Social Media Round-up of the Week – 8 July

  • PR

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 six: New Picture (2)

1. Payment processing service PayPal suffered an embarrassing lapse of security on Wednesday when its Twitter account was hijacked, apparently by a disgruntled ex-customer keen to make his feelings regarding the company known. PayPal shot to fame as an easy way for individuals to accept credit card payments for goods and services without a traditional merchant account, allowing money to be sent and received with just an e-mail address. When eBay bought the firm back in 2002 for a whopping $1.5 billion in stock, it rapidly became the only way to pay for certain eBay auctions.

2.Wild parties organised on Facebook could be banned in Germany after a series of gatherings advertised on the website descended into violence. Authorities have called for parties promoted on the social networking site to be prohibited in advance if police believe they pose a threat to law and order. Last month 100 Hamburg police offers made 11 arrests when 1,600 people gatecrashed a 16-year-old girl’s birthday.

3. Google is to retire its Blogger & Picasa brands as the search giant looks to concentrate its marketing efforts on Google+ – according to reports on Mashable. Both products will remain available to consumers but will henceforth be known as “Google Blogs” and “Google Photos” respectively.

4.Twitter is raising hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding at a valuation as high as $7 billion, Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. Citing a person familiar with the matter, the newspaper said it was unclear which investors were participating in the new round of financing for the short-messaging service. In December, Twitter received an injection of $200 million in funding from investors to help fuel its growth, reportedly giving the San Francisco-based company a valuation of $3.7 billion.

5.  A Queensland student says she owes her life to Facebook after barely escaping a house fire which set alight the mattress she was sleeping on. Hunter Matthews, 17, awoke to find her bedroom alight when a Facebook alert was sent to her iPhone at 1.34am on Tuesday. The schoolgirl was asleep when a nearby heater ignited clothing and the mattress she was sleeping on in her grandmother’s Toowoomba flat.

6. With recent disasters such as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami proving the worth of Twitter to get information out fast, this tongue-in-cheek fire notice (above) goes some way to show how quick people might be to use Twitter to inform others of an emergency.