Facebook posts

Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow us to amplify our thoughts and opinions in ways that are challenging for most people in real life. We can walk around the office and talk to all of our co-workers about a local charity that needs support, but few do. Instead, we often show our support through our Facebook status updates and Tweets. Conversely, there is always a certain amount of negativity that gets passed back and forth between people when they talk in the real world, but even the nicest people can turn into trolls and devils online when the shield of our social media persona takes over. Kindness…

They’re just not ready. They weren’t ready for their IPO.They’re not ready to get into the hardware business with a smartphone. They’re not ready to take off the hoodie and put on a suit. They’re still just a social network and they’re making the kind of mistakes that startups make. That doesn’t mean they won’t continue to be successful in the realm they own nor does it mean that they can’t make a lot of money doing it. It simply means they not ready to get into the “big time” with the likes of Google, Microsoft, or Apple. They’re still a 2nd-tier tech company. The latest problem stems from their botched…

Social media has clearly permeated out lives so much that it is now influencing the other media that we consume. This is extremely clear in the world of music. I see the songs popping up on my Facebook news ticker and it seems like my entire friends list is listening to the same songs. For the most part people have always listened to very similar music, but more and more I am seeing an increasing trend of the “ironic” hit. I don’t know if this is a new phenomenon, but I first noticed it with the rise in popularity of Rebecca Black’s song Friday. We all know and love (or hate) it. The song features timeless…

A while back, Facebook launched Sponsored Stories, an offering that allows brands to create ads from updates posted by a user’s friend or a page they are connected with. Similar to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, this particular offering is designed to help marketers increase visibility and snag the attention of the people they are trying to reach without appearing too aggressive in the process. Facebook has made Sponsored Stories even more attractive to social marketers with a new feature designed to maximize its potential. Facebook recently announced the action spec preview tool. It is…

When I first checked out Empire Avenue in May of 2011, I was disappointed. The concept was strong: a stock market game where the “companies” were people and their value was determined by the social capital they were able to accumulate through their activities on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. The problem I had with it was that it required a further commitment of time; one does not simply grow through Tweeting alone. You had to buy other people. You had to be active in other social media sites like YouTube and Flickr. It seemed like another social media time suck. Fast forward to May,…

We’re trying out a new feature on TECHi: today’s top tech talking points. If it works out, we’ll be doing it daily on the site and on Facebook. Are off-Facebook ads a threat to Google? Facebook ads were found on Zynga today. ReadWriteWeb notes that Facebook knows who we are while Google knows what we’re trying to find. Which is more important to advertisers and consumers? Will we soon see Facebook ads that compete with Google Adwords? Weigh in on Facebook. Is half-a-million too much for an abused bus monitor? The bus monitor who was verbally abused by kids on her bus has been the center of over half a million…

For the last few months, I have been asked on and off why I didn’t have a TECHi presence on Google+. There are many reasons: our focus on our Facebook page, our ever-growing Twitter presence, the lack of tools that integrate directly with Google+, and, of course, time (or lack thereof) all played a role. It’s not that we haven’t paid attention to Google+; on the contrary, we’ve been very active on it through our author accounts and through encouraging people to share on the social network. Now, the reasons to get on outweigh the reasons to stay off. Google+ is not only growing, but its importance from…

Recently the co-chairmen of the Bi-Partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, Edward Markley and Joe Barton, sent a letter requesting that Mark Zuckerberg give details about Facebook’s plan to permit pre-teens access to the social mediasite. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Image via CrunchBase"][/caption] With children under 13 years old being protected by the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act which demands that parents give their consent regarding personal data to websites, it’s going to be difficult for Zuckerberg to carry through with…

When all considerations are tallied, it’s possible that Salesforce has invested over a billion dollars into social media through the purchase of Buddy Media and Radian6, not to mention the smaller companies they bought such as Rypple and Jigsaw. Is all of this an ego play to be the biggest and baddest in social media, or is this a series of great moves for the CRM company? [caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via CrunchBase"][/caption] Social media is extremely hard to predict and the numbers involved are staggering, but the buzz that will surround the company in 2013…

Quick, what’s your Twitter handle? What’s your Facebook profile URL? What’s you Google+ address? You were probably able to answer the first two questions. The third one is a mystery to nearly everyone. Sure, it’s easy to find you, particularly if you have a not-so-common name. Just search for their name on Google and if they have an account it should be prominently displayed, assuming they’re using it regularly. Internally, all you really need is their name and a rough idea of what they look like to find them. Too hard. We should be able to tell people where to go. We should be able to put it on a business…