October 20, 2009
“ [Dont’ tell me what you are doing, tell me where you are] Twitter and Facebook ask users to answer the question: What are you doing right now? But for many urbanites in their 20s and 30s, two other questions are just as important: Where are you, and can I come join you? For them, a fast-growing social networking service called Foursquare is becoming the tool of choice. A combination of friend-finder, city guide and competitive bar game, Foursquare lets users “check in” with a cellphone at a bar, restaurant or art gallery. That alerts their friends to their current location so they can drop by and say hello. “It’s planned serendipity,” said Emily Woolf, 24, a strategic planner living in Brooklyn who checks in on Foursquare when she wants to grab coffee or a drink with friends. “At this point, I don’t even bother texting or calling my friends. I just check Foursquare to see if they’re nearby and go meet them.
October 13, 2009
“ [22 new rules for news - Dan Gillmor] 2. We would invite our audience to participate in the journalism process, in a variety of ways that included crowdsourcing, audience blogging, wikis and many other techniques. We’d make it clear that we’re not looking for free labour – and will work to create a system that rewards contributors beyond a pat on the back – but want above all to promote a multi-directional flow of news and information in which the audience plays a vital role.
“ [Danger of centralization] Owners of Sidekick phones may have lost all the personal information they put on the device, including contact numbers, because of a failure of servers that remotely stored the data. The incident is a huge blow to the reputation of the Sidekick and is a reminder of the dangers of trusting a single provider to safeguard information. The phones are made by a Microsoft subsidiary and sold by T-Mobile USA, which say many Sidekick owners’ information is “almost certainly” gone. T-Mobile is offering customers $20 to refund the cost of one month of data usage on the phone.
October 12, 2009
“ [Global Happiness Index on Facebook] There is a 9.7 percent increase in happiness on Fridays compared with the worst day of the week, Monday. That is among the discoveries made by Facebook researchers with access to two years of anonymous “status updates” from 100 million users in the United States. Another conclusion: holidays like the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Halloween make Americans happy, while days when celebrities like Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger die make Americans sad. Such insights — obvious though some may be — leap out from the new Gross National Happiness Index, unveiled last Monday by Facebook.
“ We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun. Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time. Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.
October 11, 2009
“ [No social networking at work] 54 percent of U.S. companies say they’ve banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, while on the job. The study, released today, also found that 19 percent of companies allow social networking use only for business purposes, while 16 percent allow limited personal use. Only 10 percent of the 1,400 CIOs interviewed said that their companies allow employees full access to social networks during work hours.
Social Media Strategy Framework in French - Plan Stratégique des médias sociaux - Trends in the Living Networks
Exists in Spanish too, and other languages.
3 weeks ago
“ [Networks against cartels?] Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.
“ [Open source and mobile] Symbian has the market share; Apple’s iPhone has the mind share. The future of mobile, however, will be owned by the company or project that best appeals to developers, especially open-source developers.
“ [Get the movie you want in a theater near you] If you have not yet heard of the horror movie “Paranormal Activity,” you will soon. It is about to become the first major studio film to be released nationwide as the result of online requests from the public.
[…]
Paramount promised to release “Paranormal Activity” in cities where enough people demanded it and nationwide if a million people demanded it. As of Friday night, it was close, with 960,000 demands.
[…]
Paramount promised to release “Paranormal Activity” in cities where enough people demanded it and nationwide if a million people demanded it. As of Friday night, it was close, with 960,000 demands.
“ Marketers love the subscription concept, but is it any good for consumers? It sometimes seems as if cellphone deals were designed to alienate customers rather than to lure them into that sweet garden of inertia.
October 9, 2009
“ [AT&T authorizing Skype and VOIP] the bottom line is this: public pressure+government agency doing its job=corporate behemoths doing the right thing, catching up to other countries and saving you money.
