Social Networking

Facebook Ranked Third Most Popular Video Site

When you think of watching a video online, you most likely think of YouTube. And why wouldn’t you, considering the multitude of videos to be found on that site.

In fact, there are so many videos on YouTube, some say that  it would take over 600 years watch all the videos on the site today– and that’s without a bathroom break.  Hulu also might come to mind.  Launched in 2008, Hulu offers viewers over 10,000 hours of content from several American television networks, including NBC, ABC, and FOX along with several cable networks.

But what about Facebook?  Facebook for video!? According to some recent results from Nielsen, Facebook has rapidly climbed the charts by assuming the No. 3 spot for an online video website.  The popular social-networking site had streamed a total of 217.7 million views in the month of October.  That’s nearly double the total from September, when Facebook had just reached the top 10 mark with 110 million views.  (more…)

Posting Photos to Twitter Simplified in U.K.

No matter where you go nowadays, someone nearby is either tweeting, taking a new profile picture for their MySpace page, or shooting a video to post on YouTube. 

The world of social media is all around us.  Twitter has been a great source of information for breaking news this year, since you are able to tweet from just about anywhere. You are able to update your status through text message, aka SMS (Short Message Service).  However, when it comes to posting a picture from your phone onto Twitter, you must have a smartphone and a Twitter app.  Starting today, that all changes.  Twitter users in the U.K. are now able to post pictures directly from their mobile phone via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service).

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YouTube Deal Suggests Content Counts

It’s well-documented by now that Google has lost money on YouTube since acquiring the popular video site some three years ago. Back in July, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Reuters that he was pleased with YouTube’s trajectory and believed the site would become profitable in the near future.

Analysts and industry critics were quick to ponder how the search giant could hope to make their acquisition profitable. After all, the cost of streaming so many videos couldn’t possibly be offset by advertising. Or could it? (more…)

Social Media Words Enter Official Lexicon

“Word: something that is said. A speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use.”  That’s the definition of a word, according to Merriam-Webster. 

The world is full of them.  In fact, there are more than 258,000 words in the English language.  They range from everyday words to silly words like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.  While most of us can actually pronounce supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the longest word in the English dictionary is Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which I’m not sure anyone can really pronounce.  Want to try pronouncing Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahul? No, I didn’t just hit a bunch of keys on the keyboard, either.  It’s actually the Maori name for a hill in New Zealand, and is officially the world’s longest name for a place.

These past few years, pop culture influenced which words make it into the English dictionary. Beyonce’s “Bootylicious” was added to the dictionary a few years ago, while the world of Harry Potter helped “muggle,” a person who possesses no magical powers, reserve a spot in the English dictionary as well.  While pop culture has had a significant impact on the world, it looks like it has stepped aside as social media starts to influence the world even more. (more…)

Twitter Study Shows When We Tweet

Twitter is climbing the charts as one of everyone’s favorite social media tools.  A new study released some interesting facts about the micro-blogging website, which allows you to send a message to all your followers in 140 characters or less.  Pingdom, a Europe based company, tracked Twitter for three weeks, trying to figure out when and how much users tweet.  It seems like a simple report, but it’s actually quite interesting.

Over the three weeks, the report found that on average over 27.3 million tweets were sent every day.  If you break that down, that’s an average of 1,138,772 tweets per hour.  It’s obvious and noted that Americans have the largest presence on the site. (more…)

Your Facebook Security At Risk

A group known as Control Your Info, invaded nearly 300 Facebook groups this week, demonstrating how users need to pay more attention to their accounts.  Facebook groups are becoming an increasingly large target for hackers, primarily because if a group admin leaves, an option to take over the group is open to anyone.  If someone was to take over a group, they could change everything, from the name, pictures, objectives, and just about anything you can think of, along with sending messages to the group as a whole. 

Control Your Info, made Facebook users wary as they joined and took over 289 groups.  “Once we were administrators we owned the groups and could have changed any setting,” the groups website stated.  “We chose to change the picture, the name and the description of every group. Our intention was and is to restore these groups to their original form and find a suitable admin among the members. To be able to do this, we first backed up all the data we wanted to replace.” (more…)

The Twitter Plateau

Last month, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams announced that Twitter’s US growth had been slowing recently.  Today several new reports released some confirming and challenging information.

Compete.com, which monitors website traffic, had reported Twitter’s unique views, have been relatively close and haven’t changed much since June.  Of course last year at this time, the site had roughly 3.4 million unique views, and just last month saw close to 20 million more unique views.  The plateau has been a bit confusing for experts though because Twitter has been embraced by everyone from celebrities, every day people, businesses and organizations.  (more…)

Social Media Coming To A Game Console Near You

It seems like only yesterday, that everyone in the neighborhood had a brand new gaming console called Nintendo.  Playing a 2-D version of Mario was the most high tech game at the time, and a few years later, the release of the Super Nintendo blew America away.  It was the Nintendo 64, where everyone first began to grasp the idea of 3D graphics in games and since then, the PlayStation, Xbox & Wii have become some of our favorite gaming systems.  From being able to only play games, to being able to actually work out daily, video game systems have come a long way.  So what will come next?

Luckily we won’t have to wait long.  Next Tuseday, November 12, 2009, Microsoft plans to release the latest version of the Xbox360.  The new software will be a step up from the current version, heading to the internet integrating the world of social media.  In June, the company announced they’d release the console which would include Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, and Zune video.  (more…)

Facebook Community Now More Populous than America

If Facebook were a country, it would become the world’s third most populated — surpassing the United States by more than 18 million. While having more than 325 million users worldwide is impressive, it’s how fast Facebook is growing that is making headlines.

As we all know, Facebook is the most popular social networking site. The company, which was founded in 2004, has seen a study increase in users since its site launched. However, this year alone, the site’s user accounts have more than doubled. In January the site had a reported 150 million users. In September, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social-networking site had hit 300 million users. Since then AllFacebook.com is reporting that there are more than 325 million active users. (more…)

MySpace’s Slow Traffic May Cost News Corp. $100 Million

It’s not exactly news that MySpace is losing users, but a serious drop-off in visitors could put the company in jeopardy of losing nearly $100 million.  News Corp., owners of MySpace, made a $900 million deal back in 2006 with Google, to let the world most’s popular search engine be the exclusive search advertiser on MySpace, which at the time was the most used social networking site.  The site is coming dangerously close to  maintaining the minimum traffic level, which could break the deal with Google, and leave MySpace without the $100 million. 

According to Alexa.com, in the past 3 months MySpace’s page-views have dropped 22.75%.  The site is losing its high ranking. While last week the site was the 11th most visited site on the web, however has since dropped to number 12.  At this time last year, MySpace was the 6th most viewed site on the web, but the site has been progressively making its way farther and farther from the top ranks.

“We’re still losing traffic,” said Chase Carey, chief operating officer of News Corp. He added, “We’re not trying to beat Facebook. We’re not trying to beat Twitter.”

MySpace has been making some big news lately, as they are in talks about teaming up with Facebook in order to share video and music content, which would hope to drive users back to the site.  MySpace is also in talks with MSN about sharing entertainment content.  No deals of any kind have been made and it is still not to late yet for MySpace to earn the $100 million, but they will need to do something drastic, fast, to get their hands on the money.