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Social Media News 7/27/10

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

It’s baaaaaack! After a three month hiatus, I’m so very glad to be blogging again and bringing you my weekly Social Media News.

Facebook has announced that it has officially reached 500 million active, registered users. That’s roughly the total population of the European Union. To celebrate, Facebook has launched its own app called Facebook Stories. Facebook is inviting everyone to share their own personal Facebook story with the world, aiming to capture hundreds of thousands of personal experiences, lessons learned, reunions and revelations. Read more about it here on The Facebook Blog.

Filmmakers are working on a Facebook story of a different kind: a full-length feature film called The Social Network. Mashable rounded up what the founders think of the flick, reporting that Mark Zuckerberg had shared some negative comments about the movie at the recent D8 Conference.

The big news on the Twitter front is a possible new feature called Tweet Media. Twitter hasn’t released any notices about the feature, but a mysterious new privacy setting found by some users has caused speculation. It is suspected that by opting in to Tweet Media, users will be able to post and view photos and videos within the Twitter stream. The addition of multimedia within Twitter will force advertisers to change their Twitter content strategies in a big way.

Ford made news this week by revealing the new 2011 Ford Explorer on Facebook, before revealing it anywhere else. The Ford Explorer Facebook page, sporting over 50,000 fans, includes tons of multimedia content surrounding the Explorer, including a sweepstakes. Check it out at www.facebook.com/FordExplorer.

iPhone users rejoiced with news this week that the U.S. Copyright Office has made iPhone jailbreaking legal. What this means is that tech-savvy iPhone users can legally hack their phones to buy and use apps that are not sold within Apple’s iTunes App Store. Users should note that though jailbreaking is now legal, performing such a hack will void your Apple warranty. Also, jailbreaking is not the same as unlocking the iPhone, which is a hack to allow the iPhone to work with other carriers outside of AT&T.

Social Media News 11/7/09

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Welcome to the Social Media News double-hitter! This week’s post will also cover last week’s headlines in social media. For the first time since I’ve been writing the Social Media News, I missed last week’s recap due to illness as well as being out of town. So here’s a two-for-one post to make up for it.

Twitter’s new List feature has been the talk of the town in social media during the past two weeks. I first made mention of the new feature in the 10/23 SMN post. Since then, there’s been thousands of articles and blog posts written up about Lists. Some of my favorites are these: Twitter Lists: FAQ and Strategies, Twitter Lists and Real-Time Journalism, 4 Ways News Organizations are Using Twitter Lists, and The Brilliance of Twitter Lists and Suggestions for Improvement. Twitter Lists are fantastic for grouping tweeps based on interest or profession, organizing various Twitter streams into topic categories, and allowing users to quickly access specific tweeps without having to be a follower. More over, an unexpected benefit from Lists is the creation of another way to judge popularity, authority and/or influence of every Twitter user: each Twitter profile displays how many times a user has been “Listed”. In addition to how many followers one may have, the number of Lists that a user has been listed on gives us a quantitative value of their Twitter social status.

Lists have been praised as the most useful improvement ever made on Twitter. However, the TwitterPeek is a new gadget hailed as one of the most useless Twitter tools of all time. The TwitterPeek is a small, smartphone-sized device meant for one thing, and one thing only: connect you to Twitter. It doesn’t do anything that just about any smartphone can’t do, and I believe the price tag is a little steep for a one trick pony: $99 for six months of service ($8/month after that), or $199 for a lifetime service plan. I much rather have a new Coach wallet, thanks.

On Wednesday Apple announced that it’s iTunes App Store has reached 100,000 iPhone apps. But as ReadWriteWeb reports, new data from AppsFire reveals that of those 100,000 available apps, only about 20% of them are currently used. The other 80% of apps are not actively installed on iPhones, iPods or iTouch devices. Classic 80/20 rule. Click here for the long-tail graph from AppsFire.

Following the news of Bing and Google’s deals with Twitter to include tweets in search result a few weeks ago, Google announced a new Google Labs experiment its calling Google Social Search. Here’s the idea: you create a social graph on your Google user profile by linking all of your social networking accounts like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed as well as Google products like YouTube, Picasa and Blogger. Once your social graph is complete, information from those networks will be integrated into Google search results. When you search Google for a product, service, destination, or anything else, recommendations and comments from your friends, family and other contacts would be displayed alongside the normal Web results on the search page. In this way, the Google search engine becomes a recommendation engine. If this idea becomes mainstream, it will be a game-changer for SEO and SEM marketers, as organic search listings will compete against word of mouth from the user’s social circle. Watch the demo video and get all the details straight from the Google blog, and be sure to check out this great article from ClickZ: Social Media, Meet Search.

Ad Age

The Two Faces of Facebook

Social-Media Pranksters Had Fun With Walmart’s Caskets

TechCrunch

NBC Prepares For The Winter Olympics With Silverlight, HD Video, And Facebook Connect

Facebook Share Adds Live Share Counts, Analytics

Apple Has No Sense Of Humor. Luckily, Google Does

MediaPost

Research Brief: Twittering To Keep Current

Consumers More Willing To Share Brand Info On Social Networks Than Previously Thought

Mashable

4 Ways News Organizations are Using Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists: Frequently Asked Questions and Strategies

WOW: Facebook Adding Half a Million New Users Every Day

Twitter Lists: Frequently Asked Questions and Strategies

Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies

LinkedIn Is Getting a Redesign [Pics]

Pizza Hut’s iPhone App Has Generated $1 Million in Sales

Google Dashboard: Now You Know What Google Knows About You

Blogs and other news media

Twitter lists and real-time journalism (CNN)

Social Media, Meet Search (Click Z)

Vegas Hotels Trade Rooms In Exchange for New Twitter Followers (BlackWeb 2.0)

Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend’s New York blog! (Google Blog)

The TwitterPeek is a Peek that tweets (CrunchGear)

TwitterPeek: The Twitter-Only Gadget Destined for Extinction (PC World)

iTunes App Store: 100k Apps, But Only 20% Are Being Used (ReadWriteWeb)

Google’s Creepy Social Search (PC Mag)

E-Mail Marketers Don’t Get Mobile Marketing (Mobile Marketing Watch)

Blinded by the Tweet: Don’t let social media infatuation blue TV and video (MediaPost)

The Brilliance of Twitter Lists and Suggestions for Improvement (The Next Web)

Leave a Comment » | Social Media News | Tagged: apple, facebook, google, iphone, itunes, marketing, social search, twitter, twitter lists, twitterpeek | Permalink
Posted by Rachelle Maisner

Social Media News 10/23/09

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Twitter made multiple headlines this week. Most significant of which, Bing and Google will now index Tweets in real time and display them along with search results. Bing has a public beta now available, but as far as I know Google hasn’t disclosed when they will begin to integrate. If you can’t wait for the official release, check out a new broswer plugin called Kikin. The plugin will allow you to integrate content from multiple social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon) with search results from your favorite search engine.

The Twitter announcement was made Wednesday at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco. At the same conference, venture capitalist Sean Parker gave a presentation that has spurred a lot of conversation. Parker made the distinction between “network services” like major social networking sites, and “information services” like search engines. In his slide deck, Parker claims that network services will trump information services and ultimately shape the future of the internet. “Companies that harness the power of networks will dominate the internet. Collecting data is less valuable than connecting people.”

If Sean Parker is right, then the Bing and Google deal with Twitter is a good move. This week, the Pew Internet Project reported that Twitter and other microblogging services are used by 19% of internet users, which has increased from 11% of users 6 months ago. Also this week, Twitter hit a significant milestone on Monday with the 5 billionth Tweet, now known as the “Pentagigatweet”. (The Tweet has since been deleted by it’s author Robin Sloan, for whatever reason.)

The final word on this week’s Twitter news comes from co-founder and chief executive Evan Williams. The New York Times reported on Williams’ remarks from the Web 2.0 Summit, at which he announced that later this month Twitter will release its “Lists” feature, currently in beta for a few thousand users. Lists allow Twitter users to better organize Twitter feeds that they are interested in, and I believe it’s going to be very similar to Amazon’s Listmania feature.

Facebook debuted a new feature of its own this week with a redesign of the Facebook user home page. Users can now toggle between “News Feeds” and “Live Feed”. The change was made without much explanation to Facebook users, thousands of which were left wonder what the heck was different between the News and Live feeds. Here’s I how explained the difference: The Live Feed are all the status and news updates that Facebook users are accustomed to seeing on their homepage; The News Feed is the feed of events from the Live Feed that the site believes will be most interesting to the user, based on how popular the post is, and based on the user’s past interactions on the site. This feature was developed in response to user feedback, but as with any major site change, there has been a minor backlash to the upgrade.