Facebook? For Real?

What if what we did on Facebook was real? How weird would it be? Can you imagine walking up to someone and putting "like" on everything? What if we wrote messages on our coworkers or roommates walls? How about that how asking to be someone's friend thing? How odd would that be?

Take a look at this parody to get an idea of what it would be like.




I personally find this video hilarious, being the Facebook addict that I am. It really makes me realize the terminology and concepts that Facebook uses are not something we would use in real life. It would be really awkward if we acted like the above video.


So what did you think?Leave us comments below.



*This post was written by Matt Murrow

Bebo

Bebo was launched in July of 2005 by Michael Birch. In 2008 it was sold to AOL for about $850.00, then in 2010 AOL sold Bebo to Criterion Capital Partners. Bebo stands for Blog early, and blog often. Like all social networks Bebo allows you to create profiles in which you can upload music, video's, photos, and blogs.

One thing that Bebo does allow its users to use is what they call a questionnaire, which allows the users to post questions and have any other user post their answers to the question. Bebo resembles many of the current online social networking sites, but it closely resembles Facebook. Due to that fact Facebook was its biggest competitor.

Although Bebo resembled Facebook and had the backing of AOL and then Criterion Capital Partners it still had trouble staying above water. Saying that, BBC said that the AOL purchase of Bebo was "one of the worst deals ever made in the dotcom era".

Still though Bebo is still up and running only change being that you could now sign in to Bebo using your Facebook account.

Sources;  "Bebo sold by AOL after just two years". BBC. 2010-06-17.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10341413

Written by Jesse Willems

eHarmony

eHarmony is one of the many online dating websites that is designed to uniquely match single men and women for friendships, dating, and even long-term relationships. This privately owned online company was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Santa Monica, California. The primary investors for this company include Technology Crossover Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Fayez Sarofim company.

The confidence of success for this websites rest within a compatibility model that was designed by psychologist Neil Warren, Greg Forgatch, and Galen Buckwalter. Along with creating relationship connections, eHarmony offers advice to users who may solely be inquiring about advice for an existing relationship. The founders of this website have faith in this service because they believe that it is not about matching people with similar hobbies, rather focusing on compatibility. To obtain a compatibility match each user is prompted to create a user account and profile that will tell about themselves rather then what they want in someone else. Along with written passages by the user, a questionnaire is completed that in the aftermath determines characteristics, beliefs, values, emotional health, and skills. The information from the questionnaire and profile are used in a matching algorithm which depicts traits and values to replicate happy couples.

 While eHarmony has not submitted their work for peer review or correlating evaluations, their results speak for themselves. Over ninety percent of eHarmony couples had marriage quality scores that were above average when compared to couples who begun their relationships elsewhere. Since 2000, the company has gained over 33 million members and have well over 15 thousand eHarmony questionnaires filled out each day. According to renowned outsider research relationship companies, approximately 542 eHarmony members get married in the United States daily. While eHarmony receive its’ many criticism, it clearly is a social network to be reckoned with among others.

*This post was written by Gerald Burgess 

Citation: 

eharmony.com

A Few Ways To Manage your Sites

I know that many people find themselves being users on more than just one Social Networking Sites and at times it is probably a little overwhelming or hard to manage each account. I know I usually end up neglecting one site more then the other. There is many different sites and applications that help you keep track of your accounts all at the same time. A few of these sites are Ping.fm, FriendFeed, Mysocial 24x7,  and Minggl. These are just a few of the many out there
Ping.fm is a a website that allows you to ping a message to any of your social networking profiles. This can help you out if you would like to post the same thing across profile. Ping.fm also has a future that helps to make posting urls to twitter easier. It automatically will shorten the url.
FriendFeed is an application that is similar to ping. It allows you to be able to share your things with all your friends with all of your social networking sites. FriendFeed currently supports over 50 different websites. FriendFeed also has both public and private privacy settings.
MySocial 24x7 is a different kind of site, it is an extention of Firefox and works with FriendFeed. This allows you to be able to keep up with what is going on with your friends on your sites. A benefit to MySocial is that because it is just a sidebar you are still able to have it up keeping yourself updated and still be able to do what you are doing on the interenet. Instead of usually having to go back and forth between your webpages.
Minggl is an application that is for IE, Firefox and Firefox for mac. As of now minggl is for only six sites including; Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, LinkedIN, and Digg. This application stores all of your login information on this sites and allows you to be able to send a status update to any of your sites, either one at a time or all of them at once.
There are a lot of other application and websites out there that all pretty much do the same things just in a little different ways, but if you ever find yourself having an issue updating or you feel like you can't really keep up with your social networking sites try one of these out.

Sources:
http://mysocial247.com/
http://www.huddle.com/blog/15-tools-to-help-manage-your-social-networking-profiles-more-efficiently/
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/minggl

Hi5

In 2003 Ramu Yalamanchi founded Hi5.  Hi5 is like many other social networking sites having attributes such as networks, being able to show photos, status updates, user groups, and a personal profile.
Users of Hi5 are able to create a personal profile allowing them to put in there interests, personal information, upload pictures and also create photo albums. With the photo albums it allows for other Hi5 users to comment on them.
Hi5 also allows its users to play online games and also set up music on their profiles.  Hi5 is mainly used for gamers and for playing online games. It is set up so you can still have contact with other people and socialize with them through the web.
Hi5 also allows users to set up their privacy settings, it allows people to friend people, accept or deny friend request. We all know there is creepers out in the world and Hi5 allows you to block users all together.  Another privacy setting is who you allow to see your profile.
A feature different then normal social networking sites is that it is mainly for games and you are able to create avatars.
Currently every month there is about 25 million people who visit the website and it is the 6th largest online gaming site.
Hi5 has around 100 games with more and more coming out every week. People who are set up with Hi5 are in over 200 different countries, and the site offers over 50 different languages.
Hi5 is a great way to get your gaming on and to be able to interact with people all over the world.

Sources:
http://www.hi5networks.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi5

Tumblr

Tumblr was first introduced in 2007 as a microblogging and social media site. In tumbler everyone has their own personal site which is called your Tumblelog.  You are able to share text, images, links, videos, music, quotes on your page. There is also an option where you can re-blog someone else's post if you find it interesting or like a post rather then being able to post comments. With tumblr you are able to link it up to other sites such as facebook, you can also post something from tumblr on other social networking sites.  Tumblr is different from you normal blog sites because it is for quick short things. It is a tool to make blogging easier for people. Tumblr like almost everything these days is also accessible through a smart phone. You are also allowed to customer everything that has to do with your tumblr account and page. Also it is kind of like twitter in a sense you follow other people's account and they also can follow yours.  To date there has been a total of 12,910,287,019 posts and 34,654,569 blogs on tumblr. Also just today there was 42,559,168 posts.

Sources:
http://www.tumblr.com/about
http://weblogs.about.com/od/choosingabloghost/p/What-Is-Tumblr.htm

FourSquare

"Check In. 

Find Your Friends. 

Unlock Your City."

Foursquare is a social media tool. Most users do not use the site from their laptop or desktop computer, but from an app on their smart phone. FourSquare allows you to "check-in" to locations that are currently close to you. So what's the catch? After checking in a certain number of times you can become the mayor of the location that you are checking into. Other badges can be unlocked such as; "Newbie, Adventurer, Explorer, Superstar, Bender, Crunked, Local, Super User, School Night, etc." These badges are unlocked based on the location you check in, the time you check in, and the number of times you have checked into this location. 

In addition to checking in to see where your friends are, companies have teamed up with Foursquare to give you specials and rewards for checking in at their location. For example, right now in Charlotte the major of Toppers Pizza gets 50% all regular priced food (up to $100). At Planet Fitness, if you check in for the first time it's only $5 to enroll, instead of the regular $50 enrollment fee. Other businesses across the country have begun to utilize this tool as well to increase their business through this social media app! The number of companies utilizing foursquare is astounding!

Sign up to get a foursquare and start becoming the mayor above your friends, getting discounts at a multitude of restaurants, and check out where your friends are too!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foursquare

https://foursquare.com/

*Written by Catie Beth

How Businesses Use Twitter

How Businesses Use Twitter

A lot of us use Twitter for our everyday use. But how do businesses use Twitter and how does it differ from the everyday use? The following features will help you to understand how businesses use Twitter.

Promoted Tweet:

Promoted tweets allow a company to have their tweets appear at the top of users search feeds for a longer time period (with a fee of course). They can also target users in certain geographical locations. Promoted Tweets appear as they normally would if they had not been “promoted.”

Promoted Trend:

Similar to the  “promoted tweet” feature, the “promoted trend” allows for a company to have their #word appear at the top of the trending topics. As I type this the current promoted trend is #six. If I click on the #six I will see a tweet from Jesse McCartney in which he has tweeted someone named “GirlBehindSix” which is apparently some kind of Twitter game show.

• ·         Businesses interact with their customers

o   I like to use the example of Lowe’s Home Improvement because they do a good job of interacting with their customers. Visit @Lowes and I guarantee that you will see a lot of interaction between Lowe’s and their customers.

• ·         Businesses answer questions from their customers

o   Again, Lowe’s does a very good job of doing this.

• ·         Businesses retweet tweets that they like.

o   The Charlotte 49ers Athletic Department does this pretty well. Check out @Charlotte49ers to see when they retweeted someone last. It really helps to build a relationship with the customer. It always makes me smile when someone retweets me.

• ·         Businesses use CMS (Content Management Systems) software to put their tweets on a timeline. I prefer to use cotweet.com. It gives you the option of timing your tweets to reach the maximum viewers. It also allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts from one user interface.

*This post was written by Matt Murrow

Sources:

http://www.flyte.biz/resources/newsletters/08/06-twitter-for-business.php

http://business.twitter.com/advertise/promoted-tweets/

http://business.twitter.com/advertise/promoted-trends/