It’s hard to believe that Facebook is nearly a decade old. I can remember when it was just a social media toddler spreading across colleges. Oh, how it has grown. The last five years have been tumultuous but successful for the most popular website in the world. It was in 2008 that Microsoft gave the ultimate bid of credibility to the site by investing in it, something that the software giant rarely did for up-and-comers like a social network. It can be argued that it was at that point that the attention of the world really turned to Mark Zuckerberg’s baby and the site has stayed in the forefront of media…

It was hot, then it was cold, then it was hot, then it was cold. Google+, the search giant’s 54th attempt at a social network, is going on two years old now and it has made a splash in the social media world with half a billion users, over 100 million of whom are considered “active”. These seem to be impressive numbers until you spend enough time on the site and realize that it’s still not in the same league as Facebook when it comes to engagement. People live a good portion of their lives on Facebook, while they struggle to remember to check their Google+. They aren’t far off from having a truly valid social…

It may not have the award-winning scope that The Social Network had when it explored the early days of Facebook and nobody will be wondering how accurate it really is the way they’re doing right now with Ashton Kutcher’s take on the Apple co-Founder in jOBS, but the first movie that looks at life at Google may be the most entertaining of them all when The Internship hits theaters on June 7th. There are two reasons that this might be entertaining enough to watch: Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. The storyline is played out – dinosaurs must adept to a digital age and end up turning the campus of a technology…

Those in social media marketing as a profession realize that there are certain unknowns when it comes to the new web. We know that people are on social media. We know that they don’t want direct marketing. We also know they’d rather get direct marketing than pay for the services, so there’s at least a little room for something. The question is, “what is that something?” Whether from B2C or B2B, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn give marketers the ability to try to reach the target audience and generate leads. The vast majority are trying. Most are failing, or at least not meeting…

For a man who built an online empire that is dedicated to make as much of our lives as public as possible, Facebook co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been able to keep his personal life in the dark and his media attention under control for the most part. We know very little about the man other than what he has been willing to share. Is he really that boring or is he simply a master of privacy in the public world he’s building? It could be a mixture of the two. He knows about privacy. He may know more about online privacy than any CEO in the world. It’s his job to make people disregard their privacy, to encourage…

We are vane creatures. LinkedIn has been on a roll, lately. They seem to have come to grips with their status as a resume- and professional-connection-distributing social network (even though they still look too much like Facebook). They are beating The Street’s profits and revenue expectations and they haven’t had any major scandals lately. 2012 was a good year for them and they’re starting off 2013 with a bang by getting many of its most active members to promote the service by promoting themselves. In a perfectly designed email, LinkedIn informed their top members last week that they were…

One of the most personal online violations that can occur to anyone is getting hacked. It could be a personal attack such as a Facebook account, on which 600k successful hacks are achieved daily. It could be something more general such as a database hack that exposes personal information. It could be much, much worse. With all of the security measures out there and counter-hacking attempts, many systems and accounts can be easily secured by having a strong password. There are plenty of hacks that can hit a system or an account that have nothing to do with front door password access, so there’s no reason…

There was once a time when being a geek or a nerd wasn’t cool until you bought your first Porsche. Today, thanks in part to a heightened awareness of intellectual necessities mixed with the onslaught of the internet, smart is chic and the wildly popular TED conferences and their Talks series are leading the charge to make it even more socially acceptable. Part of the revolution has been social media. In the early days, it was better to be frivolous than brainy on social. Today, the funny cat pictures are still popular, but there is a growing sentiment of more refined sensibilities and contributions…

Facebook may or may not have abandoned its long-rumored dream of having its own branded handsets, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t want to be on every smartphone. In what may be a relief to many who dreaded the thought of a Facebook phone, the social networking giant is working with Chinese chipmaker Spreadtrum to embed its software directly into the guts of inexpensive smartphones. This is a much smarter move. Rather than get into the costly, risky world of hardware, they will be able to more easily achieve their goals of world domination mass adoption by going after the target market that eludes…

If you’re going to give up something that you really enjoy, you might as well get paid for it. That was the mentality of a 14-year-old girl who wanted to focus on “getting a job and working harder at school” when she asked her father to draft a different sort of contract. The agreement, shown above, was that she would get off of Facebook for 6 months in exchange for cold hard cash. According to Buzzfeed: Paul Baier, a vice president for Boston energy firm Groom Energy Solutions, drafted up a legal agreement for his 14-year-old daughter Rachel. The contract agrees to award Rachel $200 if she can stay off…