social media

Google Inc terminated inviting users to join its new social networking service just 48 hours after the official launch.

Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra said the company had "shut down invite mechanism" for the Google+ service for the night, in a note he posted on Google+ on Wednesday evening.

"Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way," Gundotra wrote.

On Tuesday Google announced the service Google+ as another effort to dethrone Facebook from its crown position in the social media market.

American Express OPEN announced the launch of YourBuzz service that allows small businesses to manage their online presence and learn what is being said about them and their rivals in the social networking sphere. YourBuzz aggregates conversations across such sites as Yelp and CitySearch as well as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. YourBuzz ensures listings are accurate, builds customer relationships, and mitigates the damage that can be done from poor reviews.

Bling Nation, a US mobile payments service, announced about the “pause” of its activity to fix its business model that has failed to be attractive for merchants.

While it became very popular at the dawn of its business Bling Nation lost its way when it introduced FanConnect, a social media-heavy loyalty programme that was compulsory for Bling's bank and merchant partners.

A new research has been recently published by Netpop that reveals 8 in 10 social media users feel “uneasy” or “ambivalent” about sharing personal information on social media sites.

In total the study found this proportion:

42% of social media users are “Uneasies” (concerned about privacy)
38% … are “Ambivalents” (uncertain about privacy)
20% … are “Laissez-Faires” (not concerned about privacy)

Saturday night a 20-year old Acton Beale was positioning himself on a balcony railing on the seventh floor of an apartment block when he lost his balance and fell to his death. He was playing stupid but considered as harmless social media game of “planking” which involves a person lying straight, arms by side face down, sans facial expression.

Players of the game are encouraged to pose creative or daring locations and post the feat of Facebook or YouTube.

VeriFone Systems, Inc introduced a new comprehensive, subscription-based offering known as PAYMEDIA Solutions to provide small to medium-sized merchants with payment solutions and access to payment-enabled media at the checkout counter including the integration of online services such as digital couponing, loyalty, location-based social media and value-added services.

Charlie Sheen gained strong media attention during past few weeks and topped all Internet and social media discussions since the beginning of 2011 outdistancing stirs about the iPad, Lady Gaga and US President Barack Obama, as shown by a survey released on Tuesday by the Global Language Monitor.

"Charlie Sheen...is everywhere. The growing pervasiveness of social media only enhances this global echo chamber," said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst for the Global Language Monitor.

Facebook has added a new real-time commenting feature to all users. Now all Facebook members can see live comments from their friends without need to reload the page.

"Live commenting, which we rolled out to all of our users a couple weeks ago, creates opportunities for spontaneous online conversations to take place in real time, leading to serendipitous connections that may not have ever happened otherwise," writes Facebook's Ken Deeter in a Monday blog post.

According to a new research from ForeSee Results traditional marketing tools bring a better return on investment (ROI) for retailers than social media. The study revealed that social media mainly influence only 5% of visitors to retail websites.

Meantime, the research says that more traditional marketing strategies like promotional emails (19%), search engine results (8%), and Internet advertising (7%), influence more visits to retail websites.

OpenDNS, a provider of DNS-based security and infrastructure services, has recently published a new report that revealed that social media websites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube were treated reversely by corporations and people responsible for networks. These websites appeared both in "top blacklisted" and "top whitelisted" lists compiled for 2010.

In its move to reorganize for being better equipped to challenge Facebook-likes in the social networking industry Google is replacing Eric Schmidt with a co-founder Larry Page to take the CEO seat in the company. Meantime, Schmidt will be appointed to the position of executive chairman. Google, in turn denied any “reaction to competitors” explaining its actions. The news came from the company as it had posted better than expected quarter earnings.

According to the forecast made by the research company Gartner 20% of workers will be using social networks as their primary option for business communications by 2014. Gartner says that greater availability of social networking services, along with changing demographics and work styles, are responsible for the business move toward social networking services. And as more workers with social networking skills enter businesses the conventional business tool – email – will be greatly impacted by social media.

According to a recent research many people keep friends in their social network contact lists while they have never met with each other. Data provided by Geomium shows that 9% of web users have never met a quarter of their online friends. The location based service says that it has revealed the phenomenon of "faceless friends" or people that are part of an online friendship circle but have never met face-to-face.

"These are worrying findings -- social networks are meant to facilitate socializing, not replace it," said Geomium CEO, Michael Ferguson.

According to the recent data from Forrester Research the percentage of US Internet users contributing to social media sites decreased significantly as compared with the previous year.

This means that companies need to find ways to re-engage those U.S. Internet users who have stopped participating on their social media sites.

According to the latest report, authored by faculty affiliated with the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University, that was released by McAfee, business leaders worldwide see the value of Web 2.0 in supporting productivity and driving new revenue, but remain deeply concerned about security threats.