take off, despite its awful design. It’s as if the makers took the confusion that is late-stage Instagram as a starting point, and then made things worse from there.

That said, Riffr could be quite useful.

How to delete all your tweets

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Even this little birdy is deleting his tweets.
Even this little birdy is deleting his tweets.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Twitter is like that part of town where City Hall just lets anyone open up a bar or a restaurant. It’s lively, and it’s where everyone hangs out, but you certainly don’t want to take the wrong side street late at night. Maybe you’re ready to leave Twitter, thanks to its continued censorship of unknown individuals and simultaneous encouragement of hate speech and lies by more famous people and organizations.

If you’re serious about ditching Twitter, then you probably want to delete your tweets. Twitter feeds off “engagement.” If you delete your tweets, you leave nothing to engage with (although their “content” has probably been mined clean already). If you delete your tweets, and change your Twitter bio to say you’ve quit, this sends a stronger message than just slipping out the side door. It also helps stop someone else from pretending to be you.

Facebook videos are about to get extremely intelligent

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Facebook
Automatic tagging is coming to video.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Facebook is upping its game with video. Soon, Facebook will be able to automatically identify friends in videos and tag them. Better yet, it’ll store this information so when you want to find that moment again, you could find the video by searching for your friend’s name and then jump straight to when they appear in frame.

Now On iPhone, Material Wants To Be The App You Replace Flipboard With

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Lookout, Flipboard, Material is coming for you.
Lookout, Flipboard. Material is coming for you.

Developer Inq Mobile has just announced a new version of a content discovery app, Material, now available for iOS users as well as those on Android. It’s a free app that aims to sort through millions of sites to find stuff you’ve already showed an interest in, via Twitter and Facebook.

Material grabs all of the sites you’ve linked to, shared, and re-tweeted to deliver a personalized, magazine-style collection of the online ephemera that you’re already checking out, but all in one place.

The app has been on Android for a while now, and has just come to iOS with a newly re-designed app for the iPhone, dropping updates twice a day to your chosen device.

Celly Brings DIY Social Networking to iOS With Free App

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Celly for DIY Social Networks

The more and more we all use social network tools like Facebook and Twitter, the more we can see the benefit of using them in smaller, more unique groups. How great would it be to have a social network that is only open to members of a school project, a church group, or a hot rod club? Instead of going through the hassle of building a Facebook group, figuring out privacy and membership, you could just connect folks together easily and quickly and be done with it.

Well, the folks at Celly seem to have thought of that already, offering a build your own social network that you can create and manage while you’re on the go.

Twitter Releases Vine iPhone App For Sharing Short Videos

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Vine logo

Twitter has released a new iPhone app in the App Store, and it’s called Vine. According to Twitter, “Vine is the best way to see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way for your friends and family to see.”

6-second clips can be uploaded to Twitter from the app, and you can play them back right in embedded tweets on the web and in Twitter’s official mobile apps.

Multi-Service Contacts Aggregator, Brewster, Updates With Ability To Add iPhone Contacts

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New year, new contacts app?
New year, new contacts app?

iOS contact aggregation app, Brewster, updated today and added a feature that might make you wonder why it wasn’t there in the first place: the contacts on your iPhone itself. While Brewster already pulled contact info from your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, LinkedIn profile, Gmail account, and Foursquare contacts, this is the first time its connected directly to the native iPhone contacts you carry around with you every day.

New Pride App Makes Business Social Networks Easy And Fun To Use

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Pride's simple setup and ease of use make it an ideal social network for businesses
Pride's simple setup and ease of use make it an ideal social network for businesses

Many workplaces are looking at options for social collaboration. The idea is to harness the power of social networks as an internal communication and collaboration tool. While there are some powerful and full featured options in this space, a new iOS and Android app called Pride aims to provide the core benefits of social networks in a free service that’s extremely easy to set up, manage, and use. More importantly, Pride delivers a fun and playful experience that is likely to encourage employees to use it while delivering some very tangible business benefits.

Pride was created by mobile and social enterprise startup DoubleDutch, a company that delivers mobile CRM and event management solutions. The company’s approach is all about using mobile technology to engage with key partners – customers, clients, sales staff, event attendees, and pretty much anyone else involved in a business. That shows through in Pride as well as the companies other products.

iOS 6 Will Be Great For Local Businesses, Here’s Why [Opinion]

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iOS 6 offers huge potential for local businesses to attract and retain customers
iOS 6 offers huge potential for local businesses to attract and retain customers

 

If I had to pick on adjective for Apple’s upcoming iOS 6, it’d be “local” – Apple is integrating an immense range of local features and giving businesses amazing tools for attracting new customers. Regardless of whether you’re talking about a large chain like Starbucks or a family owned local business, Apple is offering virtually any customer-facing company an immense range of tools to attract and retain new customers.

Massive LinkedIn Security Breach Leads To 6.5 Million Stolen Passwords

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Massive data breach exposes 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords
Massive data breach exposes 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords

Professional social network giant LinkedIn has acknowledged that it is looking into a massive data breach. As a result of the breach as many as 6.5 million user accounts may have been compromised. Account data including login information and passwords have been leaked and posted to a Russian hacker site. Although LinkedIn hasn’t confirmed the breach or detailed which accounts might have been impacted, the fact that the company is acknowledging the potential threat and investigating it is a big cause for concern.

At this time, it’s better to err on the side of caution.

If you use LinkedIn, you should consider that your account data has been compromised and change your password immediately.

Flock’s New Social-Network Browser Finally Released For Mac

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For Mac users awash in social networking (and that’s like saying “for NASCAR drivers with the ability to make left turns”), today’s release of Flock‘s completely revamped browser — which, like its predecessor, is heavily integrated with social networking sites — should be exciting news.

It’s been a long wait for Mac users, as the browser completed its transformation from a Mozilla to a Chromium 7 skeleton. The new Flock arrived on Windows last summer, and Flock’s blog claimed an October release for the Mac version, with no word since then. But it’s here, it easily integrates major social networks right out of the box (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even LinkedIn) — and it’s fast.

We’ll take a closer look at Flock in our upcoming browser comparo. Stay tuned.