While Twitter offers a decent search experience, Twitter's own search engine doesn't make it very easy to discover interesting local Twitter users. LocaFollow wants to change this. The service offers an easy to use interface that makes it painless to find local Twitter users by searching through their Twitter bios. Once a search is completed, users are presented with a list of local Twitter users, their bios, a basic set of statistics and their latest tweets.
Social media data company Rapleaf has just completed a comprehensive study involving the demographics and behavior of webmail users. In the first part of their study, they looked specifically at age and gender data and revealed some interesting findings. For example, did you know that Gmail has more female users than male? And that Hotmail is the other way around? Meanwhile, AOL users are older...but maybe not as old as you think.
Yesterday, amid all the news of Twitter's arrival into both Microsoft's Bing and the Google search engine, another major announcement was being made. MySpace is giving up on trying to be a major social network. According to MySpace CEO, Owen Van Natta, Facebook is no longer their competition. "We're focused on a different space," he says.
That "different space," as it turns out, is music...and it really isn't all that different, especially considering MySpace's roots. If anything, this major overhaul of the social network is an attempt to return the site to becoming the popular entertainment hub it once was.
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Coming soon to a mall near you: the Microsoft Retail Store.
Yes, that's right: Redmond, Washington's favorite son wants a closer, snugglier relationship with you, the consumer.
In a blog post this week, U.S. Navy CIO Rob Carey wrote that social media is a resource for the American military that should be used to build trust and collaboration, both within and outside the organization.
In attempts to balance communication, transparency, and operational security, the military has encountered both practical obstacles and general criticism. In a recent podcast, Carey said, "Most social networking tools come with no rules of the road. As the Internet moves towards user-generated content, we thought there was a void we could fill... to mitigate some of the security risks associated with social media."
This post is sponsored by IBM's A Smarter Planet blog.
Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media ran a panel called Humans As Sensors. With him were four organizations doing innovative applications using sensors: Markus Tripp (Mobilizy), Deborah Estrin (Computer Science Department, UCLA), Sharon Biggar (Path Intelligence), Di-Ann Eisnor (Waze).
Each of the speakers started by explaining what they do.
Web search, real-time search and social search. That's a pretty compelling combination and it's what both Google and Facebook put on the table today in a head-to-head competiton. Google's Marissa Mayer did a short, surprise demo today of an experimental Google feature called Social Search but don't mistake the understated announcement to mean this was a small move. The Web 2.0 Summit today has been jam packed with very big search moves.
Both companies are hoping you'll come to their sites to search for what you're looking for, what people are saying about that topic and what your friends think. Microsoft is very much in the game, too. Here are some things to consider in this search war. It's a new fight - now including the real-time, social web!
Is today's news of major search engines' integration of Twitter posts in search results the herald of a mass extinction or a mass acquisition?
According to tonight's conversations with key players in the space, the day's events and announcements could spell either or both. Every real-time search engine we spoke to has expressed every intention of weathering the storm on their current strategies, all of which center on providing an excellent UX though excellent product development. And all see the day's events as a validation of years of concentrated effort. But who will prevail, and who will profit?
A group of UCLA researchers has determined that for middle-aged and older folks, using the Internet, particularly search, causes enhanced neural stimulation leading to better reasoning and decision-making.
At a recent presentation at the Neuroscience 2009 meeting in Chicago, the scientists stated, "The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults." Defying folk wisdom regarding old dogs and new tricks, the research was conducted on Internet users aged 55 to 78, about half of whom rarely used the Internet.
Facebook began as a place for college connections, secluded from the prying eyes of the outside world, but today that era is officially over. Major Facebook investor Microsoft announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit that it has closed deals to bring status messages from both Twitter and Facebook into the search results of Bing.com. Twitter search is live now, Facebook is forthcoming.
Facebook is opening up to a search engine - that's very big news. Only content from accounts marked public will be indexed by Bing, but it's a sea change none the less. Facebook has an explicit, acknowledged agenda to make more people comfortable sharing more information publicly - once they do, that information will be searchable on Bing. This 'aint your big sister's Facebook anymore.
