Facebook Apps that read your data

When you share information with your friends on Facebook, every app that your friends use can access and use that information. Read this post for further information.

Of course it’s better to think of all your data on Facebook as public, but still it’s hard to accept to share data with apps you can’t control.

There’s a way to stop this flow, though. Go to your Privacy Settings and follow this path:

Privacy settings
Apps and websites : Edit settings
How people bring your info to apps they use : Edit settings

Here you can customize the information you share with other people’s apps. Other than that, you can just turn off all the apps:

If you don’t want apps and websites to access other categories of information (like your friend list, gender or info you’ve made public), you can turn off all Platform apps. But remember, you will not be able to use any games or apps yourself.

Scavenger hunt on Social Media by Red Bull

The Red Bull Timeline Timewarp is a tricky scavenger hunt game on Facebook. It started with the Facebook Timeline switch on March 2012.

Red Bull asked its fans to join the contest through their Timeline. There’s also an app for Terms & Conditions.

How did it work? Users were supposed to go through these tasks:

• Find dates on pictures
• Search the Timeline
• Find a date on a Spotify playlist
• Find a date in a barcode image
• Find the timecodes of given pics in a video
• Rearrange the letters in a sentence to find a date
• Pick some letters from a sentence to create a URL

Many started, just a few made it to the end. Great job though! Further analysis here and here.

Your tweets live longer on Twylah

Twilah is a new service to display your tweets in a page and make them live longer. Here’s my page:

How do they describe themselves?

we’ve designed a unique context and experience for your readers that shows them who you are and what you’re about at a glance. This context drives engagement well beyond a single tweet and into the whole of your content and biographical information, providing a richer platform for your mission, your messages, and your offers.

It’s interesting to find ways to display your content effectively and increase engagement.

You can also display your Twylah page as a subdomain of your website. Just follow the instructions.

Hone your storytelling skills on Cowbird

Besides content curation, storytelling is another huge trend of 2012. No wonder there are social networks focused on it. Even Jonathan Harris did one.

Cowbird is a “community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web”.

It also allows you to collaborate with others in documenting the sagas, a.k.a. themes and events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story.

What’s wrong, then? Still no videos. Just text, pics and audio. But there’s a vision:

Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience.

Let’s start sharing our stories, then!