This is one facet of a bundle of legislation announced by the European Commission yesterday, and if approved by the EU member states and ratified by the parliament, could impose tough limits on how the likes of Google and Facebook can hold information about web users. The proposed changes to the laws around privacy and data security would mean that people have the “right to be forgotten”, and can legitimately ask a company to delete any data they have about them. Organisations will also be obligated to inform customers if their information has been compromised by hackers.

Once it’s gone, it’s gone. So if you were thinking about requesting all of your data to be deleted by a social network such as Facebook, you might want to store a copy of it yourself for personal posterity. With SocialSafe you can safely and privately store your Facebook content and more, in an easily searchable offline journal that you can browse at your leisure, safe in the knowledge that you are in total control of your data.

While the services offered by Unum are nothing to do with SocialSafe or what we do, the ‘backup plan’ message struck a chord with us, and more to the point, this advert is pretty impressive!

There’s a little bit of a debate going on about whether or not the above clip is real, but Unum have come back with another video that shows Mat Ricardo successfully pulling the table cloth from under the breakfast service several times, with varying camera speeds.

That’s it, just a quick blog to show you this cool Unum advert and to remind you that in whatever you do, everyone needs a backup plan.

A video uploaded to YouTube yesterday, claiming to be in the name of the hacker network states the intentions of Anonymous, but asks for the help of the general public. In the video, the distorted voice says that Facebook has over 60,000 servers, although it is still possible to bring them down with some civilian participation. The voice goes on to tell willing supporters how to download a Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC), which was the tool used to successfully bring down the Department of Justice website last week, and then explains how they can use it to help Anonymous bring down Facebook.

Due to the number of Facebook’s servers and the sheer volume of requests that they deal with on any normal day without incident, it will take a coordinated attack of some magnitude to cause a problem. The video states that “Operation Global Blackout” is ongoing”, but tells those who want to use the LOIC that the time to do it will be 12am on January 28th 2012, however no timezone has been specified.

Will they? Won’t they? This isn’t the first time Anonymous – or indeed someone posing as Anonymous – has threatened to take down Facebook, so I’ll conclude with my usual ending to blogs of this nature: if you are worried about losing all of your cherished memories, you can back up your Facebook account with SocialSafe.

As with the boy who cried wolf, eventually people stopped listening to him, and we all know how that one ended. But with a target at high-profile as Facebook, I think we can all agree that at some point or another there will be a serious attempt to bring it down, it’s just a matter of whether or not it is successful.

Addressing the issue of decline in Facebook growth rates within the USA and UK, he pointed to the markets in South America and Asia as being likely contenders to bolster the figures and show significant growth enabling the 1 billion mark to be reached. Recently released figures are now indicating that his hypothesis is correct, as it has been revealed that Facebook has passed Google’s Orkut as the most visited social network in Brazil.

Analytics firm comScore have conducted research that suggests within Brazil Facebook attracted 36.1 million unique visitors in December, versus Orkut’s 34.4 million visitors. According to the research this also equates to a 192% year-on-year rise in the number of visitors to Facebook in the South American country.

Now contrast this with the competition. The combined unduplicated audience for Google+ and Orkut was 34.9 million – less than Facebook alone, and this also indicates a significant overlap between the two networks. As a country, Brazil has the fifth largest social networking population in the world, but it was only in December 2011 that Facebook became the most popular.

So with all of this in mind, it’s hard to disagree with Gregory Lyons’ inclination that the emerging Facebook markets such as South America are set to show increasing sign up rates, and help push the number of global Facebook users towards that 1 billion mark.

Facebook pages are a great way for candidates and their campaign teams to communicate en mass with the electorate, and the chances are that if someone is a fan of your page then they are already thinking about voting for you. But when it comes to getting people onto your page in the first place, one company provides a service that aims to help politicians understand and use the science of political ads on Facebook to better connect with people.

Socialitical, a project of TargetedSocial, says its goal is to become a “one-stop shop for campaigns and PACs.” Using the information people provide about themselves on Facebook, the targeted ads can help candidates get the right messages across to the right demographics. As you’d expect, if a politician was out pressing the flesh in person, the way they’d talk to a Vietnam veteran and what they’d talk about would be hugely different from how they might engage with a 20-something college student. So why should the advertising be any different?

There is a very video-centric approach from Socialitical, whereby users who click on a client’s targeted ad are taken to a custom tab on a politicians page where a video plays, giving instant interaction. You can’t get that level of message broadcasting to different demographics with a full-page ad in a newspaper. For a more in-depth overview of Socialitical you can read the Mashable article New Tool Helps Politicians Advertise on Facebook.

At present, Socialitical has two of the six 2012 presidential canditates on their books, but they also want state and local politicians to sign on as well, in time making the process of buying ads easier for all politicians. With more and more constructive debate and sharing taking place on social media networks, it’s easy to see why Facebook is likely to be a key battleground for elections of all levels in years to come.

However, there is a Wikipedia blackout workaround or two at your disposal if today really is not the day to be blocked from the behemoth encyclopedia. Here are the ones we found out for ourselves:

1. Mobile Devices - I’ve managed to use Wikipedia on my iPhone without any difficulty today, so that is one option for a quick reference or settling a trivia question over a lunchtime pint with a colleague. I’ve also heard from a friend that it works on his Android device, so it’s possible that it works on all mobile devices.

2. Disabling JavaScript – This was spotted by a colleague here at SocialSafe, and will work for PC or Mac users. You can also access the full Wikipedia site on your web browser (I’ve only tried this on Chrome, so I don’t know how other browsers work), by disabling JavaScript. For Chrome users, from the settings button (looks like a spanner in the top right corner) click ‘Options’, and then select ‘Under the Bonnet’ from the left hand menu. Click on ‘Content Settings’, and then the third option down on that list is JavaScript. Click ‘Do not allow any site to run JavaScript’ and hey-presto, you’ve got Wikipedia back in your life.

This may not work for all browsers/devices, but it works for us so far. If you’ve found any other tricks to pull back the curtain and continue using Wikipedia that other users may find useful, then please by all means  post them in the comments section below.

Last week I wrote about Tim Tebow’s touchdown pass being the most tweeted about sporting moment with a massive 9,420 tweets per second, however this story is all about an off-field play made by New England Patriots’ Wide Receiver, Chad Ochocinco.

Just over a week ago, a college student named Victor Gonzalez tweeted Chad to say that he’d been tweeting him for two years, and had never had a response. So what did the Patriot say in response?

And the tweet wasn’t just an empty gesture of goodwill. ‘The Ocho’, as he is known, also sorted out Victor with a plane ticket and hotel room, as well as a ticket to the game, so the random twitter follower had everything taken care of.

In a world where sports stars’ wages are continually being compared to the comparatively tiny sums of money earned by those working in hospitals and the emergency services, it’s nice to see an act such as this that gives something back to the fans. Sure, there will be a lot of positive publicity for Chad Ochocinco to come out of this, but I highly doubt the kid who was flown out to the game at the player’s expense would care one iota.

Following his controversial humour at the film industry’s expense at last year’s awards, Ricky Gervais is back on the podium again this weekend to reprise his hosting role, and much of the pre-show digital buzz is about him.

The findings of NM Incite, a social media tracking and analysis company, show that “Excitement for Ricky Gervais” accounted for 26% of the tweets and conversations about the awards show, from a total of 7,000+ Twitter messages posted from January 10-11.

If you haven’t seen last year’s welcoming address from the British comedian, then you might not understand why there is so much anticipation for the 2012 awards. Gervais seems to hold nothing sacred when it comes to having a pop at the established order, or the way in which Hollywood works.

Here is last year’s opening speech where he takes pot-shots at Johnny Depp and Cher to name but a few:

Twitter is becoming more and more of a straw poll from which reasonably accurate assumptions of public opinion of a wide range of topics can be drawn, and it looks like the Golden Globes are another such event where Twitter will be the yardstick. Last April we saw how the micro-blogging site can even provide credible and useful information for making investments on the stock market.

Yesterday Facebook announced a new feature that allows you to jump to exactly where your friends are in a track and listen along with them in realtime. This new feature is expected to roll out in the next few weeks.

To use ”Listen With“, you will eventually see a music note in your chat sidebar that shows which of your friends are listening to music. If you hover over someone’s name, the “Listen with x” button appears and lets you play the song through whatever service your friend is using. But the really cool thing is that once you’ve decided to listen with a friend, you’re now essentially tuned into ‘Friend FM’ and will continue to hear whatever they’re listening to.

With multiple Facebook users able to listen to one friend’s song choices live, you can begin to form listening groups, and there is also a chat function available allowing the whole group to talk together. This could be a great way for people with similar interests to meet and become friends through a mutual connection.

Gregory Lyons, a senior analyst at iCrossing, used linear regression on date from 2008 until the end of 2011 to extrapolate the numbers and create this chart:

From here we can see that if the rate of growth of Facebook user numbers stays much the same for the next year, then the billionth Facebook user will create their profile some time around August 2012.

Lyons acknowledges the fact that the UK and USA may have hit some sort of Facebook saturation point, at which the number of registered users in those countries has plateaued, but in his blog he points to other nations yet with the potential to boost the figures:

“Both are large countries with millions of potential users who have yet to sign up to Facebook… With only 3% of India’s population on Facebook and 16% of Brazil’s (compared to 49% of America’s population or 47% of the UK’s population) countries such as these will clearly contribute heavily to Facebook’s continued growth.”

 It does beg the question, what will happen when the billionth user signs up? On October 31st 2011, the world welcomed it’s 7 billionth living person to the population based on birthrate demographics. Given the fact that Facebook is a digitally organised machine, it seems possible to me that an account can be flagged as being the exact one that brings the total number of users to 1 billion.

I wonder if Zuckerberg has anything up his sleeve for this occasion. A serious carrot to dangle would be a cash reward - which I’m sure he can afford… But would that cause a delay in people signing up, with each waiting to be the 1 billionth person?