Social Media

Tumblr is known to be one of the simplest blogging platforms around the World Wide Web and it has been doing a lot of progress. If you rate their effectiveness, you can see that Tumblr is rated between WordPress and Twitter.

WordPress would require some effort in order to create some organized content while in Twitter the whole process is almost effortless. Tumblr offers something in between. It is viewed as a tool for users that want to have a blog with videos, photos and other content embedded but do not have the time to struggle with a more complex blogging platform.

In fact the traffic and the user base of Tumblr are growing fast and they have recently hit some milestones on the way. Of course if you compare it to the success of Twitter, Tumblr still has a long way to go but it is definitely growing fast enough in order to make an impact in the web.

The Tumblr team is doing their best to provide the best features as well. They have added the option to add static pages to your Tumblr blog recently and now there are also dead simple ways in order to directly upload videos in your blog.

Tumblr is now planning to launch two revenue generating features this month. The details are scarce but it is known that these features will be powered by a widget. The success of this revenue generating feature of Tumblr is viewed as paving the way for micro blogging networks – an area that is traditionally devoid of revenue.

Big and small companies now have a better way  to use the world’s largest social network as their marketing channel.

Omniture, one of the best enterprise web analytics providers has gained a stronger partnership with Facebook as it introduces a new tool for managing Facebook ad campaigns. Omniture announced that customers can now automate, purchase and track their Facebook ad buys more thoroughly.

This offer is geared towards marketers who are interested in Facebook media buys. The new tool by Omniture has custom, reporting options for a more complete and professional outlook when it comes to the analytics and effectiveness of customer engagement that is generated by their campaigns.

The said tool by Omniture would be able to help companies understand how effective Facebook advertising is and would help encourage these companies to do more.

Omniture’s products have gone through a lot of evolutions in the past years in order to help support not only Facebook application measurement but also Twitter analytics. The addition of the Facebook ad measurement tool was a good and logical move for the Adobe owned company.

A big part of Facebook’s projected revenue for the year 2010 comes from ad buys which is one of the reasons why Facebook and Omniture would want to help their marketers have a better analysis and get to spend more and optimize on their Facebook Ad campaigns.

For all iPhone owners out there it is now possible for you to add someone you just met right on the spot as a Facebook friend. All you need is a single bump with the use of the Bump iPhone app.

If you are unfamiliar with this iPhone app, here’s a small refresher. Bump allows you to share contact information with people by simply bumping your iPhone once with another person’s iPhone. You have to take note that the iPhones must touch each other in order for the app to work – you can not just shake your iPhone in the air. After this Bump will then connect the iPhones together and transfer your contact information.

Now, the Bump iPhone app is being updated with the help of social media giant Facebook. All you have to do is link your Facebook account to Bump and if the person you want to swap information with does the same you can now initiate a friend request on the spot. After you have sent it, a prompt would appear on the other person’s iPhone and she or he can either accept or deny your request. It is as simple as that. This has got a lot of iPhone users talking.

Bump’s Facebook integration is considered to be the first iPhone app that is able to initiate and accept friend requests. Jake Mintz, the co-founder of Bump technologies had worked closely with Facebook to make this a possibility. He also boasted that this is just the first of many social media integrations that would be coming to Bump.

A lot of celebrities and well known public personalities are joining the Twitter bandwagon. Even religious leaders can not get away from the online craze. If you need proof, the Dalai Lama has joined the social media giant recently this week.

It can be recalled that there was a @Dalai Lama account before but it was proven to be faked. The said Dalai Lama account had fooled the media and this event had played a great role in Twitter’s verification of accounts especially for those who can have great influences to the public such as the Dalai Lama himself.

This time, Twitter was able to verify Dalai Lama and confirms that this is the real thing although the Dalai Lama has not posted any personal messages or tweets yet so far. If you check his account you would see that it is pulling out blog posts and albums from the official Dalai Lama website and are twitting them through the twitterfeed. But it can be assured that you would be seeing real engagement from the Dalai Lama later on.

Evan Williams, founder of Twitter, posted a message this week that he had just met the Dalai Lama in Los Angeles and had a talk with him about using Twitter. He said that the Dalai Lama used to laugh at the thought of using social media but now the Dalai Lama himself has his own official Twitter site set up by his office in India.

It is no doubt now that Twitter is now one of the best ways for you to get to know better well known personalities and get to hear their message right from the horse’s mouth.

A twitter phishing attack has been going on lately and the attack aims to obtain twitter logins through direct messages. If you have received a message that says “lol is this you”, “lol is this me?” or “lol this is funny” with a link to a site called bzpharma you are advised not to click on the link and forget about curiosity.

If you happen to click on the link and entertained the details that are being asked – spammers can already take over your account. Then they can use your account to spam the same direct message to all your friends.

The widespread attack tricked Twitter users to logging into a fake Twitter page which lets users give their account details over to the spammers. The links would vary and you are advised not to click on links that has reference to bzpharma.net as well.

Luckily, your account will not be compromised if you are merely receiving this message. However, if you find that your account is sending these messages then it is advised that you change your password as soon as possible.

The phishers are using the accounts they have taken over to send out spam and have also resulted to a lot of Viagra related messages on Twitter. One example of these messages are “Get bigger and have sex longer” then leading to a link that would send you to a sexual enhancement website.

If you see that you are seeing unusual messages similar to the example above being sent from your own Twitter account this means that it has been compromised. Stop the problem by changing your twitter password immediately.

Kikin is the newest browser plugin for Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer that adds some rich social media context to your web browsing experience as you search and surf the World Wide Web.

As the pioneer of user-centricity, Kikin is surely putting a change on how people are finding and using the information that they need in the internet.

There are different search engines available these days that are cramming more relevant information to the top of their search results. The thing is that they are getting their data from networks and places that are not consistent. Kikin can add to that lacking consistency.

All you have to do is to choose the sites that you want Kikin to hunt for in your searches when you search for a topic so that you can get them at the top of your results page. Let’s say you prefer to get data from Wikipedia or Bing or Hulu – then these sites would be at the top of your results page. This way you steer clear from web sites that have nothing to do with what you really want.

If you get connected to your Facebook or Twitter account you can see comments that would be related to the topic that you are searching for as well either from your friends or from other public comments in the site. When you view a video clip on YouTube or when you look at a movie on Amazon.com then a Kikin bar will show up at the top of the page that can show you the recent searches for that item and feedback from Facebook, Twitter or other options. You do not have to worry about this bar since you can easily close it as well.

For media searches like music, movies and TV shows, Kikin has a menu that is very easy to navigate and has a nice context. You will find this to be more convenient compared to going through the individual sites.

One more thing that you will love about Kikin is that you are able to share content that you find in your web browsing easily on your Twitter, Facebook or e-mail account.

With FirstFollower.com any Twitter can now identify who their first followers are. The site allows its users to see not only their own first follower but the first followers of other twitter users as well. The program is designed by Victor Babichev, a Russian developer.

The site is very easy to use. All you have to do is enter the desired Twitter handle. Take note that you should eliminate the” @ “sign and that you should capitalize if it is needed since the site is case sensitive. After that, click on the “wanna know” button. After this, you will be given the name of your first follower along with a pre-generated message from Twitter that states their praise of allegiance to you as a user.

lightweight Twitter app is just a small sample of the kinds of social graph analysis that can be made possible by Twitter’s open user data. However, given the fact that Twitter has change the way they listed their followers in the beginning of this year, there are some doubts as to whether the program is indeed accurate.

Think about it – who was the first person to follow you on Twitter and are you following them too? Chances are, you probably would not exactly remember who first took notice of your existence in the micro blogging site and followed you first in the world of Twitter and it would not hurt to find out. Sometimes the results can be pretty interesting and fun. Take for example

WordPress 2.9 has been recently released to WordPress users. The latest version is called “Carmen” and includes a lot of notable additions which include a image editing tool so that you can scale, crop and rotate your pictures, simpler video embeds and to save you a lot of time, there is now batch plugin updating.

WordPress 2.9 focuses on making publishing and the managing of your blog content easier. Since WordPress holds plugins in high regards, it just makes sense that WordPress made the plugin compatibility and update process as easy as possible so that they can be compatible with the current version as well.

There is also a new Trash feature. Instead of seeing the word “delete” you will be seeing the word “trash” instead. Every time you trash a post, page or comment it gets moved to the WordPress trashcan where it will stay for 30 days. So if you change your mind and you want to retrieve something, you are able to get it back as long as a month has not passed. All you have to do is to go to the new Trash tab and you can restore or permanently delete the content.

WordPress 2.9 can also automatically repair database tables in order to keep things more optimized so you can now have custom fields in the contact area, comment metadata and other features as well.

By default you will find that the new version supports Flickr, YouTube, Google Video, Photobucket, WordPress TV, Blip TV, Daily Motion, Scribd, Poll Daddy and many more.

The iPhone’s App Store may be seeing a competition with the Android Market with the latter growing at a very rapid rate. AndroLib, the online store has declared that they had just reached the 20,000 mark meaning that they have doubled in size within the last five months. According to AndroLib, Android was able to hit the milestone earlier today and shows no sign of slowing and they are very excited with this development. It is assumed that the Android market will be able to hit 30,000 in the next 2-3 months which is one good way to start the New Year. Google does not disclose the figures of the Android Market but AndroLib and others are able to track what apps are added and at what rate. By the different statistics gathered, it is quite clear that the Android development is on the rise. The success of Android is evident in the month of November which is considered to be the biggest month in the history for both new apps in the English language Android Market and is considered to be their biggest gain month.

Experts think that 2010 will be a good year for Android with all the handsets coming up and now that almost everything is going mobile. Twenty thousand apps is a nice way to kick off into the New Year. 15 percent of all applications in the Android Market are games which are very similar to the App Store’s statistics but it has been noted that the methodologies for categorizing the same application type is not necessarily the same.