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Social Media: The Swine Flu Vaccine

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is experimenting with social media sites to connect with the rest of the world to encourage people to get vaccinated for the Swine Flu. The CDC which has partnered with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has created accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, along with offering text message services, widgets for your personal website and several other ways of e-communication. 

The CDC has said they want to inform as many people as they can about possible outbreaks of the Swine Flu, and other future diseases.  Dr. Anne Schuchat, member of the CDC said, “We might see another wave after first of the year. It’s going to be important for people to take steps to protect themselves. We can’t predict what’s going to happen.” (more…)

Facebook & Myspace Teaming Up?

What seems like a bizarre move, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, told The Telegraph, a British newspaper that Facebook and MySpace are in talks about teaming up and letting users share videos and music content.  This would also mean, that users could sign into their MySpace using their Facebook account information. 

Sandburg said to The Telegraph, “Facebook is focusing on building the best technology which helps people share content, while at MySpace they are focusing on more a content-led strategy. We would like to have their content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users.” (more…)

New Facebook Feature May Help Businesses

Last week, we told you about some of the new changes coming to Facebook and now a new feature, which opened today, may be appealing to businesses who have profiles on the popular social networking site.  Facebook has said that nearly 2 billion items are shared each week through the site and the newly expanded share option will  include a live counter and analytics for shared items.  This means that when a user clicks the new share feature, they will be able to look at the number of views, shares, likes, and clicks to from that site. 

An unidentified spokesperson for Facebook, who spoke with Web Pro News said, “Share analytics bring new opportunities to show how content is being shared on Facebook, such as Techmeme for selecting top stories and bit.ly for analyzing URL traffic.  The new Share button is among the easiest Facebook Connect widgets to install and can be added to any website with just a few lines of code.” (more…)

Microsoft’s Bing.com Teams Up With Twitter

Qi Lu, Microsoft’s Online Services President, announced at the Web 2.0 Summit today, that Microsoft’s new engine, Bing, has stuck a non-exclusive deal with Twitter.  The deal is an important one because it will be the first search engine to bring in real-time updates.  It is also important because there have been reports that Google, Bing’s biggest competitor, has been in talks with the social networking site, and hasn’t been able to come up with a contract.  Many Internet users are saying that this is a “big-blow” for Google.

Twitter updates have been available for search on Bing for quite awhile now, but today will be the first time, Bing users will be able search keywords and watch real-time tweets from Bing’s website.  Lu also said that this will open up many opportunities for future business deals among business’s world wide.    (more…)

Facebook Changes Coming Once Again

Just last year, Facebook users were up in arms about the new layout on their favorite social networking site.  Close to a million people signed a petition to bring back the old layout and now after a year of finally settling down and adjusted to the layout, Facebook has leaked out information that there are some new changes coming to their website.

One change that has already taken place within the past 24 hours, is the layout of Group pages.  For the longest time Group pages were a mirror image of one of the original Facebook profiles, just with different information.  Group pages now look like the current profile layout and fan pages.  According to Facebook’s blog this ultimately means ‘that groups will now have a Wall that summarizes all the recent activities of people within the group and a Publisher that enables members to share their content.’  It also means that group activities and what’s being posted on the group wall will now be posted to your news feed.  However, instead of getting posts from everyone from your groups, you will only be shown posts from your friends in the same group.  (more…)

The Week In Social Media

iePlexus’ Weekly Video Blog from iePlexus on Vimeo.

Here at iePlexus, we now officially on Facebook and we are inviting all of you to become of fan of the company. All you need to do is log onto Facebook, search for iePlexus INC and hit become a fan. The site is intended to give you a place interact with company, by posting comments on the wall, reading our blog, and finding client testimonials along with so much more and if you aren’t already make sure you follow us on twitter @ieplexus.

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Zuckerberg’s Gamble: Facebook Thrives Despite Redesign

Now that the dust has settled and users have had almost a year to digest Facebook’s polarizing site redesign, it’s time to take stock of the social-networking behemoth’s strengths and weaknesses. Back in July, PC World tech writer Hillary Rhodes posed a thought-provoking question: Is Facebook past its prime? It may still be too early to provide a conclusive answer, but we can at least take some time to evaluate the site’s recent successes and missteps.

From the outset it was clear that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarded Twitter as a serious contender in the social-networking world. Those beliefs manifested themselves in the redesign, which aped Twitter’s simplicity and real-time news feed. Twitter began to catch on with celebrities, journalists and average Joes, in part because of the quickness and ease associated with tweeting. (more…)

Facebook Fights Crime

It seems lately that Facebook has become more of a superhero, capturing criminals across the globe. The popular social networking site caught a burglar in September, after the thief, Jonathan G. Parker, 19, of Fort Loudoun, PA. decided to check his Facebook account while robbing a home, and then left it open after he had left with two diamond rings.

This week, another criminal has been captured, and it’s all thanks to who the fugitive was friends with on Facebook.  Maxi Sopo,26, had been living the last few months in Cancun, Mexico after he had fled from the US.  According to prosecutors, Sopo who arrived in the US in 2003 after moving from his native country of Cameroon, and worked in Seattle’s nightclubs selling roses until  he moved on to bank fraud.  In late February of this year, he allegedly drove a rented car to Mexico after learning that federal agents were investigating the fraud scheme. (more…)

Social Media The New Search Engine?

It seems that social media sites have become a search engine of sorts. A recent report released by the Nielsen Group has search engines such as Google, wondering if their days maybe coming to an end. However search engines are still the favorite option when it comes to searching at 37 percent, but social media sites are climbing up the chart. 

Jon Gibs, VP Media Analytics for Nielsen, said, “roughly 18 percent of users see [social media] as core to finding new information. While still a smaller percentage than those who use search engines or portals like Yahoo! or MSN, it is a significant figure. And as social media usage continues to increase, I can only expect this figure to grow.” (more…)

Facebook Passes 250 Million Users

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and Founder of Facebook, announced about a week ago that the social networking site now has over 250 million users. Just a few months ago, back in April of 2009, Facebook passed 200 million users. The growth of the site is pretty phenomenal and reinforces the fact that Facebook is the #1 social networking site in the world, although in the U.S. MySpace still holds a slight advantage. In the global market however, Facebook is more than twice the size of MySpace and continues to dominate in every category.

To give you an idea of Facebook’s adoption, the U.S. has a population of just over 300 million, and the world has about 6.7 billion people. That means in the U.S., with over 75 million users, 1 in 4 people have a Facebook page, with about half of those logging in each day. Worldwide, Facebook reaches about 4% of the popluation. You can see more Facebook statistics here.

One of the most interesting things about the growth of Facebook was not the fact that it had so many global users, but instead that those aged 35 and up were the fastest growing population of users and responsible for fueling much of the recent gains. That means the older population is embracing Facebook as a networking tool for business beyond simple social connections, which is definitely not the case for MySpace.
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