Making Social Networking More Human

By Brad

We’ve written about audio-visual social networking service Audingo before. Today they launched a new blog examining the fast-moving industry. The first post offers a handy primer on how far social networking has come in a relatively short amount of time:

In 1999, Friends Reunited – considered by many to be the first successful online social network – was founded in Great Britain to help users relocate past school buddies. In 2002, social networking site Friendster debuted in the U.S. and grew to three million users in three months. MySpace and LinkedIn were introduced on Friendster’s heels in 2003, and Facebook captivated the world a year later. In 2006, Twitter was launched as a social networking and microblogging site, allowing users to send and receive 140-character tweets.

What’s interesting about Audingo is the company’s belief that the next revolution in social networking is making it more human. Or, as they put it:

Audingo recognizes that the human voice and facial expressions convey more than written words alone ever could. And as DreamWorks Animation Chief Jeffrey Katzenberg last year predicted, the future of social media “moves from text-based communication to video and audio-based, making it more intuitive and instinctual.” Audingo has made the future the now.

Social Democracy

By Brad

Is there a link between activity on social networks and activity in politics? According to Pew, yes:

The use of social media is becoming a feature of political and civic engagement for many Americans. Some 60% of American adults use either social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter and a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that 66% of those social media users—or 39% of all American adults—have done at least one of eight civic or political activities with social media.

Changing Media Consumption

By Brad

New numbers from Pew highlight a major shift in how people are getting their news:

Online and digital news consumption… continues to increase, with many more people now getting news on cell phones, tablets or other mobile platforms. And perhaps the most dramatic change in the news environment has been the rise of social networking sites. The percentage of Americans saying they saw news or news headlines on a social networking site yesterday has doubled – from 9% to 19% – since 2010. Among adults younger than age 30, as many saw news on a social networking site the previous day (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form.

Number of the Day

By Brad

One billion — yes, billion — which is how many users Facebook now has around the world. Dino Grandoni of The Huffington Post reports:

Facebook hit the long-sought, 10-digit user mark at precisely 12.45 p.m. PT on September 14. Approximately 1 in 7 people on Earth is on Facebook, given the U.S. Census Bureau’s world population estimate of 7.04 billion

Not bad for a company founded in 2004.

Liking Free Speech

By Brad

Via Sterling C. Beard of The Hill comes an interesting free speech case currently taking place in Virginia:

Facebook and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are arguing in a Virginia court that “liking” something on the ubiquitous social network is constitutionally protected free speech.

The wrongful termination lawsuit involves six employees fired by the Hampton, Va., Sheriff B.J. Roberts. The claimants say they were laid off for supporting Roberts’s opponent in his 2009 reelection campaign. One of them “liked” the Facebook page of Roberts’s opponent, Jim Adams.

The Facebook/ACLU action is in response to a U.S. District Judge’s ruling a few months ago that simply “liking” something is not enough to be counted as free speech. This should be fascinating to watch play out.

Twitter on the Rise

By Brad

Pew Research Center has taken a look at Twitter and the numbers are encouraging for the micro-blogging service. As Britney Fitzgerald from the Huffington Post reports:

On the whole, users appear to be more actively participating in the online conversation, according to Pew’s data. While 4 percent of adults spent time on Twitter daily last year, now 8 percent log in on a regular basis. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, the tweets are flying out faster than ever; twenty percent of internet users in this age bracket tweet nearly everyday.

Other facts from the study: 28 percent of African Americans who are online are active in Twitter, and the majority of all users are female.

Passwords, Please

By Brad

Manuel Valdes and Shannon Mcfarland of the Associated Press report on a growing trend in the hiring of new employees:

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person’s social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

“It’s akin to requiring someone’s house keys,” said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it “an egregious privacy violation.”

Not surprisingly, privacy groups are criticizing the practice. And the ACLU is getting involved:

Bottom line: we believe you shouldn’t have to choose between privacy and technology. The same standards of privacy that we expect offline in the real world should apply online in our digital lives as well.

Dealing With Censorship Around the World

By Brad

Last week, Twitter announced it would block tweets in countries where certain content is illegal. From the company’s official blog:

As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.

Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

Today, the New York Times’ Somini Sengupta reports on the inevitable backlash and calls for a Twitter boycott:

[I]n a sort of coming-of-age moment, Twitter announced that upon request, it would block certain messages in countries where they were deemed illegal. The move immediately prompted outcry, argument and even calls for a boycott from some users.

Twitter in turn sought to explain that this was the best way to comply with the laws of different countries. And the whole episode, swiftly amplified worldwide through Twitter itself, offered a telling glimpse into what happens when a scrappy Internet start-up tries to become a multinational business.

Interestingly, most of Twitter’s 100 million (and growing) users are not located in the U.S., which certainly places them in a challenging position when it comes to managing the free flow of information.

The Rise of Social Spam

By Brad

At the Wall Street Journal, Geoffrey A. Fowler, Shayndi Raice, and Amir Efrati report on a new front in the never-ending war against spam:

Spam, one of the Internet’s oldest annoyances, is gearing up for a second act. Unlike traditional email spam, which usually comes from strangers, this new form—dubbed “social” spam—often appears to be from a friend. Criminals find social networks alluring because they can spread messages though a chain of trusted sources.

Such spam puts the usefulness of social networking at risk. Facebook says less than 4% of the content shared on its site is spam and Twitter says just 1.5% of all tweets were “spammy” in 2010. But Facebook adds that the volume is growing faster than its user base. On any given day, spam hits less than 0.5% of Facebook users, or some four million people.

Connecting to Organs

By Brad

Via The Huffington Post, Donna Gordon Blankinship of the Associated Press looks at a growing trend in social media:

Between the kid photos and reminiscences about high school, more and more pleas for help from people with failing kidneys are popping up. Facebook and other social media sites are quickly becoming a go-to place to find a generous person with a kidney to spare, according to the people asking for help and some national organizations that facilitate matches.

The entire article is both heart-warming and worth checking out.

The Social Economy

By Broderick Johnson

65%.

That’s the percentage of adult Internet users now connected to others via social networking sites, according to a study by Pew Research Center released late last month. And surprisingly, it’s not those just past the threshold into adulthood who are jumping in the online social world the most, but rather the Boomers, whose usage on a typical day jumped a whopping 60% in the last year.

What does this tell us? For one, social networks are now a major means of communication in today’s business and social economies. And secondly, the expansion of broadband technology has made the social web faster, increasingly interconnected, and more valuable to its users. Gone are the days when online interaction seemed like a trek into the wild and unruly frontier. The rise of the social web also points to our increasing reliance on digital communication in the economy and thus to job creation and economic growth and opportunity.

Services like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn not only make it easy for us to stay connected to people important to us, they’re also playing an important role in business. More and more companies are leveraging the power of social interaction to sell products and services; for example, the emergence of local and family owned food trucks can be attributed to their use of Twitter for real time menu, location, and deal updates.

In addition to changing the conversation between businesses and consumers, the social web, networking through networks, has also enhanced the job seeker’s ability to find (and be found by) potential employers, careers, and startup business opportunities.

That’s what makes the rise of the social web so exciting to watch. When social sites first started hitting the mainstream, social networking may have seemed like little more than a fad. But from the Pony Express to email, we have always looked for new — and more immediate — ways to communicate, and social networking has taken its place as the latest leap forward.

Today, we check in to locations to find nearby deals. We check in with friends for reviews of products and services. We check in with companies to find a job. The rise of social networking has been enhanced by the rise of mobile broadband, and together they are changing our ways of communicating and the face of our economy.

All business, whether it’s conducted between co-workers or in the global marketplace, depends on interaction. You want to put America back to work? Give every American the ability to interact. Put the power of broadband — wired or wireless — in their hands.

They’ll do more than announce the score of the ball game.

Social Networking Boom

By Brad

Via Cecilia Kang of the Washington Post, a new survey from Pew sheds some light on just how much social networking sites are affecting our lives:

The study reported that 65 percent of all online adults surveyed in May said they were using social networking sites, up from 61 percent a year ago. The social media users represent 50 percent of all American adults, Pew said.

On a given day, only e-mail and search engines are used more than social networks by adult Internet users, Pew said.

Pew’s survey is available on their website.

Falling From a Great Height

By Brad

There was a time when MySpace — the social networking site that was a precursor to Facebook — seemed like it would completely dominate the Internet. Those days are over. As Brenna Ehrlich of Mashable reports:

The day that the web has been buzzing about has finally come: MySpace has been sold, to an advertising network called Specific Media for a mere $35 million.

That “mere” above is due to the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. purchased MySpace just six years ago for a whopping $580 million.

Blogging Around the Great Firewall

By Brad

At the New York Times, David Barboza looks at the growing influence of microblogs and other social networking platforms in China:

What is striking is that microblog services are booming here despite a recent Chinese government crackdown on social networking sites in the wake of democracy demonstrations in North Africa and the Middle East. The restrictions, which typically involve deleting or censoring politically charged content, seem to be aimed at preventing microblogs and other sites from being used to foster dissent or organize antigovernment protests.

Still, young Internet users in China seem unfazed by the restrictions, in part because microblog services are a compelling alternative to this country’s more heavily censored state-run media and, perhaps more important, because microblogs are a powerful tool for self-expression.

President Obama Goes to Palo Alto

By Brad

Yesterday, President Obama stopped by the offices of Facebook for a town hall forum, where he answered questions submitted to the social networking site. Here’s video of the event:

Erasing the Mistakes of the Past

By Brad

Social networking services like Facebook and Twitter have revolutionized the way we communicate. They’ve also created headaches for some users who, whether it’s in a fit of passing rage or bouts of inebriation, have overshared information. But where there’s a problem there’s a solution — and a potential business model. Reports Amy Lee of the Huffington Post:

Go out, get drunk, post on your ex-boyfriend’s wall with typo-ridden declarations of love, then tweet humiliating picture of self making the OK sign while dancing topless on a bar.

If any of this evokes some remembered dread of social networking gone embarrassingly inebriated, you might need Last Night Never Happened, an iPhone app that helps you delete incriminating digital evidence from an unfortunate evening.

Social Networks and Society

By Brad

At the New York Times, Jennifer Preston looks at the growing role of social networking sights in humanitarian and political events:

[The] new role for social media has put these companies in a difficult position: how to accommodate the growing use for political purposes while appearing neutral and maintaining the practices and policies that made these services popular in the first place.

YouTube was one of the first social media networks to wrestle with content posted by a human rights advocate that conflicted with its terms of service. In November 2007, YouTube removed videos flagged as “inappropriate” by a community member that showed a person in Egypt being tortured by the police.

The entire article, inspired by the removal of photos of Egyptian police on Flickr, is worth reading.

Impressive Number for Online Advertising

By Brad

Via TechCrunch, marketing analyst company comScore has released new data that finds close to 1.3 trillion — yes, trillion — online display ads reached web users in Q3 of this year alone. The #1 delivery method? Facebook:

According to comScore, the social network led all online publishers in the third quarter with no less than 297 billion display ad impressions, representing 23.1 percent market share.

Security Breach

By Brad

With online privacy concerns becoming a hot topic in the Beltway, this morning’s report from Emily Steel and Geoffrey A. Fowler of the Wall Street Journal on an apparent Facebook security breach is already garnering a lot of attention:

Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.

The problem has ties to the growing field of companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online—a practice the Journal has been examining in its What They Know series. It’s unclear how long the breach was in place. On Sunday, a Facebook spokesman said it is taking steps to “dramatically limit” the exposure of users’ personal information.

Socialized Music

By Brad

At an event yesterday, Apple showed off revamped versions of its popular iPod and its less popular Apple TV. Tucked in among the announcements was a music-oriented social networking service called Ping. At GigaOm, Om Malik explains why the new service is a big deal:

With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

With 160 million iTunes users worldwide, Malik expects the new social sharing network to send music sales on iTunes soaring.