According to Reuters, Facebook has launched a new suicide-prevention tool that's meant to give users a direct link to an online chat with counsellors who can help.
Friends are able to report suicidal behaviour by clicking a report option next to any piece of content on the site and choosing suicidal content under the harmful behavior option, Facebook spokesman Frederic Wolens said.
Facebook will then email the user in distress a direct link for a private online chat with a crisis representative from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline as well as the group's phone number.
The new tool gives people who may not be comfortable picking up the phone a direct avenue to seek help.
""This was a natural progression from something we've been working on for a long time," Wolens said.
Users also have the ability to report suicidal behavior by going to the site's Help Center or search for suicide reporting forms. They can also use reporting links around the site.
Worried friends who reported the behavior will also receive a message to say it is being addressed, Wolens said.
Facebook, the most popular Web-based social networking site, has more than 800 million active users worldwide. The Palo Alto, California-based company was co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004.
The new suicide reporting tool will be made available to people who use Facebook in the United States and Canada.
Wolens said that all reporting on the site is done anonymously and so a distressed user will not know who reported the suicidal content.
Facebook is rumoured to be launching mobile advertising services in early 2012 and will be going up against Google and Apple.
According to blog and some media reports, Facebook is considering putting its Sponsored Stories ads, which feature friends' interactions with brands, into the mobile News Feed. According to one blog post, Facebook's new advertising service was originally supposed to arrive earlier this year, but the plan was delayed.
According to a story on Zdnet, Facebook has managed to establish itself as a major advertising supplier because it has a unique offering to businesses that are willing to gamble a little with their marketing dollars. “Advantages include being able to target users with a precision not found in most other forms of advertising. With its quickly growing user base (800 million monthly active users and counting), the company’s social graph is exploding across all demographics, which only further fuels improved ad targeting, performance, and revenue as well.â€Â
Google Analytics will soon roll out a new feature will allow content developers to dig a lot deeper than simply calculating the number of website visits.
Google will soon report on how content is shared through social networking and feed aggregators.
The sharing of client content on Google+, Blogger and other social media properties will be captured in analytics reports, allowing site owners to better customize content and track performance.
While this is new for Google Analytics, there are a number of third-party, enterprise-level analytics companies offering software services that provide tracking and performance on social media aggregation and sharing.