Social Media Round-up of the Week – 16 May

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 seven.

1. News broke this week that Facebook had hired PR agency Burson-Marsteller to oversee a smear campaign against Google. Far from leaving the search giant running for the hills, the campaign back-fired and Facebook are now the ones looking at crisis management to minimise the damage caused.

2. Youtube has launched its ‘YouTube 100’ which aims to track the popularity of the top 100 user-generated and professional music videos across the site. The chart will also monitor user-uploaded videos and viral debuts and provide a “holistic” view of song popularity. J-Lo’s song ‘On the Floor’ topped the first chart.

3. A programming bug on Facebook’s website may have accidentally given advertisers and others access to a treasure trove of personal information, according to security researchers at Symantec. They posted deatils of the issue on Tuesday saying it may have affected nearly 100,000 Facebook applications for years now.

4. The iPad 2’s new camera doesn’t seem to be its most popular feature. According to Flickr’s camera usage statistics, the iPad 2′s camera is used by very few people — only 23 active daily users. And so far, 12,811 photos have been taken and uploaded to Flickr with the device. By comparison, the iPhone 4 has 4,402 daily active users; more than a million photos have been taken with the device.

5. Lady Gaga has become the first celebrity on Twitter to amass a following greater than 10 million. Gaga, who refers to her followers as “monsters” crossed the landmark threshold whilst in London recording a performance for Radio 1.

6. UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that 90% of Britain will have superfast broadband with minimum speeds of 25Mbps by 2015. Speaking at a conference in London, Hunt said that broadband speeds of 2Mbps should be available across the country by 2015, adding that 90% of homes and business will have access to superfast broadband of 25Mbps or better.

7. From last week, Facebook users will be able to tag pages in their photos. Page tagged photos will adhere to a user’s privacy settings, and will only appear on a Page’s Photos tab if set to be visible to everyone. Initially, Facebook is only allowing Pages categorized as “Brands & Products” or “People” to be tagged, but it says it is “looking to expand this functionality to more Page categories over time.”

8. Are we obssessed with Facebook? check out the infographic (right) to see.