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The worth of a Facebook picture hinges on what it says. For a Phillipsburg man, one picture spoke volumes.

It was worth six months in the Warren County jail.

A picture of Brian Slack, 31, holding a beer on the other side of the Delaware River revealed that he broke three rules of his parole: no Facebook, no leaving the state without permission and no alcohol. Slack was sentenced in June for violating the conditions of a community supervision for a life sentence imposed for a 2001 sexual assault conviction, according to court documents.

Social network requirements in New Jersey, for the most part, stop there, but some lawmakers are seeking to expand restrictions to other offenders. Assemblywoman Donna Simon, D-Hunterdon, announced earlier this month plans to propose an identical version of Louisiana's recently passed law that requires Megan's Law offenders to identify themselves as such in their social networking profiles. Simon said the law would serve as an additional protection against offenders veiling their identity to prey on children.

"Anybody who's ever watched, 'To Catch a Predator' knows they don't come to the door anymore," she said.

The question of a sex offender's right to social networking sites has saturated national discussion in the past few months. The Supreme Court recently upheld an Indiana law banning registered offenders from the sites entirely, and Louisiana's law went live Aug.1. State laws tread in varying degrees of prohibition, which is changing as lawmakers address social networks as tools of supervision.

In New Jersey, lifelong parole is imposed on offenders convicted of aggravated sexual assault, endangering the welfare of a child and kidnapping. A ban on social networks or the Internet as a whole is sometimes a condition of probation but is rarely applied in Warren County, said Assistant Chief Probation Officer Brenda Beacham. It's a special condition considered in cases where a computer was used to commit the crime, she said.

The sites can also be useful tools for probation officers to monitor those in their care.

"There are times when it is helpful because you can see something that you can talk to them about," she said.

However, checking sites like Facebook and Twitter isn't, at this point, a major component of an officer's job, she said.

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Social networking and sex offenders: Pennsylvania and New Jersey approach bans differently

As the social networking companies try to make more money, they may become less friendly to outside developers.

Hundreds of thousands of developers know that building apps that rely on the Facebook or Twitter platforms comes at a riskat any time, the companies can change their access rules or launch a competing feature.

The risk is often worth the built-in audience and data from millions of users. Just look at how Zynga grew. Lately, though, as both Twitter and Facebook strain to bring in more revenue and threaten to tighten their platform rules or alter their features to this end, the perennial uncertainty is worsening. For some startups, the situation is even stalling investments or delaying product plans while they wait to see how the future will shake out.

Twitter, which attracted millions of users in part by throwing open its data to outside developers and spawning more than a million third-party apps, has given developers reason to think it may be changing course.

As a business plan for Twitter emerged, the third-party software that many people still use to access the service or interact with it offsite may threaten its ambitions. This is because it cannot guarantee that those using outside apps will see sponsored tweets or the new expanded news and multimedia posts on its site. In a June blog post, Twitter said it would seek a more "consistent" user experience going forward, leading to speculation that it would soon issue more constraining developer guidelines for many kinds of apps. "Consistent" is the same word Twitter used when it began to make it more difficult for developers to maintain applications that closely replicated the mainstream Twitter experience last year.

This time, Twitter has not yet given additional details, leaving startups and investors wondering about how it might restrict access to its platform. Speculation worsened when Twitter stopped allowing tweets to be posted on LinkedIn and also shut off "friend finding" access to Instagram's photo-sharing app in recent weeks. The CEO of Flipboard, a company that makes an app that curates social news by integrating with Twitter and other sites, stepped down from Twitter's board this week, fueling further speculation about a brewing conflict between Twitter and the companies that depend on it.

The uncertainty is already translating into economic damages, says longtime Internet entrepreneur Nova Spivack. His current startup, Bottlenose, is building a way to find popular news by measuring activity on different social networks, including Twitter. "There are a lot of companies that have ground to a halt as people wonder. It's irresponsible," he says.

After getting no clarification from Twitter about its plans for developers and hearing the other startups cite this as a reason they are struggling to raise money from investors, Spivack launched a petition yesterday calling on Twitter to "uphold [its] promise of being an open platform," or, at minimum, make its intentions clear.

A less open Twitter may not bode well for innovation in social networking. "If you can't pull the data out that you want, it makes the kind of stuff you can do less and less interesting," says Ed Finkler, a developer who built an open-source Twitter client in 2007 but has stopped work on it, partly because Twitter's rule change last year made developing the app more difficult for him.

Facebook also seems on course for increased friction with third-party developers and startups, especially as its stock price tumbles and pressure to make money mounts.

Link:
Startups Worry that Twitter and Facebook Are Blocking Their Way

FORT WORTH

Social networking websites, like LinkedIn, are linking professional photographers to new business.

"It's allowed a lot of people into the profession that probably wouldn't be here today if they had to go back to a film camera. So, you've got a lot of photographers in the profession today and they're saying, 'okay, I've got to change my model,'" said Dalton.

The new business model includes headshots for a new clientele.

Ed Seaborn will graduate college in the fall. To land that first job, he's putting his best face forward.

"I'm going to put it on my LinkedIn account. It's a way you network with other professionals, and you want to look good," said Seaborn.

"It just says a lot more about that individual being a professional than something they pulled from their iPhone or something like that," said Katie-Rose Watson, Director of PR and Social Media at Anchor Marketing & Design.

More and more professionals are getting professional photos for their online resumes.

The photos can range in price, depending on the photographer. Many in the metroplex offer LinkedIn headshots from $100 - $500. Watson says that investment is an investment in your future.

"So, I think when you're out there looking for a job, it's extremely important to make that investment. I mean, what is 100 or 200 dollars in the long run if it lands you a job?" she said.

More here:
Social Networking Headshots Bring New Business to Photographers

August 4, 2012

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports Your Universe Online

Sick of logging into your social media account and seeing nothing but a bunch of baby pictures posted by your child-obsessed friends and family? Now, at long last, theres a permanent solution to the problem.

That solution comes in the form of a new plug-in for the Google Chrome web browser known as Unbaby Me which according to PCMags Chloe Albanesius will flag photos of those incessant infants and tiresome tykes on an individuals Facebook News Feed and then replace them with images of cats, other animals, artwork, and so forth.

If this sounds like something that peaks your interest, CNET writer Emil Protalinski explains that the plug-in is extremely easy to set up. First, users need to go to the Chrome Web Store and click on the blue Add to Chrome button to install the app. Then, they simply have to refresh their Facebook News Feed in order for the app to switch out the baby pics with whatever surrogate is selected.

The creative force behind this undoubtedly soon-to-be immensely popular app is a copywriter named Chris Baker, who along with friends came up with Unbaby Me as a side project, according to ABCs Joanna Stern. He said that they were inspired by the spread of baby photos on the popular social network, and ultimately decided that something had to be done to the dominance of the diapered.

The offering has its limitations, Albanesius said. Unbaby Me basically just searches your news feed for references to babies or terms that are commonly associated with them. The creators picked a few terms of their own like so cute, look at these cheeks, birth, mommy, and so forth but you can select Keywords of your own.

The ability to select specialized keywords means that the app can be used to block just about anything a feature which Slate writer Will Oremus calls the most underrated and revolutionary aspect of the tool.

You can set it up to block pictures of pretty much anything you dont want to see in your newsfeed, he explained. I have nothing against the occasional feline or toddler, but when Im desk-bound on a sunny August day, the last thing I want to see are my friends sunset-streaked snapshots of the damn Chichen Itza. So I tried replacing the baby-related keywords with terms like vacation, beach, sights, island, and, for good measure, fun. Then I changed the tag for the RSS feed from cats to cubicles. Zap! All of my friends summers are now as boring as mine.

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online

Read the rest here:
Unbaby Me Chrome Plug-In Puts End To Social Networking Baby Photo Menace

03-08-2012 15:27 Nickelodeon's 'iCarly' will air its series finale in November but Jennette McCurdy knows what comes next. She's getting her own show on the network co-starring Ariana Grande of 'Victorious.' McCurdy also talks about who her celeb crush is. (Aug. 3)

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'iCarly' Star Confesses Who Her Celeb Crush Is - Video