Sixty-two percent of teens set their profiles to private (friends only) on social media sites, according to results from a recent study by Pew Internet entitled "Teens, kindness and cruelty on social networking sites." Nineteen percent set their profiles to partially private, and 17% leave their profiles completely public.
Teens with public profiles tend to have had negative experiences on social media sites. They are nearly twice as likely as those who didn't have a bad experience to say that their profile was public (23% vs. 12%).
Today HootSuite rolled out an expanded social media dashboard, which includes tracking for YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and Get Satisfaction. It will be available for Pro and Enterprise users only.
Users will be able to upload, search and comment on YouTube videos and Flickr photos, publish blog posts and comment or re-blog on Tumblr blog posts, and jump into Get Satisfaction support conversations.
The HootSuite App Directory also offers opportunities for third-party developers to build extensions into the social media monitoring platform.
All throughout human history technical breakthroughs have altered the topography of human thought. Or, rather, human thought has had a freer expression when it creates a more efficient vehicle for its own transmission. The 18th century, more than many, may remind us of our own time. That period was the culmination of what had become known as the "Republic of Letters," a shared domain of imagination that lasted from 1500 to 1800.
As Open Culture points out, by the late 18th century, new technology had culminated in national postal services and mass printing. This mechanically-based read/write web allowed for the proliferation of ideas across international borders in record time and subsequently led to revolutions, not unlike the Arab Spring and #occupy movements of today. (Though with more guns.) Stanford University has been conducting a project to map the data from the Republic and its efforts have led to some interesting discoveries.
Zwiggo touts itself as a group collaboration tool where you can share photos, posts, calendars, favorite books, chats, files, to-do lists, date planners, yellow notes, maps, list voting, forums and bookmarks. It does not integrate with Twitter or Facebook, and its API is already free and open to developers. With a clean, easy-to-use interface, Zwiggo is poised for new users. Now, it just needs to decide who those users will be.
Last week in Santa Clara, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), hosted its annual Technical Plenary (TPAC), at which 500 representatives from W3C's community met for a week. The social Web was high on the agenda.
Currently, the most familiar social Web standard is OAuth2 from the IETF, widely used for open authorization (which allows us to give second-party Social Web services access to information without asking for a Gmail password) on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. However, it now appears there may be a number of other standards in the wings, ranging from work in browser-based identity to rolling your own Google+'s Circles in a federated Social Web to emerging work around the hot topic of social business.
Buffer, an app that stacks up your tweets and automatically publishes them at the best times for engagement, just launched its free Android app. The app allows you to add any Web page to your Buffer, which you can then edit, manage and view analytics. It supports multiple accounts, which you can navigate with a swipe.
Buffer analyzes social data and automatically publishes your updates at the times when most of your followers are awake and clicking. This summer, Buffer studied its user data and found that it increases clicks on Twitter links by 200% and doubles the amount of retweets.
Our social Web is a busy, data-intensive place. Twitter sees 1 billion tweets in a week, Facebook now has 800 million users, and those are just the big players, neither of which was around eight years ago. The social Web is still relatively young, and growing.
Like the Web itself, baked into the heart of much of our social experience is the good, old fashioned hyperlink. The only difference is that the social Web requires shorter links, which simplifies them visually, but adds another technical layer between users and the content they're trying to access.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has a crack group of analysts tracking the Internet, including tweets and Facebook messages, that takes the pulse of the world. Located in McLean, Virginia analysts at the CIA Open Source Center are known as the "vengeful librarians" according to a report from the Associated Press. These librarians are tracking up to five million tweets a day from places like China, Pakistan and Egypt.
It is sometimes disconcerting to know what the U.S. intelligence complex is doing, right in your backyard. McLean is a beltway city in Northern Virginia that is best known for Tysons Corner, one of the shopping hubs of the East Coast. On the outskirts of the city limits there is also the George H.W. Bush CIA complex, on of the agency's main hubs in the D.C. region.
MyLife.com, a "people search" engine that searches across social networks, has just launched a new feature called "Personal Relationship Management" (PRM), and it's much cooler than it sounds. It's a browser-based service that lets you view your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds all in one stream and reply, like, retweet and so on as needed.
This PRM stream appears on the 'Home' screen, from which you can launch all kinds of searches for old classmates, colleagues, singles and such, using MyLife's existing people searches, already in use by over 60 million people. It's a 'freemium' site, and the paid features give you more access to features like 'Who's Searching For You,' showing you people with whom you aren't already connected.
The United States is having an election next week and the political machine is just getting warmed up for what is certain to be a very contentious presidential election year in 2012. Over the last 17 years or so, the Internet has become a major player in how voters gain information and make decisions. Since 2008, social media has proven to be a powerful force for campaigns to get out its message. That was especially prevalent in the 2010 mid-term elections and a roiling point will be reached in 2012. The state and local 2011 elections show how social media and the Internet have reached an inflection point where not only are they driving people towards voting booths, they are influencing how they vote.
Multiple surveys have been released recently from companies like Topix and Digitas that show that social media and the Internet has reached a critical point in informing voters and influencing their decisions. Check out the results below.
