Social media gurus: We all know one. If you’re lucky, you know only one.
They are the attendees of tech parties, the “Twitter consultants,” the armchair generals of the Internet, and their numbers grow by the day. Yet most of them couldn’t distinguish a line of code from a badly punctuated haiku.
What’s to be done with the social media experts? Accept that their blathering may contain some wisdom? Or require technical exams for all Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers? You decide! And make the NMDs among us take our “technical” quiz.
There is always grave danger when amateurs turn overnight into experts. This sub-professional clown town is where B movies and Soulja Boy come from. It’s also the birthplace of every blowhard who tells you you’re “doing it wrong” without any technical knowledge or original thought to back it up …
Social Networking site Facebook is now offering its users the opportunity to share cash with each other, real cash that is.
You can send and receive small payments via a Facebook application called Buxter and the company behind Buxter that will process the transactions is online payments company ClickandBuy …
It looks like Google has decided against releasing new iPhone apps for the time being and has focused most of its mobile development efforts on web apps instead. While the Buzz web app is very good, however, it can’t quite rival the speed and comfort of using a native iPhone app. Fiam’s Buzzie is the first Buzz app for the iPhone ($1.99 – iTunes link) and even though it is still missing some features …
Walled gardens are already under attack because of the ease of sending content like messages and photos from one website to another. Sites that don’t let content flow in and out freely, when that’s what users want, are fighting against the powerful tide of the internet.
Now a new proposal aims to take things to the next level and send a payload of item-type specific action options along with every piece of content that gets shot across the internet. A loose body of innovators from some of the biggest social networking companies online have begun discussing an addition to the Activity Streams standard format called an Action Stream …
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced a new policy which allows all users of unclassified computers in the .mil domain access to popular social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube among others. This change in policy effectively reverses the previous ban on accessing these types of sites – a ban that had been in place for nearly three years. In embracing the new policy, the department also launched its own social media hub, a blog-like site complete with live Twitter feeds, Tweetmeme buttons and “share on Facebook” links.
And in case you thought they weren’t serious, it’s also worth noting (as spotted by the New York Times) that news of this announcement broke on the Twitter feed of Price Floyd, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, and not via a traditional press release …
Facebook is about to become a quieter, less annoying place for users. The company just announced that it has deprecated “application notifications” and will require apps to use other, less intrusive methods of sending news to users. It’s a big step in the ongoing anti-MySpace-ification of Facebook. Though to be fair, MySpace recently instituted something similar. Now your “notifications” section on Facebook will just be for things like comments left on your posts.
It’s a good move that puts the interests of users ahead of short-term benefits for app developers and monetization …
A study by Burson-Marsteller finds that 79 percent of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune Global 500 index are using social media tools.
At first glance, this may seem significant. But a closer look shows that Fortune 100 companies are showing interest but nothing to prove that social media tools are gaining significant corporate acceptance. Here’s a copy of the full report and an accompanying power point presentation
But it is early in the game and these are results show that social media tools are making credible gains …
For the past couple weeks, we’ve been following some interesting developments with Twitter – things that most end users probably would not know or care about.
As we suspected, the quickly-growing company is putting more emphasis on engineering, taking “steps… to make our engineering division more open and transparent,” according to the team’s infrastructure manager, Evan Weaver. “Much of Twitter’s success has been enabled by open-source software, and we want to give back,” he continues. And there’s a lot of giving back going on, from a new blog to new recruiting efforts.
Read on, and let us know your opinions in the comments …
Millions of people click click click their way mindlessly through repetitive casual games like FarmVille every day. Such games spread like a virus, infecting Facebook news feeds and eating up big chunks of the precious little time on earth that players were blessed with before they face their inevitable, if temporarily forgotten, mortality.
Josh Williams used to develop software like that. A graphic designer by training, his website for sharing iconography grew popular enough that he turned it into a game called PackRat. Half a million people spent far too much time on the site, but bigger companies grew faster and quickly swallowed up the “zombification” category of casual games. (My categorization, not his.) Now Williams is building something different, perhaps the opposite of FarmVille …
MySpace and Google just announced that starting today, status updates from MySpace users will appear in Google’s real-time search. MySpace announced its real-time Stream API in December and Google launched its real-time search feature just a day before the MySpace announcement. While Google was one of MySpace’s launch partners (together with OneRiot), it took Google until today to include MySpace updates in its real-time search.
Currently, Twitter dominates Google’s real-time search results, though Google also plans to include updates from FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca in its search results in the future. Google also has a deal with Facebook to show status updates from groups, companies and celebrities in its real-time search results …
