In the news, there was a recent study providing evidence that drinking coffee may help you live longer. The study was carried out by the National Institutes of Health and AARP. However, researchers urge you to remember that this doesn’t necessarily prove that coffee makes people live longer; it just shows that coffee and living longer are related. Even so, this contradicts earlier studies that had said coffee can increase risks of heart disease. This study included 400,000 individuals, making it the largest study ever done on this issue, so the results should be reassuring for those of you…

It seems that BBDO New York has come up with another way for bars to become a different kind of “social”.  As I opened Mashable today and saw one of my favorite things, a pint of Guinness, intertwined with a symbol of the digital age, the QR code. We all know that people flock to the local watering hole to relieve stress from work or meet up with friends to talk about what’s new in their lives.  The type of social scene at a bar can often determine its patrons and vice versa but either way, people go to certain bars because they either want to socialize with their friends or meet new people. The capabilities…

Facebook gives itself a facelift by improving the user experience yet again. Facebook’s Timeline, which was implemented back earlier in the year, was given the digital makeover by compressing the user profile across the cover photo. Previous Timelines were bulky and gaudy, with large tabs under the cover photo where profile visitors could cruise a user’s profile. Timeline has now designed the user’s profile to be subtle and manageable but does this improvement really do anything for the Facebook experience? With millions of dollars in revenue from the Facebook IPO and all the publicity…

She already dominated the pop world, but now with over 51 million fans on Facebook and 24 million Twitter followers, Lady Gaga plans to conquer the social media world with her very own site. The plan is to round up all of her fans and unite them under one roof, a separate social media site deemed properly, “Little Monsters.”  Here, fans are able to connect with one another and share all things Gaga related, as well as share their own pictures and videos. According to developers, Little Monsters resembles Pinterest and Reddit, allowing users to scroll through picture tiles, post and repost images…

It’s about time! Finally there is an iPhone app for Facebook page administrators to be “on-the-go” and still be up to date with their fans. As a community manager, my business associates and I feel this app will be a great addition to our methods of managing our client’s pages. With social media comes a feeling of instant gratification. I think with social media, there should be timeliness with the response on a post that fans want to see. Everyone has immediate access to what you post and everything that they post, they want an immediate response on. For a community manager it allows for your…

Day one was a disappointment as there was no “pop”. Day two was even worse, showing the shares slide 11% to close at $34.03. Is this a bad sign for the long term? No. Not necessarily. The new billionaires in Palo Alto will not become millionaires any time soon and the shares aren’t going to drop much further than they already have. They likely won’t go much higher than their IPO value, either, until some big news about how the infusion of money is being invested hits the wire. Until then, expect a few gains, a few losses, and an overall stabilization of the stock for the next few weeks. This was all created…

Microsoft is throwing its hat into the niche-social arena by going after students in a bold and likely-futile move with so.cl (pronounced “social”). “With So.cl you can share your search and help others discover what they might be looking for,” they say on their website. “Fun commentary and discussions usually follow.” This is a bad idea. People do not want to share their search. College students are hooked in to Facebook and have study groups already positioned there. Microsoft does not have the clout to be able to muscle their way into social the way Google has and the way Apple could, not because…

“Take a Bit Out of Crime” is a phrase that was often uttered by McGruff the Crime Dog, a fictional dog who despised criminals for reasons I am unsure about (we never did see his origin story, here’s to hoping for a Christopher Nolan directed “McGruff Begins”). The famous PSA character did his best to provide a good example and keep people from committing crimes. Now, Facebook may be doing the same exact thing by accident. More and more people are committing crimes, whether they are aware of it or not and then they brag about their illegal exploits on their Facebook page. It’s never a good…

Now that the company is public, the employees are rich, and the CEO is married, Facebook is ready for some serious business. They’ve slayed most of the dragons they’ve needed to face up to this point, but the game has changed. They can’t just sit back and make money as a side effort. They have to generate more revenue and profits for their numbers to stay strong on the NASDAQ. For the first time in their history, they really have to try from a business perspective. Up until now, making money was a side-effect of their efforts to make the most popular and addictive social network on the planet. They are approaching…

The best that could have happened in tech blogging would have been for Facebook’s IPO to “pop”. We still would have watched closely but there would have been no need to analyze it in-depth. As any good doctor after a successful operation, we would have clapped our hands and monitored. Instead, we’re stuck trying to break down exactly what happened on Friday and more importantly what will happen in the coming weeks. In short, Facebook ruined a lot of tech and business bloggers’ weekends. Here is a video of analysis that will help to determine if this was simply Facebook and its bankers pricing the IPO…