Nielsen Online, an analytics firm that tracks time spent online at various websites, has issued a report finding that throughout 2008 social networking sites and blogs saw more time spent by users than personal email. While not shocking, the finding does mark an important point in the history of the web.

Youth watchers have long argued that for young people, email is how you communicate with elders in formal situations, while social networks and SMS are the preferred method of communication among peers. Nielsen found, however, that Facebook in particular saw greater growth among older people than it did among the young.

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I’ve discovered that general social networks can be complete waste of time for business. It’s that simple. Facebook is a gaming gimmick that wastes office time.

I’ve therefore decided that I’m only spending time with the “Big 4″ business social networking sites SUp.biz, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Ecademy.

These four are without a doubt the top 4 social networks to promote your business on.

I’ll focus on the social network Fbook here real quick to prove that the four above are the best place to spend your time.

Let’s just look at 3 popular applications on Fbook:

1: Top Friends
Add a box of up to 32 of your BFFs to your profile.
2,658,733 daily active users

2: FunWall
Videos, Photos, Graffiti, Greeting Cards, Embeds and more!
2,603,946 daily active users

3: Movies
Test your movie knowledge with the Never-Ending Movie Quiz.
2,373,887 daily active users

A very impressive list by daily active users, you must agree. Is there anything there that jumps out at you as a compelling reason to spend time online at work ‘networking’? Indeed. I could go down the list of the top 20 apps and continue showing you things that have nothing to do with networking.

Now let us break down the big 4 social networks and where to spend most of your time on each of them…

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People generally love sharing things, and Twitter has made broadcasting updates to anyone who cares to care on what you’re doing, wearing, reading, commenting on, eating, using, etc. a breeze; in 140 characters or less, even. It’s only natural to see so many users also share which music they are listening to at any given moment on Twitter, as this has been a fairly popular use of status feeds on other social networking and communication services for years (Facebook, Skype and Windows Live Messenger leap to mind).

Click to read the source article.

Updating your Facebook profile with your blog posts is a good idea. Suppose this process being done automatically. Just post to your blog and immediately, your Facebook friends being notified.

Here is a good video tutorial that teaches you how to add your blog’s feed to your Facebook profile. That way, every time you publish a new blog post, Facebook imports it as a Note and notifies your Facebook friends.

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Google is normally quite secretive about their search infrastructure but, in a break from tradition, they have revealed that a single search query on Google can consume the processing power of 1000 machines.

Google Fellow Jeff Dean, in a keynote talk at WSDM 2009, shared some numbers about Google’s impressive growth run from 1999 to 2009. According to Dean, while both search queries and processing power have gone up by a factor of 1000, latency has gone down from around 1000ms to 200ms. Crawler updates now take minutes compared to months in 1999.

Another significant change was the switch to holding the complete search index in memory, resulting in the use of 1000 machines to handle a single query compared to just 12 previously.

This revelation may be a bit embarrassing for Google, which has defended its ecological record in the past, claiming that a single Google query takes just 0.0003KWh of energy and that the Google datacenters are “the world’s most efficient.”

Read original article here.

Wakoopa is the perfect place to discover software and games online. Sign up, install a small tracker on your desktop and automatically create your own software profile.

Track what you use on your desktop (even web apps like Gmail) and share it with your friends through widgets or even on Facebook.

Wakoopa will also give you smart recommendations based on your own software usage. Games, audio & video players, instant messengers or office tools: Wakoopa helps you discover the best apps out there. Software discovery is social again.

To learn more about Wakoopa, click here.

An interesting article in Federal Computer Week looks at how social media are changing the face of public participation in government. Traditional public comment has citizens talking to government, and government (hopefully) listening. But social media involves people talking to each other, with government in the mix participating in the discussion. Continue reading…

Today’s online culture is about participating in conversations and creating communities where people can share ideas. Similarly (and more traditionally), conferences create conversations between people with similar interests and common goals. As marketers, we spend a lot of time attending conferences – it seems logical that we should connect these two like items together. There are many ways to create and leverage event-based social media to generate Web site traffic and brand awareness long after the conference has ended. Continue reading…

There is one question that most business decisions come down to: What’s the return on investment (ROI)? It’s a legitimate question — and when you talk about the use of video content in your marketing plan, it’s bound to come up. The not-so-new news flash is that video does more than create huge lifts in convergence. In fact, it does much more than most bean counters realize.
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As a small business owner or a self-employed professional, you have two basic strategies for your marketing efforts: Writing or Speaking.

No matter whether or not you do both of these activities or only one of them, you need to know what messages you want to convey to your audience.

That’s why you need to create a list of your 10 Most Important Business Principles (MIBP). Without them, your marketing efforts will be too diffuse to really grab the attention of your intended ideal clients.
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