Social sites
Social networking keeps growing
The social networking sites just keep growing. The Pew Internet & American Life Project claims that 19 percent of the people who use the Internet also use one or more social networking sites:
Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about [...]
Have social sites made email obsolete?
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal says that email is no longer the communication method of choice:
Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a [...]
Do people reveal too much on social networks?
A lot of people are saying more than they should on the social networks. That’s not to mention all the revealing pictures and videos. Not only might some embarrassing data come back to haunt you in the future but there are some current dangers according to John Dvorak. In his column at MarketWatch, he says [...]
A new Internet?
That’s what Om Malik says we are getting. Writing at his site Gigaom, Malik describes what he calls the “NewNet”:
Right in front of our eyes, the web (and by extension, the Internet) is changing — specifically, the rise of social networking and the real-time web are changing the way information on the Internet is created [...]
Adults fuel Twitter growth
The early success of social sites has been attributed to teenagers but the explosive growth of Twitter is more due to middle-aged adults. The New York Times Bits blog reports:
A report on the reach of social technologies, published Tuesday by Forrester Research, said that in the last year, young people almost universally used social [...]
Searching the Web for feelings
The rapid growth of social sites is leading to interest in a new kind of search- not for facts but for feelings. The New York Times reports:
The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this [...]
Is Facebook aiming for bigger things?
The notion of a Facebook browser and Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed is causing speculation about whether Facebook has aspirations to bigger things. The Washington Post comments on the FriendFeed purchase:
Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online. And it cost them only $47.5 million.
Facebook’s purchase of FriendFeed, an obscure social-media platform, is [...]
Mobile technology creating narcissism?
At Computerworld, Mike Elgan writes that mobile technology is creating a bunch of self-absorbed narcissists:
While everyone’s on the lookout for risks, such as a Wii controller to the face, or walking into an open sewer while texting, something subtler and more pervasive may be happening. Mobile technology may be transforming us all into raving narcissists. [...]
Seniors flocking to Facebook
According to a recent study, there has been a large growth in the number of seniors using Facebook with a 500% increase in users aged 55 and older during the past six months. There has also been a drop in the number of high school and college age users. This younger group seems to be [...]
Spying just isn’t what it used to be
Once upon a time the identity of the head of the British external intelligence agency MI6 was veiled in secrecy. For example, in James Bond movies, he or she is known simply as “M”. But times have changed and the wife of the incoming head of MI6 went and put up a profile of [...]
Is Twitter a time sink?
Used one way, Twitter is a useful medium for providing short bursts of information to a wide audience. But it looks to me like a lot of time is wasted on Twitter as well. There have been a quite a few reports of the inanity of much of the content on Twitter.
Two recent posts [...]
