Forget the random pictures of babies and puppies, alarming status updates from family members and political rants. On My-ArtMap, you will be immersed in art. It's as simple as that. The site, which is targeted at an international audience, is available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Chinese. You can create a username and password for the site, or login using Facebook Connect. My-ArtMap is also available as an iPhone app.
When Mixel — an iPad-based collage app — launched last November, one of its features quickly caused frustration: Its requirement that users log in with Facebook before they could start creating and sharing art.
The reason for that requirement, Mixel co-founder (and former NYTimes.com design director) Khoi Vinh explained, was real names. Vinh wanted to build the Mixel community around real names, not anonymity or pseudonyms. "We think this is essential to the kind of experience we're building: a family-friendly environment that's suitable for just about anyone," he wrote.
At the time, Facebook was pretty much his only option. But that is starting to change. And as proving your online identity becomes more important, it's a valuable race for the players involved to win.
Well, there's a reason it's not called Dude-terest. The latest darling of the up-and-coming social sharing space, Pinterest, has experienced rapid growth in both users and industry buzz in the last few months. If you had a sneaking suspicion that the majority of those users happen to be young females, you were right.
Pinterest's users are 80% women, according to recent data from Google Ad Planner, as presented by Ignite Social Media. The site is biggest among the 25-34 age range, followed by 35-to-44-year-olds. These site's popularity among people in their late 20s and early 30s is illustrated (quite literally) by the proliferation of images related to wedding planning and home decor.
This week Topsy Labs Inc. released a report claiming its model was able to predict a drop in Netflix's share price after it decided to split its DVD rental and streaming video services by tracking phrases like "just canceled my Netflix subscription."
It's arguable whether investors really needed a sophisticated sentiment measuring analyses to predict Netflix's shares would drop after what has been called the worst business decision since the introduction of "new" Coke in 1985. But social media sentiment analysis is growing more sophisticated and may soon become a key component investors look at before making a decision to buy or sell stock.
In America, 240 million people are wired...to the Internet. And in Russia, 60 million people are online. That's nearly half of Russia's population of 142,946,800. Russia is currently the largest Internet market in Europe, and its Internet population has been steadily growing year over year. The population of Internet users has just hit 42.8% of the entire Russian population. Last year, we wrote about the top 10 startups of 2011. But what are the top Russian startups? And are they all just American knockoffs?
Facebook has finally surpassed Google's Orkut in Brazil. Launched in 2004, Orkut quickly caught on in Brazil and remained the number one network until the end of 2011. Facebook was Brazil's number three most popular social network in 2010. A recent ComScore report showed Facebook's steady increase throughout 2011. It only took the lead in December 2011, edging out Orkut with 36.1 million visitors.
Facebook is ready to unleash a string of verbs into your Timeline. According to a report from AllThingsD, the Facebook Open Graph will be unleashed on the ecosystem this week bringing more "read, watch, listen" applications to the social platform. Open Graph apps that track what you eat, where and how far you run and what purchases you make could be announced as early as tomorrow.
Open Graph apps are the final installment of what Facebook announced at its f8 Developers' Conference in San Francisco last September. Open Graph apps are the coup de grace to Timeline. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, "We think that people are going to want to share all kinds of things with their lives and we think that apps are the way they want to show them."
Organizers for the 2012 Olympic Games in London have banned volunteers from sharing details about their experiences on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.
Volunteers have received letters saying they can disclose they are volunteers, but that's about it: the ban forbids them from posting photos, disclosing locations or even their specific role as a volunteer. In addition to security measures - volunteers, for example, can't tweet about a visiting VIP - the ban also prohibits volunteers from sharing "breaking news" about an athlete.
The new directive seems to be a stricter supplement to guidelines that were issued last summer. Those guidelines encouraged social media use, as long as it was more of a first-person, diary-like account of what volunteers were doing.
You've seen MOO cards, those adorable half-the-size of regular business cards that have a pretty image on one side and your info on the other. Today MOO.com announced a big step toward social business, integrating with Facebook to create real business cards that use images from your Facebook Timeline. The customizable cards are available now for purchase. MOO social business cards fit into the Timeline mission, which hardly differentiates between online and offline identity. With MOO business cards, Facebook wants you to move one step closer to imagining your identity on social media less as you and more as "you," also known as your very own personal brand of yourself.
A new study from Forrester proves that the majority of Americans are a bunch of lazy re-tweeters. 93% of online consumers in the emerging markets of China, India, Mexico and Brazil use social media tools at least once-a-month. U.S. and European consumers are far more likely to view social media as a spectator sport, joining it and then just watching it fly by.
In the U.S., 68% of social media users are "joiners," which means they maintain a profile on a social networking site and visit social networks. 73% are "spectators," or users who mostly just read blogs, online forums, customer ratings/reviews and tweets, listen to podcasts and watch videos. This number is strikingly similar in Europe (EU-7 countries, to be specific), with 69% of users classified as spectators and 50% as joiners.
