Archive for the 'social networking' Category

Social Networking Rule No. 1: Don’t Be Stupid

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein November 23rd, 2008 in social sites, social networking, Facebook and MySpace. 0 Comments

It has never been easier to get in trouble while catching up with friends. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are great ways to reconnect with old acquaintances and meet new ones. But posts can be problems — the work rant you didn’t expect the boss to see or the photos your old roommate posted that document your familiarity with keg stands.

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Don’t Friend Me!

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein November 15th, 2008 in libraries, social networking, library services and library 2.0. 0 Comments

David Lee King writes: “I’m noticing that when a library decides to start a Flickr account, a Twitter feed, or create a Facebook page, they naturally want to start вЂmaking friends.’ So what do they do? They friend me. Or you. Or they friend other libraries. This is bad. Why? Who are you trying to connect with? Me? I don’t live in your neighborhood. Another library on the other side of the world? They’re not going to use your services.”

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Forrester Projects Which Enterprise Web 2.0 Collaboration Technologies Will Grow, Which Will Decline

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein November 9th, 2008 in web 2.0, podcasts, blogs, social sites, social networking, corporations, wiki and RSS. 0 Comments

As IT departments struggle to justify technology spend during trying economic times and vendor companies look to capitalize on the exploding market for social technologies, Forrester Research, Inc. has released new research that tracks the business value, maturity, and future adoption of enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration tools. Forrester’s TechRadar(TM) methodology helps enterprise technology buyers understand which emerging technologies they should consider adopting and those they should consider retiring — and when. According to Forrester, social networking tools and internal wikis will have the greatest impact on workplace collaboration. Technologies such as forums and RSS have a future in the enterprise but are currently underused, while podcasts have a limited future as an enterprise tool to increase productivity and enhance collaboration.

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What Happens to Our Social Profiles After We Die?

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein October 25th, 2008 in social sites and social networking. 0 Comments

It is safe to say that anyone reading this probably has one or several accounts on any of the major social networking sites. The same can be said about our family and friends. All of these sites pretty much serve the same function. They allow us to post and share our innermost thoughts, share pictures, music, goofy applications, and network with friends, family and coworkers. Social networking sites may in time change ownership. They and the data stored on them will almost certainly exist longer than their creators. All too often, these profiles serve as online memorials, obituaries, and a last place for loved ones and the general public to honor the dead.

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The 10 Most Absurd Social Networks

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein October 5th, 2008 in social networking. 0 Comments

Call me crazy, but social networking just doesn’t make sense to me: Why would someone want their personal life splattered all over the Web for anyone to find? It’s like leaving the front door unlocked: you’re inviting strangers to come on in! I’ve never had the urge to create a profile on the ever-so-popular Facebook and MySpace networks. Every week my co-workers nudge me to join, but there’s something so invasive about these sites telling me who I may know and broadcasting to the world that I bought movie tickets to The Dark Knight. It makes you wonder if they’re really just a huge scam to get you to reveal private information.

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The Transparent Library: When Worlds Collide

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein September 27th, 2008 in libraries, social networking and librarians/information professionals. 0 Comments

As the buzz around social networking continues, consider that author Kevin Kelly has called the emerging web “One Machine” and predicts that “total personalization in this new world will require total transparency.” So, where do we fit in? Where do we position ourselves as professionals? We two don’t completely agree, so we thought we’d try to tease out the relationship between personal/social transparency and library transparency.

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Survey: Colleges Look at Applicants’ Social Networking Pages

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein September 27th, 2008 in education and social networking. 0 Comments

A warning for college applicants: you’re Facebook page is showing. Facebook or MySpace pages could count against you in college admissions. High school seniors already have a lot to worry about when applying for colleges like good grades and high test scores. And now a new survey of 500 top colleges found that 10 percent of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social-networking sites to evaluate applicants.

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Word of Mouth, Insights, Customer Loyalty Biggest Benefits of Online Communities, Says New Study by Beeline Labs, Deloitte & Society for New Communications Research

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein September 27th, 2008 in communities, social sites and social networking. 0 Comments

The greatest value of online communities is increasing word of mouth (35 percent), increasing brand awareness (28 percent), bringing new ideas into the organization faster (24 percent) and increasing customer loyalty (24 percent), according to a survey of organizations using online communities conducted by Beeline Labs, Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research. The 2008 Tribalization of Business study found that the greatest obstacles to making a community work are not technology-related or getting funding, but getting people involved in the community (51 percent), finding enough time to manage the community (45 percent) and attracting people to the community (34 percent).

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10 Platforms for Creating Online Communities

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008 in communities, social sites, social networking and software. 0 Comments

Dion Hinchcliffe writes: “Creating online communities of customers and workers has been one of the hotter topics in business and technology this year. Whether you’re on the business side, in IT, or are just trying to build virtual teams around shared goals, online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people and accomplish work in a highly collaborative manner. These communities aren’t just for socializing but for getting things done.”

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How to Reach People Who Don’t Use Social Media

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008 in web 2.0, users, social sites and social networking. 0 Comments

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes: “Are you the only person at work who likes to read blogs? Is it your job to talk to people who would probably throw you out of their offices if you said the word вЂTwitter?’ Are you trying to reach audiences who’ve never visited a social networking website because they’ve heard those sites are used by no one but virus peddlers, sex fiends, and 14-year-old losers? Here are five strategies for using social media to reach people who don’t use social media, with specific tools you can use to do it.

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New Social Network Hopes to Catalog All Researchers

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008 in social networking and research. 0 Comments

A research fellow at the University of Oxford’s All Souls College is asking academics to sign up for his new online directory of researchers worldwide, part of a growing trend of scholars using social networking to facilitate collaboration in research.

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Ten Social Networking Tips for Libraries

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein August 31st, 2008 in libraries and social networking. 0 Comments

Part of Library 2.0 is social software, and as more and more libraries put themselves out there on social networks it becomes increasingly important that we do so in a way that works well for ourselves and for our users. How can we best take advantage of these community building tools?

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Students Using MySpace, Facebook to Scope out Possible College Roomies

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein August 31st, 2008 in education, social networking, Facebook and MySpace. 0 Comments

A growing number of students are replacing introductory phone calls to potential college roommates with visits to social networking Web sites. Within seconds of signing onto a site, you can find answers to questions you may be unwilling to ask during an initial conversation. Political parties, church affiliations, pictures and friend lists are plentiful on MySpace and Facebook, and students are reading up on and making judgments about their prospective roommates before ever hearing their voices. “If they don’t like what they see, they’ll request a roommate change,” said Lorinda Krhut, director of student housing and residence life at the University of Mississippi.

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102-Year-Old Grandma is Oldest Person on Facebook

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein August 31st, 2008 in demographics, social networking and Facebook. 0 Comments

At a mere 102, she’s the oldest face on Facebook. Ivy Bean many have been born 46 years before the first computer, but that hasn’t stopped the savvy senior from tapping in to the online world of social networking. After hearing her care workers discussing the Web site, the British great-grandmother decided to sign up too. The cyber centenarian only has nine Facebook friends, but hopes to rack up more buddies since she “loves being online.” In fact, her care workers set up a special group called “Oldest Person on Facebook,” where they regularly posts pics, videos and updates about their resident cyber celebrity. A recent video highlights high-spirited Ivy snagging a gold medal in Frisbee throwing at a local Over-75 Olympics contest. Her group now has over 200 members.

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Social Networking Explodes Worldwide as Sites Increase Their Focus on Cultural Relevance

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein August 31st, 2008 in social networking. 0 Comments

comScore has released a study of worldwide usage of social networking sites indicating that while the growth in new users in North America is beginning to level off, it is burgeoning in other regions around the world. During the past year, the total North American audience of social networkers has grown 9 percent compared to a much larger 25 percent growth for the world at large. The Middle East-Africa region (up 66 percent), Europe (up 35 percent) and Latin America (up 33 percent) have each grown at well-above average rates.

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Facebook Gets a Facelift

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein July 26th, 2008 in social networking and Facebook. 0 Comments

Facebook rolled out a major redesign of its social networking site late July 20 featuring a cleaner interface that links feed technology with user forums. Company officials said the updated site will give users more control and ownership over their profiles. The new version, now in limited use, will be rolled out gradually to Facebook’s 80 million users. The new look is all about the Wall, the blank space on a profile page that users can fill in with stories, photos, links, and the ever-popular Status Updates.

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Social Network MocoSpace Reports 3 Million Users

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein July 5th, 2008 in mobile/cell phones and social networking. 0 Comments

The largest mobile phone social network, MocoSpace, has passed the three million mark in registered users. The milestone follows a May report by browser company Opera ranking MocoSpace as the third most trafficked mobile site in the U.S. after MySpace and Google. The rapid growth of MocoSpace is being fueled by word of mouth mostly from younger consumers that prefer the ubiquity of mobile phones and the easy meet-and-greet social experience the site offers. Member can create and browse profiles as well as send messages, upload and share photos, and more. MocoSpace’s success demonstrates the value that users place on real-time mobile communication and photo sharing. The average MocoSpace member comes to the site more than once a day and the site now generates over 1.5 billion pageviews per month.

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Educational Benefits Of Social Networking Sites Uncovered

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein June 29th, 2008 in education and social networking. 0 Comments

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The same study found that low-income students are in many ways just as technologically proficient as their counterparts.

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Top 10 Disruptive Technologies

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008 in social networking, technology and cloud computing. 0 Comments

Social networking technologies, web mashups, multicore and hybrid processors, and cloud computing are among the 10 most disruptive technologies that will shape the IT landscape over the next five years, according to research and advisory firm Gartner, Inc. David Cearley says that business applications will start to mirror the features found in popular consumer social software, such as Facebook and MySpace, as organizations look to improve employee collaboration and harness the community feedback of customers.

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New Browser Flock Picks Up Social Networking Webby

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008 in social networking, Mozilla and Flock. 0 Comments

The Mozilla code-based browser Flock has picked up the prize for Best Social Networking at the 12th annual Webby Awards. The California-based company, whose software aggregates all of the user’s social networking needs, beat the likes of Bebo and Facebook with its understanding of the fact that people find it hard to keep track of all their web 2.0 sites at once. Flock was founded in 2005, launched just last year and its user base has multiplied by a factor of 250 since January. It brings together sites like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Photobucket, Picasa, Livejournal, and Blogger all in one browser and altogether, unlike Firefox where you have download each as a plug-in. It runs on the same business model as Firefox with revenue coming from Yahoo as the browser’s default search engine and even automatically picks up your RSS feeds for you.

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Manners For Social Networking

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008 in social networking. 0 Comments

UK etiquette experts, Debrett’s, have created a new set of rules for how to behave on social networks. The rules were created after research by telecoms company Orange found that 62 percent of social networking users are confused or frustrated by online etiquette. It found that 26 percent were unsure about how to respond to unwanted pokes or messages. Eighteen percent said they were confused on “how to respond to my ex when in a relationship with someone else.”

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Baby Boomers and Social Networking

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008 in demographics and social networking. 0 Comments

Less than one-quarter of US Internet users ages 40 and over use social networking Web sites, according to the JWT BOOM/ThirdAge “Boomers, Healthcare and Interactive Media” study conducted last month. The JWT BOOM/Third Age figures on social networking usage by those 40 and older generally agree with a study by ExactTarget conducted last month. Instead of using one large category of older Internet users, ExactTarget divided users who were ages 35 and older into 10-year increments, with 65 and over being the oldest cohort. Although 39% of 35 to 44 year-olds used social networks, use fell sharply with age: Only 13% of 55 to 64 year-olds were social networkers, and only 4% of those ages 65 and older. In comparison, three-quarters of Internet users ages 15 to 24 use social networking sites.

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10 Tips for Keeping Kids Safe on Social Networks

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008 in social networking and children. 0 Comments

June is Internet Safety month. With hundred of millions of teens, pre-teens-and adults-around the world using social networking sites, there’s no better time for parents to be aware of the fun, the benefits, the powerful attractions, and the potential risks that MySpace, Facebook and other similar sites offer their children.InternetSafety.com, a leader in Internet safety solutions, has assembled a list of practical tips parents can use to ensure a safe networking environment for kids: 1. Show Interest - Ask questions about how your child’s preferred social networking site or sites work. Kids are generally happy to demonstrate their knowledge if you show genuine interest. You can even ask your teen to show you how to set up your own social networking site-a great way to visit your child’s page and see what’s been posted there.

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Social Networking: Learning Theory in Action

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein June 1st, 2008 in education and social networking. 0 Comments

There has been a lot of recent debate on the benefits of social networking tools and software in education. While there are good points on either side of the debate, there remains the essential difference in theoretical positioning. Can social networking both as an instructional concept and user skill be integrated into the conventional approaches to teaching and learning? Do the skills developed within a social networking environment have value in the more conventional environments of learning?

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Social Networking’s Wall is Starting to Fall

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein June 1st, 2008 in social networking. 0 Comments

Online social networking today is more about hanging out with friends behind gated communities than exploring the World Wide Web. Visit another site and you’ll have to rebuild your profile from scratch. That’s like having to get a new driver’s license for every state you drive through.

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Where Does Your Profile Go When You Hit Your Second Life?

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein June 1st, 2008 in social sites and social networking. 0 Comments

Epitaph or cruel reminder? Your Facebook fixture poses interesting questions after your death, writes Nomfundo Xulu. Lately I have been pondering what I would like done to my very active Facebook profile if, God forbid, I were to die today. A part of me wants it to remain online until the powers that govern the site see that I have not logged on in a while and maybe get rid of it. Another part of me wants it to disappear as quickly as possible so that my friends and family don’t have to deal with the very blatant memories of me. Yet a very big part of me wants it to remain for as long as Facebook is in operation. And sometimes I don’t care what happens to the profile on which I have documented a series of events for the past two years of my life.

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People Prefer Talking Face-to-Face

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein June 1st, 2008 in social sites and social networking. 0 Comments

Despite the rise of social networking websites and e-mail more people prefer communicating face to face now than ten years ago. BT has carried out a new study with Ipsos MORI into people’s usage of and attitudes towards technology. Three quarters of us now use the internet to keep in touch compared to 44% ten years ago, and the number of people who favor e-mail as a way of communicating has risen by 6%. More than 2,000 people were interviewed as part of the study, which revealed the popularity of using the phone has halved. Just over two-thirds of those polled preferred speaking face-to-face rather than using any technology to stay in touch, compared to 51% ten years ago.

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Study: Men More Likely to Use Social Networking for Business

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008 in demographics and social networking. 0 Comments

A new study across a wide range of social networks sheds more insight into the ways men and women approach these service. As it turns out, women are more likely to be in it for the socializing, while men are more likely to use these sites for business. Social web search company Rapleaf performed a study of over 30 million users across sites like Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, Flickr, and more. Each user included in the study had at least one friend on one of these services, and Rapleaf broke its results down according to the number of connections users had: “Social Networkers” have 1-100 friends, “Connectors” have 100-1,000 friends, “Super Connectors” have 1,000-10,000 friends, and “Uber Connectors” have 10,000 friends or more.

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The UK Leads Europe in Social Networking

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008 in demographics, social networking and United Kingdom. 0 Comments

Close to half of all people in the UK will be members of a social networking site within four years, a new report indicates. The study found that the UK has the highest number of users in Europe who are members of sites such as MySpace and Facebook. At least 9.6 million people in the UK use these sites and that is expected to increase to 27.1 million by 2012. The report by Datamonitor, an independent market analyst, predicts that the UK will see healthy growth in numbers in Europe over the next five years. The growth is not only being driven by the young, but increasingly, older people are showing interest in social networking.

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Teen Social Networking Still Growing

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein May 4th, 2008 in demographics, social sites and social networking. 0 Comments

US Internet users ages 10 to 15 flocked to social networks last year as if getting a MySpace account would increase their allowances. Harris Interactive said in its April 2008 issue of Youth Trends that more than half of US girls ages 13 to 15 used social networking Web sites in 2007, roughly the same as in 2006. Social networking jumped among other boys and girls surveyed: more than twice as many children ages 10 to 12 reported using social networking sites in 2007 as did in 2006.

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UK Babies Online Within Minutes

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein April 6th, 2008 in social sites, social networking and children. 0 Comments

According to a February 2008 Orange study, 21% of UK parents have created a social networking profile for their newborn bundle of joy within minutes of delivery. Babies are also apparently expected to strike a pose. One out of five responding UK parents said they snapped and sent photos of infants to family and friends within the first 10 minutes of life. Nearly half did so within an hour.

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LinkedIn’s User Data Reveals Employee Trends

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008 in demographics, social networking and LinkedIn. 0 Comments

Yahoo employees tend to land at rival Google for their next job. The median age for Facebook employees is 27. And Hewlett-Packard draws as many graduates from India’s Bangalore University as it does from California’s San Jose State and Stanford. In a new feature introduced last week, LinkedIn, the Mountain View, Calif., professional social networking site, has produced 160,000 corporate profiles, from Microsoft Corp. to Apple Inc., detailing information such as common career paths, top schools and popular employees for each company.

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Social Networking Hits the Genome

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008 in social networking. 0 Comments

If you’ve ever wanted to know just exactly how much DNA you share with your ridiculously tall brother or doppelganger best friend, you’ll soon be able to find out. 23andMe, a personal genomics startup in Mountain View, CA, is about to unveil a new social-networking service that allows customers to compare their DNA. The company hopes that the new offering will encourage consumers to get DNA testing, potentially creating a novel research resource in the process.

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Google, MySpace, Yahoo Forge OpenSocial Foundation

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008 in social networking, Google, Yahoo, MySpace and software. 0 Comments

Google, MySpace , and Yahoo recently said they have agreed to form a non-profit group that would govern the development of a standard application programming interface that developers could use in building software for supporting online social networks. The three Internet companies expected the OpenSocial Foundation to launch in 90 days, and asked for others in the industry to rally behind the OpenSocial API, which was developed by Google to foster development across emerging social-network development platforms.

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Google Invests in Chinese Social-Networking Firm

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008 in China, social networking and Google. 0 Comments

Google Inc. disclosed recently it has invested $1 million in Chinese online social-networking technology provider Comsenz Inc., a start-up originally backed by former Google board member and venture capitalist Michael Moritz. Google inc. said in a regulatory filing that it made its investment in Comsenz in July, as part of Series B round of funding for the closely held firm. Moritz, a general partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital who announced his resignation from Google’s board roughly one year ago, has a more than 10% interest in a Sequoia fund invested in Comsenz, Google said. Reports of Google’s investment in Comsenz surfaced in Chinese media last year, though the speculation had it that Google was putting roughly $5 million into the Beijing-based company.

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The Professor as Open Book

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 23rd, 2008 in education and social networking. 0 Comments

While many professors have rushed to meet the age of social networking, there are some who think it is symptomatic of an unfortunate trend, that a professor’s job today is not just to impart knowledge, but to be an entertainer.

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Breaking Down the Social Networking Walls

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 23rd, 2008 in social networking, Facebook and MySpace. 0 Comments

In the two-horse race of social networking in the United States, it doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. A recent study of Americans between the ages of 13 and 42 found that 62 percent have accounts on both Facebook and MySpace, and most don’t plan on giving up one site for the other any time soon. The study was commissioned by Fuser, the Web communications aggregator that launched to the public last June, with the stated mission to simplify people’s digital lives. With a new social networking widget, Fuser believes it’s doing just that.

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New Facebook Features Let Users Bar Some of Their ”Friends” from Seeing Parts of Their Pages

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 23rd, 2008 in social networking, privacy and Facebook. 0 Comments

Facebook Inc. is tweaking the privacy settings on its popular online hangout to let users exert greater control over which of their friends are allowed to see personal details they post. The Palo Alto-based company said it would add features that will give its 67 million active users the option of selecting individual users who can or can’t access certain parts of their pages.

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Starbucks Caters to Digital Crowd with Social-Networking Site

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 23rd, 2008 in social networking. 0 Comments

You know social networking has jumped the shark when Starbucks gets into the act. Starbucks has launched My Starbucks Idea, an electronic suggestion box where people can offer up their best ideas for making the already ubiquitous coffee retailer even more successful. You could say the company is as aggressive with its Internet campaigns as it is with its prices. There is Wi-Fi in the stores, they let you log onto iTunes to see what song is playing in the store and download it, let you use text messaging to find the nearest store, and they gave away free digital songs for a month last year. You can offer up ideas, vote on other peoples’ ideas, and get feedback from Starbucks employees. The company says it will consider implementing the most popular ideas.

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YouTube Takes Over Wikipedia as the UK’s Most Popular Social Networking Site

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008 in YouTube, demographics, social networking, Facebook and Wikipedia. 0 Comments

All those hours spent watching videos about cats with 1000 faces have obviously paid off, with YouTube now the most popular social networking site in Britain, knocking Wikipedia off the prestigious perch. During the month of January, YouTube had a 56% increase in traffic compared to January 2007, with 10.4 million unique users from the UK, and Wikipedia managing to attract a paltry 9.6 million. Nielsen Online claims that Facebook had 8.5 million from the UK, as well.

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Harsh Realities About Virtual Ones

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008 in education, social networking, virtual worlds and economics. 0 Comments

Since the 1990s, educators have been focusing on access to Internet as a means of engagement, concerned about the digital divide; now that the divide has been bridged, we are concerned about access to education. Cause and effect here correlate. Rising costs of a college degree at our wireless colleges and universities have resulted in increasing public scrutiny, student debt and budget models based on marketing rather than pedagogical concepts. Academe’s insatiable investment in virtual worlds, social networks and other consumer applications is a benchmark of how far we will go and how much money we will spend in the name of engagement.

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Facebook 101: Ten Things You Need to Know About Facebook

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008 in social networking and Facebook. 0 Comments

When Mark Zuckerberg was 19 and a student at Harvard University, he wanted to find a way for his fellow Harvard colleagues to connect with each other. Today, the social networking site has more than 60 million active members, roughly the same population as the U.K. These users can now upload photos, have group discussions, and even play games on their individual profiles; they can also add one another as “friends” and connect with users who share similar interests, regardless of where they are in the world. Nowadays, more businesses and corporate folks are joining Facebook too, adding their pages to the Facebook network. Advertisers are even turning their attention to this growing market for good reason—there is strength in numbers. So what should you know about Facebook? Here are 10 things for starters.

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Facebook Goes Live in French

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008 in social networking and Facebook. 0 Comments

A French-language Facebook site went recently hot on the heels of German and Spanish versions of the Internet social networking giant. US-based Facebook produced the site with the help of 4,000 French users, who suggested ways to translate the network’s jargon and voted for the best choice.

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Spokeo, the Big Brother of Social Networking

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 3rd, 2008 in social networking. 0 Comments

Spokeo is a new kind of profile aggregator. It gathers information from social networking sites, but instead of aggregating info from your various profiles, like MySpace, Last.fm or Ma.gnolia, it scoops up info on all of your contacts from a wide variety of sites. The people at Spokeo call their service a friend tracker. Here’s how it works: You provide it with your AOL, Gmail, HotMail or Yahoo Mail address and password. In mere minutes, Spokeo finds recent updates and items from the people on your contact list on all kinds of social networking sites.

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The New Face of Facebook

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 3rd, 2008 in social networking and Facebook. 0 Comments

Facebook has a new look and this year it seems tabs are all the rage, with the social network rolling out its redesign over the next few weeks. According to Facebook, the redesign was prompted by a need to better organize the fast-growing explosion of information now available on the site. “As more and more information is available on Facebook — more photo albums, more applications and more history — we’ve realized that profiles have become cluttered and slow as a result,” a Facebook statement read. “We’re trying to make profiles more simple and relevant, while still giving you control over your profile and how you express yourself.”

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Student Noses Buried in Facebooks

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 3rd, 2008 in education, social networking and Facebook. 0 Comments

College students still can’t get enough of Facebook. According to Youth Trends’ February 2008 “Top Ten List Report,” Facebook was students’ favorite Web site for the seventh straight quarter.

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Between Friends

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein March 3rd, 2008 in social sites, social networking and Facebook. 0 Comments

The idea of a social graph–a representation of a person’s network of friends, family, and acquaintances–gained currency last year as the popularity of online social networks grew: Facebook, for example, claims to have more than 64 million active users, with 250,000 more signing up each day. It and other sites have tried to commercialize these social connections by allowing outside developers to build applications that access users’ networks. Facebook also advertises to a user’s contacts in accordance with the user’s online buying habits. The push to understand the nature and potential value of links between people online has led to imaginative ways to represent such networks. Here, we look at some of them.

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Opinion Piece: Face Value

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008 in social networking and Facebook. 0 Comments

Barbara Fister writes, “My corner of the Internet has been abuzz over a muckraking article that recently appeared in The Guardian on the subject of Facebook. Tom Hodgkinson, the highly principled slacker behind The Idler and author of How to Be Free, makes some familiar complaints: online friends are a pale imitation of face-to-face relationships, Facebook encourages high-schoolish obsession with popularity, it prompts its members to reveal too much about themselves, and it uses that information for commercial gain. But the article goes further. Facebook is not just an American-owned company with global ambitions. According to Hodgkinson, it’s highly influenced by a “neocon activist” board member and funded by a venture capital firm that has ties to the CIA. Their ultimate aim: “an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodities on sale to giant global brands.” Ironically, The Guardian helpfully provides a “share” link so you can send the article to all of your Facebook friends.

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Web Socialites Succumb to вЂFacebook Fatigue’

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008 in demographics, social networking and Facebook. 0 Comments

From politicians to film stars, anyone who was anyone had a Facebook profile. But the social networking phenomenon may have peaked now that the number of British users of the site has fallen for the first time. Analysts are speaking of “Facebook fatigue” after figures showed a 5 per cent decline from 8.9 million unique visitors to the website in December to 8.5 million last month. The fall could be a seasonal dip - Facebook’s audience is still 712 per cent higher than it was a year ago and 9 per cent higher than three months ago.

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Japan Social-Networking King Mixi to take on China

Print/Share This Post Email This Post Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008 in China, social networking and Japan. 0 Comments

Japan’s most popular social-networking site, Mixi, on Wednesday said it plans to establish a subsidiary in Shanghai to tap China’s fast-growing Internet market. “China’s Internet population is increasing at a significant pace, and its online-advertisement market is also gathering steam,” Mixi spokeswoman Hirono Kobayashi said. Internet users in China reached 172 million in 2007, and the figure is expected to reach 200 million by 2010, making it the world’s biggest Internet market by user numbers, she said.

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