The Girl Scouts Research Institute celebrated its tenth anniversary yesterday with the release of its latest study into the relationship between girls and social media. The findings are based on an online study with 1026 girls ages 14-17 who had social network profiles.
91% of the girls in the study said they used Facebook regularly, while only 28% said the same about MySpace. Demonstrating that teens do not eschew Twitter, 38% said they had a Twitter account, and averaged about 8 Tweets per day.

Nonetheless, the vast majority said they prefer face-to-face communication. And 92% said they would give up all of their social networking friends if it meant keeping their best friend.

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Things don't seem to be going well for the Ministry of Sound - the largest independent label in the United Kingdom. First, they decided to sue alleged file-sharers, which have placed them on the wrong side of the public relations battle. Second, their quest to obtain the identities of about 100+ suspected file-sharers was squashed last month as a UK court delayed proceeding until at least January 2011 (thanks to the massive ACS:Law data breach). Now the MOS has found out that BT Broadband has deleted 20,000 out of 25,000 records of suspected file-sharers; records that the MOS wanted preserved.
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Facebook has long been a one-way valve. You put data in so you can connect with friends, and then you can’t get it out and use it the way you would like to, even as the company is trying to corner the market on your identity.
And Thursday night Google called out its rival on such data-portability hypocrisy: It banned the huge social network from allowing its users to connect their Gmail contacts to see who among them are also on Facebook to get the friending frenzy started.
Previously a Facebook user could give the social network permission to look through their Google contacts for e-mail addresses via Google’s Contact API. Facebook would match them up with user profiles to suggest people to befriend. And if those people weren’t on Facebook, you could send them an invite by e-mail to join—which is exactly how a social network goes viral.
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UK Record label drops effort to sue tens of thousands of people suspected of illegally sharing copyrighted copies of its albums.
The Ministry of Sound says it has halted plans to sue more than 25,000 people it accuses of illegal file-sharing.
Ministry of Sound CEO Lohan Presencer blames the decision on the fact that “less than 20% of the names remain and BT (the UK ISP that the 25,000 accused are customers of) costs have soared from a few thousand pounds to several hundred thousand pounds.”
“It makes no economic sense to continue with this application,” he added.
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Proponents of 3D movies often point to Avatar, saying, smugly, “Well, look how great that movie turned out!” Yeah, that was the only one, and it was directed by James Cameron. Your typical Hollywood dross isn’t, in fact, directed by Cameron, nor does it take very obvious cues from Sega’s Panzer Dragoon series. Cameron has hit out at lazy Hollywood studios that think they can make a quick buck by converting their 2D movies into 3D at the last minute—Clash of the Titans being the worst offender. If you want a good 3D movie, he said, it has to be shot in 3D from the word go. Otherwise, don’t even bother.
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Thanks to the Nepalese telecom company Ncell, climbing the remote cliffs that dot the roof of the world is no longer a good excuse for failing to respond to emails. Ncell has brought 3G service to the Mount Everest base camp, allowing climbers and hikers to check their email and make phone calls without using bulky satellite phones.
"This achievement is as mighty as the altitude as 3G high speed internet will bring faster, more affordable telecommunication services to the people living in the Khumbu Valley, trekkers, and climbers alike," Lars Nyberg, chief of the Swedish telecom company TeliaSonera, told Reuters.
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