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In the past few years, academia-specific social networking websites have grown in popularity among faculty members at universities across the United States.

These websites, including Academia.edu, Zotero.org and several others, offer new and efficient ways for scholars and students to share research and find colleagues who share their interests. Similar to Facebook and Twitter, these websites allow academics to follow updates in colleagues work and research while sharing their own.

While a majority of students and faculty may place more faith in sharing work through academic journals and other tried-and-true peer reviews, the time efficiency offered by digital publishing on growing academic social networks may entice more users to join in the future.

Some might be concerned that edits made to papers shared online tend to have less depth than those made in academic journals.

Yet in spite of apparent shortfalls in the quality of digital publishing, the open communication and socialization offered by these new websites retain promise for students searching for potential peers and newer research in their fields of interests.

Academia.edu alone has more than 1.3 million users, 3,685 of whom are affiliated with UCLA.

Christine Borgman, the presidential chair and a professor of information studies, is one of many professors at UCLA who have used these websites in their courses.

Borgman said students in one of her advanced graduate seminars participate in a Zotero group to pool their works as a group and to track one anothers research interests.

The use of these websites by faculty members and students, however, does not counteract the risks of using social networking websites. With general social networks like Facebook, the ability to share personal or professional information does not include the ability to choose who has access to that information.

This concern for privacy, however, is not an essential issue for academic websites, as content posted by users is typically related to their studies and set in a more professional tone than might be expected on more general interest networking websites such as Facebook. Furthermore, this content is usually only viewed by faculty and students in the same field.

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Social researching: Academia-specific networking websites offer new, efficient ways for scholars to connect, share works

With New Look, Bing Gets More Organized, Social

Microsoft is revamping its search engine and exploiting the growth of social networking online.

Microsoft

In an effort to make searching on the Web simpler, faster, and more socialand further differentiate itself from market leader GoogleMicrosoft's Bing search engine is getting a new look.

On Thursday, Bing said it will roll out a new design over the next few weeks that trades in its existing search results page formata mix of images and various types of text-based results on a one-column pagefor a layout in three separate panes featuring traditional text results, results from specific information sources and services, and results related to your social-network friends.

At an event to unveil the refresh in San Francisco on Thursday, Derrick Connell, Bing's corporate vice president of search program management, said Bing's search results page needed to evolve. "If we don't evolve our search result pages, in the industry we'll eventually become obsolete," he said.

Evolution is especially important if Bing wants to gain market share. The search engine is a very distant second to Google, pulling in 15.3 percent of U.S. search queries in March compared to Google's 66.4 percent, according to comScore.

Microsoft clearly believes these changes must include increased organization of social content, which has exploded with the popularity of Twitter and Facebook over the past several years. Within Bing's results, a new "Sidebar" column will organize relevant content from your friends on social sites like Twitter and Facebook. For example, Bing will suggest friends who might be knowledgeable about a specific topic by considering their listed "likes" on Facebook. A feed will also let you see and respond to your friends' Facebook updates and questions. And users will be able to ask their Facebook friends questions via Bing.

Basic text results will still be dominant with the new design, and executives said Thursday that separating them is meant to declutter the page and make it simpler to find specific links.

A third pane, called "Snapshot," will show search results related to places and services, such as maps and restaurant reviews. A partnership with OpenTable will let users make reservations on the results page.

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With New Look, Bing Gets More Organized, Social

FORTUNE -- Facebook is known for creating the most popular social networking tool, not designing hardware. But the company has taken a do-it-yourself approach to building out its data centers and the servers and racks that fill them. The result? Data centers that are 38% more efficient and 24% cheaper than average, according to Frank Frankovsky, director of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook.

In the hopes of driving the cost down further, Facebook has even "open sourced" its designs -- making it possible for anyone to contribute to (and replicate) what its engineers have built. Last week, as most of the business world speculated on the social networking site's upcoming IPO, Facebook held a conference for its Open Compute Project, a consortium that now includes the likes of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and AMD (AMD). We caught up with Frankovsky to find out more about Facebook's open source strategy and what's next for the Open Compute Project.

FORTUNE: Why did you start the Open Compute Project?

Frankovsky: When we designed and built our first data center, we exceeded even some of our own internal goals. And we immediately thought it would be unnatural not to share this because we've all benefited so much from open source software like the infrastructure software we've built our business on. This is why our software engineers can focus on innovation every day, on making the world more connected. We don't need to go and reinvent an operating system. So we thought, let's go and open source the hardware space so that we can give back too. Also, no single company is ever going to have all of the best brainpower in the entire industry under one roof. By open sourcing, you can get the industry's best brainpower focused together. You get a bunch of great ideas, and it accelerates the pace of innovation.

A lot of companies fight standardization and commoditization. How have traditional suppliers reacted to Open Compute?

While the initial reaction might have been resistance, these are great innovation companies and they know that at some point in order to remain competitive and successful you have to reinvent yourself.

Are there any other efforts out there to open source data center hardware?

We have partnerships with a whole bunch of other projects , but we are specifically focused on the hardware design in the data center, and to my knowledge there are no other projects specifically around this. The old method is to keep all your cards close to your chest without sharing. The biggest project that inspired me and all of us at Facebook to get involved is the open source operating system Linux and the impact it had on the market. We want to have a similar impact on hardware.

Are there technologies that you won't "open source" and share with others?

We think really, really carefully about what we open source. We've shared how we pick data center sites. But when we open sourced our data center blueprints we didn't include the main point of entry for fiber runswe felt it was a security issue. So there are some things like that that we don't put out in the open. But that's really because we need to defend ourselves and our end users. The thing we won't open source are the key innovations we have in the application space. Those are the unique things that differentiate Facebook and the reason more than 900 million people come to Facebook. Intel is one of the founding members of the Open Compute Project. It also happens to have one of the richest IP portfolios in the industry. Intel's engineers have made significant contributions [to Open Compute] but we wouldn't expect them to share how they design CPUs.

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The other field Facebook wants to revolutionize

NEW YORK, May 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --Online social gaming has become a major moneymaker and is going to continue to grow, though the rate of growth is slowing considerably, according to a new national consumer study by Frank N. Magid Associates conducted in late March of 2012.

The research, conducted as part of the Magid Media Futures 2012 study, found social network gaming user growth has slowed in the United States. About two in five (38%) social network users, up slightly from 36% in '11, say they regularly play games on social networks. Social network gaming has decreased among its primary demographic, females age 12-44, with less than 43% of users age 12-17 (down from 54% in 2011) and about 36% of users 25-44 (down from 40% in 2011) reporting playing on a weekly basis.

However, there have been substantial increases in older age groups playing social games online, including males age 45-54 (up 15% from 2011) and 55-64 (up 9% from 2011), and females 45-54 (up 9% from 2011) and 55-64 (up 10% from 2011).

The Magid study also reports that consumers playing social network games say they will decrease the amount of money they spend on such games over the next 12 months. The average social network gamer who spends money on these games indicates that they are spending $51 vs. $78 last year on average. This year 34% of gamers say they are planning to spend less on social games in the next year vs. 22% who say they will spend more.

Consumers who play games on video game consoles indicate they expect to increase their spending on console games. One area expected to see an increase in spending in particular is Downloadable Content (DLC) for gaming consoles. A third of console gamers (33%) say they have bought DLC in the past with the average DLC consumer currently spending about $50 per year. Spending is expected to grow in the next year to 45% of gamers. This percentage includes those individuals who have not bought DLC in the past but plan on buying in the near future.

In order to buy DLC a gamer needs to have a console that is connected to the Internet. More than two-thirds of Xbox and PlayStation gamers in the U.S. go online multiple times a week using their console. Non-gaming activities now account for about a third of all time spent online on a connected console among those gamers. According to console gamers, online access is driving more spending and playing on their console. Online play has shown no signs of slowing; in fact online console player penetration is likely to grow by 10% or more next year as more console players are connecting for the first time.

Additionally, consumers clearly want cross-platform connectivity, with more than half of Xbox and PS3 owners wanting access to their game networks via their mobile phones.

About Frank N. Magid Associates

Frank N. Magid Associates, Inc. is a leading research-based consulting firm that helps its clients become more profitable by solving problems and helping them take advantage of opportunities. We are unique because for 55 years we have carefully studied human behavior and how communication affects it. We possess an uncanny understanding of what and how marketing and communication will motivate people to behave in certain ways. We leverage this keen understanding of consumers, our practical operational expertise and network of industry leaders to help clients across industries successfully develop and market products and services. Frank N. Magid Associates serves its' clients through corporate offices in Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco and Marion, Iowa.

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Magid National Study Finds Social Networking Gaming Growth is Slowing

For political parties in Dallas, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have become valuable tools for communication and winning votes. The opportunities offered by these sites made a big difference in the 2008 elections, and many hope to capitalize on them again in November of 2010.

For Democrats, social networking connects to voters they need to target. "In 2008, we saw a whole new set of voters come in," according to Steve Tillery, executive director of the Dallas County Democratic Party. "A lot of local candidates had been using it, and there was lots of chatter there. We decided we needed to get in on this and build some excitement."

"It's helped in a few ways," Dallas County Republican Party chairman Jonathan Neerman said of social networking. "We've become more nimble in our communication tactics. When news breaks, you can quickly notify your entire mail list. It has also helped us reach out to different audiences."

The Democratic and Republican Parties both utilize Facebook, mostly to pass along political news of local interest and to promote their candidates. It has also been an effective fund-raising tool for Republicans. During a recent Dallas visit by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the county GOP used Facebook to promote a "money-bomb," a concentrated money-raising effort. Supporters were asked to contribute to the party in a "money-bomb" to counter Pelosi's local fund-raising efforts. All told, county Republicans raised over $10,000.

According to Tillery, the county Democratic party does not use social networking for fund-raising. "It just hasn't been successful for us," he said. What has worked for Democrats, he said, is using Facebook to organize volunteer efforts. During several recent neighborhood walks to "get out the vote," over 100 volunteers turned out, largely due to word on Facebook.

Some candidates also use social networking as a fund-raising tool. Stephen Broden, who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives in District 30 (Texas), uses Facebook and Twitter to communicate with supporters, even those outside his district. Many of them use links on his Facebook page to contribute to his campaign.

YouTube may be an entertainment source for most, but it has become a powerful political tool as well. The Dallas County Republican Party has used their official YouTube channel (dallascountygop) to post news stories, videos from rallies and speeches, and even original viral videos. When chairman Jonathan Neerman posted a video of his young daughter delivering yard signs, the response was instant. "We had people calling us wanting to have my daughter deliver signs to them," he said.

The Dallas County Democratic Party also has an official channel (dallascountydems2010) that shares videos of recent neighborhood walks in Dallas. The Dallas County Young Democrats posted a series of videos called "Meet the Democrats," featuring local candidates speaking from the heart about why they are running.

Twitter has been an especially effective tool used by candidates to keep in touch with supporters, and even make news. When Debra Medina was running for governor, she often made announcements via Twitter, ahead of traditional press releases.

As both parties look to make the most of their social networks, the big question is what comes next. "I want to know what is going to be the next big thing we will have to get into," Tillery said. "What is going to replace Facebook and Twitter?"

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Dallas Political Parties Use Social Networking to Reach Voters