Articles about Social Media

Suddenly mobile Twitter makes lots of sense to me, and I wonder what good the desktop or web clients are at all. Versions 3.2 and 4.2, available today for Android and iOS, respectively, improve discovery, search and, more importantly, interaction with others and topics that matter most to you.

Not that Twitter mobile was bad before, it's just whole lots better now -- and where you need it most. On the go. Most of the goodness is behind the Discover tab, which after being much of a wasteland before is now lively and filled with streaming content relevant to you.

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Nokia has enough Lumia 900 marketing problems, without twitter making more. The photo with this post is pretty self-explanatory and shows how nasty promoted tweets can be.

The smartphone went on sale from AT&T April 8 for $99.99 -- that's quite a good price. Then almost immediately users started complaining about Internet connectivity problems, and Nokia quickly responded by making a magnanimous offer: $100 back to the people who already bought the phone and were willing to install a software update. Anyone else: Phone replacement. Meanwhile, Lumia 900 is free to new buyers until April 22. Okay, so why is there a promoted tweet in my feed on April 15: "That's right! Starting April 8, the Nokia #Lumia900 can be yours for $99.99 exclusively at @ATT"?

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People have too much time to waste, and I'm not one of them. But occasionally I have fun and write about others goofing off. Waste away, baby, because today's Google+ redesign has generated strange reaction to a sudden amount of white space to the right of the friend feed. People are posting with hashtag #whitespace.

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Some really strange stuff (I want to use the other "s" word, but content filters) comes into the BetaNews Tips box. I'm paying more attention to what's in it this week, given my 7-day Google Reader fast. Weirdness knows no bounds, nor my perplexity to embrace and share it. I swear to debating for 10 minutes about sharing this video. It's strange. Topical. From a vlogger with 26,664 subscribers (now I'm one of them). And, sheepishly confess, made me laugh.

Hell, I even liked the text of the email before the video link and made it the headline. If Instagram is worth one billion bucks... You got me Khyan Mansley. Commenters don't be cruel.

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Just as Facebook forces users to adopt a more cluttered, confusing appearance, Google+ simplifies and provides social networkers more control over the layout. Much as I've tried to use Facebook more, because that's where my family hangs out, Google+ is inescapable. It's a gravity well too strong to resist. For 170 million, the number of users Google revealed today, Plus perhaps is irresistible, too. That's a lot of people for a service less than a year old.

Google+ is more than a social network. It is the future of Google. Like it or not, the company has embarked on a strategy around social search, and Plus is a pillar. Competing against Facebook clearly is one of Google's goals. But there also is realistic appraisal that social is the web's future -- and why shouldn't it be with gregarious humans? Additionally, Google+ is the sun around which the company's other products will revolve -- even search -- defining a digital lifestyle empowering connections, communications and commerce.

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Yesterday, Facebook announced that it acquired Instagram for $1 Billion. The company is less than two years old, has no revenue, and about a dozen employees. Remember, acquisitions are about what the acquirer can do with the company in the future, not some multiple of revenues or profits today. Why is Instagram worth $1 billion?

Facebook acquired Instagram for about $30 per user, or $1B. ($30/user X 33M users = $1 billion) Facebook is valued at about $100 per user or $80 billion ($100/user X 800M users = $80 billion). Other popular social apps are valued around $20 to $50 per user. The monetization models need to work out about the same to justify the valuations.

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The official Tumblr app was a late-comer to Android, and, sigh, hasn't kept pace in the years since. That's all changed. Today's update simply puts the iOS version to shame. Surely this lead can't last.

Tumblr for Android has a spiffy new user interface, which look and feel -- including post-type icons -- is more like the social network. The revamped UI is the real deal; well close to it. The app is speedier, and that includes photo browsing as well as loading blogs and posting to them. By comparison, Tumblr for iOS looks ugly and lacking. Access to Tumblr Radar from the Android app rocks. Still there are omissions that favor Tumblr for iOS, such as audio uploads. I'm surprised this feature isn't available on the Android app (Wasn't it once?).

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That's the question I will answer this week, for myself, as I kiss off RSS subscriptions, press releases and the like in favor of social media and honest to goodness live interaction. The moratorium includes Google News, which I rarely look at anyway (although some of my colleagues are obsessed with it). Press releases, blog posts, etc. that I see on social networks (including blog comments), or someone refers me to, are fair game.

The objectives are simple: To see if RSS feeds are antiquated and to increase my social engagement, which too often is limited to coworkers and the stories I manage. Hey, I work at home, where the grind makes dust of real interaction unless it is pursued. Aggressively.

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Are you 35 and claiming to be 29? Don't post photos to Facebook. Today Face.com added a new attribute to its facial-detection API: age detection. The startup claims the new attribute will let developers create apps that use three criteria -- minimum, maximum and estimated age -- to determine how old people are in photos.

While the technology surely will appeal to social networkers, the big boon could be marketers looking to maximize exposure to select demographic groups, such as 18-24 year olds. Developers can set the attribute to look for specific age segments, hence the marketing potential. But there are others, such as detecting fake IDs at establishments serving alcoholic beverages. Additionally, Face.com claims to have improved facial recognition by 30 percent in this release of the API.

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Inspired by the look of Windows Metro, MetroTwit is a unique-looking, clean Twitter client that oozes style and simplicity. The app has just hit version 1.0, having already proved itself to be worthy of note in the beta stages. The official release sees the addition of a number of important new features including highly configurable filtering that helps you to ensure that your stream is not cluttered up with tweets you are not interested in.

In a similar vein to TweetDeck, the MetroTwit interface includes multiple columns that can be used to display different aspects of your Twitter account, and there is great integration with Windows 7 that sees notification area popups revealing direct messages and other interactions.

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It's a serious question, following today's stunning privacy post from Facebook. Has an employer or prospective one asked you for your Facebook password, or that of another social media site; could be Google+, Tumblr or Twitter, among others?

The request might have come as condition of continued employment, and there threat of reprisal might seem, or even be, real given the current job market. Or perhaps a prospective employer said that you couldn't be considered for a new position without first giving up your password. Please answer in comments. This is one of those rare occasions I don't mind, and even recommend, anonymous commenting if answer is "Yes". There also is a poll. Please answer, and you can choose multiple responses.

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Reports of prospective employers asking for Facebook passwords during the hiring process or as terms of employment has the social networking site upset. Facebook says asking for your password is a violation of privacy, and very well could set up the employer for legal action.

Criticism of the practice came to a head earlier this week following an Associated Press story detailing several individuals who had been subjected to disclosing their passwords to either obtain or to keep a job. Employers' attempts to peer into your social life has the attention of lawmakers too: in both Maryland and Illinois legislation is being considered to make the practice illegal.

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It used to be that there were numerous chat clients to choose from -- the likes of AIM, MSN and Yahoo! -- but nowadays there are also social networks to consider. Trillian has always been a great tool for anyone who wants to keep in touch with friends that are using different chat networks, and support for this likes of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and more has been added as the app has developed over time.

This latest update not only fixes a number of known problems, but also improves the app’s support for Twitter. The Twitter engine has received an overhaul so there is now support for native retweeting as well as the userstream.

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The popularity of Facebook shows no signs of abating, and after annoying a large percentage of its users with the forced introduction of the timeline, the social network has released a Windows app to help irate visitors fall back in love with the site.

Facebook Messenger for Windows is a standalone app that provides access to your online friends ready for chatting and keeps you up to date with everything that is happening with your Facebook account without the need to visit the site itself.

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Over the past year, we've witnessed a convergence of social, mobile and cloud computing prompting organizations around the globe to evaluate how they embrace the growing social business market. "Social" has become essential for organizations that want to remain competitive.

Reflecting on the clients I've met across 66 countries, five things surprised me about companies embarking on the social business journey.

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