The word "love" elicits reactions from everyone, and some of those feelings are not pretty. Except when they're absolutely beautiful.
On Valentine's Day, Internet users' emotions were plentiful and mixed. Twitter trends like #CandyHeartRejects and #FedValentines popped up, illuminating the thoughts of quite a few bitter birds. Facebook also celebrated Valentine's Day with some birdlike activity. News leaked last month that the Angry Birds would crash onto Facebook on Valentine's Day. It's the perfect game for pissed off single users to play on the heart of hearts day. But for all the love-related bitterness on social media, there are still moments of grace.
Today is Valentine's Day. If you're not coupled up, you're probably either laying low, thinking about flirting with someone, dropping witty one-liners all over the place, trying to figure out why your last relationship didn't work out or contemplating what "love" is, anyway. It's all pretty confusing, and the Internet isn't here to help you figure it out. But it does provide you with a few more communication tools for making a connection happen.
Like a certain social network that came before it, Pinterest already appears to be doing a few things behind the scenes.
CNN reports that the popular virtual pinboard social network site has been "appending affiliate links to some pins," particularly those featuring goods from Amazon, eBay, Target and thousands more merchants. If someone clicks on one of those affiliate links and buys a product featured in one of the pins, Pinterest makes money. But no one would have known this if the following blog post on LLSocial.com had not appeared.
Sometimes little things like a sweet comment on Facebook or a Twitter friend calling your tweet a "favorite" can really make a social networker bee's day.
A new study from Pew finds that for the most part, adults are kind to each other on social media sites. In fact, 85% of adults say that most of the people they come across on social media are rather kind; only 5% say that people are "mostly unkind," which would imply rude or mean. An additional 5% say that it's all situational. On the whole, adults have positive experiences on social networking sites. A total 68% of SNS users had an experience that "made them feel good about themselves," 61% said something on social networks "made them feel closer to another person." Of the generous and helpful variety, 39% of users said they saw acts of generosity and 36% said they see other user behaving in generous and helpful ways.
A post last week on pimping your LinkedIn profile drew a big response and led to a divide in comments about whether people should be using LinkedIn.
One of the bigger misconceptions in the comments was that LinkedIn is primarily a job-hunting site. But there are reasons to use LinkedIn even if you have a job you love, aside from the obvious benefits of keeping up on your industry and making connections with potential business partners.
In ComScore's report on The State of Online and Mobile Banking, it cites social networks as a space where banks are creating a presence, and improving their capabilities. But do any of the banks' customers even know about this? Apparently not.
Even though financial institutes have increased social networking activity, ComScore says that only 18% of customers knew that their financial institutions had a presence on social networks. A total 59% had no idea, and 24% were unsure of what their financial institutions were doing on social media sites.
AllThingsD's Liz Gannes has sources telling her that Rapportive, the best thing that ever happened to email, has been acquired by LinkedIn. We've heard the scuttlebutt, too. Our friends at LinkedIn won't say a word. Rapportive co-founder Martin Kleppmann "can't comment," and CEO Rahul Vohra has been quiet on Twitter lately. That's all we know.
So we aren't reporting that it has happened, but we're bracing ourselves in case it does. Since Rapportive is the most useful plug-in ever, we're concerned about something bad happening to it. But if it had to be somebody, an acquisition by LinkedIn could be a good choice.
SocialFlow, a service currently being used by the Economist, the New York Public Library, Pepsi and Human Rights Watch to manage social media campaigns, exited its beta and became publicly available Tuesday.
In the beta stage, SocialFlow increased clicks per tweet between 40% and 60%, on average. But the service comes at a cost: plans covering one Twitter and one Facebook account starts at $99 per month. As part of today's launch the company is offering the first month of service at any of its pricing points for $1.
Although predictions last week raised expectations about the role that social media would play in reshaping what has historically been one of the most engaging non-holiday events in the U.S. every year, the first analysis of yesterday's public social network data by advertising analysis firm Networked Insights makes a compelling revelation: Almost three-fourths of the chat taking place among Twitter and Facebook users Sunday night had nothing to do with the game itself.
In fact, according to Networked Insights' data, the Super Bowl topic that trended in third place was "Brady," but when you break that topic down, you realize it may actually have been more about Mrs. Tom Brady - supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who appeared on camera perhaps once during the game, whom Tweeters evidently referred to as "Mrs. Brady" or perhaps "Lady Brady" - than about the New England Patriots quarterback.
I like using Twitter. I tolerate Facebook because I have to. And I'm on Google+ because everyone says I should be.
So that has left little time to give love to my profile on LinkedIn, which is, depending on how you look at it, either the biggest niche social network or the smallest of the big, all-encompassing social networks. Some people will tell you that sooner or later, all of our networking, social and professional, will be centrally located on Facebook. Others will insist that you need a LinkedIn profile, if only to protect the eyes of potential employers from falling on photos of you wearing an ugly shirt and a stupid grin at last year's company cookout.
