Amidst all the Iowa noise from last night and today's announcement about the end of Michele Bachmann's presidential bid, something else happened: President Obama quietly joined social photo sharing app Instagram. Obama joined with the username @barackobama and has since posted two photos. The first one is of him speaking via videoconference to Iowa caucus-goers. The second is a photo of people watching the videoconference and is captioned "You guys inspire me every single day."
This is yet another instance of the president using social media to reach and engage with the younger demographic that helped him get elected four years ago. With the GOP edging in on social media, however, will this same strategy help him win in 2012?
Social media, types of media where everyday people can publish and subscribe to what one another publishes, have changed the world. At least in the United States, though, their rapid expansion through acquisition of new users may be over.
Facebook specialist Eric Eldon published a compilation of statistics from around the web this week on TechCrunch that pointed towards US and Canadian market saturation this past year for Facebook. Surely Facebook represents the forward line of all social media. Academic and tech industry analyst Vivek Wadhwa posted a set of predictions for 2012 in the Washington Post last night, starting with a prediction that the period of rapid growth for social media is over. In the future it will be a feature, not a product, he argues. To startups and investors, Wadha says "It's time to jump on the next bandwagon, folks."
The Internet is in an uproar over the Stop Online Piracy Act. The battles lines are drawn. Big Media (the record labels, movie studios and TV networks) support the bill while Big Tech (search engines, open source platforms, social networks) oppose it. The bill, introduced to Congress by Representative Lamar Smith, is ostensibly supposed to give the Attorney General the ability to eliminate Internet piracy and to "protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. support of infringing sites."
There is a lot that may be wrong with SOPA, but putting the power to censor the Internet into the hands of the government is chief among citizens' concerns. The law would force Internet Service Providers and search engines to cut off access to infringing sites as well as give the government the ability to stop payment to those sites. How would SOPA work? What do you need to know about the bill heading into 2012? We take a deep dive into everything you need to know below.
Today professional network LinkedIn released its top most shared stories. There are currently 130 million professionals on LinkedIn, and the most popular shared articles are about how to be a better worker. The number two and number three most shared stories were about Steve Jobs. The number nine most shared article was about how people look at your Facebook profile, and the number one article was written by digital marketer Ilya Pozin for Inc. magazine; it is called "9 Things That Motivate Employees More Than Money." So who are these LinkedIn users, anyhow?
Today GetGlue, the service that lets users "check-in" to watching TV shows, reading books, listening to music and even thinking about products, announced major updates for its website and iPhone app.
If you haven't heard of GetGlue, don't worry. Here's how it works: After you've checked in to the entertainment you're experiencing, GetGlue tells you who else is thinking about it, how many times you've checked-in, where it is trending on the site and how many others are currently checked into it. It connects people around entertainment, a trend that is increasingly becoming more mainstream as social TV expands. GetGlue saw an 800% increase from the beginning of the year to September.
Today the Q&A site Quora announced the debut of boards, which function a lot like stacks do on social bookmarking site, Delicious. Boards organize information around a specific topic, making it simpler for users to follow related content. You can collect similar questions that are already up on Quora and grab links from outside the sites. Considering that Quora is all about questions, why would it choose to go this route?
Picture a full-screen Facebook news feed filled with all the beautifully designed items that all your aesthetically inclined friends have purchased. Now clean up the user interface so there's no spammy news ticker. Got it?
Then you have arrived at Fab.com, the Web's fastest growing flash sales site specializing in design. Today it launched an irresistible (and I do not use this word lightly) new feature it likes to call Live Feed, which uncreepily surfaces what other Fab.com members are buying, liking, tweeting and sharing across the Web. Unlike Facebook's opt-out privacy features, Fab.com made the live feed on this new feature completely opt-in. You can choose to reveal your username whenever you purchase something, or not. If you don't want other Fab.com members to see what you've purchased, you'll just be known anonymously as "A Fab User."
LinkedIn is giving users a way to create polls for groups. If you're a group manager or member of a group, you can now create a poll with up to five questions. This is not only a fast way to collect useful information related to group-specific question, but it's also useful way to start discussion within a group that already has a strong number of members. Users can also share the polls they've published out to Twitter.
"LinkedIn groups are great for organizing users around similar topics but there is a often a big time lag in conversation compared to engagement on other social networks," Syracuse University Social Media Professor Dr. William J. Ward (@DR4WARD) tells us. Will this new feature help LinkedIn turn groups into spaces for engaged conversation?
Facebook's new Timeline is rolling out to the public, offering users the chance to upgrade to "a new kind of profile." The new profile was revealed at Facebook's f8 developer conference on September 22. The rollout began in New Zealand on December 6, and it's now spreading worldwide.
Timeline turns the profile into an illustrated, browsable history of a user's entire life, with major milestones and little moments smartly chosen by Facebook's algorithm. The recent history is specific and full of activity, but Facebook automatically focuses older stories on life's big moments.
Wajam, a social search extension for browsers, has just added Wajam Videos, which shows you what videos your friends have recommended through search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Wajam also added social search to YouTube, enabling users to see what videos their friends are sharing. Now if you're searching for a keyword like "Christmas" on Google, Yahoo or Bing, you'll also be able to see what your friends have recommended.
While the blog post does not mention this, you can also search for videos shared to Facebook through Wajam Videos. This new product begs the question: Will search and social ever truly become intertwined?
