Twitter links users to Apple music social network - Reuters

A Twitter page is displayed on an Apple iPhone in Los Angeles October 13, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Mario Anzuoni REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

SAN FRANCISCO | Thu Nov 11, 2010 12:53pm EST

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microblogging website Twitter said on Thursday it will link its service with Apple Inc's new music-oriented social network.

Apple announced the Ping social network in September. It works within Apple's iTunes music program and lets users follow artists and recommend songs to their chosen circle of friends.

Twitter said its more than 175 million registered users can now connect their accounts to Ping, allowing them to put song previews and links to buy music from the iTunes store directly in their messages, which are known as "tweets."

Twitter's deal comes after Apple failed to strike a Ping partnership with social networking leader Facebook, which has more than 500 million users.

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs told the All Things Digital blog in September that Apple had held talks with Facebook about a deal related to Ping, but the discussions did not produce an agreement.

Facebook declined to comment on Thursday.

Cupertino, California-based Apple's shares were down 88 cents at $317.15 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

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In Social Media Election, The GOP Capitalizes - NPR

Enlarge Associated Press

Jerry Tarkanian, center, who lost his primary bid to Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle, looks at voting returns with Party workers as the race is called for Angle's opponent Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at an election night party Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010, in Las Vegas.

Associated Press Jerry Tarkanian, center, who lost his primary bid to Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle, looks at voting returns with Party workers as the race is called for Angle's opponent Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at an election night party Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010, in Las Vegas.

NEW YORK November 3, 2010, 06:47 pm ET

In the final minutes of one of the most watched and fiercely contested races of Tuesday's midterm elections, the campaigns of both Sen. Harry Reid and the Republican challenger to his Nevada Senate seat, Sharron Angle, were working social media.

"Thirty-five minutes to go-every vote is needed!" read Angle's Facebook page shortly before polls closed. "You, your neighbor, your mother-in-law ... GET OUT & vote, NV!"

Reid, who was also exhorting his followers to relay his messages online, ultimately prevailed. But the postings showed that at the most crucial moments in the 2010 election, social media was in the thick of it.

For an entity that effectively didn't exist just years ago, social media has rapidly flourished as a political force.

"This is the election when it became more deeply embedded in the rhythms of campaigning," says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "It's not so much that as a single thing it influences people's votes but that it's now so inextricably a part of the political communication landscape."

The 2010 elections may also have been when Republicans truly embraced it. The change was evident at the finale, when House Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner tweeted congratulations to a litany of triumphant Republicans and fellow Twitter users.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin played an active role in the elections with posts on Facebook that were instant news; the 10 most popular political videos on YouTube were all Republican videos.

"There was much hand-wringing over whether the Internet was a fundamentally democratic or liberal platform for communication, versus a conservative one," says Steve Grove, the head of news and politics at YouTube. "We always felt like the reason that it was more used by Democrats was just they weren't the party in power, and parties not in power look for innovation when trying to communicate with voters in new ways."

The reverberations the Internet can have on an election cycle have been well-known at least since Howard Dean let out an unusual battle-cry during the 2004 presidential election. But 2010's election was the first where social media was virtually ubiquitous.

In 2008, Facebook had one-fifth the active members it now has. Twitter was nascent, its news value not yet realized. Location-sharing services such as Foursquare and Gowalla didn't exist or had just been created.

This year, most major candidates had a Facebook page. Election night results went directly to smart phones. And everything — the campaigns, the ads, the voting — was filtered through social media.

More than 12 million clicked Facebook's "I Voted" button on Tuesday, more than twice the 5.4 million from two years ago.

Asked if Facebook is contributing to a heightened awareness of elections, Adam Conner, associate manager for privacy and global public policy at Facebook, said that he'd "like to think that we are."

"It's important when the message comes from places like Facebook but I think it's really exciting when people's friends are telling them, `Hey, it's an election. Make sure you vote. Make sure you participate, it's important to me,'" says Conner.

Networks and news organizations sought to weave social media into their coverage. Reporters and TV anchors tweeted through the night. ABC partnered with Facebook, NBC posted video on Twitter and CBS worked with Google. The Washington Post was the first news organization to sponsor a "promoted trend" on Twitter with the hash tag "Election."

The flow of Twitter updates from selected sources was enough to usurp TV coverage for some users.

"By `tuning into' Twitter on election night, I was able to get timely updates on the races that mattered to me from people I've already decided that I trust," said Mark Rosch of New Mexico. "Social media, particularly Twitter, gave me the ability keep up with the far-flung contests I was most-interested in, as well getting more information more quickly on local races."

Foursquare encouraged users to vote by awarding a special "merit badge" to those who went to polling places. More than 50,000 of its 4 million users received it.

Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others used their power to get out the vote, supplying easy links for locating one's nearest polling place. That could have helped voter turnout, which was projected at 42 percent of registered voters, about 1.2 percentage points higher than the 2006 midterms.

Mindy Finn, co-founder of the online political media firm Engage, said politicians are spending less than 5 percent of their budgets on social media. She cautioned overestimating its effect.

"Do we assign impact to people talking to their friends and neighbors in the same way we assign impact to people knocking on doors and making phone calls for a particular candidate or political party or cause?" said Finn. "On a basic level, it's the same and things haven't changed. Friends are still contacting friends and neighbors are still talking to neighbors."

One of the most buzzed-about candidates of the election didn't win. Christine O'Donnell, the Tea Party candidate who ran for the Senate in Delaware, had the most-viewed politician channel on YouTube. (YouTube counted 450 candidates with official channels.)

Her campaign ad in which she began by saying, "I'm not a witch," was watched by millions. It was parodied on "Saturday Night Live," set to song in a popular "Auto-Tune the News" video and creatively co-opted by countless YouTubers with their own political messages to distribute.

Those clips, combined with the many older videos of O'Donnell that circulated widely, made her one of the most viral candidates — yet she still lost badly to Democrat Chris Coons.

Facebook claimed correlation between social media buzz and election success. It said that 74 percent of House and Senate candidates with more Facebook fans than their competitors won on Tuesday.

The social networking platform also co-hosted a town hall meeting with ABC News. The sight was telling: a room full of people on laptops gazing at a giant Facebook "buzz wall."

They were far from alone in their Internet-tethered election experience. Akamai Technologies Inc., which delivers about 20 percent of the world's Internet traffic, showed traffic peaking around 6 p.m EDT at over 5.6 million global page views a minute. That's one of Akamai's highest traffic rates in five years of measurement — even more than during President Obama's election night win in 2008.

Come two years and the next presidential election, social media is likely to be vital territory sought by Democrats and Republicans.

"In 2012, this will be a very contested battlefield," says the Pew Internet's Rainie. "It's not a sidelight to politics right now. This is a central venue."

———

Associated Press writer Leanne Italie contributed to this report.

The company's Street View mapping service unlawfully recorded data from private wireless networks.

To be sure, do it the old fashioned way: contact your local board of elections.

Reminded of an old flame? You can reconnect in the time it takes to find the person on Facebook.

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Social Security benefits again won't go up - Washington Post

For the second year in a row, the nearly 54 million retirees and other Americans who receive Social Security benefits will not get any cost-of-living increase in 2011 in their monthly checks, government officials announced Friday, renewing debate over whether the system offers enough help in a weak economy.

The absence of any growth in Social Security checks for consecutive years is unprecedented in the 31/2 decades that payments have been adjusted automatically based on the nation's inflation rate.

The news that retirement benefits will remain static was part of a trio of developments on Friday that drew attention to lingering effects of the recession. Taken together, the new reminders of the country's economic fragility carry large political stakes, coming 21/2 weeks before a midterm election in which the deficit and jobs are paramount concerns among voters.

In the White House and on Capitol Hill, Democrats immediately responded with fresh calls to give extra money to older Americans, a potent voting bloc, and other people who depend on Social Security. Republicans disparaged the idea, contending that it would deepen the deficit and skirt a more fundamental need to put the retirement system on solid financial footing for the long term.

While the parties argued in Washington, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke signaled during a speech in Boston that the Fed was prepared to undertake a new round of unconventional efforts to spur economic growth, with inflation persistently low and unemployment high.

Separately, the Obama administration reported that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended in September hit $1.29 trillion, in part because of lagging tax collections. The budget gap was lower than the record of $1.4 trillion for 2009 but, as a percentage of the overall economy, was the second-highest since World War II.

The static Social Security payments are a side effect of the nation's low inflation. The Social Security Administration made its announcement moments after the Labor Department released the latest figures for the consumer price index. They show that prices for the third quarter of this year rose by 1.5 percent compared with a year earlier, but fell by 0.6 percent compared with the same period in 2008.

Last year marked the first time consumer prices fell since the automatic adjustment formula has existed, and Social Security recipients did not get an increase in their checks.

This year, the picture is more complicated. Consumer prices have risen slightly from a year ago. But under the government rules, consumer prices must have risen past their level when the last Social Security increase was awarded - in this case, 2008 - for another boost in benefits to take effect. The Labor figures show they did not increase that much.

About 73,000 District residents receive Social Security benefits, while Maryland and Virginia have about 826,000 and 1.2 million beneficiaries, respectively.

Leaders of the AARP, the influential lobby of Americans age 50 and older, said the organization has been deluged lately with complaints from members who depend on Social Security.

"It's like being stuck in neutral," said John Walker, 62, of South Arlington, who was laid off in 2008 from his trucking job and now lives on veterans' benefits and the early Social Security payments he began to collect this year. "I have the same income, but . . . seems like the basic necessities we have from day-to-day living go up. I don't think it's fair."

In early 2009, as part of its efforts to stimulate the economy, Congress approved a one-time $250 payment for each person on Social Security, even though the size of monthly checks had gone up that January by nearly 6 percent.

In his 2011 budget, President Obama proposed another such payment, and many congressional Democrats, courting older voters before the elections, have called for the same thing. So far, Congress has not acted.

On Friday, the White House renewed its call for another payment. "Many seniors are struggling in the face of the economic downturn, having seen their savings fall," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "Today's news that the Social Security Administration will for a second year not provide a cost of living adjustment for social security benefits highlights these struggles."

In July, Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee's Social Security subcommittee, introduced legislation to provide a $250 payment to the program's recipients, at a cost of about $14 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that she will schedule a vote on the measure when lawmakers return for a lame-duck session after the election. The legislation has 127 Democratic co-sponsors and none who are Republican.

In the Senate, which defeated a similar proposal in March, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said that chamber would consider a $250 payment in its lame-duck session, as well.

GOP leaders oppose the idea. Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), said, "He has a real deficit concern about this," noting that the $14 billion price tag is greater than the entire Kentucky state budget.

House Republican leaders on Friday avoided direct comments on the $250 payments. Instead, they attacked Democrats for not passing a measure earlier, if it was a priority for that party.

And Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on Ways and Means, said: "It will be difficult for many seniors to deal with the lack of a COLA for a second year in a row, but that will pale in comparison to the actual hardships future Social Security recipients will experience if Congress continues to ignore the program's underlying financial problems."

In addition to the nation's 38 million retirees age 65 and older, the lack of a cost-of-living adjustment will affect several other groups of people. They include family members of workers who died prematurely who receive Social Security survivors' benefits, as well as people who qualify for Social Security disability payments.

The formula that determines whether Social Security payments go up also is applied to benefits paid to retired and disabled veterans and retired railroad workers.

The typical retiree receives a Social Security payment of nearly $1,200 per month, or roughly $14,400 a year. A $250 payment would amount to a 1.7 percent increase.

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Google Fights Facebook, Microsoft in Social Search - eWeek

Microsoft and Facebook have temporarily one-upped Google in social search with their new integration but, Google isn't going quietly.

Facebook Oct. 13 agreed to open its data feeds to let Microsoft's Bing search engine index and serve profile information and Liked Results in relevant situations.

The integration goes well beyond what Google has done with its own Social Search functionality, which lacks a large, cohesive network of user data.

The Facebook-Bing deal, then, is a big stepping stone to boosting social advertising, IDC analyst Hadley Reynolds told eWEEK.

"[Bing] can leverage the social info it lacked to keep people on their sites longer, with more exposure to ad inventory and the business it generates."

Google recognizes this as much as any other company. On Google's third-quarter earnings call Oct. 14, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked about how Google will capture signals in social search without accessing to data feeds similar to the deal Bing has struck with Facebook.

Schmidt paused a few seconds and noted that Google is careful about how its signals are assembled, but said there "are ways in which we could do that."

"We also have in development other ways in which people can give us that sort of information that can make it even more personal," Schmidt said.

Schmidt was clearly referring to Google's supposed Google Me project to socialize its search and Web service properties in many layers.

If that sounds like a veiled challenge to Bing and Facebook, it is. Schmidt has made no secret about Google's disdain for one-to-one arrangements where one company cedes data to another but not to the Web at large. He's also intimated he would like access to Facebook's data.

"There is always a concern that large, private collections of the data are not accessible to Web search engines," Schmidt said.

"We've take the position in a religious and business perspective that the world is better off if you take the info you're assemlbing and make it searchable, it provides a larger audience and drives more traffic to your site."

Unfortunately for Google, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is hardly in a rush to release Facebook data to any more search engines at this point.

That puts Google on the outside looking in, Altimer Group analyst Charlene Li told eWEEK.

"This is not a knock-out punch to Google, but it is significant that they are not the leaders in social search - Bing + Facebook are," Li said.

"Although [Bing] don't have the mass and scale to have an impact on Google, the fact that they have already gained ground over the past year is indicative that Google has vulnerabilities."

Another scary prospect for Google about the Facebook-Bing thing: Both Bing officials and Zuckerberg himself noted this new social search functionality is just a first step toward making search more useful, personalized and relevant using searcher's social graphs.  

"As more people collect, post, share and add more "likes" and social content, the value of social search will improve," Forrester Research analyst Augie Ray told eWEEK.

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Microsoft, Facebook Introduce New Social Search Features - eWeek

Microsoft and Facebook are partnering on a set of new social-search features accessible via Bing. The features will also activate for Web results on Facebook, which are powered by Bing.

One new feature, Liked Results, displays the Websites and links ?liked? by a Facebook user?s friends. If you search in Bing for ?Halo: Reach,? for example, your friends? Facebook profile images will appear next to certain results. ?So, you can lean on friends to figure out the best Websites for your search,? reads an Oct. 13 note on The Facebook Blog.  

The other new feature, Facebook Profile Search, factors into searches for specific people. In response to a search request for a particular name?e.g., ?John Smith??Bing will now leverage a user?s Facebook connections to deliver more relevant results. ?Those with whom you have mutual friends will now show up first,? reads The Facebook Blog note. ?Bing is also making more prominent the ability to add these people as friends on Facebook directly from Bing.?

The tighter partnership between Facebook and Bing is unsurprising, given Microsoft?s $240 million investment for a 1.6 percent stake in the social network. During an Oct. 13 presentation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared onstage with Microsoft executives to talk through the background and details of the deeper search integration. 

?We?re hard-wired so that information about people is the most interesting information we track in the world,? Zuckerberg told the audience.

Microsoft likely hopes that the new layer of Facebook data will help Bing in its continuing battle against Google, which recently added real-time search results in a bid to streamline its service. Analytics firms give Bing around 27-30 percent of the U.S. search-engine market, once Bing?s powering of Yahoo?s backend search is taken into account, while Google occupies between 65-71 percent. 

?We think it?s time for a real, robust, persistent social signal,? Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft?s Online Services Division, wrote in an Oct. 13 posting on the Bing Community blog. ?Facebook has led a transformation of the Internet already. It has reached and passed 500 million members, and the amount of content created inside Facebook each day is staggering.?

The new social-search features are scheduled to roll out in the U.S. over the next few weeks.

?What?s most exciting to us at Bing is the evolution of this new signal, based on something more than just pattern recognition or keyword matching,? Nadella wrote in that blog posting. ?This new signal will allow us to do a better and more comprehensive job predicting what resources and content are most relevant to you because, in addition to all the other signals we use, other people you trust have found them interesting.?

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No boost for Social Security checks in 2011 - The Associated Press

No boost for Social Security checks in 2011By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER (AP) – 3 hours ago

WASHINGTON — More than 58 million retirees and disabled Americans will have to go another year without an increase in their Social Security benefits, the government is expected to announce this week.

It would mark only the second year without an increase since automatic adjustments for inflation were adopted in 1975. The first year was this year.

The cost-of-living adjustments, or COLAs, are automatically set each year by an inflation measure that was adopted by Congress back in the 1970s. Because consumer prices are still lower than they were they were two years ago, the last time a COLA was awarded, the trustees who oversee Social Security project there will be no benefit increase for 2011.

The lack of inflation will be small comfort to many older Americans whose savings and home values still haven't recovered from the financial collapse. Many haven't had a raise since January 2009, and they won't be getting one until at least January 2012.

"While people aren't getting COLAs they certainly feel like they're falling further and further behind, particularly in this economy," said David Certner, AARP's legislative policy director. "People are very reliant on Social Security as a major portion of their income and, quite frankly, they have counted on the COLA over the years."

The COLA projection will be made official on Friday, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases inflation estimates for September. The timing couldn't be worse for Democrats as they approach an election in which they are in danger of losing their House majority, and possibly their Senate majority as well.

Democrats have been working hard to make Social Security an election-year issue, running political ads and holding press conferences to accuse Republicans of plotting to privatize the national retirement program.

"If you're the ruling party, this is not the sort of thing you want to have happening two weeks before an election," said Andrew Biggs, a former deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration and now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

"It's not the congressional Democrats' fault, but that's the way politics works," Biggs said. "A lot of people will feel hostile about it."

Social Security was the primary source of income for 64 percent of retirees who got benefits in 2008, according to the Social Security Administration. A third relied on Social Security for at least 90 percent of their income.

A little more than 58.7 million retirees and disabled Americans receive Social Security or Supplemental Security Income. The average Social Security benefit is about $1,072 a month.

Social Security recipients got a one-time bonus payment of $250 in the spring of 2009 as part of the government's massive economic recovery package. President Barack Obama lobbied for another one last fall when it became clear seniors wouldn't get an increase in monthly benefit payments in 2010.

Congress took up the issue, but a proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders died when 12 Democrats and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut joined Senate Republicans to block it. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine was the only Republican to support the second bonus payment.

Sanders, I-Vt., said he will continue pressing for another $250 payment when Congress returns after the election in November.

"During these very difficult economic times many seniors and disabled veterans are spending a lot of their limited incomes on rising health care and prescription drugs costs," Sanders said. "They need help."

Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., chairman of the Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security, has introduced a new bill to provide $250 payments to seniors, if there is no increase in Social Security. Maybe, he said, there will be more of an appetite in Congress to pass it after lawmakers hear from voters in November.

Federal law requires the Social Security Administration to base annual payment increases on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, which measures inflation. The CPI-W is based on the cost of goods and services, such as food, housing, transportation and energy, typically purchased by urban wage earners and clerical workers.

Officials compare inflation in the third quarter of each year — the months of July, August and September — with the same months in the previous year.

If consumer prices increase from year to year, Social Security recipients automatically get higher payments, starting in January. If inflation is negative, the payments stay unchanged.

Social Security payments increased by 5.8 percent in 2009, the largest increase in 27 years, after energy prices spiked in 2008.

But energy prices quickly dropped. For example, average gasoline prices topped $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008. But by January 2009, they had fallen below $2. Today, the national average is roughly $2.70 a gallon.

As a result, Social Security recipients got an increase in 2009 that was far larger than actual inflation. However, they won't get another increase until consumer prices exceed the level measured in 2008. The Social Security trustees project that will happen next year, resulting in a small increase in benefits for 2012.

Social Security spokesman Mark Lassiter said the agency has no leeway to increase payments if the inflation measurement doesn't call for it.

___

Online:

Social Security COLAs: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/cola/latestCOLA.html

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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