CRUSH – Your one and only source for juicy social media news in four minutes or less. Don’t forget to join us on Facebook and Twitter, and get your daily crush at www.commonsensenms.com

As promised, we’ve got the latest on the debate heating up over Facebook privacy. U.S. Senator Charles Schumer is adding fuel to the fire, asking the FCC to provide privacy guidelines for social networks. Schumer believes “The default policy should be one of privacy, and users should be in control of how they choose to share their information, not the other way around.” This “opt-out” to “opt-in” transition sounds smart to us, but check out the Senator’s Facebook page to find out what everyone else is saying and to put in your own two cents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFWAmMXmIiw

Taking a more active approach, a group in Germany expressed their concern over “privacy invasions” by sabotaging a Google “Street View” car. The Google employee returned to find the tires let down and the camera cables slashed. However, the protestors were kind enough to leave behind the informative note, “Please do not drive away, you have a puncture”.

And perhaps these privacy issues are the source of anxiety and worry bringing an influx of users to the site “Blah Therapy”. This new website pairs random strangers together as “venters” and “listeners”, however, when we tried to unload our feelings the site was down due to an overload of users.

But our epic privacy FAIL comes courtesy of Blippy, a social media site that lets users share with friends what they purchase. Several credit card transactions were visible via a simple Google search, exposing detailed information including amount spent, specific location, and full credit card number. While we hate to say it, we predicted this case of “TMI” from the beginning.

In Twitter news, a new report by Edison Research and Arbitron reveals that while the awareness of Twitter among Americans has increased from 5% to 87% in the past two years, the population is still struggling to find a reason to use it as only 7% of Americans are active users.

However, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has now joined the 140-character brigade in hopes of spreading Bolvarian Revolution. And if Chavez, who had recently declared Twitter “a tool for terror”, can be converted to the dark side, maybe Twitter still has a chance.

In an attempt to aggregate all the “Like’s” around the world, Facebook has created the new website likebutton.me. The site operates as a directory of “likes”, showing what your friends and the rest of the world have deemed most important from popular web sites, such as YouTube, New York Times and Pandora.

And that brings us to our CRUSH OF THE WEEK – we are taking on the serious epidemic sweeping the globe, “Internet Valleygirlification”. With Facebook only allowing a “like option” our freedom of expression is confined into a simplistic, 4-letter, click of affirmation. So that’s why we are hitting the pavement for the CRUSH Road Trip 2010. Don’t worry, we will find out what American’s really have to say and of course share all the juicy with you.

Post from: Social Media Vision

CRUSH: Road Trip 2010

CRUSH – Bringing you the latest in social media news in four minutes or less. Become a fan on Facebook and get your daily crush at www.commonsensenms.com

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the massive lines outside the Apple store have been for the much anticipated, release of the iPad. With over 450,000 sold, it appears that having the iPad will be as commonplace as the iPod. But while there are already 3,000 iPad-specific apps available, there is one thing noticeably absent – Adobe Flash. Apple has banned flash from any of its iPhone and iPad apps, instead choosing only programs developed in HTML5.

Another media mogul Apple is taking a bite out of? Google. Apple is challenging Google’s online advertising dominance with the introduction of the iAd platform, which allows advertisers to develop interactive ads within another application. Although Apple CEO Steve Jobs has concluded it won’t be able to compete with Google’s search advertising, he is hoping Apple can become the leader in the mobile advertising sphere.

The war on climate change is heating up as the NRDC Action Fund rolled out its new media campaign to one-by-one get the 68 Senators who are not actively pushing for comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation to get in the game. And Senators, if you think they aren’t serious, just look at the recent activity towards target number one, Scott Brown of Massachusetts…

While the NRDC Action Fund works on the Senate, fifteen-year old Parker Liautaud is showing his commitment to the environment by skiing to the North Pole. His expedition, funded by none other than General Electric, is in hopes of becoming the first person to check in at the North Pole on Foursquare, which will earn him the coveted “Last Degree” badge.

Freedom of speech has been not only a liberty our country holds with pride, but also the source of controversy when it comes to media. Most recently, the forces for a free and open internet have been dealt a blow by the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C., taking away the FCC’s power to move forward in it’s plans to get more Americans connected to a faster and cheaper internet, and potentially allowing Internet service providers to block internet content they don’t like. Luckily this future isn’t set in stone, and a majority vote of FCC commissioners could give the power needed to both protect consumers and close America’s digital divide. Go to savetheinternet.com to lend your support to this important cause.

The latest news from Twitter is bringing applause from the business community, as the site’s plans for a huge redesign shows a greater emphasis on data. Hopefully this will allow better insight into solving the riddle that has plagued many of us, Tweet R-O-I.

And the quest to solve new media riddles brings us to the CRUSH of the Week, where we highlight a number of individuals who are moving up in the world after making the leap from old to new media. Proving once again that the future where new media rules the day, well, is now.

Post from: Social Media Vision

CRUSH: The Great New Media Migration

So the Facebook f8 conference is a hot topic so I figured I should give some resources and some of the Facebook F8 Announcements.

If you don’t know what f8 here is their definition:

“8 is a Facebook conference where developers and entrepreneurs collaborate on the future of personalized and social technologies.

At f8, members of the Facebook team and the developer community will explore a variety of topics including new tools and techniques, business growth strategies and open technologies. We hope you’ll join us.”

Here are some of the new plugins and api updates and more:

• Like button plugin
• Activity stream plugin
• Recommendations plugin
• Facebook Login plugin (they plan on killing off Facebook Connect)
• Social Bar plugin
• Open Graph Protocol

You can watch the Keynote replay and other videos here – http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/

Here is the code you can use to add the Like button to your website/blog:

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=http://example.com”
scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″
style=”border:none; width:450px; height:80px”></iframe>

Here is what it looks like:

Here are some news updates and blog posts on what is going on:

Why Doesn’t Facebook Look Like This?

As you may be aware, tomorrow, Facebook kicks off its big f8 developer conference in San Francisco. We’ll be there to cover what’s going on, but it looks like a lot of the information is already out there — Inside Facebook, All Facebook, … Obviously, I’m interested in any location announcements the company may make tomorrow — but it’s not clear if Facebook will actually announce anything yet as their plans have been fluid, and possibly still aren’t solidified. …

Hacking The Graph: Live From Facebook’s f8 Conference – Story …

Story analysis for facebook graph . Quickly understand and learn about facebook graph from your favorite sources.

Facebook F8: One graph to rule them all | Technology startup news …

Facebook F8: One graph to rule them all The social network’s big announcement at its F8 developer conference is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the Open.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Facebook F8 Announcements

Hello to all Social Media Vision readers, you may of known me as the previous writer and owner of Social Media Vision. I started the blog back in November 2008 and I had no idea how successful the blog would turn out so quickly. I got Google Page Rank 3 in less than a month and eventually got accepted into the AdAge Power 150 ranking.

As many might already know, I am no longer the owner of Social Media Vision as I am unable to keep up with the blog as I have new projects that I been working on. My vision for SMV was to have great articles on Social Media Marketing and I believe the new owner will do just that.

I hope to still see everyone in the Social Media Sphere and let’s give Garrett Pierson the new owner of SMV a warm welcome!

Sincerely Justin Williams

P.S. Find out more about Garrett Pierson – click here.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Farewell Post by Justin Williams

ShareThis Announces Upgrade

I received an e-mail yesterday announcing a recent change with the ShareThis plugin.  

ShareThis is the self proclaimed next next generation of sharing technology.   If you notice on each of my blog posts and many other blog posts out there, you will see a green button that can be expanded by clicking on it to show a plethora of Social Media networks and content to share online.

Before, when expanding the menu of Social Media content, you sometimes felt a lag or a bit of delay.  Now, ShareThis has just completed a fully optimized redesign in making the plugin lightning fast with a click.  The new design has cut down the load time without sacrificing any of the benefits and automatic updates.

As you can see I personally love Sharethis plugin as it’s a simple and easy plugin that accommodates my needs in having a great platform to share in Social Media.  The ShareThis plugin is very customizable and has post & e-mail options along with the social web options.  The ShareThis team is constantly adding in new social web links and most notably they just added my favorite social bookmark, Sphinn.

By the way….

The team over at ShareThis has been chosen as Mashable’s Open Web Award winner for the Blogger’s Choice and People’s Choice Awards in the Blog Plugins category.   Talk about perfect timing, Congrats to the ShareThis team!  You guys well deserve these 2 amazing rewards and I am looking forward to the new changes in the future.

Post from: Social Media Vision

ShareThis Optimizes Lightning Quick

Google Friend Connect

Earlier this week on December 15th 2008, Google’s Official Blog wrote a post on how Twitter was integrated with Google Friend Connect service. 

This allows Twitter users now to sign in and join in with this social networking service by using Twitter Ids now so you tweet about the sites you join or find other Twitter users in your community.

Twitter Plays Fair

Quickly word spread that Twitter slapped Facebook & Myspace in the face with this breaking news but Twitter CEO Evan Williams had this to tweet about it, saying “For the record: Twitter did not “choose Google, not Facebook.” We’re working with both. We have more to do on the FB side before launch.”

Turns out Twitter wants to debunk rumors on siding with just Google, but what about Myspace you ask?

Twitter was originally one of the launch partners for Myspace ID (similiar to Google Friend Connect and FacebookConnect) Myspace has been using Google Friend Connect currently and is awaiting integration with Twitter.

Twitter’s Biz Stone also quoted from Tech Crunch here saying

Twitter plans to integrate with the open initiatives offered by our friends at MySpace, Facebook, and Google. We officially announced our intent to work with MySpace back in May because we believe strongly in offering the exchange of public information between our complimentary services.

Integrating with MySpace as well as FacebookConnect will require some development effort on our part. Now that we have 13 software engineers working at Twitter and our reliability continues to improve we’re getting closer to integrating with your favorite social networks

 

2 cents

So it appears Twitter want’s to be friends with everyone and is playing it very safe along the lines on who to side with.  Twitter seems at this point very smart to keep a hush hush business advertising model and playing it fair on all sides. 

Keep in mind Twitter was offered a buyout from Facebook earlier and was turned down.  More and more big players are viewing Twitter as “The Hot New Toy” recently, the question is who will Twitter play with the most?

Post from: Social Media Vision

Twitter Playing Fair With Google, Facebook & Myspace

Twitter and Facebook Turf Wars 

For about 3 weeks Facebook and Twitter danced around ideas of a possible merge or buyout.  All those were soon reported dead and finished by All Things Digital in their article.

Facebook was offering 500 million dollars only in shares which Twitter thought was inflated and a misrepresentation of Twitter’s full potential.

So why the Hype?

Well according to All Things Digital “some sources at Facebook said Zuckerberg was becoming frustrated by the buzz Twitter was getting–a market that should have been dominated by Facebook”

When a company shows Buzz and Interest from consumers of course the major companies are going to show interest.  Nobody really likes someone stepping into their turf especially when the challenger is such an enigma to the online world that is picking up popularity fast.

Twitter is Revenue Less

Twitter relies mainly on Investors and start up funders and has no ads on the service yet.  Although Twitter does speak of future revenue techniques nothing is confirmed so far.

So what happens if the Twitter is offered to Facebook?  According to Facebook executives, Facebook might have to deal with huge text/sms fees–up to $75 million annually.

Facebook Alternative

Already the open Facebooks Applications out there has already developed a Twitter application here.

This application feeds off your Twitter updates and updates your Facebook status on every Tweet.  This application is not the official implementation of Twitter but is a good alternative so far to feed your hybrid combination urge so far.

When you think about it Facebook’s main goal is to really take over Twitter’s turf and audience and therefore clinching a victory over Myspace.  Myspace is a tough opponent to beat with already an established user base and the famous Myspace Music audience, it only makes sense that Facebook go after Twitter’s user base.

Twitter wants to wait

The main reason why Twitter didn’t sell is because quite simply they just want to wait and they don’t know if they want to sell now or even ever, there are too many challenges ahead.

Will we see this battle rise once again where Facebook feels threatened? Or will we see another competitor like Myspace jump on the Twitter bandwagon?  It will be very interesting to see.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Twitter and Facebook Turf Wars

Social Media Teens Learning The New Way

Spending time online may be compared to time from watching T.V.  Most parents would agree that they do not like their children online.

Based on most recent studies by MacArthur Foundation show that Teens actually pick up great Social and Technical skills.

The studies show there are two categories of teen engagement with Social Media: “Friendship Driven” and “Interest Driven” 

Friendship Driven

The concept behind friendship driven results help increase Social Skills of Teens with Social Networks by encouraging current and new friends online.

Interest Driven

The interest Driven concept helps Teens explore vasts information online both new and educational.  By leading a free form type of expression, Teens will have access to outside communities normally not within the Teen’s normal realm without Online experience.

Social Media Vision

I can attest to this digital type of learning curve due to many reasons.  One is the ease of accessing information on demand by either Google or Wikipedia.  

Also by being exposed to tons of different expressions and elements on a daily basis can give your more access to become more knowledagble and give you the chance to explore and learn information on your own.

Most of the time, we are learning without thinking about it, for instance playing games or reading articles that your friends share with you may have high vocabulary words that are used and you learn from assumption.

Next time you may think twice on the idea of “Learning Online”

Post from: Social Media Vision

Social Media Teens Learning The New Way

Social Networks Are Becoming Breeding Grounds For Scam

As the Social Media phenomenon increase, people all around the world have found ways to stay connected with friends, family and co-workers.

As users widen their social presence on Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn, they need to be aware that scammers also have shifted their focus to social media sites as the next hot locations to find their next target, according to this article.

“Many [criminals] have now moved to computer networks because that’s where the victims have moved and, therefore, the opportunities,” said Shawn Henry, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Investigations unit. – [Businessweek]

Just as with anything that has become popular in mainstream you have to watch out for the new age scammers who are always looking for a way in to make money with new scams.

The Nigerian Scam

Over the past years Craigslist has been bombarded with Nigerian Scams of pretending to either give money, ask for suspicious transfers or any other method instead of the traditional cash/credit card transaction.

Per Craiglists.

Recognizing scams [Craiglist]

Most scams involve one or more of the following:

• inquiry from someone far away, often in another country
• Western Union, Money Gram, cashier’s check, money order, shipping, escrow service, or a “guarantee”
• inability or refusal to meet face-to-face before consumating transaction

Post from: Social Media Vision

Social Networks Are Becoming Breeding Grounds For Scam

Social Gaming

On Facebooks Official Blog today, Shervin Pishevar is the Co-founder and CEO of the Social Gaming Network (SGN), which builds social games on both Facebook and iPhone wrote a guest post.

Social Gaming has been increasingly popular over the years especially with the launch of the Nintendo Wii.  Shervin pointed out the he thinks gaming is inherently social.  SGN’s latest application is the first application that connects your friends, the Web, Facebook and the iPhone.

The Iphone acts like Nintendo’s Wii Controllers for web-based gaming on Facebook, letting you play games with far away friends.  Just like Xbox live and PS Online you can social game play with friends all over the world and don’t have to wait on a real life friend to come over and play.

Social Gaming Network’s has four sports games to start off with.  Golf, Baseball, Basketball and Bowling pitting you against other iPhone users over the net.

It’s pretty simple to get started. Connect your iPhone to a Wi-Fi network, register for an account, download the app and start playing.

Apple has already been taking over some market share from PSP and Nintendo DS portables with portable gaming now on the Ipod Touch, looks like Apple has it’s eye on gaming this season and the competition should be careful.  

View the Demo Below

Post from: Social Media Vision

Iphone Takes On Wii With Social Gaming Ifun Games