Storify is announcing a contest to find the best story of 2011. The team has pulled together 10 nominees, but all Storify posts are eligible to win. Users can vote by clicking the Storify 'Like' button at the top of each story. You can like as many as you want, but you can only like each story once. The story with the most likes by December 29 wins Story Of The Year, and the author wins an iPad 2.
The Story Of The Year page will keep a running tally, and the top 10 authors will all receive Storify t-shirts. After liking a story, you'll be prompted to tweet about the contest. By promoting the contest on Twitter, anyone can enter into a drawing for another iPad 2. Make sure to include the hashtag, #storifyoftheyear. "This year, stories have often unfolded first on social media," says Storify co-founder Xavier Damman. "We can't wait to see which story moved people the most."
Storify has just released its compilation of the top 10 tweets of the year. The number one tweet was Bill Gates' farewell post to Steve Jobs. Second place was Sohaib Athar's observation of a helicopter over Abbottabad, Pakistan, which turned out to be the first report of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Storify is a tool for curating conversations that take place on the Web. Its recent redesign turned Storify into a front-page news site of the social Web. This year, Storify has played an instrumental role in documenting the news unfolding live on social media, such as the Occupy Wall Street protests. Storify users quoted nearly 3 million tweets this year in their embeddable social media stories.
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?
Today Twitvid announced that it is launching a new open social video network and redesigned site focused on helping users find their favorite videos. Twitvid wants to make it easier to upload clips and share them to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and Twitter.
For now, Twitvid's frontpage interface looks more like Digg's (before the social newsrooms). It shows most popular TwitVids by views, along with a featured Twitvid and a Twitvid Tuesdays Winner. There is a list of popular members on the right rail. Twitvid is tossing this simplistic design for user profiles that focus on personalized video taste. Sharing will be more focused around personal interests rather than top rated content. Imagine the Facebook news feed, but only populated by video that has been personalized to your tastes.
The Twitter handle @breakingnews has approximately 3,379,339 Twitter followers. Today, it announced the launch of its very own StumbleUpon channel, a new feature available in the StumbleUpon redesign. This makes discovering @breakingnews content on StumbleUpon less serendipitous and more Twitter-like.
In its blog post, @breakingnews acknowledged that it was the only branded channel that curated stories from other sources. Other publications on StumbleUpon Channels, such as BuzzFeed, CNNMoney, ELLE and Seventeen, just to name a few, either aggregate content or produce original content. BreakingNews picks up on organizations that do break stories, sending more traffic back to them. The new StumbleUpon channel will give those publications an extra boost in traffic.
Comunitee is a new social network with the news-obsessed reader in mind. It purports to deliver news based on the your reading patterns, cutting away the clutter that you see on social networks that were not built with news as the main type of content. Its name is a mashup of the words "community" and "committee," which is the driving concept behind this combination social network and news site.
In its attempt to be as simple as possible, Comunitee employs a combination of social network functions, including Lists (Twitter and Facebook), Circles (Google+), socially relevant news (Digg), personalized news apps (Zite, Flipboard, News360), news based on your social graph (Facebook), frictionless sharing (Facebook), discovery (StumbleUpon) and news based on your interest graph (Twitter).
In the words of Nova Spivack, we are approaching The Sharepocalypse. The real-time Web sounded like a great idea, but it has become impossible to manage. The success of social media has proven, ironically, to be its biggest challenge. The services we already use are getting busier, and whole new networks are popping up all the time. Email used to be the only problem. Today, the info streams are legion.
It's hard enough being a normal user, but some have millions of people tweeting at them! How are they supposed to process all those messages? In the Information Age, you'd think more data would be a good thing, but on the social Web, the opposite is true. But the aforementioned Nova Spivack - along with co-founder Dominiek ter Heide - has just unveiled Bottlenose, and it could be the tool that helps us avert The Sharepocalypse in the nick of time.
The NCAA recently stated that the University of North Carolina "failed to adequately and consistently monitor the social media activity of its athletes." Now colleges and universities across the country are scrambling to better monitor their social media sites. But is it necessary for schools to maintain institutional control of their athletes' social media sites?
People today are sharing to social networks while they're watching TV. They're communicating with friends in real time (chatting, IM, tweeting) and asynchronously (commenting and posting). A new report from Ooyala predicts that these social elements will become a part of the content itself, appearing inside video players, in apps or on second screens such as tablets or smartphones. This vision for the future of social TV focuses mostly on sharing and discovering while watching. How does this vision differ for viewers and publishers?
This was the year social networks became normal. Next time you're in a crowded restaurant, close your eyes and listen to the chatter around you. Count how many times you hear the word "Facebook" in an hour. This year, the number of people on Facebook reached 800 million. Remember when it was for college students only?
Google+ also launched this year. It's not just a new social network; it's what Google+ chief Vic Gundotra called "the + part" of the new Google. Every part of the Google experience, especially search, involves social connections now. And Twitter was no also-ran in 2011. It became a system-level part of every iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch on Apple's new iOS 5. In the ongoing war of the social networks, this year's pivotal battles were over three key territories: identity, location and sharing. How did it play out?
