31-07-2012 18:07 It's amazing how much trouble can be stirred up in 140 characters. The 2012 Olympics are being shaped, shaken and indisputably changed by a social media revolution that four years ago in Beijing was in its toddlerhood. (July 31)
Excerpt from:
Olympics Awash in Twitter, for Better or Worse - Video
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
Thursday, August 2, 2012
FACEBOOK is in a lot of trouble. While it may be any day now that it will reach a billion users, its stock has been less than stellar. In fact, its quite disappointing. After setting the initial price at $38 per share, which valued the company at around $100 billion, it is now $20.80 per share, at least as of this writing. This means most investors who bought shares during the initial offering have lost nearly half their money. Close to $50 billion in value wiped out.
This also goes true for Zynga (makers of Farmville, Mafia Wars and many other favorite games in Facebook) as well as Groupon, which tends to suggest that social media suddenly seemed to be out of favor.
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On the other hand, technology continues to affect significantly the way we work and play, with the reports that in the London Olympics, several athletes were barred from the competition due to posts or comments they made in Twitter and other social media sites. It seems every day, there are reports of people losing their jobs, fighting over their marriage, friends or family finding each other after a number of years or suing each other in court because of social media.
Meanwhile, I am quite excited that Hotmail, which can be considered as one of the Internets blazing success in social communications since way back in the 1990s, is getting another facelift.
We here in the Philippines dont feel it, but Hotmail is still the worlds biggest free email system with over 350 million users. Hotmail was launched in 1995, and when it became a hot success, it was bought by Microsoft. Hotmail is very popular in some countries, but very unhip in others, including the Philippines (an informal survey of friends showed that probably over 80 percent of people use Yahoo).
Microsoft tried to reinvent it and a few years back, it became Microsoft Live. Now, there is another rebranding, and it might be renamed into Outlook Mail (www.outlook.com). The email is supposedly going to morph into a hybrid Hotmail and Microsoft Outlook available via the Internet. It is hard to describe, but if you can, check out the new website.
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Ng: Are social networking sites in trouble?
Illinois employers will not be able to ask employees or prospective employees for social networking user names and passwords under a new law signed by Gov. Pat Quinn Tuesday.
"Employers certainly aren't allowed to ask for the keys to an employee's home to nose around there, and I believe that same expectation of personal privacy and personal space should be extended to a social networking account," said Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno (R-Lemont), who sponsored the legislation in the state senate.
House Bill 3782 makes it unlawful for an employer to demand access to an employee or prospective employee's social networking accounts. The law does, however, allow employers to monitor activity on work computers and allows employers to use information shared publicly on social networking sites.
It also specifically excludes email in its definition of social networking websites.
"Members of the workforce should not be punished for information their employers don't legally have the right to have,"Quinn said in a release. "As use of social media continues to expand, this new law will protect workers and their right to personal privacy."
The law is set to take effect Jan. 1.
Original post:
Law Puts Employers on "Limited Profile"
At a tense time for the newly public company, three top executives announce they are departing from the social-networking giant, all in one day.
It was a three-in-one blow today for Facebook execs announcing their departure from the company.
All Things Digital reports that Director of Platform Partnerships Ethan Beard first said he was planning to leave the company; then, Platform Marketing Director Katie Mitic said she had plans to leave too. And finally, Facebook's Mobile Platform Marketing Manager Jonathan Matus also announced his departure.
All three employees made the announcements on their Facebook timelines and said that they've had good experiences working at the social network. Beard wrote, "I've had the pleasure of helping build an ecosystem of incredible developers from innovative startups and established companies."
Ethan Beard
With four years under his belt at the company, Beard was in charge of developing partnerships with many of the app makers that work with Facebook, according to AllThingsD. Mitic and Matus were also on the marketing side of the platform.
AllThingsD points out that investors have worried that Facebook would face a brain drain when it went public and if this is indeed the beginning, it could lead to "what all growing companies dread -- a stall in company innovation and proper leadership."
None of the three execs announced successors to their posts or specified what exactly they plan to do once they leave the social network.
CNET contacted Facebook for comment. We'll update the story when we get more information.
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Three Facebook execs bow out of the social network
Social media and social networking for internal collaboration and knowledge sharing can raise the productivity of some employees by up to 25 per cent according to a McKinsey report released last month.
However, internal deployment of social technologies by businesses often involves a spike in engagement followed by a drop-off in participation as the novelty wears off, according to McKinsey. This can be a product of failing to integrate social technologies into work processes and a lack of attention to changing workforce culture to maintain internal social networking adoption rates.
To promote the kind of knowledge sharing that will actually increase productivity requires developing users as ongoing participants, not merely passive consumers. Its tackling this problem that led to the development of Barter: A social networking platform created at MITs Media Lab.
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All social media services, especially knowledge-related platforms that rely on users' participation, sharing, and contribution all face the challenge of building incentives for users, says Dawei Shen, the MIT PhD candidate who developed the platform.
One problem faced by organisations with a fixed employee incentive for contributing knowledge, for example $100 per article, is it leads to an oversupply of garbage information, and undersupply of really valuable information, Shen says. A market is a term that's the opposite let the market decide how to allocate resources and what knowledge should be built, and how it should be priced.
Using Barter, people buy and sell ideas, documents, questions and answers using virtual points, and virtual currency in a decentralised way. But building a knowledge market has its own set of problems owing to the nature of knowledge products, Shen says. Knowledge products are peculiar non-rivalrous, non-excludable, and repetition cost is zero. Information asymmetry is severe, and knowledge has spillover effects that are not captured by transactions. My research is to devise mechanism that addresses these problems.
We are applying innovative market mechanisms and established economic theories and practice to the domain of social collaboration/knowledge management software, especially trying to optimise incentive design, he says.
In short, we are building a knowledge economy with currency, market dynamics, and sophisticated economic tools optimising both social and material incentives, instead of simply building another social media website.
The platform consists of three components: Knowledge currency, knowledge markets, and economic policies, which consist of monetary policies and fiscal policies.
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What's your idea worth? Building a social knowledge market with Barter