Women hyped up, men tired of networking
In a sharp reversal, more young women are now embracing online communities than their male counterparts, a new study says.
By contrast, men are showing some signs of “networking fatigue,” with fewer men saying that their online communities are as important as their offline equivalents.
The shift in attitudes between the two sexes has taken place over just a couple of years.
Researchers at the University of Southern California are reporting this week that 67 percent of women under 40 said they feel as strongly about their Internet communities as their offline ones. Only 38 percent of men said the same.
In 2007, the numbers were just the reverse, with 69 percent of the men and 35 percent of the women feeling that way.
Internet communities don’t just mean social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, but include online gathering sites focused on hobbies, politics or spirituality.
Michael Gilbert, senior fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, said women tend to adopt new technologies more slowly than men, but once they do, they catch up and often surpass men in their enthusiasm.
Rhapsody goes after iPhone users
Subscription music service Rhapsody is dropping its monthly price to $9.99 from $14.99, hoping that loads of iPhone users who sampled it will now pay for all-you-can-listen access.
Several companies have announced their intention to launch similar music plans that let people listen to songs that are stored on remote computers and streamed to their smart phones wirelessly. Such music services, based on so-called “cloud” computing, are challenging Apple Inc.’s system of having consumers buy and download tracks for playback on iPhones and iPods.
The subscription plans have yet to take off. But as cell phone networks have gotten faster and more capable of handling large amounts of data, more companies are beginning to offer cloud-based music services.
Apple itself is believed to be developing a cloud-based music offering after its acquisition in December of Lala.com. That site lets people purchase songs to stream online from a digital locker for 10 cents apiece.
Rhapsody says it has an advantage over other subscription plans because it has an established user base — about 675,000 at the end of 2009. Also, it has cash to spend after spinning off from parents RealNetworks Inc. and Viacom Inc.
Twitter users hip to malicious content
Link-shortening services such as TinyURL seem ideal for criminals because they can disguise the names of malicious sites. Yet on Twitter — one of the most popular places for them — they may not be nearly as malicious as many industry experts fear, according to new security research.
Zscaler Inc., a company that sells security services, studied 1.3 million shortened links taken from Twitter over two weeks, before Twitter began in early March to examine such links for malicious content. Just 773 of those links — a mere 0.06 percent — led to malicious content.
Link-shortening services convert long Web addresses into shorter ones. They have become more popular as people spend more time on social-networking sites and share with their friends links to photos, news articles and other tidbits. They are especially important on Twitter, which restricts its posts to 140 characters.
Criminals can use them to trick people into visiting malicious sites because the links carry the names of the shortening services, such as Bit.ly or TinyURL, rather than the actual addresses of the sites.
Julien Sobrier, senior security researcher with Zscaler, said users seem to be paying more attention to such links because they know they are being taken elsewhere.
“Twitter’s shortened URLs (links) aren’t trusted by users,” he said. “You know the link you’re seeing is not where you’ll actually go.”
And if users are going to be suspicious, criminals have less incentive to use them.
Analysis: iPad’s parts worth $259
The iPad may promise a computing revolution, but Apple’s new gadget is also a pile of glass, metal and electronic innards — $259.60 worth, or about half the retail price, according to an independent estimate.
After taking the iPad apart and adding up the estimated costs of the components, the market research firm iSuppli said the low-end version of Apple’s new gadget costs about $250.60 in parts. Manufacturing costs $9 more. Combined, that’s 52 percent of the $499 price for that model.
That doesn’t mean Apple’s making a nearly 50 percent profit. There are development costs, marketing and other factors to take into account. Apple didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
ISuppli’s analysis, released Wednesday, does offer some sense of what you’re paying for.
A lot of the cost, it turns out, is that sleek, user-friendly touch screen. Each iPad contains an estimated $109.50 worth of components that provide the user interface, or about 44 percent of the total cost of the parts. For instance, just the glass display, which measures 9.7-inch diagonally, costs $65.
Second in cost in the low-end, 16-gigabyte version is the memory, which runs about $30. Then comes the battery for $21.
Apple began selling the iPad on Saturday starting at $499. Versions with more memory run $599 and $699, and the company plans to start selling models with cellular wireless capability later this month, starting at $629. The versions now out offer only Wi-Fi wireless connections.
Associated Press
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
