10 posts tagged “linkedin”

Please see this post on my new blog, SocializeMobilize.

• AOL:

• AOL announced its earnings this week.  The most interesting part of the report: “Revenues decreased 17% ($207 million) to $1.0 billion, due to a 26% decline ($165 million) in Subscription revenues and a 6% decrease ($33 million) in Advertising revenues. The decline in Subscription revenues reflects mainly a decrease in domestic AOL brand subscribers, related primarily to AOL’s strategy to offer its e-mail and other products free of charge to Internet consumers. Driving the decrease in Advertising revenues were declines in display advertising on AOL Network sites and sales of advertising on third-party Internet sites, offset partially by an increase in paid-search advertising.” 
  

• Apple:
• According to a recent report by SquareTrade, The iPhone is more reliable than Blackberry and Treo after one year of ownership.  This doesn’t surprise me since there are less externally moving parts on the iPhone than a Blackberry or Treo.  The study is summarized by MobileCrunch here.
• Facebook:
• Rumor has it… Will Facebook buy Twitter? 
• Google:
• Google ends it’s Advertising Agreement with Yahoo because “government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement” 
• According to CrunchGear, Steve Ballmer says Google is behind the competition and is questioning Android’s financial strategy.
• Google patched the
  
• LinkedIn:
• According to an Anderson Analytics’ study, LinkedIn users are high income.  You can see a good summary of the review here.  Among the findings: LinkedIn users that make between $200,000 and $350,000 were around seven times to have more than 150 LinkedIn connections than those who made less money. 66% of LinkedIn users are identified as “decision makers”.
• TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn cut 10% of its staff, some of which will be re-assigned to other roles:
• MySpace:
• MySpace launched with Auditude, an online video tracking platform.  Auditude fingerprints user posted videos to determine who the “content owner” is. It then inserts advertising into the video and tells the user whose content they’re watching.
• TechCrunch reports that  less than 1 month after it’s launch, MySpace MyAds is making a load of money: “Demand for the product was immediate and significant, we’ve heard from multiple sources close to the company. Average daily revenue, say our sources, is $140,000 - $180,000, which means MyAds is at least a $50 million/year business for MySpace already.” 
• Nokia: 
• Nokia laid off around 600 workers in “follow-up” to its earlier 2008 layoffs.  Nokia Research Center is also going to “sharpen its focus on fewer but stronger research areas.” You can read the announcement here.
• Nokia launched the beta of “FriendView”, “a location and micro-blogging service that helps you stay in touch with your close friends. It let’s you share where you are and how you feel from home, work, or on the go. With Friend View it is easy to meet up at only a moment’s notice. “   
• RIM:
• CrunchGear reviewed the Blackberry Bold saying, “The Bold is unequivocally the best piece of hardware that RIM has ever put out.”
• Samsung:
• Samsung reportedly surpassed Motorola in US Mobile market.
• Twitter:
• Twitter is contemplating corporate accounts as a way to make money.
• Twitter is now hiring a Director of Strategic Partnerships. This is the company's first business development hire... At last, the answer to "How do those guys plan to make money?!" question will likely soon be answered.
• TechCrunch reports that “Digital Garage, Twitter’s partner with Twitter Japan, launched Twicco, a site that lets Twitter users create groups and then subscribe to them.” 
• <Repeated from above> Rumors are swirling… Will Facebook buy Twitter? 
• Yahoo:
  
• Flickr: The 3 Billionth photo was uploaded to Flickr this week.  
• Misc:
• Rumor has it…
• <repeat from above> Rumors are swirling... Will Facebook buy Twitter? 
• Recent Layoffs:
• <repeat from above> LinkedIn 10% layoff
• M&A:
• Wink & Reunion.com are merging and will launch a new site next year: “Through this merger, we're redefining the people search space by bridging existing social networks and providing consumers with the tools they need to find, be found, and stay connected," said Michael Tanne, chief executive officer of Wink. "We're aiming to create an entirely new online experience that simplifies people's lives by making it easy to find and keep up with everyone they know. There will be exciting developments in the coming months as we integrate our strengths and push our business forward." 
• Technology announcements:
• PerfSpot: Perfspot will be rolling out “Friendvouch” to its 25M members in 3 million member segments over the coming months.  Friendvouch enables users to sign up for advertising offers, which they can send to heir friends.  When those friends indicate interest, Perfspot then sells those details back to advertisers and rewards the referring user.   Here’s how the Friendvouch website describes it: “Make great recommendations and earn cash with friendvouch. friendvouch is a community of people created to connect you directly to your favorite brands. Become a brand ambassador while earning money in the process.”  
• Barak Obama & Joe Biden: The office of the President Elect launched a transition website, where people can learn about what they’re planning. There’s a blog, newsroom, job application submission, agenda information, and more. Citizens are encouraged to submit their ideas to the future administration on all agenda items including technology. 
• MobileCrunch did a nice summary of the “Mobile Market View” study by The Kelsey Group.  The most interesting point from my perspective: “18.9% of mobile consumers in the United States are now toting smartphones, with 49.2% planning to pick one up within the next two years.”  
• Though not released this week, I learned about the Pico Pocket Projector by Optoma, which is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while.  For all of you mobile geeks, this pocket-sized projector seems to solve the problem of needing an Elmo to showcase the latest and greatest app on your phone AND makes it easy to project the videos you store on your ipod or mobile phone on a wall... Very cool.
  

Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards), officially opened to the public yesterday.  If you use Microsoft Outlook, it will change your life...  Xobni is a utility for Outlook that analizes your email - things like:

• Who emails you most and when
• Who responds fastest to your emails
• Who you respond to fastest

 

Xobni makes it easy for you to find files you’ve exchanged via email – regardless of where they’re buried within the thousands of emails in your inbox. 

Besides being a really valuable productivity tool, it turns your inbox into a social network.  Without having to type a thing, in two clicks, you can initiate and send an email to anyone in your "network" (i.e. anyone you've exchanged email with).  There are also pre-populated notes that enable you to:

• Ask a friend/colleague for their phone number, or
• Request time on a friend/colleague's calendar - Xobni pulls down data from your calendar and inserts your availability into an email... You can even customize what days/times you want Xobni to search for your availability.

 

Downsides?  I hate to admit it, but Xobni is actually making me like using Outlook!  The only thing I dislike about Xobni is that it's not available in more places.  You can't use it on a Mac or or web-based mail systems like Gmail (sigh).  There is no mobile application or WAP compatability, so it doesn't work on a mobile phone.

 

What would I like to see in the future besides broader availability on other email platforms? 

• More control over email templates... I'd love to be able to create my own email templates.  For example... "Thank you" emails that I can send to people that, say, had me to dinner, or who I invited to a party. 
• Integrations to my favorite web sites. For example... I'd like to be able to set-up an evite from within Xobni and send it out to everyone on my network.  Even better, I'd like Xobni to track my interactions on all of my favorite social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) AND multiple email accounts AND IM AND phone calls (i.e. with a mobile integration)
• Group/ List functionality - that is - the ability to set up groups of people and have the ability to email them all at the same time. (i.e. my "best friend group" my "project X group", etc.)
• Greater integration with Calendars and Address Books.  For example, I'd love to see the scheduling template be more interactive and actually allow a user to book time on my calendar, without me having to enter the time into the calendar, upon receiving their reply to my email.  I'd love it to work like Outlook invites work... Allow recipients to click on one of the available times listed in an email and automatically book it.

 

Yep - I think I'm love.  Get it, and it will change the way you look at your inbox.

The power of social media (including social networking) constantly amazes me. It keeps people in touch with each other, facilitates introductions that may otherwise never have happened, and so much more.  Since I first started writing this blog a year and a half ago, I've received emails and introductions from all sorts of interesting people - entrepreneurs, techies, mobile industry followers, media agencies, etc. - some famous in tech circles, others not.  Several of these introductions have remained electronic 'friendships' over email or Facebook.  Others have resulted in 'real life' friendships, when one of us realizes we have friends in common or we meet face-to-face at an industry event.  Today, I got to thinking about how amazing this really is when social media faciltated yet another interesting introduction....

A man who works in the Business Development Agency for a European country, pinged me on LinkedIn.  He wanted to know whether I would be interested in consulting for companies in his country that are expanding to the US.  In the course of our email conversation, he wrote:

I've known for a long time [about] the many different forms of social media interaction, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, etc., but I never thought of it as something more than personal interaction… kid’s stuff that made a few people very rich. I guess I was quite wrong. So, I’ve returned a few times to your blog, searched a few other related blogs and started researching that issue more extensively. I feel, in fact, that there may be a much more around that concept than I thought.

His email made me pause.  Living in San Francisco, a stones throw from Silicon Valley, where "social media" is pre-printed on everyone's "buzz word bingo" card, it's easy to forget that most people - especially those outside of America are still just beginning to understand the potential of social media.  Five years ago, when I was living in the UK, I would have never anticipated that I'd be writing a blog or (gasp) meeting people over the internet.  My British friends all thought I was crazy and looked at me strangely when I first mentioned that I was writing a blog.  Today, at least one of them has a blog, and most of the others are on Facebook.  And, that's the tip of the iceberg. The world is only just beginning to see the potential of social media, and social networking is just the start.

Today, Reuters published an interesting article "Social Network Sites Tempt Investors"  talking about the liklihood of a flury of social networking IPOs.  The article is well worth a read for all of you social media fans out there.  According to the article, so called "Wall Street observers" believe that United Online Inc.'s recent registration for an IPO of its Classmates Media Corp. arm (i.e. Classmates.com) will  "test the IPO waters" for other social  networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

While I believe that the remainder of 2007 and early 2008 will bring more social networking IPOs than we've seen so far (not many), I don't believe that Classmates.com will be an accurate indicator of the success of future social networking IPOs.   Even if Classmates.com's IPO bombs, Facebook, LinkedIn IPO, and Bebo IPO have a strong liklihood of being successful IPOs.  To have a solid IPO, a social networking company will have to do more than just link people socially.  It will need to be a platform for relevancy, discovery, sharing, and search. 

When Google IPOed, it was successful, not just because it enabled search, but it provided a platform that wove together search, information, email, and more with relevant and targeted advertising.  Facebook will succeed with an IPO not because it is a social networking site but because it is a social networking platform that allows 3rd party developers to plug-in and users to benefit.  In other words, it is, in effect, a social media operating system.  LinkedIn and Bebo will have successful IPOs if they continue to grow their user base, expand their platform capabilities, and quickly develop a useful API for 3rd party developers.  However, to be clear, it will take a lot of effort, great skills, good timing, (and, perhaps, a miracle) for either Bebo or LinkedIn to have a more successful IPO than Facebook.

By engaging 3rd party developers so early, Facebook gained a clear lead over the competition, which will be hard for competitors to surpass.  By creating a social networking operating system, which allows entreprenurial developers to plug in, contribute to, and profit from a wider economy, Facebook has peaked the interests of investors - not only as a company in which to invest but as an economy in which to invest.  As I mentioned in my last post, VCs are expressing a strong interest in the players within the facebook 3rd party developer economy, and is easy to see why.  Facebook is creating a social media operating system that has the potential to revolutionize the web by changing the way people find and interact with content and applications.

Yesterday, Robert Scoble posted an interesting video trilogy on his blog in which he predicts that if they work together, Facebook,  Mahalo, and Techmeme will trounce Google in 4 years by providing superior SEO-free, reduced-noise, social search that does more than Google.  While I'd be seriously surprised if Google didn't have something up its sleeve to compete with the vision Scoble outlines and I don't think we'll see the end of SEO, I do think Scoble makes some good points in his vlogs.  His musings on the topic of social networking, social media, and search highlight a growing interest in social networking as a space and its potential to change the way we surf the net.
 

There is nothing more attractive to investors than strong possibilities and good ideas, and it's clear in the quickly growing and evolving space of social networking, there is a high concentration of both.  Which social networking companies will choose to ride the wave with an IPO remains to be seen, but I'm betting with Reuters in thinking the numbers will increase very soon.

Note: I'm not an investment advisor, and my blog posts do not constitute financial advice.

Mashable in conjunction with PhotoBucket is hosting "The Social Networking Awards" and is asking you to vote on your favorite mainstream social networking site. The nominees are:

• MySpace
• Friendster
• Multiply
• hi5
• Piczo
• Tagworld
• Bebo
• Tagged
• Orkut
• Xanga
• Facebook
• Facebox
• LinkedIn
• Vox

To vote, click HERE. 

I voted for Vox because I use it so often, but each of the nominees has its strengths.  As I look at the list, I keep thinking that the old phrase "It's not where you are but who you're with" is as true in social networking as it is in life.  While I've experimented with a lot of the above sites, I've wound up using Vox and LinkedIn because these are the two sites that I find the most useful for interacting with people who share similar interests.

On a different note - I'm looking for new material for this blog - including new social media sites/services to review.  If you have ideas (topics of interest, products, services, etc.), I'd love to hear them. Email me at: socialmediablog@gmail.com. 

Coming up in next week's socialmedia blog a review of Brent Hoberman's new baby - a social networking site for world travelers.

Last week, San Francisco-based start-up Activeweave launched an exciting new product called Stickis.  At first glance, Stickis looks like any other web overlay and annotation tool (i.e. Google Notebook, Trailfire, Fleck, Diigo, etc.), but dig a little deeper and you’ll see that Stickis does more.  If it reaches critical mass, Stickis could revolutionize the way that people interact with the web and each other.  Unlike popular social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, LinkedIn, Cyworld, etc., which require users to interact with each other within the confines of a specific website, Stickis allows users to interact with people in their network anytime and anywhere on the web.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with web overlay, traditional annotation tools have been around for a while.  These tools are browser plug-ins that let you stick virtual Post-It-esque “notes” on websites.  One of the first and most notorious of these web overlay services was the now defunct “Third Voice,” which many likened to “web graffiti”.  One of the problems with Third Voice was that it lacked privacy features, which critics argued, exposed everyone with Third Voice’s plug-in to potentially lewd and libelous commentary. In 2001, reporting on the backlash to this criticism, Wired reported:

Third Voice couldn't generate enough advertising revenue to raise consumers' awareness of its free service, and it couldn't generate enough consumer awareness to raise the advertising revenue it needed to stay in business.

Web overlay/annotation tools have come a long way since the missteps of Third Voice.  Since then, the web has seen significant technological advances – especially in the areas of privacy management, web search/organizing content, and social networking.   Stickis incorporates several advanced features in these areas into a product that not only free but highly functional, innovative, and easy to use.

One thing that makes Stickis different than its competitors is the way that the service is structured.  Stickis is organized around “channels,” which are groups of Stickis notes published by a particular user.  Anyone can set up a channel – a private individual, a blogger, an organization, a website, or a company.  (Yelp and OpenTable San Francisco are two of the first companies  to have Stickis channels.)  Users can subscribe to new channels or unsubscribe from their existing channels at any time.  Similarly, “channel” owners control the privacy of their content and are able to ensure which of their Stickis notes are shared with which of their subscribers.

Here’s how Stickis works today:

• Register at Stickis.com.
•  Pick a nickname/ username
  
•  Enter your email address
•  Select the channels you’d like to subscribe to
•  If you'd like to publish a channel, pick a name (mine is Socialmedia.vox.com)
  
•  Set-up your privacy settings
• You choose whether you want to make your Stickis channel public or private.  If you decide to make your channel public, you have control over which of your subscribers can see specific posts.  You can organize your subscribers into groups- limiting which of your Stickis are seen by which of your subscribers.  This is done by creating what Stickis calls “antisocial tags” http://www.stickis.com/settings/tags/
• Upon signing up, a small plug-in is downloaded to your computer and installed when you re-start your browser.  This plug-in does NOT contain spy ware and can be turned on or off anytime with the touch of a button, which appears in your browser’s toolbar.
• When Stickis is “on”, anytime you go to new web page, a small, unobtrusive icon appears in the bottom right hand corner of your browser window.  This button displays the number of Stickis notes that your subscribed “channels” have written about that web page.
  

  Corner-button

• Unlike other annotation programs, Stickis notes are easily ignored if you don’t want to see them. 
• If you want to open the Stickis notes on a page, simply click on the button in the lower right side of your browser, and a “tray” containing a summary of each Stickis note appears (listed in reverse chronological order).

• To get a closer look at a specific Stickis note, click on its summary in the “tray” and voila- the entire Stickis note appears as an overlay over the page you’re on.
•  If you want to add to a Stickis note or reply to someone else’s Stickis note, just press the compose button on the “tray” or in your browser’s toolbar, and start writing.
  

  Compose
• You can drag or drop URLs, Pictures, Icons, etc. into your Stickis notes.You can add ‘tags’ to each of your Stickis notes, facilitating easy searching. Similarly, you can add ‘antisocial tags’ to specific posts to ensure that only certain people see those posts.
• You can also customize the look and feel of your Stickis notes so that they reflect your personal style.
•  You can set up alerts that notify you when:
• Your favorite channel posts a new Stickis note.  
• Someone writes a Stickis note on a topic that interests you (e.g. notification when specific ‘tags’ are used).
• To see step-by-step instructions of how to work with Stickis, click here.
  

It’s easy to imagine the different ways Stickis could be marketed…

• Individuals: Share your most / least favorite sites with your friends, family, the public, etc.
• Fans: Talk with fellow fans about all of the latest on-line gossip.  Meet friends who are going to up-coming shows.
• Bloggers: Enhance your reader’s experience by cross-referencing websites that you’ve commented on.
• Blog readers: See what your favorite bloggers are saying about the sites you’ve visited.
• Marketers/ PR people (for products, bands, actors, etc.): Stickis is a great way to engage with the users who want to hear from you.  Create your own channel and share exclusive information with your prospective and existing customers.  Host contests, on-line scavenger hunts, and more.
• Teachers: Create different channels for each of the classes that you teach.  Share relevant websites / on-line content with your students and encourage them to engage in discussions with each other about what they see on-line.
• Politicians:  Reach out to your constituents and tell them what you think about what’s happening on-line.  Engage your staff in a confidential discussion about how to address leaks, negative comments/ allegations that appear on the web.
  

Stickis has the potential to become a leading social networking tool.  To succeed in this capacity, it must continue to evolve.  Activeweave’s CEO, Marc Meyer, agrees:

Today we’re very much emphasizing the annotation features and the ability to discover stuff. In the near future, we’ll be improving  people’s ability to connect more closely to their communities.

To read my blog anywhere on the web, add this blog to your Stickis Network.

To read another review on Stickis, check out TechCrunch.
 

The most genius and useful solutions are often born from simple ideas. Take, for example, basic office tools - paperclips, Scotch tape/ Sellotape, Whiteout/ Tip-Ex, Post-it notes, etc.  It’s hard to imagine life without them.  Why am I talking about office supplies in a blog about social media?  The two have more in common than you might think…

Just as the invention of simple office tools revolutionized personal administration, simple, yet innovative, on-line social media tools are (and will continue) transforming the way people live and work… MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Dodgeball, etc. are all good examples of sites that are changing the way people interact.  Plenty of other social media and web 2.0 services that you haven’t heard of yet, will do the same, when they reach critical mass.  

This is an exciting time.  The world is abuzz with the potential of social media and people everywhere are generating ideas about how it can be leveraged in new ways.  Something similar happened when the Post-it Note was launched 26 years ago.  The original Post-it (a little yellow piece of paper with a sticky edge) spawned thousands of other useful products – large Post-its, colored Post-its, lined Post-its, “sign-me” plastic sticky flags, sticky book flags, removable tape, etc. – the list goes on and on.  An entire industry was born from one, simple idea.

When is the last time you thought about, White-Out/ Tipex?  I’m the first to admit that I use it regularly but don’t think about it until I need it and find that it’s run (or dried) out.  Once a product reaches ubiquity, users begin to take it for granted.  Don’t believe me? Replace the Whiteout example with TV or Internet connectivity.   How many times do you really think about how much TV you watch until the cable or satellite signal goes down?  How often do you think about your Internet Service Provider until your ISP experiences a blackout?    

If you want a real eye-opener about how many ever-day necessities you take for granted, flip through a copy of:

Think about how many of the inventions of the last century you use regularly.  Then, ask yourself, “How many of those well used inventions do I regularly marvel over? How many of these inventions truly fascinate me?”  My guess is – not many.  The fact is that most people don’t bother to think about things that have already been invented.  Instead, they incorporate the use of those inventions into their daily lives and keep using them until something better comes along.  

Social Media is that “something better,” and it’s coming along quickly.  It is changing everything: the way we learn, the way we work, the way we socialize, the way marketers push products, the way the world communicates.  By many accounts on-line social media and social networking are the “next big thing” – “the wave of the future.”  Right now, there is still a lot on-line rubbish to sift through, and the web – including social media- is, like the early days of the Post-it note and the original dot com boom, still spawning more ideas than the market can sustain.

The dot-com bubble is well and truly back with web 2.0 and social media.  In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, in particular, start-ups are cropping up all over the place.  Corporations and VC see the potential and are, once again, spending big money to acquire the IP and people that they feel have the most potential.  Similarly, start-up beauty pageants are in full swing, and promo parties abound - the likes of which haven’t been seen since the last bubble… To check out the latest and greatest industry parties (and the resulting juicy gossip), check out bub.blicio.us.

Getting back to my original analogy, in my opinion, the social media ideas with the most potential are a lot like the paperclip, Scotch Tape, Whiteout and Post-it Notes.  They’re simple concepts with elegant, user-friendly designs – the kind of “wow” ideas you wish you’d though of yourself.  

TEASER: Tomorrow, I’ll be reviewing one such web 2.0 and social media tool… An incredibly simple concept that I feel has the potential to revolutionize social media and the way the world interacts with and on the web. Stay tuned… I think you’ll like it.

With the volume of information available on social media sites increasing rapidly, the need for effective search tools is greater than ever before.  Users need ways to sift through the "garbage" on the Internet to find information that is relevant to their search - both on topic and in the desired format. 

Search engines are evolving, making the process of finding information easier and ensuring that results are more useful.  The upsurge in information generated through sites specializing in social media is making the need for search engine evolution even more important. 

Here are a few sites that are making the search for information on social media sites easier:

• Wink.com: Claims to be the first "social search engine" that "allows people to search across multiple social networks and find other people with similar interests."  The site searches across social networking sites including: MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn, and it claims to contain "over 100 million profiles".  Search across social networks for interests, locations, screen names, names, etc.  Wink looks for information that other people have ranked as useful/relevant.  Users can  re-rank search results, bookmark sites they want to remember, and block results that aren't relevant.  Users can also create "Collections" of the  most relevant sites on a particular topic and assign privacy settings to those "collections," making collections available to the public, to designated groups of people, or keeping them private.  Collections labeled as "public" then turn up in the search results. 
  
• Eurekster's Swicki: Eurekster explains what a swicki is far better than I ever could, "Swicki is a natural extension of personal publishing on the web. Just as you can create a webpage, blog, or podcast, now you can publish a community powered search engine, tailored to produce only the targeted search results that you and your community want!  A swicki shows a buzz cloud of what is hot in your community and makes it easy to find the best content, news and info on the web."
• Google Blog Search, Technorati, Blogpulse, and IceRocket are great resources for searching for information contained within blogs.
• ClipBlast, Blinkx, and Google Video are all great sites for searching video.  Internet TV Search Engine is a Swicki that does what it says on the tin.
  

If you're interested in Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization, check out the following article (and the links within it): SMO: The Next Phase Of SEO.

If you have a favorite search engine for social media, that you'd like to recomend, send a comment!

It seems like everyone in the Bay Area is talking about web 2.0 and social media these days, and there are a ton of start-ups popping-up in this space.  This blog will focus on the fast evolving world of social media: what's happening in the space, what's new/cool, and the ways that social media is evolving/ expanding.

According to Wikipedia, "Social media describes the on-line tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs."  "Social media" includes "on-line social networking" web sites and applications.  Wikipedia calls on-line social networking "a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools."

I'm interested in the ways that social media improves interaction between people, making the world a smaller, and more accessible place.  Social media makes it easy for people - regardless of location - to learn from and/or interact with groups of people whose interests are similar to theirs.  The social media revolution has the potential to "fix" the issues that Robert D. Putnam discussed in his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 

In this book, Putnam argues that Americans have become disengaged from their social networks (friends, family, social groups, etc.) and have taken on a more individualistic mentality.   He says that in the old days, many Americans used to belong to bowling leagues, where they made friends and engaged with others.  However, over time, while the number of bowlers increased, the number of 'bowling leagues' decreased, with the majority of players choosing to bowl alone.  Putnam's theories, while somewhat controversial, are supported by statistics and nearly 500,000 interviews over a 25 year period.  He cautions that Americans are socializing less in groups and are becoming less "connected" with the wider human community.  I believe the emergence of social media is changing this paradigm.

When Bowling Alone was published in 2000, the term "social media" didn't exist.  Wikipedia credits Chris Shipley (Co-founder and Global Research Director for Guidewire Group) with being the first person to use the term "social media."  The term was used in the run up to "BlogOn 2004" conference, July 22-23, 2004, to describe a new form of "participatory media," emerging from the convergence of social networking, blogging, wikis, and other, complimentary technologies.

Today, while the number of bowling leagues has probably remained stagnant, the number of social media sites that facilitate interpersonal interaction between individuals and groups with common interests is growing exponentially.  I predict that social media will continue to evolve quickly, with the leading social media companies finding innovative ways to engage new users by developing compelling feature enhancements.  Video, audio, photo sharing, written word location based services, and mobile enablement will all play a role in the future of social media.  My blog will explore the integration of existing technologies into social media, the mobilization of social media, and what's new and cool in  this growing space.