Social Media

Despite plummeting temperatures, the Irish political landscape will heat up on Saturday as thousands of people are expected to take part in the planned Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) march.

Bing Maps showing Twitter overlayFor a second consecutive week only one topic has been occupying Irish Twitter users – the €85 billion EU/IMF #bailout.

Although this figure may come as no surprise to most but almost 9 out of 10 tweets concerning our incumbent Taoiseach Brian Cowen are negative in nature according to TweetFeel. TweetFeel is a service that combines real-time Twitter search with sentiment detection algorithms to determine whether a tweet is positive or negative.

The economic and political crises in Ireland is the only topic of discussion on Twitter this week. In a day that has seen the collapse of the Irish government and calls for the Taoiseach to resign, the crises has occupied each of the social network's regional trends for Ireland.

Is MySpace about to be get Facebook integration? The media in San Fransisco have all been invited to a joint announcement from MySpace CEO, Mike Jones, and Facebook VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing, Dan Rose, that will take place tonight.

Well, you can't. Not just yet anyway but you can request an early invite to the service from Facebook.

Today Facebook unveiled their new “modern messaging system” that promises simpler real-time communication across any medium or device. Speaking at the press event in San Francisco Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, is quick to confirm that this is “not an email killer”, but “a messaging experience that includes email as one part of it”.

Facebook's "Project Titan" announcement in San Francisco is a little over two hours away. While all the excitement focuses around Facebook allegedly creating a fully fledged webmail application, or a 'Gmail killer' as it is often referred to, I'm sceptical as to whether this will happen.

Facebook will launch a revamped email application on Monday, in direct competition to Gmail. TechCrunch reports that the new application, which will automatically be included in user Facebook accounts, will now become a fully fledged webmail client.

A week after its launch the Gardaí's unique use of the social networking site Flickr has seen early success and positive feedback.

An Garda Síochána have begun using the image sharing social networking Flickr to reunite lost-and-found items with their owners.

Ireland is preparing itself for the worst storm of the year today as gale force winds and driving rain are expected to hit the country Sunday evening through to Monday. Latest info here

As we reported earlier Irish students have been live tweeting their Dublin protests using the hastag #studentmarch. You can follow the reaction below using our live Twitter feed. (Feed will auto update)

As the #studentmarch in Dublin today turned violent, news reports from citizen journalists at the protest came flooding in on Twitter. This is one of those occasions that Twitter, as a live blogging tool, becomes extremely useful.

Google has been forced to pay $8.5m compensation for breaching user privacy with the launch of Google Buzz in February this year.

Facebook has announced a series of punitive measures against developers who leaked user ids. In a hard hitting blog post Facbook programmer Mike Vernal attacked applications that shared/leaked Facebook users' ids while also defending the social network's privacy policies.

Twitter's status blog reports that the social network's new interface is down. Users currently logging into Twitter are seeing blank screens, no error messages are being shown. Twitter clients such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite are not affected.

From accusations that it has outed gay users to poor security that allowed apps to leak user information to advertising agencies the Facebook has not had a good week. But in between these claims and accusations Facebook's users have genuine concerns for their privacy.

Speaking in response to an information request from this site the Irish Data Protection Commission said that as Facebook's Europe, the Middle East and Africa are based in Dublin it will be discussing the privacy issue with the social network.

Rumours have been circulating around Twitter in the last few days speculating that Facebook Places is about to launch in Ireland. While The Sociable can confirm that Places is not live in Ireland yet, we do expect this to happen in the very near future.