Social Networking Archive

Last week I attended a 15-minute presentation at SXSW 2011 by blogger Julia Allison titled, “Social Media or Sado-Masochism? Cyberbullying & Celeb 2.0″. I’ve posted the video from her presentation below. The takeaway for me was that people are picking on Julia and she wants the police to setup a “cyberbullying” group that will go after anyone who says mean things online.

Before I go forward, I think bullying of kids (and adults) is horrible. Bullying someone about their size, shape, color, ethnicity, race, sexual preference, etc. should not be tolerated at any level and it’s great to see the government getting involved with education and other ideas to help end bullying.

After I left Julia’s presentation, I was walking around the expo hall and started to wonder if a personal brand is any different than a corporate brand? Should we be expected to treat personal brands different than corporate brands? Technically a corporate brand is made up of individuals so perhaps it’s the same?

Continue reading “Is There a Difference Between Julia Allison and United Airlines?” »

It appears that Twitter is currently down for most users – I was first unable to access the site around 3am Eastern time. As of the time of this post, 8:30am Eastern time, I am still unable to access Twitter.com. The Twitter status site notes, “Currently experiencing elevated error rates — You may experience some problems loading twitter.com and with Twitter clients.  We are aware of the problem and are taking action.”

Based on some searches on Google, it does appear that some people are able to post messages — it does look like if you use a third-party client (Seesmic, HooterSuite, TweetDeck) you might still be able to get in.

This is the first time for an extended Twitter outage in quite a long time. In the old days of Twitter outages, we would all hop on the bus to Friendfeed but that is no longer an option since many have left that service.

Update 9:45am Eastern – Several of my undercover sources tell me this might have to do with the snow in San Francisco.

Update 2 – 10:15am Eastern – Twitter is back – now go post all the things you would have posted if Twitter was up and running.

If you are a social media ninja, social media rockstar and are really upset or need someone to talk to because of this outage, please call 867-5309.

As always, please report in if Twitter is down for you – include your location, whether you use a client tool or the main Twitter.com site and what you are doing to occupy your time during this outage.

Of course, the outage gives me a chance to share Twitter Come Back one more time!

Disclaimer: I am a NY Giants football fan but as an international tech blogger, I have put aside any bias to compose this post and report facts accurately.

The New York Jets came close to making it to the Super Bowl today. Moments ago they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers — the Steelers will now play the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl. The real question is how did they get so close but lose the big one? The answer is simple… (I didn’t even need to ask on Quora!) they didn’t have enough social media.

Late last year I came up with a formula that I have been using to determine which team will win a particular game. I’d like to share the formula for the first time with you tonight. This formula took hundreds of hours of research and an international team of experts to compile the research. To make sure any device bias was removed, half the team used Android tablets and the other half used Windows Phones. We had to figure out which networks mattered, how they mattered, why they mattered.

The end result is the following formula:

W = fβ + my_ / cos(tm * alexa) * √ff – (tW² * Q) – YT/vid + LS½GR

Below is a graph of the W values for each of the 3 playoff games that the Jets participated in. As you can see, in games 1 and 2, they were able to keep a good level of W while in game 3, their W score dropped to a negative number which had our entire team concerned that the Jets would lose.

Continue reading “Jets Needed More Social Media” »

One of the big movies last year for geeks was The Social Network, which provides a look into the early days of social networking service Facebook. The movie has won several awards and has been nominated for a variety of Golden Globes awards.

Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian has an in-depth review of the movie. Boris at The Next Web suggests you watch the movie as it will help tech entrepreneurship grow.

If you are like me, you didn’t get a chance to catch the movie in theaters. Good news for all of us, the movie will be released on DVD, Blu-Ray and in some of the rental machines tomorrow. You can pre-order the movie (it will ship tomorrow) from BestBuy and Amazon. BestBuy launched the movie on DVD at $16.99. Late last week Amazon matched the price and depending on your tax rate, you could save a buck by buying the movie on Amazon. You can pre-order the DVD for $12.99 from both outlets. The nice thing about the Amazon option is they are offering $5 in free Video On Demand movies when you purchase the movie in either the DVD or Blu-Ray versions.

There are a number of bonus items if you purchase the Blu-Ray option — I have two sources telling me that the failed interview at SXSW is included in a hidden track.

It does appear that The Social Network will also be available for $1 in RedBox and Blockbuster Express machines. This is how I will watch the movie as I can’t see any real reason to own this film. The movie does show up on Netflix although no date is provided regarding availability. And if you were planning to watch the movie via Amazon Video-On-Demand, you will have to wait until February 2, 2011.

While this news isn’t as big for wrestling fans as the time when Hogan slammed Andre or Roddy Piper smashed a coconut over the Superfly’s head, the WWE has announced they are closing their social networking service WWEUniverse. The service will close on January 2, 2011. It appears the WWEUniverse site was managed by social networking provider ONEsite. There doesn’t appear to be a way to export any of the content that a person placed on the social networking site and with only three days until closing, most won’t even know the site has hit the mat for the 1-2-3.

You can read the full announcement regarding the WWEUniverse closure and WWE Online Community Leader Corey Clayton notes, “Our WWE Universe Twitter account, @WWEUniverse, will continue to provide answers to your fan questions, re-tweeting the best comments from our followers, Superstars and Divas, and provide live coverage and pictures from select WWE events. In parting, I just want to say thank you to all the dedicated long-time members of this site that participated, contributed photos, blog posts, and comments in the Forums.”

Some fans wonder if the popularity of Twitter and Facebook rendered the site useless.

The WWE (will always be known as the WWF to me) is suggesting you add their accounts on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For now I am going to go take my vitamins, say my prayers and be true to myself!

It appears social networking site Facebook is currently down and out of action. Reports are coming in rapidly that the site is either completely not loading and/or the service is loading very slowly. I am unable to access Facebook currently from multiple Internet connections – I only get a blank page. Twitter users are also noting issues connecting to Facebook.

Update 4:45pm Eastern – Facebook is back – resume tagging photos, planting crops, etc. It does appear that they may have rolled back the changes that went live today.

I’ve had multiple people try loading the facebook.com site from different parts of the world and no dice – nothing loads.

Some CN readers have noted that the outage has been going on for over 15 minutes now although most reports are only a few minutes as of the time of this post. I also note that Like buttons are not loading as well – this will make it hard to tell the world about your love for Pepsi or the New York Yankees.

My favorite reply comes from Landon Palmer who notes, “Somebody should ask Time’s Person of the Year why Facebook isn’t working right now.”

The outage could have something to do with the changes Facebook made today including some massive changes to their Pages infrastructure.

We have emailed Facebook for more information and will update this post when we hear back.

Please remain calm during this time – you might want to use this time to do something productive.

As always, please report in if Facebook is down for you and also note what you are doing to occupy your time during this outage.

Earlier this week, we took a look into the offices of Russian search engine giant Yandex. Today Yandex has announced a new partnership with Facebook in which Yandex will integrate information from the social network on the Yandex website. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

From the partnership announcement, “Yandex makes its services more attractive for the users of social networks, including those with a Facebook account. So, the portal’s front page hosts a Facebook widget and the company’s own instant messaging service Ya.Online informs its users of new notifications on the networking website. In addition, Yandex will now add the data from Facebook into its blog search index improving its international search and boosting new, recently created pages’ indexing. Specifically, Facebook will provide Yandex with a syndication feed that gathers information about updates on its Pages and profiles created to represent public figures, businesses or organisations.”

If you click the Facebook widget (seen below), it does request access to basically your entire Facebook account. This is different than the Like badges seen on many blogs and websites.

Javier Olivan, Head of International at Facebook, noted regarding the new partnership, “We feel that this partnership will bring a lot of value for our Russian users as we would like the public information on Facebook to be easily searchable via Yandex.”