Archive for December, 2009
December 31st, 2009
Facebook’s privacy update earlier this month was pretty big news when it first hit – partly because every single one of Facebook’s more than 300 million users was prompted to go through a privacy wizard to help them customize their new privacy settings. There’s only one problem, though – the upshot…
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December 31st, 2009
When Twitter announced The Fledgling Initiative in October—making and selling wine to benefit an organization called Room to Read, I was thrilled. This past month, my enthusiasm and commitment increased dramatically when I had the chance to visit some of the sites where Room to Read works in India.
Teachers and students in Hardiwar gave me the warmest of welcomes. I was given the opportunity to help children read books in English and one group of students even inited me to sing a song for them. My performance of Itsy Bitsy Spider (see above—pit stains included), sent the kids into fits of laughter.
The schools in these areas face incredible obstacles but the community approaches problems with passion and vigor. One school was having trouble with a dangerous elephant so parents volunteered to take turns walking the kids to school and would even sleep there for a night or two. When I was little there were snow days but nothing like this.
Seeing kids get excited about learning to read made my heart skip a few beats, and made me feel proud to work at a company that chooses to partner with world-changing organizations like Room to Read. Here are some of the photos from my trip and you can learn more about Room to Read at their web site.
December 31st, 2009
In that past we’ve discussed countless uses of Twitter – beyond the obvious shameless self-promotion, which remains the microblogging platform’s bread and butter. There’s another side to Twitter, though, one that maybe deserves a lot more attention than it receives – philanthropy.
It should go without saying that the same power of connectivity that can bring celebrities like Ashton Kutcher millions of followers can be leveraged to improve awareness of the causes and issues that countless people around the world have pledged their time and money to solving.
December 31st, 2009
There’s good news this week for Facebook users who’ve become confused by the frequently-changing homepage, privacy settings, and other interface changes: Facebook has given their help center a major overhaul for the coming year, and the new Facebook help center is imminently more usable than the previous one.
December 31st, 2009
Practically every treatment of Twitter in the mainstream media up until now has made special mention of the fact that Twitter doesn’t actually make money – with a “yet” perpetually hanging at the end of the statement. We probably won’t be hearing that statement anymore, since Twitter insiders say the company has unofficially turned a profit during 2009 – thanks to search deals penned recently with search engine giants Microsoft and Google.
December 31st, 2009
Last week we mentioned Twitter’s top trends of 2009 and what they say about our culture. This week Facebook is the latest social network to release their trending topics for the year, in what is fast becoming a trend in and of itself. Facebook’s trends don’t quite play out like Twitter, and they show some of the essential differences between Facebook and Twitter, and say a little bit about how Facebook users see the world as well.
December 31st, 2009
Twitter announced last week that it had completed negotiations with major mobile carriers in Ireland and Indonesia to allow Twitter users in those countries to use Twitter via SMS for no additional fees. That means that people using Twitter via SMS can send and receive Twitter messages at the same cost as they would text messages from their friends.
December 31st, 2009
When Twitter’s DNS entries were hacked on Friday and the microblogging platform’s homepage was defaced, replaced by a statement of responsibility by the so-called “Iranian Cyber Army,” many users had a feeling that a pretty major shakedown was in the works. Once initial investigations revealed that the website’s DNS settings were hijacked, and Twitter’s DNS provider, Dyn Inc, absolved itself of responsibility, stating that the records were changed by an authorized user, things really got interesting.
December 31st, 2009
Nobody can argue that 2009 hasn’t been a huge year for Twitter – the year that the microblogging platform truly went mainstream and showed the world the variety of things that Twitter’s revolutionary communications medium is capable of. There were any number of big Twitter events this year, but five stand out as noteworthy because of the unique aspects of Twitter that they displayed and the effect they had on the world’s perception of the microblogging platform.
Five Ways Twitter Changed the World in 2009
December 31st, 2009
2009 was, without question, a great year for Twitter, the year that will be remembered as the year they “went mainstream” around the world. With one of the fastest-growing userbases in social networking, the future is bright for the microblogging platform. Just what that future is going to look like is fairly accurately reflected in the top Twitter trends of 2009 – because what those trends tell us about how people use Twitter and what the future has in store for the microblogging platform is a bit bleak.