Social Media Round-up of the Week – 05 August

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top five:

1. Parents-to-be can now add their unborn children to their Facebook profile as family members. Facebook members have been able to add other members of their family to their profile for some time but the new option allows the addition of an unborn child.  A spokesman for the social network said: “We develop new features, in part, by seeing how people use the service. For years, people have been using Facebook to share the joyous news of expecting a child and, a few months ago, we began testing a feature designed to make that process easier..”

2. More Twitter threats have been directed at Duncan Bannatyne, including one that read ‘dirty b****** we slaughter f****** Hollie Bannatyne’ – the Dragons’ Den tycoon’s 25-year-old daughter. The fresh Twitter threats prompted Bannatyne to post on his own page on the microblogging site: ‘Living in a nightmare’. Earlier this week, he put out a tweet – swiftly removed – offering £50,000 to anyone who broke the arms of ‘Yuri Vasilyev’ (which, some have pointed out, is the Russian equivalent of ‘John Smith’…) after he vowed to kidnap Hollie unless her dad handed over £35,000.

3. Twenty-five million users have signed up to Google+ from its launch date in June 28, reports the research firm, comScore. By comparison, Twitter took 30 years to amass this number of subscribers, and Facebook three years. Andrew Lipsman, comScore’s VP, industry analysis, is quick to assert that fastest does not equal the best. “Sometimes, that slow build can lead to a strong network effect that pays long-term dividends,” he added.

4.German data protection officials have requested that Facebook disable its facial recognition software and delete any previously stored data. Making facial-recognition technology opt-out might run afoul of European and German data protection laws, John Caspar, Hamburg’s commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, said in a Tuesday letter to Facebook. Caspar likened the facial-recognition software to the collection of biometric data. He said Facebook is likely sitting atop the world’s largest database of biometric information given that users have uploaded an estimated 75 billion photos to the social-networking site and tagged 450 million people.

5. Our latest infographic (right) is a comparison of the key functions of Facebook and Google+