Posts tagged Social Networking

Video: The Growth of Social Media

Ever doubt the growth, value, importance, and potential of social media? You won’t after you take a look at this video produced by Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics. If you’d like to see how you could take advantage of the opportunities, give us a call, we’d be glad to talk.


via: mashable.com

Declining MySpace Loses CEO

First, the audience it stole from Friendster left for Facebook. Now, Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive Rupert Murdoch hired less than a year ago to reverse the site’s declining fortunes, has also left, MySpace announced late Wednesday night.

MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta will be replaced by “co-presidents” Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn who, like Van Natta, joined MySpace last April.

The bell has been tolling for MySpace for years, with users leaving the site pretty much as they found it: as a place to hear what a band sounds like and see what they look like in a matter of seconds, rather than as a place where they establish an online identity and communicate with friends.

After signing on last April, Van Natta wisely acknowledged this change in how people were using MySpace — as a media site rather than as a social network — by doubling down on the ad-supported MySpace Music service. However, the company was not able to fix problems with the service including poor integration with existing band pages, which left many users confused or uninterested in the service.

According to an Ad Age source, Van Natta bailed on MySpace because he was frustrated by the company’s “slow pace of change” and “entrenched culture.” A dearth of fast, competent, loyal software engineers in the Los Angeles area reportedly slowed things down even further. MySpace is headquartered in Beverly Hills, in southern California. Facebook, which evolves its design and feature set so often that some users can’t keep up with the changes, is located in the more technology-oriented Palo Alto, California.

VIA: wired.com

Google Launches New Social Application: Google Buzz

Today Google announced its latest social application, designed to bring the fire hose of social media and status updates down to a useful trickle of the most “interesting” bits. Dubbed Google Buzz, the service is designed to offer easier ways to share links, photos, and other information, corral all those things shared by friends and other connections, and integrate well with other services in an open way.

It’s “a Google approach to sharing,” according to Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz.

While the rumor was that Buzz would be Google’s “Twitter-killer,” it would actually be missing the point to describe it that way. Buzz offers a way to share status updates, if you want to use it that way. It can also be used to share links, videos, photos, and more—in this regard, it’s more akin to Facebook posts or even quick-blogging services like Tumblr or Posterous. Buzz can also integrate with other social services to share any publicly accessible things you post to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader, Blogger, and any service that offers an RSS feed.

Buzz also offers a way for anyone you’re connected to via your Google contacts to comment on the things you share, much like your friends can on Facebook. Further, it adopts the de facto standard of using “@replies” to send notices to specific users.

In addition, Buzz gives users control over how information is shared. Posts can be made public or private. You can create groups of contacts, such as “co-workers” and mark items as shared with only that group, multiple groups, or just a single contact.

Everything that is shared publicly is instantly indexed by Google search index, and Buzz streams and comments update in real time.

Google Buzz is being rolled out over the course of the next few days. Gmail users should see a notice when they log in once it has been activated on their account. We’ll be sure to share our thoughts once we have an opportunity to put it through its paces.

VIA: arstechnica.com