Social Software and Tagging

The Crucial Mistake Most Bands Are Making With Facebook

Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls' Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to help you ... More >>

The Village Voice is Partnering with Foursquare, and We Have a Badge to Prove It

Every year, the Village Voice hosts Choice Eats, our annual tasting event, in which we provide delicious dishes from all of our favorite restaurants. And now with that in mind, we've announced a partnership with Foursquare.

Mile End Deli: Social Media Flare Sours Smoked Meat's Return

It took Mile End Sandwich almost a month to get smoked meat back on their menu after Hurricane Sandy destroyed the Red Hook commissary. But after raising the sandwich price from $12 to $14, a heated discourse between owner Noah Bernamoff and unhappy patrons hit Twitter and Facebook.

Donald Trump Lays Claim On Phrase "Never Give Up"

Here's some sports trivia you probably didn't know: when legendary North Carolina State University basketball coach Jim Valvano courageously told the world "don't give up...don't ever give up," he was actually just paraphrasing billionaire wordsmith Donald Trump.That, of course, is according to hist ... More >>

Follow Fork in the Road on Twitter Because It's 2012!

You have a Twitter account. We have a Twitter account. Let's be Twitter friends. Tweet @ForkintheRoadVV!

Brand It, Post It, Sell It: How Millennials Are Reshaping Business As We Know It

Laura Murray, an FIT student by day and live music photographer by night, has a fascination with exposure: "Being able to show people things that are going on all over the world sounds incredible." She admits on her website that she has a "slight case of wanderlust" and her dream job would be a band ... More >>

Does Not Being On Facebook Mean You're A Psycho?

I used to think you'd have to be psychotic to waste your time on Facebook, but now I'm so hooked on it, it almost feels like you'd have to be mentally ill to not be on it. And some media agree. In fact, as this blog points out: A German magazine took pains to note that Dark Knight killer James Ho ... More >>

New York City Education Department: Do NOT Friend Students!

For New York's educators, to Facebook friend students or not to Facebook friend students is no longer the question. That's because the Education Department just released "guidelines" for K-12 instructors, which make very clear that teachers should not be part of students' social media networks. Th ... More >>

Asshattery In 140 Characters Or Less: Which Musicians Are The Biggest Klouchebags?

If you're on the Internet you might have heard of Klout, a pseudo-scientific way for measuring the slippery ideal of "online influence." Taking into consideration a variety of factors, it has (despite its often being utterly gameable and as a result off the mark) turned into a way for people online ... More >>

The Police Don't Need a Warrant to Subpoena Your Tweets, Judge Rules

Twitter messages, obviously, are public. That's the point of social media: to share, to broadcast. But one of the reasons people continue to tweet -- and to post incriminating photographs of their youthful kegstands on Facebook -- is the illusion that they have some measure of control over what they ... More >>

Now That Eddie Murphy's Out, Should the Muppets Host the Oscars? Q&A

​Eddie Murphy announced that he was bowing out of hosting duties for next year's Oscars today. This came on the heels of Brett Ratner's resignation as the show's producer following an unfortunate gay slur. Oscar hosting duties are now up in the air. Who will take the reins?! Maybe the Muppet ... More >>

State Senator Diane Savino's Facebook Friends: An Important Announcement

​New York State senator Diane Savino, a Democrat representing Staten Island and Brooklyn, had some important breaking news to share with the media today. Her personal Facebook page has hit the 5,000-friend mark (a "social media milestone," it seems), which is where Facebook cuts you off. Follo ... More >>

Your Phone Numbers and Facebook: What You Should Actually Worry About

Collecting your data to serve you better.​If you're on Facebook, you've likely seen the panicky message that's been circulating, warning that the social networking behemoth has started publishing all your phone contacts for everybody to see: "ALL THE PHONE NUMBERS IN YOUR PHONE are now PUBLIS ... More >>

Levi Aron Suspected in Murder of Brooklyn Boy Leiby Kletzky; Facebook Page Asks, 'Is Your Family Safe?'

​Levi Aron has been named as the suspect, not yet charged, in the brutal murder of Leiby Kletzky, the Brooklyn boy missing since Monday who was found chopped up in a suitcase, left in a Dumpster in Park Slope. It has also been reported that some of the boy's remains were found in Aron's refrig ... More >>

Lobster Roll Proliferation Is Partially Attributable to Foursquare

The makings of scintillating dinner conversation​ CBS News has discovered Foursquare, a "mobile application that allows its 10 million users to virtually check in from their smart phone when they visit a local business."

Grubwithus Allows You to Pay to Eat With Strangers Without Difficulty

​Do you hate your friends and would rather eat with a bunch of strangers instead of them? Would you like to shell out thirty dollars to do so? There's a new application called Grubwithus which is built just for you. Basically, it lists a bunch of meals organized by people using the service, for wh ... More >>

Osama Bin Laden Sign Updated in Brooklyn

​Self-explanatory. (Via Twitter user Tina Fallon)

R.I.P., Friendster, the Social Media Site of Our Relative Youth

Turn that smile upside down!​Remember Friendster? One time we met someone on Friendster, a date, in fact, and we went to a vegan restaurant in the West Village (not that we were vegan), and we ate something that looked like meat but wasn't, and was really weirdly chewy, and then we never spoke ... More >>

Mayor Bloomberg Declares NYC Foursquare Day: Live From the Village Voice Building!

Bloomberg looks at Foursquare, bikes [via]​Michael Bloomberg is in the building. The mayor of New York City is not in the Village Voice offices, unfortunately, but he is in the historic building with our name on the front, a few floors above us, at the office of location check-in service Fours ... More >>

Anti-Gay Activist Actually Loves Gay Marriage

​There's an adage about intelligent people changing their minds, so maybe anti-gay activist Louis J. Marinelli is smarter than we thought. He formerly served as the National Organization For Marriage's tour organizer and social media expert, and writes that he "spent the last five years puttin ... More >>

Your Facebook Friends Hate You

​Being on Facebook can be an exercise in self-punishment, whether that means obsessively spying on your friends' baby pictures and envying their "perfect life" or constantly monitoring your ex's wall. We all know this, and yet no one really talks about it. Until now. There's a survey that has ... More >>

Newark Mayor Cory Booker Vows to Lose 57 Pounds, Will Facebook and Tweet All About It

​Just a week ago Newark Mayor and "social media darling" Cory Booker was digging out his own citizens a tweet at a time, subsisting on Diet Coke and Advil, and becoming the hands-down hero of Snow-pocalypse 2010. Now he's taken to Facebook and Twitter with another cause: He plans to hit 240 ( ... More >>

Columbia University Warns Students Against Mentioning WikiLeaks in Public

Not a Columbia grad​The School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University sent out an email warning students not to talk about WikiLeaks on the internet if they hope to ever work in the State Department. The school, which aims to construct new diplomats from scraps of old diplo ... More >>

Media Scare Tactics About Facebook Burglars Revealed by Jeff Jarvis

​Some readers see articles like this from Fox News, about the "burglary ring" who found their victims using Facebook Places' geolocation tagging and uncritically mourn the loss of privacy and dangers of the internet. Others see articles like that one and mourn the loss of basic reporting chops ... More >>

Germany Plans to Turn a Blind Eye to Job Applicants' Facebook Antics

If you're in Germany, you may soon get a job even with Facebook photos like this.​Tuesday, the German government proposed a law that places restrictions on employers' uses of Facebook to protect workplace privacy. But the law, a nice gesture of respect for future employees, ignores Facebook's exis ... More >>

Facebook Is the New 9-1-1, Apparently

​This may be a little disturbing to those of us who simply refuse to break down and get a Facebook account like any normal human, but in times of disaster, those people will probably be evolutionarily dismissed from our social construct anyway. Because it turns out that a whole 35 percent of u ... More >>

Facebook's Not Just For Stalking: High School Teachers and Organ Donors Pile on

​First of all, it's remarkable that anyone old enough to have been a teacher in the 1970s is also tech-savvy enough to use Facebook -- times they are a-changin' (and I'm sure the same folks get that reference). But it's also very sweet that former students are on Facebook seeking out teachers ... More >>

Study: British Pansies Freaked Out By Foursquare, Obviously Aren't Using It Correctly

​The New York-bred phenomenon known as Foursquare -- which is basically the Bros Icing Bros of Social Media -- has made its way across the Atlantic, where British people who clearly don't "get it" are currently being scared out of their "knickers" or whatever by it.

Internet Week: Geeks Get Wild (With Sledgehammers) at NY Tech Meetup

​New York's week long gathering of techies and cyberlebrities known as Internet Week had its biggest event this past Tuesday, NY Tech Meetup, with over 800 attendees. The event allowed eight people to demo their fresh tech product to the tech community, and while a few of them were a little ov ... More >>

Social Media Presence Now Journalism Job Performance Metric, Commence Twitter Teabagger Movement

​That sound you heard was a few thousand reporters shitting bricks of varying volumes, and it gets louder by the day with each Tweet. Literalized, it would sound something like a someone throwing a boulder the size of a small child into a calm river. The Tweets and Twitterers are coming for yo ... More >>

Harold Ford Has A More-Than-Zero Connection to Harold Ford's Twitter Feed

​A few things about Harold Ford's twitter feed: 937 is a perfectly respectable number of followers for a feed with 15 tweets on it, particularly one which doesn't follow anyone It's just a hair indiscreet to list an "unofficial blog supporting Harold Ford, Jr. and his vision for New York an ... More >>

Cuomo Announces Removal of Sex Offenders from Social Networking Sites, Warns Others

Having gotten MySpace and Facebook to remove 3,533 members with a record of sexual predation in 2009, attorney general Andrew Cuomo has facilitated another sweep of other social networking sites and gotten 803 other registered sex offenders removed from their buddy lists. The newly-scrubbed sites ... More >>

Social Disease Media: The Twitter Traffic Machine

Forget all this crap about Twitter being the new Tom Paine, revolution and evolution and all that hippie crap -- it's really about making microfortunes with the Twitter Traffic Machine! Here's some dude named Gabe in a t-shirt and a frickin' lei on the internet (signifier of wealth, not poverty! W ... More >>

The Lousy Onstage Pickup Line Hall of Fame Hereby Inducts Mickey Factz

Actual seduction not depicted, but you should be grateful, trust me. If you've not had the pleasure of one of the Roots' jam sessions at Highline Ballroom, know first of all that "jam" is taken very literally: They're more or less just fucking around, learning how to play Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" ... More >>

Did a Missed Facebook Date Cost Julissa Brisman Her Life?

What looks to be the Facebook page of New York City resident and masseuse Julissa Brisman, who was murdered Tuesday in a Boston hotel room where she was meeting either a massage client or a john (people are still speculating), is still up and running. On the friend list of the profile that bear ... More >>

Welcome to the Future! Runnin' Scared Goes Web 2.0

Well, as the Governor says in A Clockwork Orange, these new ridiculous ideas have come at last. We wanted to go backward, and issue Runnin' Scared posts (or as we like to call them, dispatches) on parchment sheets, rolled up and delivered by carrier pigeons. But, like the Chief Guard, our boss told ... More >>

Fuck Twitter!

I don't even know what Twitter is, but I say to hell with it! I'm just recovering from the organized movement of people begging me to drink the Kool-Aid and join Facebook, and now THIS has become the hot communal cult activity--a "social networking service" of "tweets" and "microblogging". As cert ... More >>

Facebook Relents, Drops "We Own Everything" TOS

The words "Facebook" and "forever" appeared together in a lot of news stories this week, but not as an endearment. On Sunday Consumerist revealed that Facebook had changed its terms of service so that, essentially, anything that anyone put on Facebook belonged to Facebook in a "irrevocable, perpetu ... More >>

Please Stop Spoofing the Shepard Fairey Hope Poster

It was maaaaaaayyyybe cute for a while. But now you just look like a fool. Are you still guffawing about riffs on Tom's MySpace picture too?

Facebook Freaks Are Still Trying To Get Me!

A gang of Facebook fanatics--led by my soon to be EX friend Susan Anton, lol--are determined to see me get more fake friends, find greater chances for people to tell me they're at the ballet, and welcome increased opportunities to plug the fact that I'm judging jockstrap sniffing contests in New J ... More >>

'Fuck Facebook' The T-Shirt!

Why MySpace Music Won't Succeed

Rupert Murdoch's pride and joy is trying to go legit; mayhem may ensue, and success may not

Telling the Internet My Dirty Little Secrets

First-person tales from a cybersex expert

El Perro Del Mar and Lykke Li Tonight and Tomorrow

Eliot Spitzer's Hooker, Reviewed!

TABLOIDED: Clinton and Obama Face Off

Caroline Giuliani: Obama Flip-flopper

Dry Space

What happens when Murdoch buys the Web's networking portal

People's Google

Erase your history, crash your hard drive—and surf like it's 1999 at del.icio.us

Six Degrees of Sexual Frustration

Connecting the Dates with Friendster.com