No, Snapchat Isn’t About Sexting, Says Co-Founder Evan Spiegel

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“The minute you tell someone that images on your server disappear, everyone jumps to sexting.” Evan Spiegel laughed and leaned back into his chair during his first sitdown interview since his iPhone app Snapchat blew up over the last month. Snapchat  is #12 on the free iOS photo app charts in the U.S. and  just scored some mainstream media attention in The New York Times . Plus, we hear that Snapchat has also impressed Facebook’s internal product leadership and even Zuck himself

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Americans Now Spend More Time On Facebook Mobile Than Its Website

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All those minutes reading your news feed in bed, messaging friends over lunch, and browsing photos on the bus really add up.

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The Importance Of Social Media In Elections: Mostly Hot Air

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If social media mattered in elections, Ron Paul would have a realistic shot at being the Republican nominee and Barack Obama would be on track to crush Mitt Romney in the biggest landslide in American history. Despite the hype over follower counts, a new study shows that there’s no credible evidence that Twitter can be used to predict how elections will turn out. “It can be concluded that the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated,” writes computer science professor, Daniel Gayo-Avello, in an unusually strident rant (for an academic).

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Gamification: Insights And Emerging Trends

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Editor’s note : Tim Chang is a managing director at Mayfield Fund .

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Text The Rainbow: Color Text Messages+ Nabs Top Social App Spot From Facebook, Twitter

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A new app has just taken the App Store by storm — a colorful, rainbowful storm. It’s called Color Text Messages+ and the idea is relatively simple, but clearly appealing judging by the app’s popularity. The app is so popular, in fact, that Facebook Messenger, Facebook, and Twitter have all just dropped down a spot to make room for the new kid on the social block

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Facebook proposes more transparent privacy policy, wants to know what you think of it

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Facebook's had some privacy foibles in the not-so-distant past , and has been working to improve its policies to better inform Facebook users how their info is exploited. Last year, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner's Office did an audit of Facebook's data usage approach, and determined that, while Facebook's doing a decent job, further details should be provided to us all

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New Book Investigates the Wide, Wonderful World of LARP

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A Celt relaxes between battles at Knight Realms, one of the LARPs featured in the new book Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role-Playing Games by Lizzie Stark (Photo credit: Kyle Ober; photo courtesy of James C. Kimball) So you want to be Harry Potter, or Aragorn, or Frodo, or Kirk or Picard, or a barbarian. Or some mash-up — say, a steampunked brigand Robin Hood character who pilots a dirigible while stealing from the rich and giving the poor

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Here’s What The Facebook App Center Is Really About

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post by  Chester Ng , co-founder and CMO of SweetLabs, makers of  Pokki , an HTML5 app platform for the PC. The tectonic plates in the app world have been shifting quite a bit lately, in ways that will significantly impact developers and users.

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Adventures in big data: How AddThis’ Hydra works

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Clearspring, a social publishing platform, on Thursday changed its name to AddThis as part of an emphasis on the analytics side of its business. The company, which was formed in 2006 and provides those social sharing buttons that are ubiquitous across the web, also offered analytics services under the AddThis brand. But it realized that the data analytics had become the essential element for its customers and changed its name accordingly.

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Twitter Buys Personalized Email Marketer RestEngine To Deliver Best Tweet Digests

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Twitter has just finalized a deal to  hire the team and buy the technology of RestEngine , a personalized email marketing service, which could help Twitter deliver email digests of great tweets you’ve missed.

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