Google+, the fastest growing social network of all time, has announced that starting today, Worldwide, they’re open to teens. Previously, you had to be 18 or over to join the site, but that has changed.

Teens are a very big demographic and take up a good chunk of Internet use. For Google to deny them access means to leave out Millions and Millions of users who could potentially benefit from the social network and hopefully use it on a daily basis.

Being that the tech giant is very serious about privacy, they also have some safety features in place to help protect teens from, for example, posting not-so-good details publicly or if a stranger joins a hangout.

Via Bradley Horowitz, VP Product of Google+:

Sharing content
With Google+ you can share privately with your circles, or publicly with the world. Posting something for everyone to see is a big deal, however, so when teens try and share outside their circles, we encourage them to think before they post.

Receiving notifications
Google+ is a great place to connect with close friends, as well as discover others with common interests. We want to help people explore the community safely, however, so we give users control over who can contact them online. By default, only those in teens’ circles can say hello, and blocking someone is always just a click or two away.

Hanging out with friends
Google+ Hangouts bring people together using live multi-person video, and the results range from heartwarming to awe-inspiring. However, we recognize that connecting face-to-face is special and serious, so if a stranger outside a teen’s circles joins the hangout, we temporarily remove the young adult, and give them a chance to rejoin.

Do you think it’s a good idea to let teens use Google+? Why or why not?

Google+ Opens Up To Teens, Safety Features In Place is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google has released a new version of their sign up form which, while much more visually entertaining to look at, also looks to do away with anonymous accounts. The first two fields ask for your full name and gender, something that is required when signing up for their social network.

The company has had the same sign up page for a long time now so it’s good to see them roll out something new. One of the big focuses is getting more people to use Google Plus and being that they announced 90 Million users yesterday, they’re doing pretty good thus far.

When new users sign up for an account, they’ll get both a profile page as well as Gmail account, something that previously was just an email account. Again, to get people using the fast growing social network.

Via Wired:

“The revamped Google account creation page adds some additional fields to the sign up form, including name and gender which are both necessary for creating a Google+ account. There’s also a new agreement — turned on by default — granting Google permission to “use my account information to personalize +1s on content and ads on non-Google websites.”

It’s no surprise that the company makes money, the mass majority of it’s money actually, from advertising. Although some people might not like that new option, they always have the ability to uncheck it. Better to let users know and have them be aware, than to say nothing at all.

How many Google products would you say you use?

Google Launches New Sign Up Form, Better Optimized For Google Plus is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google+, the tech giant’s answer to a social network, is doing very well and according to Larry Page, CEO, extremely good. Today, Google had its earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2011.

Google Plus aside, the company did very well with full revenue up 29% for the year and quarterly revenue shooting past $10 Billion for the first time ever. Anyways, back to the social network…

Via Larry Page:

“I’m also pleased to announce that there are over 90M Google+ users — well over double what I announced just a quarter ago on our earnings call. Engagement on + is also growing tremendously. I have some amazing data to share there for the first time: +users are very engaged with our products — over 60% of them engage daily, and over 80% weekly.”

One of Larry’s priorities after becoming CEO was to improve velocity and execution at the company. With Google+, they’ve managed to keep at releasing a new update every single day since launch, more than 200 updates total thus far.

The company is very focused on making the social network a great place for people to spend their time on.

“But as I said last quarter, Google+ is about much more than the individual features themselves. It’s also about building a meaningful relationship with users so that we can dramatically improve the services we offer. Understanding who people are, what they care about, and the other people that matter to them is crucial if we are to give users what they need, when they need it.”

Are you using Google+?

Google+ Now Has 90 Million Users, Over Half Use It Daily is a post from: The Inquisitr

Last week Google+ ditched their invite-only policy, opening up the floodgates for everyone to join the site and now it’s being reported that Google has witnessed a 1,269% increase in the number of users taking advantage of the network.

Based on current numbers the site is said to have more than 50 million members. With the type of visitor increases Google+ is receiving they are reported to have more account creation activity than Twitter while still lagging behind Facebook and Google’s very own video sharing website YouTube.

The move according to analytics reporting firm Hitwise has also opened up the site to a larger demographic, allowing Google to attract more than the sites average 18-to-24-year-old crowd.  Analytical reporting shows that the site is now seeing a larger middle-income user class, an increase in the number of “single” users and more Hispanics taking to the social network.

While some analysts believe Google+ could one day catch up to Facebook thanks to privacy concerns and outrage over interface changes at the world’s largest network, Google has a long way to go as Facebook reaches for the 800 million user mark.

Google+ Membership Soars As Site Leaves Private Beta is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Latin American social networking audience grew by 16 percent last year, according to The Rise of Social Networking in Latin America from comScore. The total time spent on social networking sites in the region has also increased 88 percent.

In June this year, 114.5 million people in Latin America visited a social networking site, representing 96 percent of the entire population in the region. Facebook is huge in the area, reaching more than 91 million visitors. Windows Live Profile is a far second with more than 35.5 million visitors. Orkut has a foothold on Brazil though.

Alejandro Fosk, comScore senior vice president for Latin America,

“Social networking has become an essential part of consumers’ digital lives over the past several years. As it has become more widely adopted throughout the region and across demographic segments, it has redefined the way consumers interact with content and with each other. Social media is also changing the way marketing messages are disseminated and offers a new channel to engage with current and potential customers, which presents a variety of attractive opportunities for brands to effectively integrate social into their digital strategies.”

The Latin Americans are strongly engaged with social networking. Half of the top 10 worldwide markets ranked by time spent on social networking sites are in Latin America. Argentina leads the region at 10 hours per month in June 2011.

The region’s social networking audience is almost equal. Females, however, account for a larger share of social networking time spent (54.6%) compared to males (46.4%).

There is no doubt that the Latin American region is a huge market for social networking sites, just like anywhere actually.

Latin America is Totally Hooked with Social Networking (Just Like Everyone Else) is a post from: The Inquisitr

Wow, so Facebook is bringing us an incredible new world of being social and everyone seems willing to fall for their ‘kitchen sink’ approach to making you believe that they can provide everything you need so you don’t have to wander outside of their gardens. Never mind serendipity just sign over your your willingness to explore outside of the bounds of what your so-called friends think is important.

Thank goodness not all social networks are going down this road and right at the forefront of this alternative way of discovering priceless gems on the web is StumbleUpon; who announced to day that rather than throwing the kithen sink into the mix they are actually getting rid of stuff.

While Erica Ogg at GigaOM thinks that there will be some pretty upset users when these changes roll out I; as a happy StumbleUpon user, am really glad to see at least one company that recognizes its core competencies and phase out the things that take time away from making a better company and user experience.

Unlike Facebook and its obvious desire to create a whole new web StumbleUpon is trying to make the web we have more discoverable one thumbs up at a time which means anything that isn’t directly related to that experience is up for retirement.

One of the first things to go will be the ability of users of the service to customize reviews of the stuff they find via StumbleUpon. As such there will be no HTML support in reviews and no ability add photos to those reviews. It is StumbleUpon’s feeling that while some of the services that are getting cut were needed in the early days, days before sites like Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, but due to the change in the web and social networks StumbleUpon needs to get back to its roots – social discovery.

“Other platforms frankly do a really good job of [customization and self-expression] and that’s what they’re all about. While certain [StumbleUpon users] may not want to go, other services do offer a better experience of that,” said Marc Leibowitz, Stumble Upon’s vice president of marketing and business development, in an interview Thursday. Essentially, they want their users to come for the social discovery, and go elsewhere for other stuff. Leibowitz said that they know based on how people share StumbleUpon URLs that many of their users are already using Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and others for blogging anyway.

Attempting to put the changes in perspective, he noted how different the social web is today versus when his service got its start:

It’s amazing how StumbleUpon started in a day and age when the searching we take advantage of now didn’t exist. Google was just getting started. There are things and microblogging services that hadn’t even been conceptualized when StumbleUpon was already a few years old. The things we built out of necessity because they didn’t exist elsewhere are no longer warranted.

via GigaOM

Of course there will be an uproar as these parts of StumbleUpon are removed but for once I am glad to see a company realize where its strength lie and concentrate on making the best they can be instead of falling for the “me-too” syndrome.

At least one ‘social network’ gets you don’t need a kitchen sink as StumbleUpon cuts the fat is a post from: The Inquisitr

Facebook on Wednesday announced their newest feature Video Calling. The program, which incorporates Skype technology and allows users to chat one-on-one is available for immediate use by all of Facebook’s user base.

The program according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a long time to develop because the company didn’t want to interfere with other site functions. Under the new program users can visit Facebook.com/VideoCalling and download a special PC or MAC based program that installs in a matter of minutes and once installed users can click on a small video icon on their friends profiles and chat windows to request a chat, users then see an “accept” or “deny” window where they can engage with friends.

Facebook at this time is not attempting to compete with Google +’s 10 person video group chat feature, however Mark Zuckerberg has “not ruled out” a group video chat function for the future.

On the company’s blog today Philip Su told users:

“Video chat has been around for years now, but it’s still not an everyday activity for most people,” while he went on to add, “Sometimes it’s too difficult to set up, or the friends you want to talk to are on different services. So a few months ago, we started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook.”

The program is 100% free to use.

Facebook Video Calling Becomes Reality, Launches For 750 Million Users is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you managed to pull yourself from what ever rock you like to hide away in to get away from the endless hype that happens in the tech blogosphere you might have heard of some new mobile photo-sharing sharing service called Color that managed to snag itself $41 million in first round funding.

I’m not even going to go into the whole insanity of any just popped up from stealth startup getting $41 million because that is just mind boggling when you consider Google didn’t even get half that much in its funding. What gets me though is the fact that anyone thinks that Colors is worth any amount of the hype it is getting, admittedly both gushing and not so gushing.

For those of you not familiar with what Color is the simple story it that it is a photo sharing app between you and those people around you in any given place that have Color installed on their smartphone. You don’t have to know any of the people either as the software will detect another smartphone and share any photos you have taken at that location with those unknown people and will share their’s with you.

As Frederic Lardinois at NewsGrange points out this “elastic social network” that lives for the time you and other Color users are in close proximity and shares all photos within that temporary location based social network

Here is what Colors does: Unlike apps like Instagram, picplz or Path, every picture you take is public and there is no option to make it private. More importantly, the app groups together both the photos that were taken at the same location and the people that took them. To do this, the service uses some admittedly smart algorithms that look at where your phone was pointing, the ambient noise around you and other factors to determine that these pictures were indeed taken in the same place. The service then organizes you into an “elastic” social network with all the people around you who took picture at the same place. It basically creates the social network for you as you use the app (and dissolves your “friendships” automatically if you don’t take pictures close to each other for a while).

My reaction when I read all that is being written about Color is – why?

Why would I want someone else’s; a person I don’t know from Adam, images of the same place mixed in with the I have taken pictures?

Why would I want to share my pictures, my memories, my special moments, shared with people I don’t know and will never ever see again?

Why is there some stupid assumption that this picture taking of special moments even needs to be socialized beyond the charing that we are doing on our blogs, on Facebook, or on Twitter. At least there we are making a conscious choice of whether our pictures we have taken are available for public consumption.

Color proposes to take that away because as Frederic points out every picture you take is public and instantly sharable to other people around you who have the app installed.

I realize that that the line between private and public is constantly being moved, with a real effort to remove it altogether, but idea is just plain stupid. It’s not revolutionary as some would have us believe. It is just another attempt to inundate the web with totally pointless images, except to those who took them.

Thankfully Color has one very large Achilles heel – in order for this idea to work it will require mass, and I mean mass, adoption and I honestly believe, regardless of the over sharing world we live in, that the critical mass Color’s will need to justify its stupid $41 million round of funding will never be reached.

Color Demo from Color Labs, Inc. on Vimeo.

Color me stupid but I don’t get Color is a post from: The Inquisitr

At yesterday’s big Apple event that was live streamed to only those people lucky enough to own a Mac, iPhone or iPad one of the big announcements was the launch of the company’s music social network called Ping (thank gawd they didn’t go with iPing). One of the features that was a high point of Ping was that you could connect to your Facebook account.

A lot of press followed talking about how this was going to change the whole social network or how Ping was going to be a dud. Then we started hearing whispers that not all may be good between Apple and Facebook as some people suddenly found the option to connect to Facebook had disappeared.

Then Kara Swisher let us all know that the option had been removed because of what Steve Jobs referred to as onerous terms

When I asked Jobs about that, he said Apple had indeed held talks with Facebook about a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions went nowhere.

The reason, according to Jobs: Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to,” related to connecting with Facebook friends on Ping.

For those who are struck by the word, the definition of onerous,according to an online dictionary: “Involving an amount of effort and difficulty that is oppressively burdensome; Involving heavy obligations.”

Jobs did not elaborate on those troublesome terms and also would not say if Ping would incorporate connecting with Facebook or even using Facebook Connect–which would make it much easier to find friends to share music with.

So what was suppose to be a primary source of connecting with people within Ping was suddenly no longer available and much was made of that change. As Om Malik wrote this morning after waking up to find that the Facebook to Ping connection that he had been early enough to enable wasn’t working.

I’m hoping that the Facebook Connect problems are temporary and a glitch. Otherwise, Ping would really suck and the big losers in this game of corporate one-upmanship are the consumers, who probably — like me–  just want recommendations from our friends, then buy those tunes. As a long-time customer of Apple and its iTunes store, I’m severely disappointed that I can’t bring my pre-configured social graph to Ping. I hope Apple and Facebook both come to an agreement and kiss and make-up.

So what caused this tiff between the two companies?

Well according to Kara Swisher in a later post it all boiled down to Apple being Apple and Facebook saying that the new music social network was breaking Facebook’s TOS by by not signing an agreement to honor large scale network interaction limits. Instead Apple went for the public API which is free which caused Facebook to block them.

Sources said Apple went ahead with a plan to access the Facebook APIs freely, but Facebook blocked it since it violated its terms of service.

When that happened, it seems Apple pulled the plug on the connection with Facebook friends.

But in the same post Kara also said that the two companies are talking about putting in a more robust Facebook Connect feature into Ping, because really without it Ping will be a pretty empty place.

Apple’s Ping does Facebook. Oh wait, no it doesn’t. Oh wait yes it will – soon, maybe is a post from: The Inquisitr

Remember the English social network called Bebo?

No?

Not surprising since its only real claim to fame was that Aol lost its mind and bought it for $850 back in 2008 and from there returned to an even worse state of obscurity. During Aol’s latest round of trying to figure out what their future is they let the word out that they would be willing to sell Bebo to whoever was interested.

It was also stated that if they couldn’t find a buyer they would shut the service down which according to Mashable won’t happen as a buyer has showed up.

Update: The buyer of Bebo is Criterion Capital Partners, a hedge fund. We’re digging for more details.

—

AOL has found a buyer for struggling social network Bebo, we are hearing from sources close to the deal. The Internet company has been publicly looking for an acquirer for some time, and in April, news leaked that AOL would likely shut down the site if a buyer was not found.

We can all return to not caring now.

Bebo gets sold – no-one cares is a post from: The Inquisitr

The problem with this viewpoint is that it is delusional. Regardless of the organization, government, or business your personal data is in many cases the only commodity that they have that allows them to stay in business, or in the case of governments – in power. To think otherwise is short-sighted and only empowers the parties we entrust our data with to act more like slum lords than caretakers of the most important information in the world.

In many cases we make a decision; consciously or unconsciously, that whatever is being offered in exchange for that data is worth accepting the inherent risks that your data may be misused at some point. Sure we hear all the horror stories about how this company or that government agency has been caught misusing people’s personal information but that doesn’t seem to impede our willingness to keep spreading our data around the web.

In order to understand the breadth of the collecting, dissemination, and misuse of our data we need to understand how the different parties involved in this massive collection of personal data continually convince us their overall intentions are good.

It isn’t just how our data is misused on the web either as we are seeing more and more how governments especially, and in some cases in collusion with corporations, are creating massive databases containing even our most basic information like DNA. Under the guise of protecting society we have governments – at all levels – are increasingly using all the modern technological tools at their disposal to build and continually add to an increasing number of databases.

Whether it be from the information we are required to hand over for our driver’s license to DNA databases our data governments are continually adding more information about us. Traffic camera are being touted as a way to increase the security of everything including towns trying to give the illusion of safety to its residents living in this type of electronic gated community. CCTV camera in general are monitoring more and more cities around the world to the point that individuals can be tracked going about their daily activity with all the digital information being stored in these databases.

Increasingly these once disparate databases are able to talk to each other which allows any government agency to create an extensive profile of just about any individual in the world. It has become a priority with many governments to collect as much data about its citizens as possible from whatever avenues that are open to them and by any means possible.

Case in point is the the report out that the British police officers are routinely arresting people so that under British law they DNA is added to their national database.

Police officers are now routinely arresting people in order to add their DNA sample to the national police database, an inquiry will allege tomorrow.

The review of the national DNA database by the government’s human genetics commission also raises the possibility that the DNA profiles of three-quarters of young black males, aged 18 to 35, are now on the database.

The human genetics commission report, Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?, says the national DNA database for England and Wales is already the largest in the world, at 5 million profiles and growing, yet has no clear statutory basis or independent oversight.

The highly critical report from the government’s advisory body on the development of human genetics is published as the number of innocent people on the database is disclosed to be far higher than previously thought ‑ nearing 1 million.

Source: The Guardian – via Boing Boing

While corporations might do whatever they can to collect our data it is primarily for financial gain whereas with governments it is more about finding ways to control its citizenry. There is nothing benevolent behind their reasoning beyond their own self-preservation and their control of power. Parties in power may shift but “government” stays the same and with each successive group of people in power the objective is to stay in that position of power.

To maintain that status quo technology is allowing them to control the one variable that has always given them the most problems – us.

There is one basic tenet when it comes to business:  make as much money as possible by any means at their disposal and without any regard to laws and the rights of individuals. No matter how you argue this point when it comes down to the very core reason of business this attitude can be considered their First Law.

For the longest time corporations were limited to extremely generalized information about demographics. This was achieved by surveys, viewing patterns, shopping patterns, and social patterns.

Then along comes the Internet. In the beginning much of the data gleaned was similar to that collected pre-Internet although improved to an extent by modern technological data analysis methods. It was still a time of generalized information with only a glimmer of personal information making its way into growing corporate databases.

Corporations have proven over an over that until they are caught with their hands in the cookie jar their concern for consumer rights isn’t part of their money making equations.

It wasn’t until the coming of social media though that we saw the rise of web based businesses whose whole existence in nothing more than a disguise created in order to collect our personal data. It doesn’t matter how cute their names are or how they pontificate about openness and transparency. It doesn’t matter how they brag about giving the average person an avenue to be creative – to become a part of the social elite. It doesn’t matter about all the warm and fuzzy words like user generated content, social conversation, or even the most basic human emotive word – friends.

It is all about the data and the more personal they can convince you to be the more you are worth to them. They will do anything, say anything, or make you agree to EULAs or TOSs that give them exclusive control over your information shared on their systems.

Regardless of how you want to beleaguer this point the fact is that when you boil all these  businesses down to what is their core value to anyone it all comes back to your personal information. That is the only value that any of these businesses like Facebook, Twitter or any one of the hundred look-a-likes that spring up every week have to anyone. It is that information that brings in the millions of dollars of advertising or makes them attractive to be the object of a purchase by a bigger company that wants that data.

It is true that for the most part we all walk into this deal with both the governments and the corporations with open eyes. For the most part … however that doesn’t mean that we should think that all this collection of our personal data is being done for any type of altruistic reasons.

Whether it be the simple act of entering our email in a form to friending some new person on a social network to click the ‘like’ link on a picture at some point all that personal data you are creating every day is going to become nothing more than an entry in a spreadsheet somewhere to be sliced and diced for money. You aren’t an avatar to either the government or corporation. You are a dollar sign to business and a potential danger to society to governments.

They can spew out all the glib speeches they like about respecting the private citizen or the rights of the consumer but in the end it is all about your data and how it will benefit those in the corporate boardroom or the halls of political power.

No matter how many rose colored glasses you might wear or how much you might want to believe in all the spin there is one simple fact when it comes to your personal data.

It will get misused.

Our data will always be misused is a post from: The Inquisitr

Users 18 to 24 years old, though typically portrayed as being among the “most connected” people, make up one of the lowest chunks of Twitter’s userbase, according to an analysis published by ComScore this week. It’s the 45 to 54 age group that takes up the biggest piece of the pie, ComScore finds, followed by the 25 to 34 group.

What explains the breakdown, then? ComScore points to the increasingly common corporate uses for social technology.

“With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users ‘growing up’ and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited,” says ComScore’s Sarah Radwanick.

“Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the ‘technologically inclined,’ which means that trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to,” she contends.

Twitter Userbase Skews Toward Older Crowd, Data Suggests is a post from: The Inquisitr

Save The Planet And Win, opening publicly in beta mode today, lets you calculate the environmental damage you’re doing and find ways to cut it back. Billed as the “first voluntary personal carbon registry in the United States,” the site offers networking opportunities to compare your steps to others’ and discuss strategies for saving the Earth.

You can also accumulate “points” by watching the site’s sponsored videos about going green. Those points can then be used to buy carbon offsets, donate to environmental causes, or — if you just need the dough — you can trade them in for cash.

Save The Planet And Win is promising weekly sweepstakes to keep environmental friendliness fun and interesting, too.

So far, the site claims about 66,000 pounds of carbon reduced by its members prior to its public launch.

Environmental Social Network Launches With Lofty Goal is a post from: The Inquisitr

The deal will make thousands of UMG artist videos available for free on Kiwibox.com. The media will be ad-supported, with artists getting a share of the revenue. (The specific percentages are not being released.) Current UMG artists include Jay-Z, The Killers, Snow Patrol, and Kanye West.

Kiwibox, purchased by Magnitude Information Systems in 2007, combines interactive social features with both professionally written and user-generated content, all in a magazine-style layout. The site saw a major makeover in August, which included the debut of an expanded internal video section. The new service — fittingly set to be titled “Kiwibox Music Videos” — will launch before the end of the year and will be integrated with the existing content.

Will the offering draw users over from existing streaming services such as Imeem and the recently launched MySpace Music? Probably not. But for its own devoted base of teen and pre-teen users, the option is sure to add a nice layer of functionality to an already robust site — not to mention the additional avenue of exposure it’ll provide for the artists always vying to reach that very demographic.

Teen Social Network To Get Label-Supported Streaming is a post from: The Inquisitr

TwittAd lets you implement “product placement and web site promotion” on your profile page. Once you sign up for the service, you set the price you want and the duration of the ad. From the looks of it, you get paid a flat fee — not a traffic- or click-based rate. TwittAd says it pays you for “every hour you serve the ad.”

Tweet For Profit

So will we really see the profit-savvy Twitterer? As of now, TwittAd’s ads go only on your Twitter home page, meaning users who receive your feed through any other medium (including their own Twitter pages) won’t see the spots. The limited scope may make it tough to pull in a whole lot of dough at the start, but once the technology expands and ads start being attached to every Tweet (which is, in all likelihood, just a matter of time), the potential will definitely be there.

A Growing Commodity

On the whole, the past calls of “Twitter is dead” couldn’t be further from the truth at the moment. Check out Australia this month: Usage of the site down under has shot up an unbelievable 512 percent over the past year, according to numbers released by HitWise this morning.

It only makes sense, then, that more marketing and advertising are on the horizon, and not just with TwittAd, either. Researchers are already matching up particular businesses that might be a strong fit with the Twitter crowd, so don’t be surprised to see more and more targeted Tweets coming your way over the coming months.

Interactive Action

The other, less invasive trend is the use of Twitter to gauge reader perception and reaction to a brand or product — basically, observing and interacting rather than force feeding. Some forward-thinking companies have already explored this path and with some success, too — including one airline that seems to suck a bit less than the others. Then there’s Zappos, a company quickly becoming as known for its Twitter use as for its products.

Evolutionary Challenge

The question, then, is how long it’ll take for the rest of the mainstream herd to catch on and start turning to Twitter for marketing and money-making purposes. My prediction: Don’t hold your breath. The old media-new media evolutionary challenge — the same one we’re seeing traditional media outlets slowly struggling to overcome — is far from over. Whether it’s in the media world or the general corporate world, there are still too many people high-up who either don’t get it, or who just choose not to acknowledge it (“it” being both the importance and the process of intelligently investing time and capital in interactive resources).

Think how long blogging was around before it became a corporate and money-making concept. Odds are, more execs and entrepreneurs will eventually learn to embrace the profit potential of Twitter — but whether it’s placing ads, placing purpose-driven users, or just placing themselves in a position to watch and learn, the revolution won’t be an instant one. Time will change things, of course…but nothing’s happening overnight.

In the meantime, though, get ready to see dollar signs lighting up in the eyes of hardcore users. Someone’s going to be trying to turn a quick buck or two — and it can’t be long before Twitter itself introduces its own user-oriented monetization options to claim its piece of the pie.

This Twitter Feed Brought To You By… is a post from: The Inquisitr

The feature will look familiar. Anyone with a Google account, it seems, can opt to follow a blog. Then the site owner can add a widget with all the followers’ mugshots to the front page.

Where Google gains an advantage, though, is with its integration into other properties: Any blogs you, as a reader, opt to follow will appear in a special folder in your Google Reader — and you can also click on any blogs already in your Reader and subscribe to them as a follower from right there. Google is also working on building a tie-in with FriendConnect, its social tool introduced this past May, so Blogger sites can use it to add another set of social features to their blogs as well.

So will the add-ons drive the masses over to Blogger for hosting? Of course not. But for sites already hosted there, it’ll add a new layer of interaction and some extra room for social growth. For the casual blogger content hosting his or her site with Google, at least, it’ll be an interesting option to gain.

Will “Following” Give Blogger a Boost? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Of the various social media sites, the one I’ve seen used the most for non-marketing business uses is LinkedIn. While there are many people who see little to no value to the site, I’ve witnessed companies using the site for recruiting, locating service providers, and seeking business advice. I was hired at The Industry Standard based on working LinkedIn, and yet it’s the one social media site that always seems to be ignored or dismissed. It has the highest CPM rate for advertising of any social media site, and probably will be one left standing in the end.

Facebook and Twitter are probably on par in terms of usefulness for companies. Both can be used to build brand awareness, as well as pitch journalists, announce news in a less formal manner, and reach out to a different audience. Some people have had success with leveraging their contacts on the sites for jobs and partnerships, but the majority of the users seem to use the sites for their intent: socializing.

FriendFeed is the current darling of the tech set, and Duncan himself has been converted to a believer. The problem, however, is that there doesn’t seem to be a justifiable business case for using it, at least in its current incarnation. Those trying to woo the tech A-listers know it’s a necessity to keep up with the in-crowd gossip, but overall, the site has the feel of an upside-down high school cafeteria, with the nerds at the popular kid table and the cheerleaders left to their own devices over on MySpace and Facebook. The few companies or blogs who have set up rooms seem to use them only as one more way to publish a news feed, and even the site’s “recommended” users are, for the most part, empty profiles with newsfeeds but little participation.

Unfortunately, the sites with the most practical uses seem to be overlooked while those that prop up the flip-flopped social structure of tech geek supremacy seem to get the most appearances on the tech blogs. For any single post on the usefulness of LinkedIn, there are 100 about a new design at FriendFeed or an outage on Twitter. When it comes to being a viable site that can be used as a tool (and earn money to boot), odds are the sites that pump up your ego won’t be the ones that survive.

Is Social Media Useful or just Ego-Boost? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Lifehaps gives you the ability to plot out all your life’s events — ranging from your birth to that concert you’re seeing next month — and then share the data with friends. It’s kind of like a massive, lifelong calendar that’s open to your online community. In addition to the major life happenings, you can easily include random outings or upcoming weekend plans so your friends can coordinate and link up with you.

The site offers its services for free, though it does indicate certain “premium features” in the works for the future. These include customizable theme options, charting and graphing capabilities, and custom event categories.

We couldn’t find much about the creators or the company on the site. WhoIs records, though, show the domain pointing to Knowtes.com — an interactive online flashcard service for students, also in beta. The Lifehaps name is registered to Shaun Halberstadt, who holds the copyright for Knowtes — so it seems a likely conclusion that he’s the brain behind both operations.

Lifehaps: The Social Networking Timeline is a post from: The Inquisitr

“I can’t necessarily attack Facebook or MySpace, but I can attack their users all day long,” Computer security specialist Shawn Moyer told AFP. The specialist added that not having a social networking page does not mean that you will not be vulnerable to trouble.

So, what then do we do now? I believe that the web, not just social networks, is a playground for hackers, prying on people with their malicious codes. That’s a given and we have to live it with, unless we stop using the web (but then you have to live with real-life malicious intentions).

To avoid it, I do not make the web as my life nor do I fill my online social network account with crappy applications or widgets. Poking is enough for me.

Online Social Networks Now Playground for Hackers is a post from: The Inquisitr

Friendster also announced the appointment of Richard Kimber, formerly the regional managing director of Google at South Asia where he dramatically increased the search engine’s revenue in the Asia Pacific region.

“Utilizing the Internet to connect to your friends is one of its greatest benefits, and is changing the way relationships work globally. With more than 75 million users, it is clear that Friendster has already made a dramatic impact. I look forward to growing our business further as we continue our global growth and strong focus on Asia,” Kimber said.

Friendster boasts of having 55 million registered users and 33 million monthly unique visitors from Asia alone, with the remaining 20 million from all over the globe.

Impressive numbers but they should try setting a stronghold in the US as well.

Friendster is (Still) Alive with $20 Million and New CEO is a post from: The Inquisitr