The talk of social media: Zuckerberg's five billion new friends, Vine's pursuit of Instagram and the sad story of Slane Girl

In order to help those in developing countries become part of the internet community, Facebook has teamed up with Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, among others, to lower the cost of mobile data.

It’s great that big companies are going out of their way to support people in developing countries, but if these are the same people that don’t have running water, I can’t imagine their first priority is going to be checking their Facebook page to find out what time their neighbours are off to the local well.

It’s all well and good coming up with a solution to the problem of data costs, but how are people even going to be able to access the internet without tablets, phones and laptops?

I really hope this is a success and it does take off as the internet is a great tool for education, which is key in the developing world. They say knowledge is power, after all.

#slanegirl

An event in which a 17-year-old girl took complete leave of her mental faculties has lead to quite the conversation starter online this week.

Whilst at an Eminiem (2004 called, they want their rapper back) concert at Slane Castle in Ireland, a 17-year-old girl was snapped giving oral sex to two different men. These pictures were subsequently leaked online (such is the age we live in now) and police are now investigating the incident amid concerns that the images amount to child pornography.

In light of everything that’s been going on in the news surrounding social media over the past couple of weeks (a teenager taking her own life after being abused by trolls on Ask.FM and rumours of One Direction fans committing suicide) it’s particularly important that parents educate their children about what to expect in terms of social media.

It’s interesting that a generation of people that weren’t brought up with the internet, let alone social media, are expected to know exactly what to teach their children, so what’s being done about it?

For children to learn the rights and wrongs of online etiquette, there needs to be someone there with better knowledge to teach them.

US Open social wall

The US Open tennis tournament is planning to debut a 50-foot social wall when the competition kicks off on the 26th of this month.

The social wall, which is essentially just a giant version of Tweetdeck, will aggregate real time updates from fans throughout the tournament, pulling posts from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, in order to keep people up to date with what’s trending.

It’s a neat idea. Whilst tweet walls are all the rage, it will be interesting to see a 50-foot version that pulls streams from several different platforms.

Vine catches up on Instagram

Vine seems to be closing in on Instagram’s tail, as the service has acquired over 40 million registered users.

This is quite a leap from the 13 million users it announced in June, but presumably the launch of Vine for Android is to thank for this.

I’m a huge Vine fan, and find that six seconds is more than enough for my inane ramblings, but I’m also a sucker for a good Amaro filter on Instagram. Which one to choose?