Mediaboss Marketing

A deals site for those with an overdeveloped sense of mortality? Possibly, but the team behind a new social network,My-bucketlist.net, which launches on March 30, say their goal is to connect people to check off shared goals togetherwhile offering group discounts.

Users sign up on the site or through Facebook, add items to their lists, and connect with friends and other people on the site who share the same goals. Users decide whom to invite and accept into their group.For popular goals such as skydiving, visiting the Eiffel Tower, or swimming with dolphins, My-bucketlist contacts vendors to offer services at a discounted rate. The most popular items are travel or adventure based, co-founder AndrewJorgensen says. For niche goalssay, traveling to the South Polevendors send targeted offers. Vendors might also sell dance lessons or language classes or software.

The network is the newest service developed byRemembered.com, a three-person company co-founded in 2009 by Jorgensen, now 46, and developer Adolfo Espadas, 34. When he started the company, Jorgensen had just recovered from swine flu. This kind of makes you think about your life and what youre doing, he says. Thats when Jorgensen started thinking about the death-care business.The Salt Lake City-basedcompanylaunchedRemembered.com in September 2010 as a place for users to create online memorials for $10 to $20.Freefuneralnotice.com allows people to send out announcements via e-mail or Facebook. Also in development are My Final Message, which sends pre-recorded video messages to friends and family in the event of ones passing, and Account Vault, which designates a recipient for a dead users IDs and passwords.

Not exactly cheery stuff. A lot of the business we were doing were more on the death-care side of things, Jorgensen says. Its not exactly the most uplifting. Sometimes it can be very positive, but sometimes it can be on the emotional side.

Hence My-bucketlist, acheerier turn for the field of death care.The idea stemmed from the pairs frustration with daily deal sites, which spam subscribers with offers that dont interest them. They wanted to achieve simultaneous aims: stay in the death-care business, which is profitable for Remembered.com, while offering deals targeted at peoples life goals. The company sells ads and collects a commission on sales generated by the site.

In beta, My-bucketlist has signed up about 1,000 users, most of them 30 and younger. Jorgensen expects they will be the sites main user demographic because they grew up using Facebook and Twitter.Theyre not people who have a high preoccupation with dying, he concedes. Theyre people who have their life ahead of them, and they are making their list of things they want to do.

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Social Networking For Your Bucket List

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/556b1c35/benchmarking_consu) has announced the addition of the "Benchmarking Consumer Social Networks and Their Applications in Taiwan and China" report to their offering.

Chinese QQ and weibo.com have caught the spotlight in the global consumer social networking market owing to their considerable growth and rapid user base increase in China. Many vendors are eyeing social networking development in the Taiwan market as well. This report offers insight into the applications and service preferences of Taiwanese and Chinese consumer social networks for branded and social networking vendors outlining their future development plans.

List of Topics

- Touching on Internet penetration and social networking market development in Taiwan and China

- Social networking platform preferences of Taiwanese and Chinese consumers, including discussion forums, social utility sites, multimedia-sharing sites, and microblogs

- Different preferences for application activities between Taiwanese and Chinese consumers

- Social platform application usage levels of Taiwanese and Chinese consumers in terms of social networking and information application digital capabilities

- Consumer preferences towards platforms, activities, and applications analyses, it is found that Taiwan consumers focus more on social utility sites and discussion forums, while integrated mobile applications satisfy consumer demand for self-expression in China

Key Topics Covered:

1. China's Internet User Base 30 Times Larger than Taiwan's; Social Networking Market Expected to See Strong Growth

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Research and Markets: Benchmarking Consumer Social Networks and Their Applications in Taiwan and China Report Offers ...

A new era ... NSW schools are set to become more relaxed after students accessing social networking sites.

THE ban on students accessing social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter at school could be relaxed as the NSW Education Department reviews its internet filtering policy.

Social media sites are at present blocked, but with its internet filtering contract due to expire, the department is surveying schools to ensure the next version of the software meets their needs.

Schools ''have been asked to complete a survey designed to identify the features they believe are required in the future'', a department spokesman said. ''Part of this process has included the question of student access to sites under the social networking category.''

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The department's director of public schools, Dianne Marshall, told an education forum this week she believed that social networking would play a major role in education.

Lila Mularczyk, the deputy president of the NSW Secondary Principals Council - which reviews internet filtering categories as part of a schools web-filtering control group - said there had been varied responses towards social networking.

But through ongoing consultation with the Digital Education Revolution program, the council was aware of websites that could be useful for students to access at school and was looking forward to the survey results, she said.

A spokeswoman for the NSW Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations, Rachael Sowden, said parents would welcome supervision of students accessing social networking sites at school.

''Kids are actually accessing it at school anyway on their mobile phones. It's better to help support our students rather than put our heads in the sand and hope they don't access it by blocking it. We'd much rather have policies in place that support its safe usage.''

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NSW schools may lift social networking ban

27-03-2012 08:47 Richard Allan, Facebook's director of policy in Europe, talks with Ian Katz about Facebook's policy on expansion into China and how much access to users' details it is willing to allow http://www.guardian.co.uk

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Guardian Open Weekend: Facebook and China - the Guardian - Video

A new social networking trend has users getting increasingly personal with their digital content.

We are inundated with ways to share. Photos, food, news, videos, games, you name it there are innumerable platforms for sharing content with the World Wide Web. Privacy has become an increasingly important aspect of these social networks, and applications have responded to varying degrees. Google+ Circles were arguably one of the most distinct steps toward more customized sharing, and a Facebook Lists refocus followed suit.

Not good enough, say some. The private social network may sound like an oxymoron, but it is a very real emerging trend. Path could be seen as the grandfather for this momentum. The app originally introduced itself with the idea of whittling down your friend list to a select 50 people. But some other networks that have hit the market are trying to go even smaller. FamilyLeaf is a new application to connect your relatives, Nextdoor is only for you and your neighbors. Smaller yet: applications like Pair and TheIcebreak are for couples only (the latter, to be fair, is also a curated activity guide but there is a strong social element). Thats as small as your social network can get.

So whats the impetus for these increasingly exclusive platforms? You can chalk part of it up to privacy fears. Social networks have gotten big, cumbersome, and laden with concerns over where your data is going and what is being done with it. Consider that fact that these sites are go-tos for employers, users have to keep strict tabs over whats made public, whats showing up, and who they are friends with. Its a lot of work, admittedly.

At the same time, the question of whether a private social network needs to exist is begging to be asked. Isnt that what phone calls or text messages or Skype chats or emails are for? The problem of private, digital communication was solved a long time ago. Social networks became a thing because we hadnt yet found a way for mass, community-driven digital experiences. Then the Myspaces and the Friendsters came along and started that evolution, setting the stage for what we know and use today.

You could argue that the purpose of the truly private social network is to offer up all the features that public platforms do for you and your significant other. The ability to communicate via a News Feed-like function, to post and share photos and links and videos. Its more visually rich and interesting than an email or text thread maybe only slightly though. In fact ,most of the screenshots from Pair just look like an iMessage thread.

While all of these options come with their benefits (for instance with Pair you can log details like anniversary reminders and touch each other with virtual fingerprints; with TheIcebreak you get points that can be redeemed for date nights), the overwhelming emotion these platforms seem to be preying on is narcissism.

The easy culprit is to place the blame on the privacy fears that come with using sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, but those alone arent entirely responsible. Part of the draw is the unquenchable thirst to digitally document ourselves that social media has created. Jon Mitchell over at ReadWriteWeb recently wrote about quitting Path:

I had my doubts about Path 2.0 when it launched. It was like a gorgeous mirror for gazing at oneself. It seemed vain and unnecessary.

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Can you really make a ‘personal’ social network?