social media

(PNS reporting from SILICON VALLEY) Social networking giant Facebook rolled out a new feature to its nearly one billion users this week: Enhanced Liking, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg says gives users the option to waste even more time on the site.

The current Like version allows users to give a thumb’s up on their friends’ status updates, photos, and just about anything else they do on the Web. Enhanced Liking  means a user can Like a Like, and so on, in endless iterations.

Zuckerberg told a Wednesday press conference the concept of Enhanced Liking came to him when he was got lost driving to see his friend and mentor Steve Jobs at Apple headquarters. “The address, dude, the address,” he said.

Zuckerberg finally made it to Apple, located at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino. [Mas…]

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(PNS reporting from EAST LOS)  All people have six degrees of separation? Hells, nah! A new study by an area mathematician begs to differ.

“The truth is that, for Chicanos, there is only a single degree of separation,” says UCLA Ph.D. mathematics candidate Beto Pérez, of Painter Avenue in Whittier. “I’ve done a global calculation based on a plethora of factors and concluded that journalist Frigyes Karinthy’s theory of the general population does not apply to Chicanos.”

Pérez published his findings in article and photo essay titled, “Inlakesh: Chicano Identity One-On-One,”  in the June issue of National Geographic.

“First of all, most Chicanos have too many primos,” he told PNS, “and therefore there are never too many people you won’t know. When you add in homies and rucas, plus tíos and tías, plus people you start calling “compadres” five minutes after you meet them, you never even get to the point where more than three degrees of separation are required,” Pérez said. [Mas…]

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Saturday Night Funnies! In our exciting and biting second podcast, POCHO’s Jefe-in-Chief Lalo Alcaraz, Migrant Editor Al Madrigal and Subcommandanta del News Sara Inés Calderón talk about homeless human WiFi hotspots, an asteroid heading towards Earth, disaster preparedness (Al grows veggies) and the Austin GeekFiesta also known as SXSW (South By Southwest.) LOLs aplenty! (NSFW language.)

Podcast produced by Marcelo Ziperovich, Jefe de Creative, who also took these photos.

Play

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(PNS reporting from CYBER ESPACE) Like virtual huitlacoche  growing on a diseased ear of GOP political corn, an avatar of candidate Mitt Romney emerged on Twitter Wednesday, a digital fungus thriving on the stinking mess of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.

Using the handle @MexicanMitt,  the campaign’s online Hispanic personality exalts Romney as a canny opportunist, occasionally-job-killing corporate turnaround guru and proud-to-be-loaded capitalist examplar. MexicanMitt now has 1,100 followers.

Pocho Ñews Service  interviewed @MexicanMitt via email:  

PNS: You seem to love enforcing immigration policies. How many of your own Mexican family members have you deported?

MexicanMitt: I keep deporting them back after they finish working for me selling oranges. So I don’t think of it as deporting them, more like firing them [Mas…]

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