Ready to embrace another arbitrary holiday - or just looking for an excuse to slack off and eat cake? Who isn’t?

This Saturday, May 25, is internationally known as Geek Pride Day. “But, Pi Day and Star Wars Day already happened,” you might be thinking. Which leads me to retort, “Do you want this holiday or not?” In actuality, Geek Pride Day is the only one of the bunch that works overtime as a general celebration of all types of geekery. 

3 Reasons To Geek Out

In fact, there is a trifecta of different reasons May 25 is considered the geekiest day in the year. 

1. It’s Towel Day, the day two weeks after Douglas Adams’ passed in 2001 in which fans celebrate by keeping a towel handy a la The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
2. It’s the anniversary of the very first Star Wars movie, Episode IV: A New Hope, which was released on May 25, 1977.
3. It marks the Glorious 25th of May, on which fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books wear lilac and raise awareness of Alzheimer’s, following the author’s 2007 diagnosis. 

Geek Pride Day has been celebrated in dorky masses since 2006, when it originated in Spain as "Día del Orgullo Friki.” (That’s “Day of Geek Pride” in Spanish, natch.) The Internet did the rest, and today it’s an (unofficial) celebration all over the world. Here are a few of ways you can commemorate it:

Geek Stats

For three years running, IT recruitment agency Modis has conducted an annual Geek Pride survey in honor of the holiday. More than 1,000 American adults shared their thoughts about all things geek. Some of this year’s findings:

• The majority of Americans (87%) are proud of their geeky hobbies. Or, as the survey cringingly puts it, most “don’t sneak their geek.” 
• Good news for Google Glass! More than half of respondents (60%) are interested in “wearable tech,” with 56% specifically interested in “smart glasses.”
• You might want to dial it back a bit with the Doctor Who in-jokes. While 74% of self-identified geeks rated themselves “very funny,” only 53% of non-geeks agreed.

Learn A New Geek Skill

Historically, we’ve used “geek” to refer to people “who are unabashedly interested in learning and will eventually be our bosses.” (And before that it referred to sideshow spectacles, but let’s not get into that.) What better day to encourage your own intellectual curiosity? 

ReadWrite has covered many online programs that can teach anyone — even kids — how to become programmers. But one we didn’t cover, Code School, is offering a free trial specifically in commemoration of Geek Pride Day. Sign up on its celebration page to dabble in Ruby, JavaScript, HTML/CSS or iOS for free over the weekend. 

Acquire, Collect & Consume Geekiness

Where would our economy be without geeks lining up in droves to snag the foil-cover limited-edition 3D-capable Blu-ray copy of The Avengers? Embrace capitalism while ensuring that any date you invite to your apartment will have to stare down your anime figurines first. 

Predictably, ThinkGeek has an annual Geek Pride Day promotion. Just like last year, it's shipping out freebies and holding a giveaway. Redbubble is also kicking off a geeky weekend sale. Actually, just Google “Geek Pride Day Sale” and you’ll find tons of companies hungry to snatch up your nerdy, nerdy money. 

Meet Up, Geekily

Not one, not two, but eleven different science fiction, fandom, gaming and anime conventions take place on the weekend of Geek Pride Day 2013. From San Jose’s FAnime Con to Houston’s Comicpalooza to Toronto’s Anime North, the convention centers of Northern America are bound to be crawling with fellow geeks. 

It should be easy to find people out and about who are celebrating Geek Pride Day in particular. If Twitter (#GeekPrideDay) and Facebook aren't enough, just look for people inexplicably carrying lightsabers, lilacs and towels. 

Photo by betsyweber.

Aligning itself aesthetically more along the lines of social networks like Facebook and Google+, LinkedIn has introduced a new navigation bar to its website. The aim is in line with the company's simplification efforts, which so far have included redesigns of the homepage and profile pages and as an overhaul of its mobile apps and the discovery news page LinkedIn Today. 

(Read more: With Pulse, LinkedIn Is Becoming The Newspaper Of The Future)

The company released this video that details how users can best use the new navigation addition: 

In a pure case of closing the barn doors after the horses have come home (and so many corporate Twitter accounts have been hacked), Twitter has announced today the option to implement two-factor authentication. If users opt-in, any sign-on from a new computer will require a code texted to their phone. 

The feature hasn't been made universally available yet, so keep checking your settings if you want this added security feature.

(See Two-Factor Authorization Is Awesome - Until You Lose the Damn Token.)

If we needed an event to wake people up to the power of native advertising, it's surely Yahoo's $1.1-billion purchase of Tumblr.

We'll be talking about this a lot at AdNatively, a one-day conference I'm emceeing in New York on Thursday, May 23.

So what is native advertising? A quick, simple definition: It's an ad whose form and delivery is identical to the content environment in which it is served.

The opposite, in other words, of interruptive advertising: billboards, takeovers, and big banners that take up space on the page but don't otherwise relate.

Tumblr's Real Value

So why did Yahoo buy Tumblr? People talk about the hip, cool vibe of Tumblr's network of millions of blogs. Or the younger demographic Tumblr has attracted, which Yahoo desperately needs.

But Yahoo doesn't need blogs and young'uns for their own sake: It needs them because marketers need them. And the only way marketers can reach Tumblr users is through Tumblr posts, which advertisers will pay to feature on Tumblr users' "dashboards" - the stream of posts from accounts they follow.

That's more theory than practice at this point. Yahoo hopes to turbocharge Tumblr's revenues through its large sales force, which has been itching to have more native advertising formats to sell. 

Tumblr investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is delivering a keynote address at AdNatively. I'm keenly interested in what he'll have to say.

Wilson is also an investor in Twitter, which has a similar native model: Advertisers can pay to promote a tweet so it's seen by more people, or on Facebook, where sponsored posts get more prominent play in users' News Feeds.

Fuck Yeah, Native Ads

Native advertising is not without its controversies. A big one is the learning curve: Marketers must master each potential advertising environment and learn its intricacies, from Tumblr users' love for animated GIFs and the phrase "fuck yeah," to Twitter's peculiar language of retweets and replies to Facebook's maddening algorithms.

It's no wonder that some give up and just buy banner ads, which can be bought and sold by machine, almost like stocks. Native-ad environments are catching up, opening up their ads to automated buying and selling through application programming interfaces, but there's no question that native ads add complexity.

Native ads seem inevitable, though, as content consumption goes mobile and social. Back in 1994, when Wired's HotWired website sold the first banner ad, that little rectangle was arguably a native format adapted to the new medium of the Web. But Web browsing has evolved. If we're changing how we design interactive experiences for touch interfaces and screens of all sizes, shouldn't we change how marketers fit in, too?

Full disclosure: ReadWrite and its owner and publisher, Say Media, are actively thinking about the native-advertising question. ReadWrite runs ad formats, like sponsored posts, which some observers include in the native-advertising mix. So we're not just curious bystanders. But I promise you that ReadWrite will do its best to cover native advertising objectively and disclose when we have a stake in the game.

The conversation at AdNatively promises to be a rousing debate. If you're in New York for Internet Week, please join me, Fred Wilson, and others - ReadWrite readers get a 50% discount on attendance.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

On Monday, Yahoo announced it was buying Tumblr, the blog network, for $1.1 billion. And then the tweets started, with people declaring that Tumblr founder David Karp was now a billionaire.

The conflation of Tumblr's purchase price with Karp's net worth assumed that Karp got nearly all of the Yahoo payday. And that's simply not how it works for venture-backed startups. Investors like Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz will share in the take, with Karp getting an estimated $275 million.

(See also: Tumblr's Perverse Lesson: To Get Rich, Don't Make Money)

That's a lot of money, but it won't get him on Forbes' list of the world's billionaires.

You try explaining this to people on Twitter, though.

From high school drop out to billionaire: previously coy Karp cashes in on Tumblr smh.com.au/it-pro/busines…

— Sandra Sully (@Sandra_Sully) May 20, 2013

David Karp (26) now a billionaire after Yahoo! agrees to buy Tumblr news.com.au/technology/yah… Thx #FF @josepheach @sanddragger @conservotop

— Joey Myers Jr. (@JoeyMyersJr) May 20, 2013

Funny how people think that the founder of a venture backed company sold for $1.1b is somehow a billionaire

— David Galbraith (@daveg) May 20, 2013

David Karp--High school drop-out to billionaire stuff.co.nz/technology/dig… I too have no clue why anyone needs to go to school for 12yrs #Tumblr

— Tolstaja Zhirniavka (@tolstunka) May 20, 2013

Sadly, even some respectable publications like Australia's Sydney Morning Herald made the error:

From high school drop-out to tech billionaire: Meet David Karp. ow.ly/lbRIw #Tumblr

— smh.com.au (@smh) May 20, 2013

Other people asserted that Karp was a "high-school dropout." That's actually a debatable point. He left high school to continue his education through home schooling, and never received a formal diploma.

I hate how the media is referring to David Karp as a "high school dropout". Like, yeah he's a dropout but now he's a hot billionaire.

— Trey Amandus Bennett (@trey_amandus) May 20, 2013

Vespa lover, yes. Billionaire, no.

Who knew that newly billionaire @davidkarp likes to ride Vespas? nym.ag/163cMDH #VespaVita

— Vespa USA (@VespaUSA) May 20, 2013

And Business Insider's Henry Blodget tried to resolve the issue with punctuation:

New York tabloids discover @davidkarp, the city's newest ~billionaire tech god read.bi/11RmFms

— Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 20, 2013

Related stories:

• Who Hates The Yahoo-Tumblr Deal? Tumblrers, That's Who
• Buying Tumblr Will Leave Yahoo With The Same Old Identity Crisis

Photo by Web09

Editor's Note: This is the last installment of a 3-part series covering Len Kendall’s abstinence from the “Like” button for a month.

If you haven't been following along, in April I decided to commit myself to a simple behavioral experiment. I pledged to not "like" anything on or off of Facebook for a month, no matter how tempted I was (and believe me, I was tempted often).

My hypothesis was that at the end of this 30 day cycle I would be free of likes and that my detox period would be over. That isn't the case. I still actively have to stop myself often from hitting that button, and it troubles me quite a bit. It was so simple and I did it for so long that it has burned into my internet muscle memory far more severely than I had anticipated.

I've learned several things along the way, but when I started this trial I wanted to answer one primary question:

Who exactly is benefitting the most from me hitting the like button?

While this experiment didn't provide me with a direct answer to this question, it did force me to think long and hard about the probable ones. I've concluded that the following parties benefit from those billions (yes billions) of likes each day:

• Me: I'm not going to claim I get no value. Facebook has an algorithm that shows me people and information that I'm more interested in based on my like behavior. It's not always spot on, and it irritates the shit out of me when I see this kind of stuff, but nonetheless it has a smart engine that shares timely content from people I care about.
• Brands: Likes feed brands who are trying to understand how they can refine their content distribution (copy, timing, targeting). They also increase the visibility of branded content through all sorts of Edgerank-y goodness. The fact of the matter is, I don't care about making my favorite brands better marketers. I care about my favorite brands continuing to make products that I like. In other words, these likes don't help me.
• Facebook (Part 1): Facebook makes the majority of its revenue from selling data. Yes, that manifests as selling ads, but in reality the company is selling the data that drives who sees ads and who buys them. Every single time I hit "like", even if it's on a friend's baby picture, Facebook is growing its data stockpile that is being refined for their advertising customers. Sure, you could claim I'll see more relevant ads if I help Facebook understand my tastes, but ultimately these likes don't help me.
• Facebook (Part 2): When I give my friends likes, a little Pavlovian red flag goes off in their browser windows and it pulls them back into Facebook. There they spend more time, see more ads, and see more ads, and see more ads. While directly my likes may help my friends' important posts rise to the top, it also trains them to crave likes and potentially augment their sharing behavior to earn them more likes. Again, these likes don't help me.

Above are just four benefits yielded from "like" behavior. The obvious problem is that only 25% of the these items are benefitting me. And that's being generous since I didn't list off countless other beneficiaries. Call me selfish, but the ROI of the like button isn't high enough for me to continue using it. Therefore, I plan to continue abstaining from it.

Although I started this experiment around a single element of Facebook, it's led me to question the value of the many services the social network provides. Facebook has in many ways become the "big box" store of the internet. And while I do shop at such places in real life for certain commodity items, I don't really want to go there for all my many specialty needs. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I personally don't want a big-box internet experience. For me, the web is about discovery, being bombarded with choice, and finding niche experts.

Refraining from likes has been a trivial experiment. I know that there are far more important behavioral issues online worth exploring (cyber bullying, crowdfunding, and citizen journalism just to name a few), but I hope that this small example of personal reflection on digital habits encourages you to do the same. Think about how you're spending time on the internet, who its benefitting, and what's worth testing in your own digital world.

And don't like this post. I really mean it this time.

Lead image via Flickr user Djenan, CC 2.0

Google+ has never looked and felt as it good as it does right now. Alas, looks aren't everything.

A massive overhaul of the service, announced Wednesday during a keynote at Google's I/O conference for developers, has brought it in line with the most modern and functionally powerful Web design principles. It now has a multi-column layout, scrolling menu bars, and enormous images. Google also rolled out an umbrella messaging service called Hangouts, a standalone app for Web and mobile that neatens up the sloppy mess that was Voice, Talk, and Google+ messaging.  

All of this is great news for heavy users of Google+ who have been awaiting a design push that looks and feels like 2013. But there's still one giant problem plaguing the service and Google's entire social platform at large: the hub of your Google life is still an email address, and that's a nightmare for users with multiple Gmail accounts.

Since taking over as CEO in 2011, Larry Page has been talking up the notion of "One Google" to unify the search giant's disparate services. But the reality is that it's very hard as a user to experience a unified Google until Google realizes that a person is a person, not an email account.

At best, the complex process of trying to manage multiple Gmail accounts with Google+ and all the various apps involved slows users down. At worst, it could keep some users from adopting the beautiful new services altogether. 

Two Accounts, Twice The Pain

"For me personally, I have two Google accounts: I have a corporate and personal [account], and it is a pain," admitted Seth Sternberg, director of product management for Google+, in a roundtable discussion with reporters in San Francisco Thursday. And Sternberg is definitely not alone. Many people have two Google email accounts—a personal Gmail and a corporate Google Apps account. Those ought to be Google's best users. Instead, they're the most frustrated ones.

And many people set up multiple email accounts for other reasons. Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn let them associate multiple email addresses with a single personal or professional identity. Google doesn't.

What that ends up doing is disrupting the entire process of laying the Google+ social net atop the Web. Every time a user tries to +1 a link, log into a website with Google+ sign-in, or personalize search, they're confronted with Google's fragmented view of online identity.

So for Google, the email-as-account concept disrupts users' ability to seamlessly use Google+, which in turn makes the network's constantly increasing integration with the rest of the company's apps and services more and more painful with every turn. And for users, it's just plain obnoxious having to use incognito browser windows and all sorts of other workarounds to try and simply manage their online identity.

No wonder Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are the go-to networks for finding friends and sharing information.

Identity, If And When You Want It

Google says it's trying to get better.

"We sanded off all the rough edges," David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, said in the recent roundtable event. Google, to its credit, has introduced an account chooser that makes it easier to stay logged into multiple accounts.

But those fixes don't address the core problem—Google's email-linked identity model.

What Google really needs is something above an email address that could be used as an identifier for all of a user's various accounts. This higher-level identifier could be something akin to a Twitter handle or a Facebook username.

This new Google login could have a registered primary email address—the way Apple and Amazon handle logins to their online accounts—but it should sync up your other Google+ accounts.

Separating personal and professional sharing could be simply handled with a strongly established Google+ concept: Circles, or lists of contacts.

(And, of course, you should still be able to establish a Gmail account for an unlinked, throwaway identity—for, say, a Craigslist posting or mailing lists.)

Umbrellas Are Good

Google showcased its ability to neatly fold up services with Hangouts, and the strategy is a no-brainer. It resolves so many problems users face when a company's products are all around them, yet they have no idea how to manage them all and end up just turning away from what they feel they don't need. 

An umbrella strategy to Google+ and Gmail is a much taller order, but it's one of the biggest impediments standing between the search giant and a more steady, fuller-scale adoption of its social network. So Google, please give us that umbrella, and you'll likely see more people standing underneath it if its done right. 

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's hyperbolic CEO, has been telling anyone who will listen that the "sudden convergence of cloud, social and mobile spheres" is forcing - and allowing - companies to connect with customers in new ways, and to listen with an intensity never before possible.

I'm sure the benefits of social business are dramatic and undeniable, but am I alone in being totally creeped out at what seems to be an obvious invastion of privacy? I don't know about you, but I'm just not ready for companies - even companies I choose to do business with - to closely follow everything I do and say. Even if other humans aren't involved.

Do You Want To Be Connected To A Machine?

At a recent executive event in San Francisco, Benioff entertained customers and journalists wtih a video featuring Beth Comstock, GE's high-profile CMO, claiming her "core belief" is that "business is social." But she didn't just mean people communicating with people, she also meant people communicating with machines. 

The big question for GE, Comstock said, is "how do we connect our customers/employees to our machines?" GE's goal is to combine data from customers and data from its machines - connecting machines to social networks is very big.

The video demonstrated how GE was connecting jet engines to social networks to alert mechanics of their diagnostic status. "If you're in business," Comstock said, "you need social because it will get you closer to your customer… Feedback - that's a marketers dream."

Sounds great, right?

The Menace Of An Internet-Enabled Toothbrush

But consider Benioff's example of the Internet of Things driving social business. He cited Philips' Internet-connected toothbrush that records the time and duration of brushing. With one of these babies, when you go to the dentist and he asks, "have you been brushing" and you answer "yeah," the conversation doesn't end there, Benioff said. The dentist could reply "Let's have a look" and see exactly how much brushing you actually did.

That thought terrifies me. While such a scenario might indeed help keep my teeth from falling out, it's also profoundly creepy and invasive. After all, what if my dental insurance provider got hold of the data, and decided it wouldn't pay to fill that cavity because I didn't brush long enough?

As Benioff correctly noted, the "biggest part is trust." "With all that data about you out on the network, it gets down to another level of trust with the vendors you choose to let be a part of your life."

I trust my doctor with a large amount of intensely personal information - augmented by pretty specific laws and industry practices. For some reason, I'm less comfortable giving my dentist the same degree of trust. Philips and Salesforce? Absolutely not!

How Much Should Your Shirt Salesman Know About You?

Another participant at the event, male-apparel retailer Trunk Club, is also leveraging user information to help "guys that just dont like to shop" said COO Rob Chesney. Trunk Club's goal is to make "it really easy for you to look great" by not just tracking what he's already bought, but whatever other information may be available online. When a customer contacts Trunk Club, "we pull up this guy and find out what is he all about. We see all his social media info. "It's the future of service-oriented retail."

Not for me.

Chesney noted that having this kind of info could help Trunk Club sell higher end clothing to a customer who just got a promotion - an event it might learn of Facebook. That might not be so bad, but what is the company going to do if the customer gets laid off? Offer condolences and try to sell them cheap t-shirts? Awkward to say the least.

Social.com: Salesforce's Facebook & Twitter Tools

Salesforce also pitched its new Social.com tools, designed to help other companies operate this way. Salesforce rolled out the ability to run Facebook campaigns that target users based on what they've posted and linked to on their own Facebook pages.

On Twitter, the idea is start "buying in the moment" - spreading promoted tweets even as the larger Twitter conversation is trending. The promoted tweet shows up any time someone tweets with a relevant hashtag.

To make that work, of course, you've got to be monitoring all the time. "You can't be relevant if you're not listening," explained Facebook's Fergus Gluster (yes, that's his real name).

Jonathan Nelson, CEO of ad agency Omnicom Digital, said that these innovations are a key step toward closing the loop linking real-time advertising to real-time buying. The key, he said, is delviering "the right message for the right person at the right time."

Ironically, in a small panel discussion for journalists, Nelson noted that the "suppression of advertising" when it's not appropriate is "more than half the battle."

That's a key part of reducing the creep factor. 

Finally, just so you know, I'm not alone in worrying about these issues. Another panelist, Altimeter Group's Susan Etlinger, admitted that "as a consumer, I don't particularly want to be targeted." The key, Etlinger said, is to build a relationship over time and "be relevant when the consumer needs us, not when we need them." 

That's a step in the right direction. But if companies they really care about not being creepy, they'll learn to respond quickly and effectively when asked, and otherwise stay out of my face.

Photos - except for the toothbrush - by Fredric Paul for ReadWrite

With a whirlwind of announcements at its Google I/O developers conference this week, Google's vast suite of social products is finally starting to look like it was created by a single company and not cobbled together via a series of haphazard acquisitions. Here are the highlights of what's changed:

Hangouts: Google Messaging, Unmessy At Last

According to a statement from Nikhyl Singhal, Google's head honcho of real-time communications, Google Voice will be folded into Hangouts too (Yay!), though there's no word on when.

Google+ Gets A Lot Of Love

Messaging may have been the messiest area of Google's social services, but Google+ is the big umbrella that covers them all. Amidst the company's epic 3-hour-plus Google I/O keynote yesterday, Google+ guru Vic Gundotra announced approximately one million updates to Google+, the social network that the company launched two years ago. Okay, he pegged the number at 41… but that's almost a million.

The updates are extensive. As a regular Google+ user, it's actually difficult to get a sense for what changed, since the redesign looks and feels right in stride with Google's recent overall changes in user interfaces that runs from Google+ to Google Glass to Google Now and Android. So here's a list of some of the most notable of the 41 updates:

• A multi-column layout. This can be toggled off, if you're still into the Blogger single-column-era.
• Photos and videos get even bigger. Google is really into making media massive - and we would be too if the average person knew how to share properly high-res photos.
• New animations. Things are flipping and sliding all over the place in there.
• A third dimension. You can scroll up and down through your social stream, but Google wants you to be able to scroll in too. Now you can take a deeper dive on a given Google+ post -or is it a Card? I think we're suppose to call everything Cards now -- via related hashtags, which will lead you to more content of interest. It will also take you further down the Google+ rabbit hole, of course.
• Lots of treats for photographers. Google+ has a thriving community of awesome photogs, and Google is keen to do right by them. Photos in Google+ now have all sorts of cool bells and whistles. A few I'm particularly stoked about include "auto highlight," which de-emphasizes duplicate and blurry pics, automatically picking the best shot out of a batch. I've yet to test this extensively, but since I have a habit of bracketing (taking multiple shots at different exposures) - even on my phone - choosing the best photo of a set can be a major timesuck. This feature could help there. Another feature, "Auto Awesome," can stitch together shots in a series to make a playful Photobooth-esque picture or even a Vine-like animated gif.

For a full breakdown of Google's social updates, hit the company's official blog post or just cruise around in Google+ for a while. The  the social network has been the butt of many a joke over the last few years, and we're happy to see Google take the time to spruce things up a little.

 

Photos by Nick Statt for ReadWrite. 

At the Moscone Center West, where Google's been holding its annual I/O conference for developers, we've seen a fair number of people wearing Google Glass, the face-mounted display-and-camera gadget Google introduced last year.

The most prominent Glass-toter was Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who drew a crowd at an after-hours party for press attending the event. He first talked to reporters, then chatted up SlashGear writer Vincent Nguyen, also a Glass-wearer.

There's A Right Way And A Wrong Way To Take A Selfie With Glass

Then Brin put his arm around Nguyen, drew him close and made an unusual gesture: He whipped off his Glass headset, spun it upside down, and clicked the camera button to take a photo of the pair.

"So you can take a selfie with Google Glass?" I asked Brin.

"The team debated this," Brin told me. Some felt the camera should turn off when you take the headset off, to avoid accidental photos. But Brin felt Glass users should be able to take a self-portrait. Normally, wearing Glass, you can only take a photo of what you're looking at.

Of course, with Glass off your head, you avoid the consumerist showiness of displaying the fact that you possess a $1,500 headset. But unlike those who snap fake Glass selfies in a mirror or with—gasp—the smartphones Glass is supposed to obviate, Glass owners who follow Brin's prescribed whip-reach-and-click routine can rest assured that they're doing it the right way.

LinkedIn just rolled out a number of changes to its privacy policy and user agreement, informing its more than 200 million members through a notice on the professional network's website.

Most of the changes are simplification of the legalese. But one in particular caught our eye. According to LinkedIn, thou shalt not:

i. Even if it is legal where you are located, create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution.

What surprised us was that this was even necessary. On a site where every action you take is tied to your professional identity, would anyone really take the risk of advertising adult services?

Apparently, yes. Prostitution, in fact, is a skill for which you can get endorsed on LinkedIn. (Many self-identified experts on the topic work in law enforcement or religious ministries, suggesting that their experience is with catching or counseling offenders rather than offering such services.)

Judging by the suggestions LinkedIn's search algorithm offers, LinkedIn members are actively looking for this kind of professional help. Search on "escorts," for example, and LinkedIn will prompt you to search instead for the following terms:

• female escorts
• independent escorts
• call girls
• hot girls
• adult entertainment
• escort services
• dubai escorts

This ban is not completely new. LinkedIn previously forbade advertising "unlawful" services. However, prostitution is legal in some European countries and parts of the United States, and escort services fall into a legal gray area in many jurisdictions.

The clarification appears necessary, as some LinkedIn members appear to have been skirting the older terms to offer risqué business. For instance, check out this profile, which we've redacted just a bit:

Lead image via Flickr user Bruce Tuten, CC 2.0

I’ve seen the future of Facebook, and it is... Yahoo!

Between 1994–2000, Yahoo! dominated the consumer Internet industry and much of the world’s attention. The company’s exclamation mark (sometimes called a "bang") cast a long, purple-hued shadow across the globe, as users flocked to its ever-expanding array of services, and online and offline companies of all sizes threw money at it (almost literally) to gain prominent visibility among its massive, segmentable audience. Yahoo!’s page views rocketed; revenue rocketed; profits rocketed; stock price rocketed; market capitalization rocketed. Yahoo!, it seemed, could do no wrong.

Then, the world changed. Radically.

What Happened To Yahoo!

Consumer behavior shifted, with individuals the world over flirting with, and then devoting themselves to, myriad other online services. The business cycle changed and companies chose/were forced to reduce or eliminate their online advertising budgets. Then, when Internet advertising budgets returned a few years later, business behavior adjusted again, with marketers broadly diversifying their spend across the Web (following those same migrating users). And, perhaps most significantly and most representative of both of the previous issues, Google emerged, presenting consumers with a slate of invaluable (and competitive) services and companies with a nearly perfect mechanism/venue through which to market their offerings.

Needless-to-say, the 2000–2013 period has not been nearly so kind to the purple giant-of-yesterday — not to its metrics, its business, its stock or its market capitalization.

Throughout its rollercoaster-of-a-life, however, Yahoo! has remained shockingly static at its core, with a (still) massive, segmentable audience consuming an enormous volume of free content and services, surrounded by advertisements of all shapes and sizes. That those content/service offerings now include Fantasy Football and photos from Flickr, rather than, say, news and NASDAQ quotes, is nice, but irrelevant, as is the fact that the company now offers rich media and video ads, as opposed to just sponsorships and banners.

Those are incremental changes to the story — variations on the theme; because, the fact of the matter is that — apart from its early days of minimal competition and “easy money” — Yahoo! has struggled mightily to engage its users in fundamentally new ways; unlock the true value of its global user base for its advertising clients; and, bring to market any lasting innovation that even hints at shaking the status quo all over again.

In not so subtle ways, this reminds me of Facebook. A lot.

What Facebook Is Doing

Like Yahoo! in its early phase, Facebook hit the ball out of the park from the outset, and, it seems, hasn't yet stopped running the bases. From the ivy covered confines of Harvard University, Zuckerberg & Co. now attracts more than one billion users to its site globally; has enabled hundreds of billions of friend connections; sees hundreds of millions of photos uploaded daily; and, generates several billion dollars of revenue annually. Not bad for its first nine years, right?

And yet, since its astounding opening act, Facebook has bestowed upon us:

• Gifting - blah.
• News Feed algorithm changes - yawn.
• Suggested Posts - meh.
• Messaging - join the club.
• Sponsored Stories - ummm.
• Graph Search - niche.
• Poking (again) - ha.
• Timeline - zzzzz.
• News Feed design changes - argh.

What's next, a new color scheme? A new font?

What Could Happen To Facebook

Suffice it to say, the company is not exactly setting the world on fire with these efforts; more importantly, these are not (individually or collectively) doing much (if anything) to materially enhance Facebook's relationship with its users; substantively increase the level of dependency felt by its advertising clients; and/or fundamentally alter the trajectory of its franchise or business. Said differently, where is Facebook’s second act, like Android (acquired, transformed and massively scaled by Google) or iPad? Where is its money-printing AdWords product? Where is its PayPal (acquired, and massively scaled by eBay)? Where its its quantum leap forward? Where is its disruptive force?

None of this is to suggest that Facebook has, in any way, “failed;” nor is it meant to take anything away from the extraordinary space that Facebook has carved out for itself in our collective universe. Similarly, I do not mean to imply that Facebook is necessarily destined to follow in the path of Yahoo! (after all, it would be damned near impossible to repeat all of those mistakes).

That said, it is, hopefully, a wake-up call, because — at least to this observer — the company and its business seem far too focused on tweaking the edges of its past creation(s) instead of changing the world all over again for both its users and advertisers. And that, as history might suggest, is a very risky path to enduring success on the Web.

Beware the “!,” Facebook. Beware the “!”!

Guest author Derek Brown is a technology executive and analyst who blogs at One Blind Squirrel.

Pinterest is a three-year-old start-up with what is rumored to be no revenue to date. Zero. In fact, by all accounts, it hasn’t even attempted to generate revenue yet. In three years! Hard to fathom in this day and age, isn’t it?

And, yet, some of the sharpest minds in the venture capital community are so confident in Pinterest’s team and business that they recently invested in the company at an eye-popping valuation of $2.5 billion. Yes, billion!

If you were involved in the Internet economy of the late-1990s, as was I, you may be rolling your eyes right about now and muttering to yourself about Pets.com, Kozmo, Webvan, theGlobe.com, govWorks, Boo.com, eToys and all the other so-called-companies that were, for one brief moment in time, valued as if they had discovered the cure to cancer, only to be out of business a few short quarters later. Ahh... the memories.

Assuming that Pinterest’s investors share many of the same recent memories (or, more aptly, nightmares), what could be so compelling about the company and opportunity that would justify their support of such a lofty valuation this time around?

Passion At Scale

In short, I believe it is the economics of passion at scale.

Pinterest, in its own words, is “a tool for collecting and organizing things you love).” (Italics mine.) By pinning images from around the Web to their own board(s) or browsing others’ pinboards for images (which can then be “liked” or “re-pinned” to their own board(s)), users are able to create, manage, share and discover highly personalized image collections that define their passions.

Vintage fashion. Wind surfing. Gourmet cooking. Disneyana. Digital photography. Wedding gowns. Home decor. Camping. Italian design. Rolex watches. Travel planning. Architecture. Mid-century furniture. Urban farming. Knitting. Cross-Fit... The list of people’s passions is literally endless; and, Pinterest helps its users collect, organize and maintain all of them. On their own (or, with the help of the broader community). In granular, image- and/or SKU-specific detail.

Self-identified passionistas on a product-by-product basis — are you kidding? I’m not sure a marketer or merchant could dream of more fertile ground among a set of unknown people, short of seeing a prospective customer standing directly in front of items on a shelf, with cash already in hand. And, I’m not even convinced that would be more compelling on a long-term basis.

What could possibly be better? How about having that level of insight into the interests and intents and aspirations of not hundreds of thousands, but tens of millions, of people per month! According to press reports, Pinterest is already doing just that, hosting roughly 30 million unique monthly visitors who are generating more than 2.5 billion page views, the majority of which are likely coming through little more than domestic word-of-mouth promotion.

Fast forward three years and I think it’s entirely reasonable to assume that Pinterest is successful at growing its user base and traffic flows by 5 times, fueled by existing users continuing to build out their identities, waves of more mainstream domestic users finally catching on and contributions from millions of new pinners (their word, not mine) in overseas markets. That’s a lot of passion under one roof!

Passion Pays

On the business side of the house, passion pays. Extremely well.

Advertising, alone, could generate several hundred million dollars of revenue per year. Let’s say, hypothetically, that Pinterest follows in the footsteps of virtually every sizable media company on the planet, by introducing advertisements of some sort across its pages in the next few years. With marketers across every vertical likely salivating at the prospect of reaching into the company’s massive, impassioned and finely segmentable audience, it seems more than plausible that advertising rates across the company’s site could be at least 50% higher (if not considerably more) than the current industry average. Accordingly, with 12.5 billion page views per month (three years from now) and a site-wide CPM of, say, $4, Pinterest would generate advertising revenue of roughly $50 million per month, or about $600 million per year.

And yet, despite this sum, Pinterests more intriguing revenue opportunity at Pinterest lay in its role as a direct facilitator of online commerce.

Passions, as we all know, cost money — lots of it, over extended periods of time; and, it is money that we are, on some level, actually excited to spend. So, whether it’s a weekend warrior who pins a Burton snowboard, or a hobbyist portrait photographer pinning a Zeiss lens, or a budding interior decorator who pins the perfect accent table on Fab, Pinterest has the potential to become an economic kingmaker when these enthusiasts transition into consumers looking to purchase the goods/services that bring their passions to life.

Projecting Pinterest's Numbers

To appreciate the financial implications of Pinterest’s role in the transaction cycle, think of the service as a massive affiliate that gets paid for delivering customers to online merchants. If just ~3% of its 150 million+ users (three years from now) decide to indulge in their passions by clicking from a "want-to-have" product image on one of their own Pinterest boards to a relevant online merchant, the company could claim a direct role in driving 4.5 million transactions per month. Assuming an average transaction size of $200 (remember, people are buying their passions, not everyday staples), Pinterest’s users would account for ~$900 million worth of monthly purchases. Were the company to receive a 7% affiliate “take”/lead fee/commission on these sales, it would generate transactional revenue of about $60 million per month, or $720 million per year.

As if annual revenue of $1.3 billion (from just two sources) weren’t enough, the company’s margin profile has the potential to be the envy of most. Based on my 15+ years of experience evaluating a wide variety of online marketplace business models, it wouldn’t surprise me if Pinterest were able to sustain gross margins of 90% or more and adjusted EBITDA margins comfortably in excess of 25% (even while continuing to invest heavily in future growth). At these levels, the company would generate adjusted EBITDA of approximately $325 million per year.

Worth It? Or Not?

So... were Pinterest’s investors ultimately wise to value the company at $2.5 billion? No comment.

Will the company generate any annual revenue, let alone $1.3 billion, and adjusted EBITDA of $325 million in a few short years? I don't know.

Will Pinterest eventually be worth $5 million or $50 billion? I can’t wait to find out.

Those purposeful vagaries aside, though, I clearly see the underpinnings of a company with tremendous potential and, if I squint just enough, a business that could be the driver of billions of dollars of passion-fueled online commerce each year — and that’s a position that few companies ever even have the chance to dream about.

SlideShare, a hub for online presentations that LinkedIn acquired a year ago, just crossed a milestone: Its users have uploaded a total of 10 million presentations. And in the process, it's become an indispensable resource for what some say is a big challenge: helping businesspeople communicate and explain the value of what they do.

Andrew Dumont, the director of business development at SEOmoz, a search-marketing software company, wrote in a blog post that technical types often don't value the contributions of salespeople and marketers because it's difficult to quantify their skills. "There's no Dribbble or Github for businesspeople," Dumont wrote.

Dribbble is a site where designers post screenshots of work in progress. GitHub is a popular site—it recently crossed 3 million users—for programmers to upload their work and collaborate with other developers.

When I tweeted Dumont's observation, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a writer and entrepreneur, replied, "Isn't that SlideShare?"

SlideShare founder Ross Mayfield didn't quibble too much with that observation. "SlideShare is a place for businesspeople," he says. "There's five times the number of small-business owners as other social networks."

Mayfield noted that the combination of a LinkedIn profile, enhanced with SlideShare presentations and other examples of one's work, that let nontechnical employees show their value. "Just like an open-source developer, what they contribute on their merits and how they work with others, when that's made public, factors into what a real reputation is," says Mayfield.

Mayfield says he's even seen SlideShare users "fork"—or copy and modify—presentations, much as GitHub users do with code. (SlideShare users can grant permission to other users to download and adapt their work.)

He also observes that SlideShare users have shifted the visual language of presentations around the idea that they'll be viewed and shared online, rather than presented at a conference or meeting. Marty Neumeier's "Brand Gap" presentation, posted in 2007, is an early example of this genre.

LinkedIn recently revamped its news product, LinkedIn Today, around topics or "Channels," boosting the visibility of SlideShare presentations in the news mix. This sometimes lead to truly awful results—but over time, the best business content ought to bubble to the top. And with it, the careers of the business minds behind it.

Here's a presentation—of course—that Mayfield and team created:

Photo by Flickr user ImagineCup, CC 2.0

Would you trust the "wisdom of the crowd" over your own doctor? CrowdMed thinks you might. The San Francisco start-up has an audacious plan to use crowdsourcing techniques to tap the "collective wisdom" of strangers to help diagnose patients - particularly those who've bounced from doctor to doctor for years trying to understand uncommon symptoms. 

While many may worry that healthcare is too important to trust to strangers, I think this is awesome. 

After all, crowdsourcing is already used to help find missing persons, track down terrorists, answer life's vexing questions, pick stocks - and to select our President. SETI uses crowdsourcing to search for extraterrestrial life. Why not employ crowdsourcing to help our multi-trillion-dollar healthcare industry? 

CrowdMed recently received $1.1 million in seed financing from some of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms, including NEA, Greylock Partners, Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz. 

Ask Your Doctor? No. Ask the Crowd.

CrowdMed works like this: Patients pay a $199 fee to list their case on CrowdMed. They fill out a "patient questionnaire" that details their symptoms, case history and personal information. Though CrowdMed founder Jared Heyman declined to say exactly how many patients have enrolled so far, he claimed that there has been "pretty strong demand." Without the fee, Heyman explained, the site would be overwhelmed with patients who might not get diagnosed.

Once a case is posted, the crowd, what CrowdMed somewhat coyly terms "MDs" - for "medical detectives" - can review the patient's information and offer up what they believe is the correct - or most likely - diagnosis. 

According to Heyman, "close to 3,000 people have signed up as medical detectives." He said CrowdMed's "MDs" include doctors, residents and "regular people that like solving medical mysteries." Why sign up to be a medical detective? First, there's the chance to help patients. Second, CrowdMed awards its detectives "points" for the diagnoses they correctly predict. 

CrowdMed utilizes a so-called prediction market methodology to help glean the correct diagnosis. For example, when a detective selects a case to review, they use up some of their points. They use up still more when they suggest a diagnosis or vote up (or down) other suggested diagnoses. Essentially, it "costs" to play. The more accurate their predictions, however, the more points they are ultimately awarded. 

Points do not have any cash value, however. For now, they can be exchanged only for donations to Watsi, an organization that helps fund medical treatments in the developing world. Heyman did not say how much CrowdMed is donating.

While it's true that CrowdMed's detectives may not always correctly diagnose a particular patient, if they can narrow the likelihood of someone's illness to, say, two or three likely options - those that garner the most points, for example - that could speed up decision making and help point to which tests should be perfomed. 

In Crowd We Trust?

The obvious question: Can a crowd of strangers with unknown amounts of medical expertise be trusted to safely and correctly diagnose baffling medical problems? CrowdMed claims that after "four years of development" it possess a patented "unique technology" specifically designed to optimize group intelligence for medical diagnostic purposes. From its site:

Groups hold far more knowledge collectively than any individual member, no matter how brilliant. With hundreds of minds working in parallel, groups can process information much faster than individuals.

Heyman told me that his sister suffered for three years from a rare disease. Once it was finally correctly diagnosed, doctors were able to significantly ease her symptoms. CrowdMed used her case to help validate its model - Heyman says it accurately diagnosed her within days. 

What Do Real MDs Think?

The first rule of medicine is primum non nocere, Latin for "first, do no harm." It does not necessarily apply to the crowd. Not surprisingly, the CrowdMed approach bothers many real doctors.

Dr. Hubert Chen, the Associate Medical Director for biotech pioneer Genentech, said, "I want to be enthusiastic, but I have concerns about it." Dr. Chen's primary concern was the potential for numerous "false positives" that CrowdMed's "detectives" might generate: "I've seen many patients misled by the Web. Doctors often have to un-educate them."

Dr. Aaron Roland, wo runs a family practice in northern California and is an associate clinical professor at UC San Francisco, had different concerns. "I wouldn't pay $200," Rolan said. He also wondered whether CrowdMed could attract the scale it needs. "Crowdsourcing is good when there's a lot of people in the crowd," he said, "but until you get that crowd, I'm suspicious."

Industry Connections

To help attract the required crowd, Heyman recruited Clare Martorana, the long-time editor of WebMD, to help support CrowdMed's outreach efforts. 

Not surprisingly, Martorana was very positive about the concept. There are many "experts," she said, not necessarily doctors, who may have suffered from a particular disease, or have a family member who has suffered, and whom can now contribute to the site.

She hopes to "reach out" to staffers - not just doctors - at medical research, counseling and support organizations that concentrate on specific issues - think, autism, for example, or Parkinson's dioease - and encourage them to participate in CrowdMed.

Martorana also suggested crowdsourcing diagnoses could be a boon for health insurance companies: "If you are insured and going to multiple specialists, but not getting relief, that costs a lot of money - you, your employer, your insurer all must bear those costs. At some point, there probably will be a pretty significant revenue stream for CrowdMed coming from insurance companies. Right now, their cost numbers are staggering."

Staggering Potential

The relatively paltry $1.1 million CrowdMed has raised so far suggest that investors remain unsure of the idea's potential risks and rewards. But connecting patients with chronic medical symptoms to experts, regardless of their titles, clearly holds massive disruptive potential. CrowdMed's ambitious, even inspiring idea is to use connectivity, collaboration and collective intelligence to help people avoid needless suffering. Despite the risks, it seems like it's a worth a try to me.

See also

• Social Revolution: Crowdsourcing For Change
• The Problem With Crowdsourcing Crime Reporting In The Mexican Drug War
• The Key To Crowdsourcing: Smarter Crowds

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. Images of Jared Heyman and Carly Heyman courtesy of CrowdMed. Image of Clare Martorana via LinkedIn.

LinkedIn, once a site known for job hunting, is now becoming an online news destination with some job ads attached. The shift won't distract from the site's job focus, though; it will actually enhance it.

Late Tuesday, LinkedIn quietly launched Channels - its name for topics - on LinkedIn Today, its news hub. Ranging from "social impact" to "the economy," they allow LinkedIn members to customize the news they see based on their interests.

The company is expected to formally announce Channels Wednesday morning in a blog post. CEO Jeff Weiner had mentioned the impending launch of Channels in the company's first-quarter earnings call with Wall Street analysts earlier this month.

Previously, LinkedIn's customization options were more limited: Members could follow companies or industries, as well as LinkedIn's "influencers," high-profile business leaders like Richard Branson and Jack Welch, who contribute articles to the site. The redesign of LinkedIn Today puts more emphasis on posts from influencers as well.

Already, LinkedIn's push into news seems to be working. Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn's head of content products, told ReadWrite that members spend six times as much time finding and reading content as they do searching for jobs on the site.

It's Still About Jobs

Roslansky says that by offering links to news on other sites, as well as LinkedIn's Influencer posts and presentations from SlideShare, a site LinkedIn bought last year, LinkedIn is trying to help its members develop professionally and get better at their current jobs - not just find new gigs.

What's in it for LinkedIn? Offering more content - and offering more interesting content - is a key way to get people to use the site more frequently, which helps LinkedIn in obvious ways, like building up its advertising business.

But far more interesting is the potential for LinkedIn to build up its database of information about its members. Right now, LinkedIn mostly has explicit data that members share, like their job history and education.

Through tracking news consumption, LinkedIn can develop implicit knowledge about its members, too - their interests outside their immediate professional field, perhaps, or new, developing interests reflected in the articles they read.

That could ultimately help recruiters - a key customer base for LinkedIn, some of whom pay thousands of dollars a year for LinkedIn's high-end talent search software - find not just people with a track record in a particular industry, but harder-to-find career switchers and other non-obvious candidates for jobs.

Paul Miller, a technology writer for The Verge, performed a curious experiment over the last year: He quit the Internet. Miller replaced his smartphone with a feature phone. He got his news through TV and newspapers. He embarked on what he thought would be a liberating journey to find himself and a life not dominated by the immediacy of information and communication.

What he ultimately found was himself. Warts and all.

Noble But Naïve

Miller's experiment, while noble, reeks of naïveté. People like to think they can change the way they are by changing their circumstances. Oftentimes somebody will move to a new city and say, “I am going to be a whole different person now.” It rarely works that way. Real behavioral, emotional and characteristic change is not something that happens overnight.

At first, Miller’s experiment started well. He biked more, got outside and found that his attention span was longer. Life without the Internet, he found, was oddly liberating. 

For a little while, at least. 

Miller writes:

A year in, I don't ride my bike so much. My frisbee gathers dust. Most weeks I don't go out with people even once. My favorite place is the couch. I prop my feet up on the coffee table, play a video game, and listen to an audiobook. I pick a mindless game, like Borderlands 2 or Skate 3, and absently thumb the sticks through the game-world while my mind rests on the audiobook, or maybe just on nothing.

The Law Of Unintended Reality

It is undoubtedly true that the Internet is changing the intricacies of human behavior. This effect is especially pronounced among younger individuals who have known only a life with the Internet ever-available just a swipe or keystroke away.

Yet, ultimately, Internet or no, Miller’s own behavioral traits asserted themselves.

When I first read of Miller’s yearlong trial, my first thought was to applaud. I respected the project for its experimental and journalistic merits. I have seen other young people that have become disillusioned with the Internet and the life they lead on it and attempted to escape. Former ReadWrite author Jon Mitchell might describe himself that way. 

But as I thought about it a little more, Miller’s decision to leave the Internet struck me as, to be honest, kind of dumb. I wish there was a nicer word for it. But, instead of trying to cope with his perceived personal deficiencies, he fled from them.  It seems Miller had decided that his sense of self and worth was defined by the Web, so he tried to change things overnight. In the end, he just changed his location.

Miller admits to going through the modern psycho-sociological phenomenon known as a “quarter-life crisis.” This period of a person’s life, usually occurring between the ages of 24 to 26, is defined by a lack of definition. The behaviors, world concepts and sense of self built up since the teenage years come in doubt. These 20-somethings face the task of figuring out, yet again, who they really are. Sometimes they key on the notion that what had defined them before is the source of their problems and the best way to fix things is to completely disassociate with their previous life. For Miller, that definition of self stemmed from the Internet. He has lived on the Web since he was 12, earning his livelihood on it since he was 14. 

I totally get what was going on. My own story is not so different from Miller’s. I started cooking professionally when I was 14. By the time I was in my early 20s, I was a trained chef. By 25, I would’ve given anything to get out of the kitchen and be a different person. Though my experience was not tied to the Web, the framework was similar. While I was able to successfully change careers (to the Web, ironically), I did not change the type of human being I was. Only time did that.

The Unexamined Life

There is a reason that our series on stepping back from from the Internet life is called ReadWrite Pause and not ReadWrite Quit or ReadWrite Disconnect. We realize it is healthy to step away, read a book, write something by hand or just Digital Detox for a couple of days. But we also know the difference between taking a break and giving up.

The Internet is what we make of it. Luckily, I have never had a problem turning off the computer to read a long book or go on a long bike ride. I have learned to compartmentalize my digital self from my physical self. The Internet does not define me. It is a part of what I do and what makes me… me. But it is not the core of my existence. 

Miller, in the end, came to a similar conclusion:

But then I spoke with Nathan Jurgenson, a ‘net theorist’ who helped organize the conference [on Theorizing the Web]. He pointed out that there's a lot of "reality" in the virtual, and a lot of "virtual" in our reality. When we use a phone or a computer we're still flesh-and-blood humans, occupying time and space.

Maybe it's just me, but that seems kind of obvious.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

For such a seemingly minor detail, the Instagram hashtag is remarkably powerful. Anecdotally, the hashtag has long appeared to lead to a flood of "likes' from fellow Instagram users. Now there's data to prove it.

By analyzing over 1 million Instagram photos, self-described social media scientist Dan Zarrella found a strong correlation between hashtags and likes. The more you tag your photos, the more likely you are get a virtual hat tip from your fellow Instagrammers. 

(See also: Instagram Now Lets You Tag Friends, Brands and Selfies)

How Instagram Hashtags Work

As the contextual connective tissue that ties related images together, hashtags grease the wheels of photo discovery and get your pouty-faced mirror selfies and vintage-tinted lattes seen by more people. That exposure, in turn, results in more taps of the "like" button.

If you've ever taken the time to go back and tag your older photos, you've seen this in action: one after another, a parade of strangers will instantly start tapping the heart-shaped 'like' button under the image, sending a flood of virtual love your way. 

Of course, the results will vary depending on which hashtags are used. Super-popular tags like #love, #me, #cute and #instagood are naturally going to lead to more exposure, simply by virtue of the fact that those tags are popping up all over Instagram and a higher volume of people will wind up tapping on them. 

Driving Photo Discovery on Instagram

Along with geolocation tag pages, the pages for individual hashtags are one of the few areas of Instagram that let you break out of your own immediate network and peruse photos you wouldn't otherwise see. When you add a given hashtag to your photo, the image winds up on that tag's page, where it's seen by hordes of new people. Since most tags are at least somewhat descriptive, the images one finds by tapping on them are more contextually relevant than, say, the tween selfies and cat pics found on the app's Explore tab. That relevancy is what drives so many of those likes. 

Of course, like everything on the Internet, Instagram hashtags can be gamed for self-promotional purposes. Tags like #followforfollow, #like4like and #followback are used quite frequently as a sort of logrolling currency. If you like my photo, I'll like one of yours or better yet, I'll follow you.

Tactics like this might seem a little slimy, but they're incredibly effective, accordion Zarrella's data. The 11 top tags that garner the most likes seek some kind of reciprocal behavior. Nature-related tags like #sky #clouds #sunset and #nature are also highly correlated with frequent taps of the "like" button. 

See Also: 

• How To Get More Followers On Instagram
• Top 10 Most Popular Tags On Instagram
• When Is The Best Time To Post On Instagram?
• #Me: Instagram Narcissism And The Scourge Of The Selfie

Facebook enabled a privacy feature Thursday called Trusted Contacts that allows you to select three to five confidants from your friend list to receive the virtual key to your account. If your Facebook is compromised by hackers or you forget your password, these people can supply the codes to get you back in. 

The feature was first announced as 'Trusted Friends' in October of 2011. "However, we were only testing for the first part of last year [2012], and the feature actually wasn't available for much of 2012," Frederic Wolens of Facebook Policy Communications told ReadWrite in an email. "The bulk of our work was making this more proactive (allowing you to select your friends ahead of time) than reactive (selecting your friends after you couldn't get into your account)," he added. 

The Joy Of Facebook Hacking

While there may be some benefits to this feature, Facebook already has two-step authentication, making Trusted Contacts unnecessary in the likely event you can access your email and just use the normal password recovery option. More to the point, Trusted Contacts also pose a big risk. How much can you really trust those Trusted Contacts not to abuse their power?

Remember, it takes only three of the Trusted Contacts' codes to get into your account. That's good, right?

Right.

Unless the friends you choose have an affinity for the art of the Facebook hack. In my college years, when shared computers were often accessible in dorm rooms and campus hangout spots, Facebook hacking wasn't just a prank, it was an art. The rules were simple: If anyone left their account open on any computer that wasn't their own that person's Facebook account was fair game. (Sometimes, even that simple rule was bent by the less honorable.)

What typically ensued was a chaotic, hilarious and often line-crossing exercise in testing the limits of friendship. The hack quickly transcended crude status updates and moved into true social media sabotage. Facebook hackers would change birthdays, send unwanted friend requests and write embarrassing notes on walls.  

For me, the whole ordeal culminated in a prank where I created a fake profile of my victim, replicated his post history for a week in secret, and then began friending everyone we knew. I mimicked his behavior so well no one figured out it was me for a good day or two. It remains one of my proudest Facebook hacks - and the epitome of my juvenile social media behavior. 

Breaking In

First off, let's run through how a trio of your Trusted Contacts could access your account without you knowing about it. 

After opening Facebook in a different browser or private browsing mode, a Trusted Friend would  click "Forgot your password?" From there, they would identify the victim by name in the Find Your Account field, saying that they no longer have access to the email accounts listed. That lets you put in any email address - and the process moves on without requiring further authentication.

By entering in only one of the Trusted Contacts' names — in the event that you're the one doing the hacking, it can be your own name — you can access the code portion of the page. With three codes collected by visiting Facebook.com/recover and claiming the person has reached you by phone, you're immediately brought to a new password screen where the Trusted Friend can reset the password and gain access to the account. 

Sounds like it would be a lot of work, and it certainly is when I tried it myself on my own account, but you are essentially handing over the ability for three people, or just one who convinces two others to give them the codes, to change your password without any new authentication required on your end. Granted, you can revoke access to a Trusted Contact, but only from your account.  

Who Can You Trust?

Obviously, the best precaution is to pick people you're confident won't prank you. But there are also a certain types of Facebook user who should never get this kind of access. 

For one, don't trust anyone who infrequently uses Facebook or who likes to condemn the social network and those who indulge too much in it. The first sign of a weakness for Facebook hacking is disregard for the damage a "Liking" spree can do, or downplaying the importance of Facebook birthdays. These people find it hilarious when dozens of people begin mistakenly wishing you a Happy Birthday. 

Conversely, people who use Facebook too much may be just itching to pull off the perfect Facebook prank - and they'll know the the best, most believable ways to impersonate you.

One smart approach might be to pick two people that dislike each other, making it unlikely that they'll work together to mess with you. 

The simplest solution: Don't use Trusted Contacts. The feature adds a layer of defense against strangers attacking your account, which could be reasonable considering this year's surge incidents of malicious hacking. But it also seems like a sly attempt to push the boundaries of Facebook's importance in our lives. 

But by "trusting" your friends enough to give them a key to your digital life, you may be taking an even bigger risk of being pranked, if not actually hacked.