social networking

We’re living in an age of networks. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have hundreds of millions of users. New services like Instagram and Pinterest become billion dollar companies in months instead of years or decades. This year, marketers will spend over $4 billion on social media.

I've been deeply immersed in Google Plus for the last week or so, not only following what's being said about the service but actually using it, kicking the tires and making observations along the way. For what it's worth, I think Google Plus has an incredible amount of potential for a number of reasons. Here's a few thoughts or more accurately opinions. Everyone has a take, so the only thing can offer here is that I've had these thoughts in my head while using the service but wanted to give it some time before putting it into writing.

Here's what I observed this past week after scanning the reactions of people in my own networks in relation to Google Buzz. People in my own ecosystem seem utterly exhausted by the plethora of networks they manage and the number of people within those networks. E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Yammer, Instant Messenger... just how many platforms can we participate in?

Guest Post by: Charlie Osmond

What joy. This week, The Economist, every Capitalist’s favourite magazine, has published a special report on on social networking.

Three-quarters of Japanese social network users access the sites only from their mobile phones.

This observation comes from a survey conducted last year with almost 4,000 social network users in Japan by Mobile Marketing Data Labo. They found that 75.4% of respondents only accessed social networking sites from their mobile phone (and not from their PC). The number only accessing it from their PC (and not their mobile phone) was very low at just 2%.

It’s that time of year where you cannot open a newspaper without reading predictions for 2010 and rationalisations of 2009. I thought that enough had been written about 2009 but it might be interesting to speculate about the coming 12 months – from the perspective of the things that will be important when marketing to older people.

by: danah boyd

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

Today is "Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology," which I support 100%. I find the event particularly interesting for two reasons:

by: David Armano

by: Karl Long

Foursquare appears to be a wonderful evolution of Dodgeball, a much loved service that Google bought a couple of years ago but didn’t fund, and eventually shut down at the beginning of March. Dodgeball was a super simple SMS based service that you would send a text message to with the name of the venue you were at, and then dodgeball sent a richer text message to your friends letting them know the name and address of where you were at.