Facebook

With Social Networking Sites on the rise it is interesting to see how sites differentiate themselves. There are some great niche specific networks pertaining to: the social good, business applications, medical applications and various personal pursuits. With all these options available, I think it is important to focus and to be involved in the networks that offer what you need.

I signed up for Ping.fm today. It allows you to set your status or create a blog and send it to multiple social networking sites such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several others, all at once. I've found it useful since I just started using Plurk and continue to use Twitter. You can sign up today by using the code "tastyping".

MySpace, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and the list goes on; trying to keep up and maintain all my junk accounts friends status got to be a little overwhelming. At any given time I'd have tabs to an array of communication tools and personal blogs just to stay in touch with friends and family, so I decided it was time to consolidate.

Can I just say that as the last person in a fully developed country that doesn't have cable OR high definition television, the internet is like a treasure trove for me? This morning I went on YouTube and caught the highlights of last nights South Carolina debates, checked out some blogs to get people's reactions and joined my candidate's support group on Facebook.

While I work in an interactive development agency, I still find my self a little lost sometimes with all of the new technology and online developments. Recently Chris Brogan wrote a great blog on how to help others understand social media, and I found that this was probably one of the most helpful blogs I've read in a long time.

If you are at all involved with marketing, particularly in the interactive venue, you have heard both terms. Yesterday, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, took these ideas one step further in formally unveiling marketing campaigns that combine the two, further propelling the growing popularity of social networking. He calls this new trend pull marketing in which consumers voluntarily endorse the brands and products they like. As reported in AdAge (November 6, 2007), he unveiled a system in which marketers can marry an ad message to a user-initiated endorsement of a product or service

Until recently, search engine optimization consisted of concentrating on how a website ranks in all the big search engines. Now the game has changed and traditional SEO is a thing of the past, according to a recent article in SitePro News by Jim Hedger. It claims the old ways of SEO are being pushed aside as the popularity of searching on social media sites is becoming the new means of search.

Facebook.com, a social networking site with 31 million active users, recently announced efforts to develop a more sophisticated ad serving system allowing marketers to precisely target ads based on the personal data users have provided about themselves.