Friday Social Round up: Facebook, Apple, Google +1 and True Blood

The world of the interweb is very exciting, and this week has been no exception!

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/

Facebook has been up to its usual tricks and added a new feature. In the next few weeks all users will be able to use facial recognition technology to help tag their photos. When pictures are uploaded Facebook will suggest tags to users, it will then recognise your friend’s faces’ from previously been tagged pictures and use that information to help you tag. On the surface this is a great time saving tool, but if you aren’t fond of being tagged in pictures, especially the ones that proved not to be as flattering as you imagined during a night out, what does this mean for you? Well you can disable the feature in your privacy setting, but this won’t stop Facebook from trying to recognise your face, it will just mean your friends can’t tag you. A lot of users have expressed their concern with this new feature and what it means for their privacy, some even dubbing it creepy, but now this has caught the attention of the EU data protection regulators who are now going to investigate it.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/

Also this week Apple announced iCloud at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The iCloud will allow users to store data such as music files and automatically sync between numerous devices and will replace MobileMe, acting as a syncing center for emails, contacts and calendars. Other new developments mentioned at the conference were the integration of Twitter into iOS 5. This will essentially make Twitter the default social network on Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The new iOS5 will be released this Autumn and will allow users to Tweet from various different applications with just a single tap.

Image: Google

As you have probably heard, last week saw the launch of Google +1, according to Google  the +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out” in other words you are expressing you like it, sound familiar to anything else out there? In order for it to work you must be logged in to your Google account, and Google say you need a public Google profile, to help people see who recommended the +1′d item. Again this seems very reminiscent off something else; I just can’t quite put my finger on it…

Right after all that serious stuff here is a bit of fun in the form of a delightful Facebook tab on behalf of HBO. To promote the start of True Blood season 4 in the US later on this month, HBO have created this wonderful interactive video tab called Immortalize. In order for it to work you must ‘Like’ the page, the app then imports information from your Facebook profile such as your friends names and pictures and locations and incorporates them into a promotional video almost seemlessly.