I've been interested in the cultural and business implications of social graphs since Facebook launched their app store. I've had the pleasure of working with Electronic Arts, Research in Motion, Epson Japan and Level Social, and from those experiences found my true passion: writing. I enjoy covering this emerging space and helping our writers find their own voices and interests as well.
Flickr has been rolling out what they call the “Justified” view of photos for the last few months, including it in various parts of the site as a nicer way to look at photos. Well, they announced in a blog post that they’re now bringing it to Groups, and it makes the whole experience a lot more fun and a little more social. I take a look below.
How do people actually spend their time online around the world? Did you know Brazilians have the highest online friends, and Japanese have the least? How many views does YouTube get per day (hint, it’s in the billions). Who gets the most unique visitors per month other than Facebook or Google? Is it Twitter? Wikipedia? Take a look at this new infographic by Go-Gulf and find out.
The Google+ Photographer’s Conference took place a few days ago, and there was a panel who answered the question: “What do you want next from G+?” In classic Google style, they set the conference up to include a few people connected remotely via a Hangout. The panel first discussed how Google+ is helping photographers before moving on to more general desires for Google+.
Soccer fans worldwide tuned in over the week of May 14th to 19th to watch the UEFA Champions league finals play out, and they didn’t just win with an estimated TV audience of 150 million viewers — they won on Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter and Foursquare as well. The games were a fantastic success, and viewers were able to connect with one another over social media the entire time. The world of social TV is just around the corner, and stats like the ones in the infographic below prove we are in the beginning stages of the phenomenon.
I just received my special invite to Lady Gaga’s new social network, called Little Monsters, and to say it took inspiration from Pinterest would be like saying Kesha was mildly influenced by Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. The site has based itself on Pinterest in its entirety, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a fun, niche place for Lady Gaga fans to share interesting images and ideas. Check out my impressions below.
Mary Long from our sister site AllTwitter has looked at how a person can create a plan for what will happen to their social media accounts after they pass away. It’s a morbid thought but one that may be important to those of us who have a lot of private or personal information on there. Check out Mary’s ideas, as well as a review of some tips from the US government over at AllTwitter.
Read more here
Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a host and producer for the Huffington Post, talks about his experience with various social media feeds as he tried to cover the Arab Spring for the Huffington Post. What’s notable about the video is that he identifies the new journalistic experience and it is remarkably fast and requires a great awareness of the various available technologies. He scans Twitter, YouTube and even monitors a few Google+ Hangouts in there to get as much information he can.
LinkedIn is definitely on a roll. The company, which is public, has a strong stock with over 600 times earnings and a great support around $100, even on tough days in the market. They’ve also been recording record quarters and have started to aggressively expand internationally. A recent infographic from digitlab looks at one of those expansions, and reveals how LinkedIn breaks down in South Africa. The stats are pretty illuminating.
As we covered earlier in the year, VKontakte, Russia’s largest social network, has been in court defending itself against an order to remove its file-sharing functionality from its site. One of the largest record labels, EMI, led the charge and won the case. VKontakte recently appealed, but have lost the appeal again.
Stephen Colbert, the swiss army knife of late night political satire, has joined Reddit’s Gift Exchange for the troops. The program is part of ‘redditgifts’, a popular subreddit where users sign up to give one another gifts. It’s especially popular during Christmas time each year.
