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Three Facebook Users Die Every Minute. How Will Your Online Legacy Look After Death?

Three Facebook users die every minute, leading to millions of worldwide accounts that have deceased owners. Will the account remain as it were, frozen in time? Is that how the person who passed would have preferred it? A new hot topic is posthumous "online reputation management," which looks at how friends and family can retain control of the online legacies of the dead.

“While many people prepare a will to manage what happens to their possessions after their death, most have likely not considered what happens to their digital information,” said Jeff Quipp, the founder of Canadian internet marketing company Search Engine People. “Photos from wild parties might not be the lasting impression a person may wish to leave when they die.” 

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Facebook Opens Registration for Second Annual Hacker Cup

Canadian programmers have the opportunity to compete against the world's best for some massive bragging rights and thousands of dollars cash. Facebook has opened registration for its second annual Hacker Cup, the social network's international coding competition. It consists of four online rounds and a final round held at Facebook's headquarters.

The competition begins at the end of this month, with rounds two and three happening in February. 25 competitors will be flown to Facebook's office in Menlo Park, California in March for the final round.

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40% of Facebook Users Use the Mobile App

Mobile, mobile, mobile. If you've read and heard the word so many times this year it now sounds like gibberish, no one can blame you. But the numbers continue to astound.

Most recently, new data from Benedict Evans for Enders Analysis revealed that an incredible 40% of Facebook users use the social network's mobile app—a remarkably high stat, especially considering only about half to two-thirds of Facebook's population even owns a device capable of downloading said app. Facebook has more than 800 million active users, so this translates into approximately 320 million mobile users, and an extremely high penetration among eligible device owners.

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Got Defriended on Facebook? This is Probably Why [INFOGRAPHIC]

Facebook opened up a new layer of social interaction between friends and acquaintances (and enemies, for that matter) when it became ubiquitous. New research from NM Incite reveals the top reasons for both friending and de-friending on Mark Zuckerberg's 800-million-strong platform.

The number one reason someone adds a friend on Facebook comes as no surprise—82% of the time, it's because they know the other person in real life. 60% of the time it involves mutual friends, while only 11% of friend requests come as a result of business networks. Some 7% of users add friends to boost their friend count. The average user has 130 friends.

But why do people remove friends? It doesn't happen often, but when it does, 55% of the time it's due to offensive comments. 41% of the time it involves not knowing the other person well enough—an odd reason as at some point both definitively agreed to be friends. 39% of Facebook users report their "friends" try to sell them something. Only 20% do it because they don't actually interact with that person. 11% defriend as a result of breakups and divorces.

On Facebook, men are more likely to seek professional networking and dating—a questionable mix—while women are all out coupon-hunting and expressing their creativity.

Overall, 89% of people use Facebook for family contact while just 16% do so for dating. 28% try to find a job while well over half give feedback on products and services, be it good or bad (negative and positive feedback is, somewhat surprisingly, split evenly).

Toronto startup BeUnick connects brands with consumers via Facebook photos

BeUnick photo tagging interfaceA few years ago, Yannick Lefang was looking at a friend’s photo on Facebook and really liked her dress. He thought it would be great to buy that dress for his girlfriend. But he had no way of figuring out where the dress came from, unless he messaged his friend on Facebook. He then began to think about all of the travel photos that are posted online and wondered how travel and tourism companies could promote their resorts and trips via user-generated travel photos.

“A photo is a gateway to emotions and memories. But a photo can also be a great storefront,” says Lefang. “We came across some data showing that Eventbrite (the online event ticketing service) sees an increase in ticket sales whenever someone shares with their friends on Facebook or Twitter that they have bought a ticket. I had a feeling that the same principle might be true if friends shared photo information about where they bought their outfit, or where they went on vacation.”

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Sean Parker's Son is Canadian? [VIDEO]

On Friday Techvibes wrote about a Canadian entrepreneur that attended LeWeb in Paris last week and pulled a pretty genius stunt to get the attention of tech entrepreneur Sean Parker.

So what motivated Toronto's Christopher Carmichael to take a big risk in front of an international tech audience?

Carmichael wants Parker to play some sort of role in the new company he is launching. It's called Atendy and while it is still in stealth mode, we do know that it is in the event space and hopes to disrupt the way events are promoted, managed and engaged. Carmichael knows a bit about the events space, his previous startup was BuildMyLanyard.com which won Queen's Entrepreneurs' Competition.

Here is the video of Carmichael's question from the audience where he tells Parker that he is his son from the future.

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What Canadians Talked About on Facebook in 2011

Facebook has revealed what Canadians were talking about in 2011.

In its "Memology 2011" report, Facebook showed that Canada's top 10 status trends were lms ("like my status"), Jack Layton, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, the death of Osama bin laden, Charlie Sheen, Insidious (the movie), military operations begin in Libya, the death of Amy Winehouse, Jersday, and Skrillex.

The most popular pages Canadians liked were Megan Fox and Vin Diesel in the Entertainment category; Rihanna and Bob Marley in the Musicians category; Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in the Athletes category; and CNN and Fox News in the News category.

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How Facebook Buying Gowalla Could Change The Social Media Game For Good

This article was originally published on Smedio.

Have you ever wondered why Facebook is the world’s most popular social network? Is it all about the user experience? Or is it because Facebook is the undisputed choice for businesses when it comes to social media? Or perhaps because Facebook did most things right while others got it wrong? Well, I strongly believe that Facebook’s biggest strength is its’ continuous focus on innovation and its relentless focus on the ‘Change is good’ philosophy.

A social network with 700 million plus users could rest on its current laurels and make the most out of it. But that’s never been Facebook’s philosophy. On the contrary, Facebook isn’t afraid to try every trick in the bag even if it means risk annoying its users in the short term. And in a potentially game changing move, Facebook is reported to have acquired location sharing service Gowalla for an undisclosed sum.

The obvious question – Facebook already had ‘Places’ which did a decent job, then why does it need to buy another location-based service? I strongly believe there are a number of factors which come into play here.

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