A new study suggests that social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are more difficult to resist than cigarettes or alcohol. A team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently conducted an experiment involving 205 people in Wurtzburg, Germany to analyze the addictive properties of social media and other vices. Participants in the week-long study were polled via BlackBerry smartphones seven times per day and asked to report when they experienced a desire within the past 30 minutes, and whether or not the succumbed to that desire. They were also asked to gauge each desire on a scale from mild to “irresistible.”

In total, 10,558 responses were recorded and a total of 7,827 “desire episodes” were reported by participants. The results of the team’s study will soon be published in the Psychological Science journal, however preliminary data provided to The Guardian suggests the highest rate of “self-control failures” were tied to social media services.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Wilhelm Hofmann, the leader of team conducting the study. Hofmann suggests people may fail to resist social media so much because there is no obvious or immediate downside to checking services like Twitter or Facebook. He does warn that these services can ultimately be a huge drain on users’ time, however.

“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” Hofmann said. ”With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”

Seesmic Ping lets you schedule tweets and status updates for future dates. This will be useful for those of you who promote scheduled content via social networks, like to pretend you can predict the future, or will ...

Official Android Police t-shirts are now on sale, with over 25 designs to call yours.

• Android 4.0.3 Announced, Brings Bug Fixes And New APIs For Developers
• [New App] FriendCaster Tab For Facebook, Now You Can Virtually Mingle In HD
• Motorola XOOM Coming To Best Buy On February 24th, HTC Thunderbolt On February 14th
• Google TV: Now With 95% Less TV, Thanks To Networks
• Launcher Pro v0.7.9.0 Update Introduces Friends Widget, Customizable Homescreen Grid Size, Bug Fixes

[New App] Seesmic Ping Schedules Your Tweets, Facebook Statuses, Consolidates Your Online Social Life was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

President Obama will be hosting his first Google+ hangout tonight at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. In the discussion, the president will be answering questions that were submitted over the past few weeks through YouTube. Google maintains that the White House has had no role in which questions will be selected. Google’s team will instead choose the top-rated questions among those submitted, ensuring there will be several different issues discussed. The event will take place in the Roosevelt Room of the White House and is scheduled to last 45 minutes. The hangout will also be streamed on the White House’s web site, and reporters and press cameras not permitted inside during the event. Obama has previously hosted town hall meetings on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all of which received harsh criticism and claims that the President ignored subjects that drew the most questions.

Read [Google+] Read [CNN]

Twitter announced recently that it now has the ability to, and will begin to, censor content on the social network by country. “As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” the company said in a blog post Thursday. “Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there.” Twitter gave France and Germany as examples, two countries that ban pro-Nazi rhetoric from being posted on the Internet. Previously, Twitter would have had to delete specific content worldwide in order to prevent it from being visible, but it can now remove content on a country-by-country basis. Read on for more.

The company’s announcement has caused some to worry Twitter might cross a line that is already blurred. For example, the new policy could prohibit a country’s citizens from using Twitter as a means to band together and stage an uprising. No doubt much of 2011′s Arab Spring uprisings were fueled by social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and censorship could have killed the powerful voices that helped topple a number of regimes.

“We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld,” Twitter said. “One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice. We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The Tweets must continue to flow.”

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Twitter finally appears to be preparing a new wave of attacks on the malicious spammers that have overrun the popular social network during the past year. Web security firm Dasient on Monday announced that it has been acquired by Twitter. ”Since its inception, Dasient has been focused on solving web-scale security problems involving malware and other types of online abuse,” the firm noted in a blog post. “In 2009, Dasient launched its web anti-malware platform, capable of scanning URLs and websites for the presence of harmful content. In 2010, Dasient launched the industry’s first anti-malvertising service to protect ad networks and publishers from the scourge of malicious ads. Over the last year, we have been very active in securing the ads and content of the some of the industry’s largest ad networks and web sites.” The firm is seen as playing a large role in securing new self-service advertising efforts Twitter is preparing to roll out in the near future. A secondary benefit to end users, however, is that the link-spam currently plaguing members of the social network may be quelled as part of Twitter’s efforts with Dasient technology.

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We've been kind of down on Android Twitter clients of late. Sure, the "official" Twitter app has gotten a lot better, but other favorites seem to be dying off. Tweetdeck was purchased by Twitter, so it's no great surprise to see it languish as a standalone app. Our old favorite Seesmic hasn't been updated in months (though they do say an update is on the way), and there's still a dearth of really good tablet-designed Twitter apps.

That's why we're pretty excited to see webOS-favorite Carbon getting into the Android game. As we first told you last year, developer dots & lines is bringing the popular Carbon app to Android (and Windows Phone). And last night, UX director Saleh Esmaeili gave us a sneak peek at how things are going. Of course, still (black-and-white) images only show you so much, the clean lines are very much piquing our interest here. 

Stay tuned for updates, folks.

Source: @dot1ne; more: @CarbonAndroid

Google+ web app adds two new features, iOS and Android soon to follow originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I've been desperately trying to convert from Foursquare to Path for bothering most of my social networks at once, but a pretty critical bug was keeping that from happening. But Path's just released an update that fixes Twitter authentication in Ice Cream Sandwich, as well as keeping push notifications from being delivered if, in fact, that's the way you want it.

For the uninitiated, Path is sort of mix of Foursquare and a much smaller Facebook. The idea is to have a tight-knit group of friends with which you share. Of course, adding the ability to share via Twitter, Facebook and, yes, Foursquare, opens it up to much more. The app itself is stunning, though it could use a little refresh for 720p displays.

If you haven't checked it out yet, we've got download links after the break.

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Nokia confirms Lumia 900 doesn't have Pentile display originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading The Echo Nest teams with Twitter to integrate tweets into music apps

The Echo Nest teams with Twitter to integrate tweets into music apps originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.