A new poll carried out by the Associated Press (AP) and CNBC found that social networking giant Facebook has some steep challenges to overcome as it moves ever closer to becoming a public company this week.  Facebook is expected to start trading on Friday.

The AP-CNBC survey of 1,004 Facebook users, conducted between May 3 and May 7, found that 57 percent of Facebook users don’t click on sponsored content or ads and another 26 percent said they rarely do. Facebook depends on advertizing for revenue, and much of this comes from user clicks on these sponsored ads and content which are important because they tell an advertiser how effective their ads are, and Facebook how much to charge for them.

Eighty-two percent of Facebook’s 1.06 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2012 came from advertizing sales, although the company is now less dependent on sponsored content than in prior years. In 2009 98 percent of Facebook’s revenue came from advertising sales.  David Ebersman, chief financial officer for Facebook, told retail investors that the company is working hard to make ads “more relevant, more social, and more engaging.”

The AP-CNBC poll also showed that just 8 percent of Facebook users feel very safe or extremely safe in using Facebook’s platform for carrying out financial transactions like purchasing goods or services, and 54 percent said they don’t feel safe in doing so, dampening Facebook’s hopes for expanding its e-commerce activities. Currently Facebook’s e-commerce is mainly limited to virtual goods and games, but analysts say e-commerce has the potential to be extremely lucrative and could be important in fueling Facebook’s future growth.

Survey respondents expressed mixed opinions about Facebook’s expected $100 billion valuation for its IPO with 62 percent of respondents who were active investors believing the valuation is too high. Fifty percent of all respondents thought the $100 billion valuation too high, and only 3 percent thought Facebook would be undervalued at this figure.

Older survey respondents tended to think Facebook would not make a good investment while younger people tended to think the opposite: 39 percent of seniors liked Facebook as an investment, compared to 55 percent for baby boomers, 50 percent for Gen-xrs, and 39 percent for those aged 35 and under.

The AP-CNBC survey revealed Facebook has another, more serious problem, one which accounts in part for the lower number of clicks on ads and sponsored content: trust.  The social networking giant certainly has impressive and still growing user number at 901 million monthly active members, but people do not feel safe about their personal data while on the social networking site.

A whopping 59 percent of users said they had little or no trust that Facebook would keep their personal information private. Clearly, people like Facebook but in spite of this concern – pc users that have Facebook accounts spend between 6 and 7 hours a month on the site compared to just 3 minutes for Google’s social networking platform Google+, according to recent data from comScore.

A Facebook addiction test has finally been developed and published by researchers at the University of Bergen, in the journal Psychological Reports.

The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale, created by Psychology Professor Cecilia Schou Andreassen based on research with 423 students, deems a user addicted to Facebook if they answer “often” or “always” four or more times to six questions which must be answered with “very rarely”, “rarely”, “sometimes”, “often”, and “very often”, or “always”:

1)     You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan to use Facebook.

2)     You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.

3)     You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.

4)     You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.

5)     You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.

6)     You use Facebook so much that it has a negative impact on your job/studies.

I am a big Facebook fan and on again off again critic because of its awful privacy policies and confusing way of providing what the company seems to promote as the new commerce of social interaction – “frictionless sharing” (as if we could not have healthy social interaction before Facebook became an integral part of our culture).

And, I write about Facebook a lot, so this is my job. I answered: “often”, “sometimes”, “very rarely”, “very rarely”, “very rarely”  and “very rarely” to the above test so it would seem that I have so far managed to avoid the dreaded Facebook Addiction Disease.

Professor Andreassen, who is in charge of the Facebook addiction project at the University of Bergen, explained that younger people tend to get addicted to Facebook more than older people, and those that score higher on the scale are generally more anxious or socially insecure than average and use Facebook so much because they find it easier than face-to-face interaction.  Women in general are more prone to get addicted to Facebook because of its social nature.

People who are more goal oriented, ambitious, and organized have less of a tendency to become addicted to Facebook and use social media in general for networking and as an important part of their work.

Andreassen said their study of 423 students, comprised of 227 women and 196 men, showed there is a relationship between overuse of Facebok, extroversion, and a delayed sleep-wake rhythm. The study showed that the symptoms of Facebook addiction are also similar to addiction to alcohol, chemical substance, and drug addiction.

Thank gosh I’m finished writing this Facebook article, I’m way overdue for a Facebook fix.

CrowdCloud LLC, a subsidiary of digital media technology company Adiant, last month released the final version of its CrowdCloud app, which uses a patent pending technology to search social media and provide curated reports for users in the 41 U.S. cities it currently covers. Other Adiant brands include the Adblade Ad Network, OptiServe ad platform, CrowdCloud Mobile Community platform, and Mani Rewards.

The CrowdCloud app, available for free on the iTunes store, is also now available in beta version for the Android.  Adiant CEO Ash Nashed said: “This launch is another great milestone in our digital media strategy.  Our goal is for CrowdCloud to be the real-time information platform for local venues such as restaurants, merchants, mass transit systems, and other community focal points.”

The CrowdCloud app provides the most important and relevant information about happenings and events in a community by searching millions of social media posts. CrowdCloud lets users share their location with select friends for a defined span of time, share photographs by tagging, and use dynamic mapping to search posts by location.

I talked with Josh Detweiler, Director of Operations for CrowdCloud LLC, about what the app does and how it works. I asked Mr. Detweiler about this statement on the press release announcing CrowdCloud’s launch: “CrowdCloud is striking partnerships with leading local media outlets to help partners leverage their unique mobile technology within their markets.”

Mr. Detweiler explained that because CrowdCloud searches through millions of tweets it is able to find out information before it is officially released or reported by major news outlets.  As an example of how this can benefit media outlets, he cited an announcement made by the Steelers football team the previous weekend via its Twitter account. Because the football team management chose to report the news first on its Twitter account, CrowdCloud had the news a full 40 minutes before the Steelers officially announced the news, and before the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Mr. Detweiler said this is how CrowdCloud can make partnerships with and add value to media outlets. CrowdCloud has a web widget website which brings in relevant information based on the category of interest in a user’s community, like restaurants, sporting events, transportation, weather, and news. Anyone who goes to this website or one of its partner websites, can select one of the 37 major U.S. cities from the dropdown box, including Austin, Texas, New York, New York, and Hartford CT, and then choose their area of interest from another drop down box, and the box below will bring in the real time streaming, relevant tweets for that category and that city.

To test the CrowdCloud Web Widget, I went to the website, chose Boston, MA then “Transportation”, and sure enough the box filled up with relevant tweets about transportation like this one from the MBTA: “Update: Redline experiencing Residual Delays Due to Earlier Medical Emergency at Charles/MGH..” For those of us who enjoy Twitter but find the mass of information available a tad overwhelming, this kind of filter is a breath of fresh air.  An item of interest can also be shared back to one’s Facebook or Twitter accounts or even emailed. I tested these functions and all three worked fine, and the item could be immediately viewed.

However, I noticed that the transportation category for Boston MA on the CrowdCloud Web Widget was only bringing in feeds from one source: the MBTA Twitter account. Similarly, when checking New York, transportation feeds came from only one source: the NYCTSubway scoop Twitter account. And, I checked the transportation category for other markets like Hartford, CT and Miami Florida and there were no feeds at all. Perhaps CrowdCloud is still refining its filtering system.

I asked Mr. Detweiler if CrowdCloud searches other social media besides Twitter, and he said at the moment, it does not, but he emphasized that CrowdCloud has developed a technology for identifying highly relevant information, and pushing it out to the user: “Our patent pending system searches tens of millions of social media posts daily, filtering out nearly 99% of the junk, automatically identifying the highest quality and most relevant data which is displayed to our users.”

I made reference to a recent review on the CrowdCloud app in PC Magazine that said CrowdCloud was essentially just another social networking website to manage because in order to get posts about the happenings and events in one’s community, the user would have to contribute frequently and have a network of other users who would published reports that would be of interest: “[]CrowdCloud really pushes the capability of finding out where your friends are and what they’re doing. In order to do that, you need to share the app with your friends, and actively create ‘reports’ by posting information about where you are and what you’re doing. That to me sounds like another social networking website I have to manage.”

Mr. Detweiler suggested perhaps the writer for that article was not using the app in one of the 41 covered markets, because CrowdCloud regularly curates information from social media and publishes reports for all 41 cities (full list follows at the end of this article).

Mr. Detweiler said at the moment, about 130 million Americans could see data upon opening the CrowdCloud app. If a user opens the app and does not see any data, they can use the map feature, and scroll to the location they are interested in.

I asked Mr. Detweiler about how CrowdCloud works – how does this app know to push out tweets that are of interest to me based on where I live? He explains that the app “geotags” both the tweets made by me and by those made in my area. I live in Pathum Thani, Thailand, and asked about geotagging here – he explained users who log on from here will be geotagged but the tweets are not.  In this case then, for me to get relevant information about happenings and events in my area I would need to develop a network of users in my area over time.

These are the 41 cities in the United States for which CrowdCloud currently publishes more than 10,000 high quality, curated, individual reports every day:

1)     Atlanta, Georgia

2)     Austin, Texas

3)     Baltimore, Maryland

4)     Boston, Massachusetts

5)     Charlotte, North Carolina

6)     Chicago, Illinois

7)     Cleveland, Ohio

8)     Cupertino, California

9)     Dallas, Texas

10)  Detroit, Michigan

11)  Houston, Texas

12)  Denver, Colorado

13)  Indianapolis, Indiana

14)  Jacksonville, Florida

15) Kansas City, Missouri,

16) Los Angeles, California

17) Las Vegas, Nevada

18) Memphis, Tennessee

19)  Miami, Florida

20) Milwaukee, Wisconsin

21) Nashville, Tennessee

22) New Orleans, Louisiana

23)  New  York, New York

24)  Oakland, California

25)  Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

26)  Orlando, Florida

27)  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

28)  Phoenix, Arizona

29) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

30)  Portland, Oregon

31) Sacramento, California

32)  Salt Lake City, Utah

33)  San Antonio, Texas

34) San Diego, California

35)  San Francisco, California

36) Seattle, Washington

37)  Somerville, New Jersey

38)  Stamford, Connecticut

39) St. Louis, Missouri

40)  Washington DC

41)  Rochester, New York

Wolfram Alpha, the computational knowledge engine launched by Wolfram Research in 2009, is now available as a desktop app for Windows 7, but only via purchase from Intel’s AppUp Store.  The app can be purchased for $2.99.

Wolfram Alpha is free on the wolfram.com website so it is not clear why Wolfram is launching a paid version on Intel’s AppUp store, and only on the AppUp store. The product page for Wolfram Alpha at the Intel AppUp store promises: “Across thousands of domains – with more continually added – Wolfram|Alpha uses its vast collection of algorithms and data to compute answers and generate reports for you. [] this app give you full access to the full power of the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine” followed by a long list of what appears to be hundreds of academic subjects and ‘domains’ starting with Mathematics topics.

However, the same free Wolfram computational engine can be accessed directly at the website and does not appear to be different from the desktop app now available at the AppUp store for $2.99. The webpage for Wolfram|Alpha similarly promises: “Wolfram is an engine for computing answers and finding knowledge. It works by using its vast store of expert-level knowledge and algorithms to automatically answer questions, do analysis, and generate reports.”

TechCrunch contributor Frederick Lardinois noted this ‘oddity’ and another, that Wolfram|Alpha can only be purchased on Intel’s AppUp store, which does not seem to have had much success so far: “We weren’t able to track down any user numbers for AppUp, but the fact that even the most popular free app has only one review makes us think that it isn’t a huge hit by any means”, Lardinois said.

If you are one of the small but growing number of netizens who have grown weary with nagging privacy concerns while Facebooking each day, worried that the social networking giant is giving your private information away to any Tom Dick or Harry walking down the net street, app in hand, here is how to delete Facebook: carefully, slowly, and with no second thoughts.

Deleting Facebook is harder than it looks but it doesn’t have to be a headache or take very much time, just follow the right steps in the right order, untangle yourself from the tangled Facebook web and make your exit to a more private internet world where networking with your family, friends, and peers is as private or public as you want it to be (check www.posterous.com for starters.)

The first step in the process of permanently deleting your Facebook account is this: go to any website you used your Facebook credentials to create an account and log on to, and close this account. It is important that you remember and make a list of any website you logged onto with Facebook credentials, so check your email and your browsing history, go to each website, and close the account. Do not attempt to log onto the website with Facebook credentials again during the next 14 days, because if you do, your account will be reactivated and you will have to start again.

The next step in the tedious task of deleting your Facebook account is go to the Facebook account deletion page where you will need to logon, then you will be asked to enter your password a second time, then you will see a page that informs you:

“If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of that for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added. If you would like your account deleted click “Delete My Account”

Take a deep breath, count to ten, then click the button on the left that says “Delete My Account”. If on the other hand you are like me, and can’t bear to live without this new warm and fuzzy (and nosy) Facebook social life, click the button on the right labeled “Cancel”.  If you do click on “Delete My Account” you will next be presented with a page that says “You are about to permanently delete your account, “Are you sure?”. Here click “Okay” to move forward and delete your Facebook account.

The next and equally important step in deleting your Facebook account is to do nothing for the next two weeks. If you forget or have second thoughts and log onto your account again, it will be reactivated and you will need to start all over again.  You should check your email after deleting your account to make sure you have received a notification that it has been deleted. If you do not see this email in your inbox or spam folder quite likely the deletion process has not started.

Social networking giant Facebook, which is getting ready for a widely anticipated IPO this spring, saw its first quarter to quarter revenue slide in two years, raising red flags for investors who have been watching its sizzling growth with keen interest.

Facebook is expected to raise a whopping $5 billion when it goes public, based on a $100 billion valuation, but the decline in revenue during the first quarter may be an indication that it can’t sustain its current rate of growth and is a worry to investors as they prepare to get a piece of the Facebook pie. Bryan Wieser with equity research firm Pivotal Research Group, said the slowdown was faster than they anticipated and cautioned: “No matter how you slice it, for a company that is perceived as growing so rapidly, to slow so much on whatever basis, sequentially or annually, it will be somewhat concerning to investors if faced with a lofty valuation.”

Facebook attributed the revenue decline to seasonal advertizing trends.

Chief investment advisor for Sica Wealth Management said investors will still invest in Facebook, but the slowdown will make it less likely they will hold onto their investment over the long term. Jeff Sica said he is still encouraging people to invest in Facebook as long as they understand there will be ups and downs. “The biggest issue is the realization that Facebook is not going to have an easy time meeting expectations of the public market. It will affect how people look at the IPO.  “

Facebook filed an update with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission on Monday disclosing that if its deal to buy photo sharing startup Instagram falls through for $1 billion dollars, it will pay that company $200 million. Facebook’s filing today also shows the company’s full time staff increased by 1,100 to 3,539 in the last 12 months and its active monthly users reached 900 million in the first quarter of this year.

Revenue was an impressive $1.06 billion in the first quarter of this year, but this was a six percent decline from the prior quarter, the first quarter Facebook has seen its revenue drop since 2010. Anapam Palit, an analyst with GreenCrest Capital LLC, said the slowdown was bound to happen, but cautioned Facebook does not have a strategy for increasing its revenue in international markets where it continues to enjoy its greatest growth, like Brazil.  “They have not cracked international markets yet while others like Google do very well.”

Social networking website Facebook, which has seen an increasing number of complaints about its privacy policy and the way it handles user data even as it becomes more popular, this week announced it has made further changes to its terms of use document.

The document, which Facebook refers to as “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” (SRR), is open for comment to the public until April 27^th 2012 at 5 p.m. PDT. Facebook last month announced it was going to make changes to its SRR, gave users a week to make comments, and has since reviewed and considered thousands of them.

In a post to its Facebook governance blog, Facebook explained why it is making the changes to its SRR and told users, who have become increasingly vocal, and aware of privacy issues on the website that “unlike other Internet companies, we propose updates to our SRR and give our users an opportunity to comment before they go into effect.”

Facebook’s post on its proposed changes to the SRR, which is more than 2,000 words long and addresses changes to Section 2, Section 3, Section 5, Section 8, Section 13, Section 14, Section 17 concludes: “We hope you find these responses helpful, and hope that we have addressed your concerns in the responses and in our revisions. Your trust is extremely important to us. Remember that, as always, you can receive notice of any future changes to our SRR by liking our Site Governance page.”

Facebook explains in careful detail in the general section of today’s post that it changed the name of its “Privacy Policy” to “Data Use Policy” in September 2011 so that it would be more descriptive and consistent, and one of the changes to the SRR is that the term “Privacy Policy” is replaced throughout the document with the term “Data Use Policy”. Facebook also helpfully invites us, if we wish, to review its Data Policy here. Before you do that, perhaps you would like to read an article I posted here earlier this month on what Facebook apps do with your data, and your friends’ data.

Facebook also explains in its “General” section of today’s blog post that journalists had misunderstood and misinterpreted last month when it announced proposed changes to the SRR, reporting that Facebook was planning to make changes to its “Data Use Policy” (formally known as “Privacy Policy”) but in fact it is not doing so, rather: “we proposed some mostly administrative and clarifying changes (e.g. “profile” to “timeline” to the SRR.

ZDNet contributor Emil Protalinski, who, like most of us, said he hasn’t yet had time to review the entire 9 page pdf document on changes to the SRR, but did note that the controversial provision remains, which requires users to agree that Facebook owns the trademark for the word “Book” along with 72 other words or phrases:

Here is the relevant text from the new agreement:

“You will not use our copyrights or trademarks (including Facebook, the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Facebook, Face, Poke, Book, and Wall), or any confusing similar marks, except as expressly permitted by our Brand Usage Guidelines, or with our prior permission.”

Facebook has a total of 73 active trademarks listed with the U.S. Trade and Patent Office.

Please take a deep breath, count to ten, and join me now in logging onto Facebook, and typing the word “Book” two or three times in your status update, just for fun.

Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong got on the Facebook bandwagon with his own Facebook page, which has so far attracted almost 12,000 “Likes”. Those who wish to “Like” and learn more about PM Loong can visit his page at  http://www.facebook.com/leehsienloong

The Prime Minister provided a welcoming address to his supporters and fans, noting that many of his colleagues are now using social media and that this phenomenon has so affected the way we work and live: “Societies, communities, and governments will never be the same again.” PM Loong expressed the hope that people will enjoy his page, which he will use to talk about what is on his mind and to communicate with people. “Let’s use this page to help shape ideas and understanding of what we can do together to improve our lives.”

PM Loong said his staff will manage the page but he will make personal updates or posts which will be signed with the initials “LHL”. The prime minister included photographs in his timeline marking important milestones in his life, such as one picture taken in July 1973 showing him as the Platoon commander at the school of artillery, another in 1984 in which he is being introduced as a member of parliament, and one in 2004 when he was sworn in as the third Prime Minister of Singapore.

PM Loong’s about page shows that he likes to read, walk, listen to classical music and tinker with computers.

A new report by PwC found consumers are increasingly turning to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to find answers to their healthcare concerns, and that this frequently results in seeking out second opinions for previously diagnosed problems.

The PwC Report, titled “Social Media ‘Likes’ Healthcare”, includes results of a social media survey of 124 members for the eHealth Initiative carried out by its Health Research Institute (HRI), which revealed that 80 percent of healthcare companies were using social media and had a presence on social media websites.

The eHealth Initiative (eHI) is a national organization launched more than ten years ago that focuses on healthcare information and technology with a mission to “drive improvement in the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare through information and technology.”

PwC’s HRI also developed a “week in the life of social health” snapshot by following the social media activity of numerous hospitals, online patient communities, drug companies, and insurers, and supplementing this information by carrying out interviews with over 30 industry executives.   PwC’s Daniel Garrett explained the importance of this social media healthcare survey: “Social media is another source of business intelligence that provides information at the aggregate level, not only about what the consumers ‘like’, but what they need, how they behave, and when their experiences demand an immediate response.”

Garret, who is U.S. Health Information Technology Leader for PwC, said most health organizations have the ability to use their IT in order to engage and integrate with current systems, yet these companies are bogged down dealing with the data in their own systems.

HRI’s found that 82 percent of those surveyed said their organization’s efforts at using social media were carried out by marketing and communication staff.  Further, PwC said only a small number of organizations reported that their social media strategies were handled by IT departments and digital teams.

While the proportion of health care organizations with a presence on social media sites is impressive at 80 percent of those surveyed, the activity by these hospitals, drug companies, and insurers  is very small in comparison to the activity on community sites, which boasted a level of social media activity 24 times higher.

PwC’s Healthcare leader Kelly Barnes said the results of the survey show social media has become a new customer service point for the consumer, and this is good for both the consumer and the organization: “Health organizations have an opportunity to use social media as a better way to listen, participate in discussions, and engage with consumers in ways that extend their interaction beyond a clinical encounter.”

The U.S. Military is moving forward with discharge proceedings against Sergeant Gary Stein, a marine who severely criticized President Barack Obama on his Facebook page, following a decision by Federal District Judge Marilyn Huff to deny his request to block them.

According to court papers, Stein posted severe criticism, perhaps even what might be called outrageous slander, depending on which side of the political fence you sit on, against President Barack Obama, in his online comments on his Facebook page, such as this one: “Obama is the economic enemy…He is the religious enemy, and he IS the Domestic Enemy”. Stein also created a Facebook page he called the “Armed Forces Tea Party” and posted comical figures on them ridiculing the President and his administration.

One of the ‘comical’ pictures on the Armed Forces Tea Party is an altered picture of a movie poster for “The Incredibles” (2004). The name of the poster has been changed to “The Horribles” and President Obama is the masked figure in the foreground instead of the movie’s fairer skinned Mr. Incredible (voiceover by Craig T. Nelson).  ZDNet contributor Emil Protalinski reports there was another altered movie poster – of “Jackass: The Movie” featuring superimposed images of the president although it is nowhere to be found now. Stein’s lawyers say that he was simply exercising his First Amendment rights by expressing his opinions about his boss, the President of the United States.

The Marine Corps made the decision to move forward with discharge proceedings against Stein after he declared on his Facebook page that he would not follow orders given my President Obama, although he later clarified that what he really meant to say was that he would not follow any unlawful orders given by President Obama. Stein said that he was referring to online discussion over NATO permitting U.S. troops to be tired for burning the Quran in Afghanistan.

Last week the Marine Corps administrative court ruled that Stein’s actions and statements online were misconduct and so he should be dismissed for it, and no ordinary dismissal. The Marine Corps want Stein’s discharge to be classified as “other than honorable” so that he would not get his benefits and not be allowed on a military base.  Stein has been a Marine for nine years.

Stein, whose service with the Marines is to end in four months said that last month he was removed from his post at the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot and was given a desk job but without access to a computer.

Stein told the Marine Corps board members he loves the Marines and wants to reenlist.