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How to get social with Pandora

Maybe I'm a creature of habit, but in spite of all the great new streaming-music services out there, I still find myself settling back into my love of Pandora. It's just a solid service that demands none of my attention and best of all, none of my money.

And while Pandora may be an old dog compared with the whelps of Spotify, Rdio, and Twitter Music, it actually has includes a number of ways to share your favorite music on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

To see how it's done, watch the video tutorial above. … Read more

Turkey tracks down Twitter provokers

Turkish authorities have detained 25 people accused of using social media to spread false information and provoke antigovernment riots, according to several reports.

Last week, protests erupted in Izmir, the third most populous city in Turkey, over the government's decision to replace Gezi Park, one of a few remaining green spaces in central Istanbul, in Taksim Square with a shopping mall. Demonstrations devolved into a broader critique of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's authoritarian regime and turned violent when police used tear gas and other tactics to break up protests.

Tuesday night, police brought in several people suspected … Read more

Facebook to retire Credits on September 12

Facebook said Wednesday that it will no longer support Facebook Credits, a virtual currency specific to the social network, as of September 12, 2013. Developers, instead, will need to migrate their applications to local currency payments using the company's just-released API.

The complete payments switch, a year in the making, is meant to help developers better price their virtual goods for international markets, as well as simplify the purchase process for buyers.

"Local currency payments give developers much more control over their pricing and payments," software engineer Yongyan Liú wrote in a blog post. With the … Read more

Facebook post about hungry child gets school bus driver fired

Let's role play.

You're a school bus driver at Haralson County Middle School in Georgia. A 6th-grader gets on your bus and complains he's hungry.

You ask him why he's hungry. The kid says he was 40 cents short on his lunch card, so he was denied food.

When this scenario played out for bus driver Johnny Cook, he took to his Facebook page to express his shock and offer to help any child who is short of lunch money.

However, as CBS Atlanta reports, the school wasn't too pleased with this expression of concern. … Read more

RNC picks Facebook engineer for first CTO

The Republican National Committee has hired Facebook engineering manager Andrew Barkett to serve as its first-ever chief technology officer.

The newly created role is meant to provide the party with much-needed expertise in the digital realm and help it develop relationships in the tech sector.

"I am confident that with Andy's experience and our continued efforts to build meaningful relationships with experts in Silicon Valley, we'll see the changes to this part of our operation that we all agree are both important and necessary to winning elections in the future," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in … Read more

Parents lack bandwidth to monitor kids' online activity, says study

When the world's most famous companies are run by boys who seem to have only slight familiarity with shaving, it's easy for grown-ups to give up.

Somehow, this newfangled digital world has created an entirely new species of human -- one that ultimately wants to eradicate all species that are currently thought of as human.

Who can even lift an eyebrow, therefore, at new research that suggests parents are largely clueless about their kids' activities on laptops, phones, Facebook, and all the other places to which kids choose to disappear?

A new study from McAfee, touchingly called Digital Deceptions, … Read more

Pepsi vending machine takes Facebook love, not money

These days, most marketing stunts are aimed at going viral online through social-media shares. Pepsi's new Like Machine marketing stunt makes social media a requirement, not an option. The vending machine doesn't want your cash, it just wants your Facebook cred.

The Pepsi Like Machine is putting a twist on the age-old art of sampling. Normally, a hired gun dressed up in brand apparel hands out samples to anyone walking by. The specialized vending machine hands out samples, too, but you have to give it a "like" on Facebook before it coughs up the goods.… Read more

Facebook file-transfer app Pipe goes wide Wednesday

Pipe, a peer-to-peer file-sharing app for Facebook along the lines of Dropbox, is set to launch for the public at large Wednesday, creating a simple way for people on the massive social network to share big files that, thus far, Facebook itself hasn't provided.

The Pipe app allows users to simply drag and drop a file for a friend to receive it directly.

"We've worked really hard to make Pipe this simple," Simon Hossell, founder and chief executive of Pipe, said in a statement. "We've made the technology invisible."

The company took its … Read more

Turkish users sneak past censorship of Facebook, Twitter

Many Turkish Internet users are staying connected to Facebook and Twitter despite reported government censorship of the two sites.

To get past the blockade of the two popular social networks, Turkish citizens have been using VPN software such as Hotspot Shield, which opens a tunnel through the Internet so the connection can't be detected. This past weekend, more than 120,000 people in Turkey downloaded the software, according to the Guardian, a huge leap from the 10,000 new users seen on an average day.

On Saturday, blog site TechCrunch said a number of sources told it that both … Read more