This Week In Social Media: Nov. 13, 2009 iePlexus from iePlexus on Vimeo.
From Facebook groups being invaded, to Rupert Mudoch taking his New Corps Sites off Google, this is what happened this week in the World of Social Media & on the World Wide Web. (more…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
Everyone is gearing up for the holiday season. While many businesses have said that they will be using social media sites this year to attract online shoppers and offering exclusive discounts to users, consumers are already scoping out discounts through social media networks.
The advertising agency Razorfish released the results of survey on Tuesday, suggesting that online businesses should start to see profits for the holiday season very soon, if not immediately. Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, falls on November 30 this year and has been the No. 1 online shopping day since its start in 2004, but online shoppers are looking to start their holiday shopping early this year. (more…)
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…)
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.
Twitter users from around the world have been seeing some major changes to the website lately, and this week the popular microblogging website rolled out some major features that could be very useful in the future.
A few weeks ago, Twitter launched Twitter Lists Beta, which allowed users to organize a group of followers into specific categories and last week it went live to the entire Twitter community. This week, 2 new beta features went into effect, which if all goes well should be seen by all users very soon. First, a small number of users have been granted a feature which allows them to see when someone they are following has updated a post. The feature will automatically notify them of new tweets since they last refreshed their page from the people they follow on their Twitter.com homepage. Users be able to click the notification and Twitter will automatically refresh their page without them having to do anything else. The feature is almost identical to the automatic refresh on the Twitter Search feature. (more…)
Social media sites have become an important tool for breaking news, many times breaking a story before the mainstream media picks it up. Sites such as Twitter have also been important communication tools for those affected by the events as they unfold.
Yesterday, news about a shooting in Fort Hood, Texas, shocked the country and almost instantly became a trending topic on Twitter. The massacre, which killed 12 and left 31 wounded, sparked interest and supporters from around the world — many of whom ended up leaving comments on the Army’s social media sites. The Facebook group “Prayers for Fort Hood” was started soon after word spread, and currently it has just more than 20,000 supporters. The U.S. Army‘s Facebook page was also flooded with support and prayers from people around the world. As one person wrote, “My prayers go out to the family and friends of the fallen heroes. It’s time we remember to pray for all our soldiers regardless of where they are.” (more…)
It seems like all we have heard lately is companies teaming up with Twitter. So it should be no surprise that Amazon.com has incorporated a new Twitter tool that will allow some users to share great deals online.
In today’s blog post, Amazon announced that this feature would be only available for Amazon Associates. The associate program allows Web site owners, Web developers, and Amazon sellers to make money by simply advertising some of the latest products from both Amazon and Endless.com on their website. When a consumer purchases a product after being referred, the associate gets a profit. It’s said to be that simple. The new Twitter feature is just another way to make it easier for associates to make a little more money. (more…)
