People soshalize. They don't care how it's spelled. They just do it.
Every year many people perform the loose ritual of making promises to themselves to improve something or another in their life. Many say they will strive to be healthier. Others set more ethereal goals such as “I will live life with no limits in 2012.”
Every year (for a whopping 3 years running!) we highlight who we believe is the top social media site of the year. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s not based on (much) empirical data. There’s no voting. The team sits down and argues for an hour on Skype and I write up the piece.
The story of Ben Breedlove is sweeping the internet. It has achieved full “viral” status by reaching both the social media and mainstream media audience. Just as Susan Boyle did with her voice and Chuck Testa did with his humor, Ben Breedlove’s story went from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to mainstream media through television.
I know, it’s hard to tear yourself away from Twitter and Facebook. It’s probably even harder for your friends and family, who are trying to respond to the many messages you’ve left them. This holiday season, give them – and yourself – a break with an eBook that will give them a new perspective on their social media lives.
It was a year where a ton (perhaps too much) attention was given to social media. While it’s relatively old in internet years, every day brings more people onto Twitter, Facebook, and apparently even Google+. 2011 proved to have some very excellent uses for social media from amplifying rage in Egypt to major IPOs in the tech industry (met with relatively little success, unfortunately).
Early signs of the mass exodus from GoDaddy are already starting to show up and the unofficial Leave GoDaddy Day is still later this week. First, they supported SOPA, the evil bill that would weaken the internet as we know it today. Then, due to a mass uprising by prominent GoDaddy users and attacks coming from prominent social media sites like Reddit, they dropped their support of SOPA and did what they could on Twitter to get the word out.
Everything’s better now, right?
Nope.
If you really want to ruin a life, here’s the perfect last minute gift to give to those you hate. In the future, we may see a need to use Facebook credits as a true form of legal tender that can be used for a variety of things, but right now it’s a pretty safe bet that anyone who uses this will be buying virtual goods on various addictive Facebook games like Farmville.
Get them hooked. Make them pay. The Facebook master plan.
Buzz has always been an important element when trying to launch a startup. The rise of social media from 2005-2008 became a great way for people to get their budding businesses attention. Then, something happened. Social media became TOO big in 2009 and the noise levels started drowning out the potential benefits of the buzz that was getting generated.
Every year, I ask the same question around the end of December. Every year, I answer my own question by saying that people are going to eventually learn the difference between going directly to a website by typing a domain name into a browser and typing the same thing into a search engine like Google.
This is going to be a make or break year for Digg.com. After the debacle of 2010′s V4 launch, many in the industry thought that the site would die a quick death in 2011. As the year comes to a close, Digg is far from dead and is poised for a rebound in 2012.
