Two Aussie girls got lost in a storm drain. Solution? Post an update on Facebook via mobile phone. The thought of using the phone to call Australia’s version of 911 apparently never occurred to them.
Fortunately, it worked — this time. But what if none of their friends had been logged in at that time? What [...]
Posts under ‘Social media’
Urgent distress call sent to Facebook friends. Phone broken? No, they used the phone to send it
Follower Monitor bot on Twitter: If you unfollow, they WILL know
I used Tweepular to rid myself of a bunch of accounts that weren’t returning my follow on Twitter. I shook them off like the fleas they are! The service works great.
Then I happened to check @netkritter, and discovered that a Twitter account called Follower Monitor was notifying many of them that @netkritter had dropped them.
So I looked it [...]
Quote from NYT: ‘It’s not your Facebook profile. It’s Facebook’s profile about you’
The New York Times has an article that expresses much of the sentiment I’ve been forming about Facebook over the last several months. It says there is a small but growing group of people who are leaving the site after putting some thought into its implications. To summarize this sentiment in one sentence: commercializing the [...]
Latest Facebook lawsuit alleges site exists only to snoop on you and sell the information
Five users of Facebook recently filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the true purpose of the site is to collect information about consumers “in the most innocuous way possible” and sell it to third parties. While it’s doubtful that the suit will gain much traction, the litigants’ analysis of the Facebook business model is [...]
Testing the effectiveness of Linked In group discussions
A few weeks back there was a discussion in a Linked In group for e-marketers in which the initiator complained about people who start topics ostensibly to have a substantive discussion, but it’s actually an attempt to promote their services – usually consulting of some kind or another. Anyone who’s spent any time in Linked [...]
40% of Twitter traffic is worthless tripe, study says
Pear Analytics of San Antonio studied 2,000 tweets and broke them down into categories. They classified 40 percent of the tweets as “pointless babble.” Only 3.75 percent of tweets were designated spam, which shows only that they have a much narrower definition of the term spam than I do. Read Pear’s announcement of the study.
Hunch.com applies social media techniques to build collective intelligence
If you haven’t stopped by Hunch.com, it’s worth a visit. The first thing the site will do is ask you to answer some questions. No, not your social security number – questions about your likes and dislikes, so it can learn about you. Then it will let you do one of two things. You can [...]
Why we’re seeing a social media gold rush
We are in the middle of a gold rush. A full-tilt, get out of my way or I’ll trample you gold rush. Possibly the biggest gold rush in technology since Y2K.
I’m referring to the flood of people competing in a noisy, rapidly shifting environment to gain quick recognition as the vaunted SME: Social Media Expert. In 2008, Facebook and [...]
Are recommendations on Linked In worth anything?
There’s a lot to like about Linked In. For one thing, it’s a social networking site with a specific purpose beyond time wasting: finding a better job. For another, it has so far avoided the clutter and chaos of MySpace and Facebook (though I’m not sure how long that will last.)
But there’s one feature on [...]
The state of friendship in a world of social media
As a writer I can’t help noticing how technology’s continuing advance into every aspect of our daily lives is inluencing how we think and talk. I’m intrigued by the changes in our language even from a short time ago. Not only are new technology-spawned words entering the lexicon, but existing words are gaining new meanings. [...]