Showing posts with label social networking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social networking. Show all posts

Jul 4, 2010

Ways to Use Social Networking to Land Your Next Job

Cover of "Networking Like a Pro: Turning ...Cover via Amazon

By Stacy Rapacon
Sunday, July 4, 2010; G03

When looking for my first full-time job about six years ago, I didn't really consider tapping my personal networks online. Friendster and MySpace -- the big names in social media at the time -- were just vehicles for sharing pictures and finding out what old friends were up to (without having to actually talk to them). And that newfangled thing called Facebook, which still required a college e-mail account to join, just seemed redundant.

Today you're falling woefully behind in the race for open jobs if you're not plugged into social-networking sites. Facebook, for example, has exploded with more than 400 million active users, each of whom averages 130 friends. That's a whole lot of people who could help with your job hunt. LinkedIn, with more than 70 million members, offers a more professional networking platform for you to post your résumé and connect with former and current co-workers. And many other sites, including Twitter, can also help you find employment. Wherever you surf, here are tips on how you can work the social-networking scene to land your next (or first) job:

Build your professional brand. Just as you would with a traditional résumé and cover letter, you should create an online presence that represents you best. If you're active on Facebook or other sites for personal use, consider creating separate accounts specifically for your professional efforts.

Make sure all your profiles are complete, highlighting your skills and filled with keywords and phrases that recruiters might search for. Andrea Sittig-Rolf, author of "Revolutionize, Revitalize & Rev Your Résumé," recommends including a mission statement of five words: "I help companies . . . "

You should also start a blog or Twitter account that can establish you as an expert in the field you'd like to pursue. "A blog will enable you to become more visible in search engines, such as Google, which hiring managers use to screen a lot of candidates," says Ivan Misner, author of "Networking Like a Pro" and founder of networking company BNI.com.

Part of building and maintaining a brand is monitoring what others have to say about you. Watch out for anything about you (or someone with a similar name) floating around cyberspace that might put you in a bad light -- which could be anything from photos of you drunk to bad language or even excessively poor spelling. Google yourself regularly, and delve deeper into your online presence with sites such as Pipl.com and Spokeo.com.

Keep in touch. Social-networking sites have made it easier than ever to maintain relationships with distant relatives, old classmates, former co-workers -- just about anyone you've ever met (who's also plugged in). Facebook suggests people you may know through your existing contacts, and LinkedIn shows you first-, second- and third-degree connections.

Advertise your professional intentions. Misner suggests letting your networks know the top five companies you'd like to work for. Send out tweets and status updates asking, for example: "I'd really love to work for Kiplinger. Can anyone put me in touch with someone there?"

"That laser specificity is counterintuitive, but it's very powerful," he said. When you're explicit, people are more likely to remember connections they might have and offer them to you. Also, ask for an introduction, not just contact information.

Research prospective employers. Use your social-media savvy to dig up all you can about any companies and jobs that interest you. Check out a company's Web site and Google the heck out of it, but also search social-networking sites for company pages, as well as employees. Or follow them on Twitter; some companies even offer feeds specifically for job postings, including AT&T (@attjobs), MTV (@mtvnetworksjobs) and Thomson Reuters (@TRCareers). You can also check on career sites, such as Vault.com -- where you can find loads of information on companies for free, plus additional details for $10 a month.

Showcase your tech savvy. Ours is the first full generation raised on computers. Social-networking skills and knowledge that feel natural to us (no, Mom, you don't say the Facebook) can be a great advantage, especially in workplaces looking to enhance their online exposure. Be sure to include your social-networking expertise on your résumé.

Now that you've plumbed the Internet for opportunities to jump-start your career, remember that your online persona can only get you so far. You have to continue your job search with in-person meetings.

-- Kiplinger's Personal Finance

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Jun 19, 2010

Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social

Image representing Amazon Kindle as depicted i...Image via CrunchBase

“THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him.

If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in the book.

Amazon calls this new feature “popular highlights.” It may sound innocuous enough, but it augurs even bigger changes to come.

Though the feature can be disabled by the user, “popular highlights” will no doubt alarm Nicholas Carr, whose new book, “The Shallows,” argues that the compulsive skimming, linking and multitasking of our screen reading is undermining the deep, immersive focus that has defined book culture for centuries.

With “popular highlights,” even when we manage to turn off Twitter and the television and sit down to read a good book, there will a chorus of readers turning the pages along with us, pointing out the good bits. Before long, we’ll probably be able to meet those fellow readers, share stories with them. Combating loneliness? David Foster Wallace saw only the half of it.

Mr. Carr’s argument is that these distractions come with a heavy cost, and his book’s publication coincides with articles in various publications — including The New York Times — that report on scientific studies showing how multitasking harms our concentration.

Thus far, the neuroscience of multitasking has tended to follow a predictable pattern. Scientists take a handful of test subjects out of their offices and make them watch colored squares dance on a screen in a lab somewhere. Then they determine that multitasking makes you slightly less able to focus. A study reported on early this month found that heavy multitaskers performed about 10 to 20 percent worse on most tests than light multitaskers.

These studies are undoubtedly onto something — no one honestly believes he is better at focusing when he switches back and forth between multiple activities — but they are meaningless as a cultural indicator without measuring what we gain from multitasking.

Thanks to e-mail, Twitter and the blogosphere, I regularly exchange information with hundreds of people in a single day: scheduling meetings, sharing political gossip, trading edits on a book chapter, planning a family vacation, reading tech punditry. How many of those exchanges could happen were I limited exclusively to the technologies of the phone, the post office and the face-to-face meeting? I suspect that the number would be a small fraction of my current rate.

I have no doubt that I am slightly less focused in these interactions, but, frankly, most of what we do during the day doesn’t require our full powers of concentration. Even rocket scientists don’t do rocket science all day long.

To his credit, Mr. Carr readily concedes this efficiency argument. His concern is what happens to high-level thinking when the culture migrates from the page to the screen. To the extent that his argument is a reminder to all of us to step away from the screen sometimes, and think in a more sedate environment, it’s a valuable contribution.

But Mr. Carr’s argument is more ambitious than that: the “linear, literary mind” that has been at “the center of art, science and society” threatens to become “yesterday’s mind,” with dire consequences for our culture. Here, too, I think the concerns are overstated, though for slightly different reasons.

Presumably, the first causalities of “shallow” thinking should have appeared on the front lines of the technology world, where the participants have spent the most time in the hyperconnected space of the screen. And yet the sophistication and nuance of media commentary has grown dramatically over the last 15 years. Mr. Carr’s original essay, published in The Atlantic — along with Clay Shirky’s more optimistic account, which led to the book “Cognitive Surplus” — were intensely discussed throughout the Web when they first appeared as articles, and both books appear to be generating the same level of analysis and engagement in long form.

The intellectual tools for assessing the media, once the province of academics and professional critics, are now far more accessible to the masses. The number of people who have written a thoughtful response to Mr. Carr’s essay — and, even better, published it online — surely dwarfs the number of people who wrote in public about “Understanding Media,” by Marshall McLuhan, in 1964.

Mr. Carr spends a great deal of his book’s opening section convincing us that new forms of media alter the way the brain works, which I suspect most of his readers have long ago accepted as an obvious truth. The question is not whether our brains are being changed. (Of course new experiences change your brain — that’s what experience is, on some basic level.) The question is whether the rewards of the change are worth the liabilities.

The problem with Mr. Carr’s model is its unquestioned reverence for the slow contemplation of deep reading. For society to advance as it has since Gutenberg, he argues, we need the quiet, solitary space of the book. Yet many great ideas that have advanced culture over the past centuries have emerged from a more connective space, in the collision of different worldviews and sensibilities, different metaphors and fields of expertise. (Gutenberg himself borrowed his printing press from the screw presses of Rhineland vintners, as Mr. Carr notes.)

It’s no accident that most of the great scientific and technological innovation over the last millennium has taken place in crowded, distracting urban centers. The printed page itself encouraged those manifold connections, by allowing ideas to be stored and shared and circulated more efficiently. One can make the case that the Enlightenment depended more on the exchange of ideas than it did on solitary, deep-focus reading.

Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television.

And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make.

Steven Johnson is an author and entrepreneur. His new book, “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation,” will be published in October.

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Jun 1, 2010

Yahoo to turn subscribers' e-mail contact lists into social networking base

Image representing Yahoo! as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase

By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 1, 2010; A08

Yahoo plans to announce Tuesday that it is jumping into social networking by using its massive population of e-mail subscribers as a base for sharing information on the Web.

Over the next few weeks, its 280 million e-mail users will be able to exchange comments, pictures and news articles with others in their address books. The program won't expose a user's contact list to the public, as was done by Google through its social networking application, Buzz. But unless a user proactively opts out of the program, those Yahoo e-mail subscribers will automatically be part of a sweeping rollout of features that will incorporate the kinds of sharing done on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The plan could spark criticism from Yahoo e-mail users, who signed up for the free service perhaps never imagining the people they e-mailed would become friends for sharing vacation videos, political causes and random thoughts throughout the day. And the move comes amid growing concern by federal lawmakers and regulators over how firms such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft have handled the privacy of Internet users.

After backlash, Facebook last week announced new privacy tools to make it easier for users to block Web sites from tapping into their information, as well as a simpler way to configure who on the site can see personal data. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Facebook on Friday to explain what kind of user data it had shared with third-party sites. Conyers also asked Google to retain, for federal and state regulators, the data the company scooped off WiFi networks as it collected Street View mapping photos around the country.

To allay privacy concerns, Yahoo said it would give users a week's notice before launching the new features and provide a single button on the site for opting out entirely.

Yahoo! Messenger IconImage via Wikipedia

"We've been watching and trying to be thoughtful about our approach," said Anne Toth, head of privacy for Yahoo.

Specifically, the company will launch a product called Yahoo Updates that allows e-mail users to see what other contacts on their lists are commenting about or sharing on sites like Yahoo Finance, Facebook and the photo sharing site Flickr. Updates will initially include 15 sites and partnerships and will eventually expand to include partners such as Twitter this summer.

Yahoo has tiptoed into social media, launching a similar tool last year called Connections, which allowed each user to customize a list of contacts with whom to share information. The company also tried two years ago to build a competitive product to Facebook, where users sought "friends," or contacts, to join micro-networks within Yahoo in the same way Facebook users amass friends through requests. Yahoo abandoned that project and instead decided to tap into its captive audience of e-mail users.

The move is part of a revamping of the once-rudderless Internet pioneer. Chief executive Carol Bartz, brought in last year to lead the firm, has stripped the company of unprofitable business units to focus on its greatest strengths -- its popular free e-mail and messaging programs, and its library of sports, news and finance sites -- to keep users in the Yahoo universe longer.

The longer a user stays on the site, the more advertising dollars and e-commerce it generates. But it remains to be seen if users will view their contact lists as the kinds of people they choose to socialize with on the Web. When Google launched Buzz, some users complained that they used Gmail for business and to correspond with strangers and that they didn't want to share birthday videos with their plumbers or bosses.

Yahoo will begin notifying users of the change on June 7, one week before the launch. Users who don't want to participate can click one button on the settings page to opt out. Or they can customize each piece of information -- a Facebook update or a comment on a Yahoo news story -- to either be shared with Yahoo e-mail contacts or Facebook. Eventually, Twitter and other partners with social-networking platforms will also be included.

"What Yahoo has done is recognized that your e-mail or messenger network is a useful resource and that you may be interested in knowing what your contacts are interested in knowing about, and they stop there," said Jules Polonetsky, the director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a privacy think tank. "That's opposed to the idea that then, therefore, your relationship with them risks being exposed."

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May 31, 2010

Value Added: Online, the art of the deal

Tim O'Shaughnessy, chief executive and co-founder of LivingSocial,  started with other businesses before hitting on this idea.
Tim O'Shaughnessy, chief executive and co-founder of LivingSocial, started with other businesses before hitting on this idea. (Bill O'leary/the Washington Post)

By Thomas Heath
Monday, May 31, 2010; A10

I am not on Facebook. I have never bought anything on eBay. My Amazon account is retired and my LinkedIn activity lapsed long ago.

I regularly tweet on Twitter. So at best, my online social activity is at the low end of the scale.

But I am fascinated by the marketing opportunities the online world presents. Every business under the sun, including newspapers such as this one, is trying to figure out how to make money through the Internet.

It looks as if one Washington enterprise might have cracked the code.

LivingSocial is a start-up run by some online entrepreneurs, led by Georgetown University graduate Tim O'Shaughnessy, 28.

The company has a simple online model: It has a deal of the day, in which participants use a credit card to buy, for instance, $50 of goods or services from a local company for $25. LivingSocial customers punch in their credit-card information and receive a code (or coupon) redeemable at the restaurant, spa or retailer participating in the offer. LivingSocial keeps 30 to 50 percent of each transaction and passes the rest to the deal-of-the-day business.

The May 19 deal of the day was a $40 voucher for food at Georgetown's Il Canale that sold for $20. O'Shaughnessy said 1,373 people bought in. That means LivingSocial took in around $27,460. At a hypothetical 50-50 split with Il Canale, LivingSocial's cut was $13,730.

Not bad. Throw in the fact that the company is operating in 20 cities, with dozens more on the horizon, and LivingSocial looks like a nice business indeed. It expects to gross $50 million this year; its net profit should be around 10 to 15 percent of that. One big competitor is Groupon, a company with a similar concept.

LivingSocial raised $40 million from venture firms such as Vienna-based Grotech Ventures and from former AOL mogul Steve Case this year. O'Shaughnessy, the son-in-law of Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham, invested some of his own cash during the fundraising to increase his stake in the business. The four founders still own a significant portion of LivingSocial, though it is less than half of the company.

O'Shaughnessy is a busy man these days. I caught up with him on the telephone after a long day of meetings in San Francisco, and before he jumped on a red-eye flight back to Washington.

Business is in his blood: His father runs a trucking firm in Minneapolis. O'Shaughnessy joined AOL after graduating from Georgetown's undergraduate business school in 2004. Two years later, he left the Internet giant to join Case's Revolution Health, an online site designed to help people take better care of themselves. O'Shaughnessy ran a 20-person products team in charge of the entire site, which offers a variety of things, from a calorie calculator to a listing of symptoms for diabetes.

Revolution Health paid the bills, but O'Shaughnessy and three buddies had been noodling for years over the business possibilities of online social networking. Specifically, they were trying to figure out how to use the social side of the Internet to get people to buy stuff. After a day at Revolution Health, they would head to the nearby Brickskeller Saloon on 22nd Street NW, where they would bounce around business ideas.

In July 2007, O'Shaughnessy and his pals resigned from Revolution Health the same day. Soon they had used Legal Zoom to incorporate as Hungry Machine: "We were hungry to do a lot in the technology world."

By then, Facebook had opened up a platform that allowed companies to build products that worked with the hugely popular social networking site. Hungry Machine noticed.

They found space above a Georgetown antiques store and started doing two things. First, they built their own product, a book-review site called Visual Bookshelf, which they offered to Facebook's millions of users.

Second, Hungry Machine picked up consulting gigs for companies such as ESPN. That covered operating costs while they beavered away at Visual Bookshelf. Visual Bookshelf would attract readers through its reviews, then take a fee from retailers such as Amazon for every customer sent their way. By 2009, it was grossing $2 million a year.

They experimented, inventing an application called "Pick Your Five." The advertising-based site posed fun questions to Facebook users: "What are your five favorite movies of all time?" "What five people you don't want to wake up and see standing at the end of your bed?"

The group shut down its consulting business in 2008 and decided to build on Visual Bookshelf and Pick Your Five. O'Shaughnessy went to the D.C. venture capital market, and in June 2008 they received $5 million from Grotech.

They closed down Hungry Machine and launched the LivingSocial brand, which concentrated on one question: How do we bridge the gap between knowing what beer people drink, what they eat and what they like to do -- and driving them to the businesses that offer those things?

"It seemed like a really big nut to crack," O'Shaughnessy said.

They experimented more.

"Hot Potato," an online game in which people could compare one another's success at passing a potato, taught them loads.

"We learned that if you put up a leader board, people wanted to win," he said.

When LivingSocial built a leader board in Visual Bookshelf, where people competed to see how many books they could review, the number of reviews jumped 30 percent. The result was more online traffic and more advertising.

A key move came in early 2009 with the acquisition of BuyYourFriendADrink. Beer, wine and liquor companies paid LivingSocial to steer its online audience to bars and restaurants where they could buy the clients' products.

"It was pay for performance," O'Shaughnessy said. "Participants would get a code that you would bring into a bar, and [the bar] would then plug it into their point-of-sales system like a credit-card number. For every person we brought in, we would get paid. There would be a specific list of participating bars."

By last summer, LivingSocial had moved into its current 7th Street NW offices and began running with the coupon model from BuyYourFriendADrink.

The "aha" moment came last fall, when they offered $8 one-way bus tickets from Washington to New York. They sold 2,500 tickets in a single day, filling up 50 buses.

LivingSocial now sells coupons for restaurants, spas, sky diving, cooking classes, boat cruises, hot-air balloons, golf lessons and bed-and-breakfasts, to name a few things. The company employs 120 people and is growing by the month.

I haven't bought anything on LivingSocial, but I'm thinking of it.

Anyway, I am not a complete online dinosaur: O'Shaughnessy and I follow each other on Twitter.

You can follow me on Twitter at addedvalueth.

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May 30, 2010

When Patients Meet Online, Are There Side Effects?

Brian Stauffer

COULD we cure diseases faster, or at least better control them, through crowd-sourcing?

That is the premise behind social networking sites like CureTogether.com and PatientsLikeMe.com, which offer online communities for patients and collect members’ health data for research purposes.

PatientsLikeMe provides forums where more than 65,000 members with epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and more than a dozen other disorders are encouraged to share details about their conditions and the success or pitfalls of specific drug treatments.

“When patients share real-world data, collaboration on a global scale becomes possible,” the site says. “New treatments become possible.”

Moreover, in a world where serious side effects often emerge only years after a new medication enters the market, such real-time information from real-world patients may also provide an early warning signal for drug safety problems.

PatientsLikeMe has an innovative for-profit business model, too. It sells health data, gathered from member profiles but with certain identifying information removed, to drug makers and others for scientific and marketing research.

Jamie Heywood, the company’s chairman, says both patients and drug makers delve into that data to meet their own needs.

Members can seek out patients of the same age, sex, and disease progression, whose profiles are displayed on the site, to see which drugs or doses worked for them. Drug makers can pinpoint subgroups — say, severely depressed middle-aged men — who reported the greatest improvement on a particular medication.

“What we have done is made a system that allows you to think about personalized medicine,” says Mr. Heywood. He co-founded the site in 2004 with his brother Ben and a friend after another brother, Stephen Heywood, developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. (Stephen died in 2006.)

But pharmaceutical crowd-sourcing also raises important questions about the trade-off between the benefits of information sharing and the risk of patient exploitation.

Some people share their health information for the sake of the greater good. Yet they typically have no way of knowing whether their health profiles contribute directly to the development of more effective treatments — or are simply mined to create more effective drug marketing.

“Do we need to protect people who have illnesses from being exploited?” says Cathy Dwyer, an associate professor at Pace University who has studied how advertisers market to consumers based on their online behavior. “It’s a very tricky line because people absolutely need emotional support when they are dealing with illness.”

PatientsLikeMe is one of many sites that promote the idea of the “e-patient,” a health consumer empowered by online information gathering. Along with offering health resources, many of these sites are also engineered to foster an environment where patients effectively promote treatments to other patients, without a doctor as intermediary.

The lines become blurry in these new arenas. There are unbranded “disease awareness” communities — for example, on Facebook or YouTube — where a drug maker may pay people to moderate patient forums or give testimonials but might not prominently display that fact to participants. Other sites collect consumer health data to help drug makers aim at specific kinds of consumers, using psychological cues.

Unlike television viewers, who can immediately spot direct-to-consumer drug ads, consumers on some health sites may not fully understand that they could be subject to marketing or marketing research, even if they have read the site’s privacy policy.

“We are talking about a digital pharma stealth economy that is emerging,” says Jeff Chester, the director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group that works to safeguard user privacy. “You don’t know who is being paid to moderate. You don’t know who’s listening in to your conversation. You don’t know what exactly they are focused on and what they are doing with the information.”

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 restricts the way health care providers use and disseminate patients’ information, but entities like consumer health Web sites are not subject to it. The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, which strictly regulates direct-to-consumer drug commercials and print ads, is still developing a policy on drug marketing through social media.

In many ways, PatientsLikeMe is open and clear about its data collection and how it makes its money.

The site’s privacy policy explains that it shares members’ data, shorn of certain personal identifiers, with drug makers and others. Even as the policy encourages people to share their health information so others can learn from their experiences, it advises members that the more personal details they disclose, the more they risk being publicly identified.

For corporate clients, the site also functions as a sophisticated data-mining tool that allows them to better pinpoint consumers and to develop new or improved drugs. PatientsLikeMe adopts a more bottom-line approach to companies than it does when advocating its greater-good policy to consumers.

“Yesterday, you couldn’t engage with patients because of regulatory conflicts and lack of patient access,” one corporate pitch says on the site. “Today, all that has changed. It’s time to interact directly with your new customers: patients.”

Among the services the site provides to its corporate clients is analysis of members’ conversations, broken down by age, sex, disease progression and treatments, to “learn not only what’s being said about your brand, but by whom.” Another service allows drug makers to conduct market research on 25 to 50 of the most active users on the site — typically those who post messages often and have emerged as opinion leaders — who consent to participate. Afterward, drug makers can refine their marketing efforts based on the effect of the program “on patient dialogues across the entire community,” the site says.

Ms. Dwyer of Pace says she has been “really, really shocked at the blatant manipulative language” that some sites use to describe their corporate services to industry versus how they describe themselves to consumers.

Ben Heywood, president of PatientsLikeMe, says the program for drug makers that focuses on the site’s most active users is not meant to promote specific messages. After participating in the program, he says, members do not disseminate industry ideas on the site. Some members, he says, simply want to share their opinions with drug makers, but they aren’t paid to do so.

Jamie Heywood says that such data analyses provide insight for drug makers on how best to reach patients, but the site itself does not market drugs to its members. Moreover, the Heywood brothers say, the site openly describes its industry services.

“Our objective is to teach the company,” he says, “not teach the patient about the company’s products.”

Still, some of PatientsLikeMe’s competitors have taken a less aggressive approach to how they market patient data.

CureTogether.com, for example, has occasionally earned money by e-mailing advertisements aimed at its members who have certain health conditions on behalf of drug makers seeking participants for clinical trials, says Daniel Reda, who co-founded the site with his wife, Alexandra Carmichael.

But CureTogether does not post a person’s profile for other members on the site to see or give drug makers access to members’ health data in any form, he says. “The best way to protect people,” Mr. Reda says, “is to collect as little information as possible.”

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May 28, 2010

Southeast-Asia Tweetstream List Now Open on Twitter

Southeast Asia countries, not only ASEANImage via Wikipedia

by John MacDougall

Twitter allows any account holder to create public or private 'lists' on his or her page. On Twitter, a 'list' is an automatically refreshing stream of tweets in real time. While there are many types of people using Twitter for many different purposes, one large easily identifiable group consists of people and organizations who specialize in providing current content.

I've taken advantage of all these Twitter feature to create on my page there six (6) lists, each reflecting one of the six content areas on which Starting Points research blog focuses. All six are set to public. One list, southeast-asia, is ready-to-view, and should be accessible to all (logged-in 'twerps') with one click on its name here. For persons interested in Southeast Asia, t's a vastly more stimulating experience to read these tweets than anything one can find on places like Yahoo Groups, the whole of Facebook, or even Google News and Google Blog Search.

Worth a visit. One click. :-)


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My Tweet Stream Today about Internet Resources

Mum's FlowersImage by ~Prescott via Flickr


  1. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall #Google #Buzz Adds #Reshare #Option: http://bit.ly/9GpOD2 via @addthis #gmail #social #networking
  2. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall Why #Facebook's #privacy war is not over - CNN.com: http://bit.ly/a9N32i via @addthis #internet #twitter - Lucid essay.
  3. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall Hands-On: #Roku's New #Netflix #Interface [PICS]: http://bit.ly/cIGJFD via @addthis #movies #streaming #video #internet
  4. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall Top Places To Get #Free and #Legal #Music: http://bit.ly/bQGZSK via @addthis #sites #blogs #internet
  5. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall Create #Playlists from #Music Blogs with #ExtensionFM: http://bit.ly/czHfWr via @addthis #google #chrome #browser
  6. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall Reputation Management and #Social #Media | #Pew #Research Center's #Internet & #American Life Project: http://bit.ly/bffSHj via @addthis
  7. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall Drill (Down), Baby, Drill: #Facebook’s #New “Simple” #Privacy #Settings Pretty Complex: http://selnd.com/d4SNRv via @addthis - Grade: D.
  8. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall #iGoogle: http://www.google.com/ig via @addthis #personal #homepage -- for everything Googlesque.
  9. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall Welcome to #Google #Wave: https://wave.google.com/wave/ via @addthis #social #professional #networking
  10. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall Official Google #Blog: Happy 1st birthday, #Google #Wave!: http://bit.ly/d0V3dd via @addthis #social #networking
  11. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall #Local #Twitter #People #Search, #Twellowhood: http://www.twellow.com/twellowhood/ via @addthis #internet
  12. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall #Twitter #Yellow #Pages - #Twellow: http://www.twellow.com/ via @addthis #internet
  13. D Rosen dollarmaker7 @JohnAMacDougall Saw your tweet about traffic. This review of Miracle Traffic Bot just might interest you. http://bit.ly/bKLRSc?=njg5
  14. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall List and Links for #Top #1000 #Sites in #Users - http://bit.ly/9fylrc via @addthis #internet #google #research
  15. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall Starting Points: #Google Names #Facebook Most Visited Site: http://bit.ly/bXHLzj via @addthis #internet #traffic #list #top #1000 #sites

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May 25, 2010

Who Needs Facebook? You Can Do It All with Twitter

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase


  1. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/diZkt7 - See if your #friends are on #Twitter. Yes, #follow them. No. #Invite them.
  2. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/Ia0aL - 5 Impressive #Mashups of #Twitter and #Flickr - #internet #photo #sharing
  3. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/EQU82 - #Mashable's #Guide to #Twitter - #internet - Great resource!
  4. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/96aMAr - #Mashable's #Twitter #List #Directory - #internet
  5. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/bGDZel - #Twitter power: Learning from ourselves, in real time - #friends #internet
  6. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall #Shareaholic: #Social #Networking #Add-on for #Firefox - http://bit.ly/48axRB and http://bit.ly/9OgQP8 - #twitter #internet
  7. ✓ Tweet Tips&Tricks Tips_n_Tricks RT @JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/9nO4yc - How to Get More #Twitter #Followers - #internet
  8. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/baJ3Eb - The Basics of #Twitter - #internet
  9. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/9nO4yc - How to Get More #Twitter #Followers - #internet
  10. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/drv7Da - How To: Change Your #Twitter User #Name Without Losing #Followers - #internet
  11. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/jTt6 - #Advanced #Twitter #Search Form - #internet
  12. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/9ueGMH - The #Twitter Platform - #blog #internet
  13. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/3BG4oO - Complete #List of #Twitter #Search #Operators - #internet
  14. JohnAMacDougall JohnAMacDougall http://bit.ly/a6ic3F - 6 Quick Tips to #Search #Twitter Like an Expert - #internet

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