Consumer opinion seems to have trended Twitter towards the creation of two new features for users now: one called Retweet and another called Lists. The thing about these ideas is, not only did Twitter not come up with it on its own, it is not even building them on its own: fanatic Twitter enthusiasts are doing it all for the company. While this is a fresh approach, it isn’t really unheard of. Bug Labs does something similar with its hardware products, giving informed consumers to design and build their own.

Where Twitter stands out is in turning this kind of innovation from an occasional departure to a regular feature of its plan. For instance, the popular way in Twitter of providing a link to the name of anyone who may appear in your post, is to put a “@” symbol in front of their name; this popular way came of a user idea. Twitter accepts features that users think up and popularizes them even when the management doesn’t entirely like it. The wildly popular hash tag used today was a user brainwave that was wildly unpopular with the management at first.

The new feature anticipated now, called Lists, is meant to let people make lists of updates posted by their favorite celebrities or anyone. It is meant to help people make some sense of their voluminous Twitter interests. The other feature of the week, Retweet, has been in unofficial use for a while. Users a time ago formed a casual shorthand term called RT when they wanted to repost someone else’s tweet. Twitter is introducing a way that will perform the same function without increasing text volume by repetition. Now this should be something to Twitter about.

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Midomi and the competing product Shazam, both work on the iPhone and other smartphones too. Perhaps the best part of Midomi is the way it can tie in with the Twitter and Facebook experience. There is a Facebook app that Midomi has that can help you share all your musical discoveries in this way with your friends on the network. Once you have that song nailed, the program will also let you go over to your favorite YouTube clone site to watch a video or take you to an online music store to buy it.

In collaboration with LyricsFly and IMDB, a new service called ScreenTunes helps you search for movie soundtracks too. The Midomi concept can certainly help push a popular segment in social networking, one that is devoted to obscure music in a shared experience of discovering it. Perhaps the best part of these applications is hearing how they were created by enterprising young people, some barely out of school.

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But why would Facebook do this – give away access to the core of its business to other commercial players? For one thing, Facebook believes that it is being overwhelmed by demand for its service; there are so many different kinds of gadgets out there to view content on that to expect one company to provide for all of them seems impractical. Actually, as counterintuitive as this sounds, it’s been done before – by none other than Twitter. That service has allowed third-party programs right from the start, that bring to people the ability to look at Twitter updates from outside of the website.

So how goes the third-party application situation so far? Consider SocialScope, a startup that aims to bring Facebook to your Blackberry. It lets you tap into multiple social networking sites, and is better even than Facebook’s app for that smartphone. Seesmic is another noteworthy service; when you install their software on your desktop, it allows you to use Facebook right from your desktop without going to that website. Seesmic just hopes to return Facebook the favor by basically making the Facebook idea more successful, giving their users convenience.

Facebook and Twitter are not really profitable enterprises yet, even with all their massive popularity. When people find out that they don’t need to actually go to those websites to check their information, won’t the websites lose whatever little chance they have at making a profitable venture of it? Only time will tell how this unconventional idea pans out.

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Everyone has elderly relatives who need to be in on all that happens in the lives of the children in the family – birthday parties, school events; often, to help the technically uninitiated elderly relative, people just post their children’s pictures and videos on a place like Facebook without password protection or even on a YouTube clone website. They figure that their video is lost in the crowd of millions of others; what predator is really going to find it?

People only wake up to how easy it is for people to find it, when things get out of hand; people anywhere on earth roam the Internet, put together freely available media files and use them for anything – for a school project, for plastering all over the walls of a city a thousand miles away to advertise a baby show, or merely to share among friends. It can be very easy to let one mistake get out of hand.

Even where personal views on the subject tend to the liberal, there is always the serious consideration of how other people might react to your media-posting activities. Birthday party pictures, school event videos and the like, usually include images of other people’s children too. People take a dim view of having decisions about their children taken without their consent. If the parent of a friend of your child’s finds a picture of his child at your child’s birthday at a recognizable restaurant or park, they can right away worry about how a sick predator out there can find their child if they wish to. There’s also the matter of setting a good example for your child in online safety; if you go about posting personal pictures at random on the Internet, how will you ever tell your child to exercise caution himself?

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Twitter add-ons for Firefox are nothing new; but this one takes the idea a step along, and makes it possible on all major browsers, and lets you watch your Facebook and Twitter updates in the same place. The design of the toolbar is tasteful and restrained, you can even hit pause if you want to concentrate on something else.

What does feel like to use Lu.ly then? New status messages constantly crawl into view; you can travel back and forth with the messages of the tweeter of your choice, right from within the toolbar too. There is a search bar on the toolbar in addition, that allows you to search within Twitter. The functionality offered by Lu.ly is right at par with the ones offered in competing Firefox extensions, like TwitterNotifier or Tweetbar; the implementation and the cross-platform compatibility is what sets Lu.ly apart. Of course, Lu.ly is now one more competitor for your already crowded toolbar space. Perhaps things could go the Ludicrous way; the Ludicrous Firefox add-on allows you to work in Twitter from your Firefox browser window using no other interface for its purposes other than Firefox’s own search box. Mac users should be able to use Lu.ly presently: a version is in the works.

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Microsoft’s tested the waters first in this area; there is now a special Twitter search option on Bing. When you search with this service, the results page shows a pretty hysterical cloud of tags of hot Twitter topics, along with a swarm of relevant shared links to them. You can even search among the search results you get.

Google won’t be left behind of course, having put down arrangements with Twitter. It says it plans to show Twitter search results among its regular search results; this innovation could be a few weeks coming though. But there’s not nothing quite like The Google Social Search feature that Google has planned; you could probably guess that it’s a Google Labs project yet again.

Google’s Social Search is for Google account holders only; when an account holder performs a regular search, Google looks up everything that your Twitter pals may have put up on the subject you searched for and gives you that information too. Now this is not exactly an all-new feature the way you might imagine, seeing it appear on Google’s Labs. Search websites like Crowdeye have been letting you search for Twitter results for quite a while now. It’s just that having the major search engines do it helps you do all your searching in one place. Will great new startups like Crowdeye be crowded out of the market they helped create, by the majors? Only time will tell.

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The typical reaction is to overreact and decry social media, blaming it for all societal ills. However, for most people social networking is just a handy tool to further one’s business or social goals. Only certain vulnerable people fall prey to social network addiction and for those few that are in the grip of this addiction there are ways to address the affliction.

As with most malaise, recognizing that it exists is the most important aspect of managing it. With children it is easy. All you need to do is to restrict their access. For grownups the strength and resolve to do this has to come from within. The first step is to monitor your time and set a limit. When the time is up, log out immediately with no excuses. Often we go online to avoid work that we just don’t feel like taking up. Being online gives us a feeling of doing something productive when we are in fact wasting time. Make going online a reward for finishing all your work. Don’t forget your friends and family. When you spend too much time online your family and friends get forsaken in favor of your online comrades. Online interactions usually are sanitized, free of the messy emotions that characterize real life and are very easy to get lost in but in the end it is the offline real world bonds that truly enrich your life friends.

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Raindrop is an open source API that is intended to be built upon by other third-party developers for better sorting, and better features. To begin with, the application functions through any browser you choose at all: any browser that is compatible with Open Web Foundation projects. There are so far two different versions of Raindrop, and there are more on the way. It isn’t that easy to install it and run it though, as there isn’t a readily available installer yet to make it actually sit on your computer and act like program. There is one on the way though.

Raindrop is not a Firefox extension or add-on; it is a standalone application that can one day hold its own add-ons. Seen one way, Raindrop seems to take a cue from the kind of direction that Google and Gmail have been taking off late, where users bring in widgets for RSS, or chat. If it lives up to what is promised, Raindrop seems to be a great idea by the sound of it: a program that not only brings all of your online messages to one place, but also sorts the personal ones that really need your attention from masses of automated ones. Lets see how well it goes.

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This is the golden age of data. Nearly any media metric can be measured and data mining produces quantities of data, however, without substantive data knowledge and proper modeling the data is mostly worthless. As, Eric T. Bradlow, co-director of UPenn’s Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, says, “Many social commerce problems have been addressed previously, and massive amounts of data will not change the continuing need for the understanding of basic and primitive customer behavior which provides the correct lens to view social media data.”

Mass marketing has lost favor in the face of social media marketing and viral marketing. However, mass marketing is still the most effective technique available though it is important, considering the proliferation of media channels, to ensure that the right media channels are selected. Social media marketing requires that very huge numbers of social media users share product recommendations for any significant impact and the same goes for viral marketing. These techniques may be effective for B2B marketers who have concentrated markets but rarely have much impact on B2C marketing. Rarely does the buzz created by such strategies translate in to product purchases.

Content is important but it has impact only if it reaches consumers. Traffic driving strategies such as referral programs must be the cornerstone of marketing policy. Many people try using the “Long Tail” (items which individually sell only in small quantities) niche driven marketing as one way to boost sales but such investment should be made only if justified by volumes.

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Emails with links to infected files are old hat, most infections these days occur when malicious software is automatically downloaded to user computers without their knowledge while browsing infected websites. Often malware is disguised as legitimate software / security updates and people are misled by messages via Facebook, etc into downloading them. These techniques are causing an exponential growth in infection according to RSA, a leading security company. The security firm detected 19,102 Trojan infections in August 2009 as against only 613 Trojan infections in August 2008.

As the complexity of design increases most criminals find that they do not have the technical skills to write their own malware and turn to Do-It-Yourself kits that contain everything needed for writing Viruses and Trojans for those who don’t have the know how to write their own.

A top notch malware kit can be worth a lot of money. The Limbo Trojan kit sold for about $350 at the peak of its popularity and the Zeus Trojan kit, which currently dominates the market sells for anywhere between $1,000 to $3,000. However, the dominance and popularity of a kit rarely lasts long as security companies soon fight back by trying to decipher the code and create general heuristic detection routines for anything created using the kit.

Some of the kit makers with waning popularity are trying to stay alive by releasing their source code. By giving free access to criminal developers to their code they can get a huge pool of talent working on their code and adding and improving features. Of course, the flip side is that the security companies also get their hands on the code making it easier for them to create detection routines.

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