Remember Twitter before November, 2008? Don’t worry, neither do most people. A year ago the microblogging juggernaut started to skyrocket in popularity as celebrities began flooding it with their own personal tweets. Once they began promoting it throughout various television interviews (e.g. Larry King Live with Ashton Kutcher and Sean Combs) and infomercial-like talk show specials (e.g. Oprah) it became a nationwide tech phenomenon that everyone and their mom just had to try out. Read more »

As promising as virtual goods utilized by Facebook games have looked to be this past year, there has been a wave of controversy rising over its potential expense. As relationships with virtual goods companies and social games are reportedly yielding boatloads of revenue, consumers, privacy advocates and pundits are taking notice. This past week has proven particularly damaging for several companies participating in virtual goods, as scams are revealed and less than stellar business practices are uncovered or alleged with many of the popular social games on Facebook (i.e. FarmVille, Restaurant City, Mafia Wars, etc.). Read more »

These days our smart phones come GPS-enabled, helping us figure out which direction to head when we’re lost, and where the nearest post office is. Being location-aware can be a pretty social thing as well, considering all of our interactions have a time as well as a place. These two factors can have a great impact on the decisions you make – you’re already on the north side of town and you don’t mind killing another 25 minutes until a local networking event begins. Read more »

Twitter is the high-tech haiku, the latest and greatest in social services that’s really going to change the way we do everything! Seriously! Not like MySpace, or Facebook, or any of the other things that mass media advertised as the end of everything that came before (but turned out to be advertising platforms loaded with preteens and people who illegally like preteens). Unfortunately the fantastic future is again unfounded, as Twitter is falling to the same problem that paralyzed previous popular sites: spambots and idiots. Read more »

In addition to Google Maps, are plenty of other great location-based GPS (Global Positioning System) driven Google Android apps available for free download in the Android Market. GPS can be very helpful when you’re needing directions, trying to find the closest restaurant nearby, or simply wanting to display your location to friends on some of the popular mobile social networks. Nowadays Android apps that utilize GPS can even help you find your T-Mobile G1 if it’s ever lost or stolen. Read more »

The internet is an incredibly powerful tool for sharing information, communicating, and learning, but it’s also an excellent resource that identity thieves use to obtain your personal information. Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the United States and nowadays most people don’t give a second thought to posting their full name, address, and phone number on popular social networks like Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. Read more »

It seems like nearly everyone in the tech world is sick of hearing about Twitter so I thought it would be nice to checkup on some of the other microblogging and micromessaging services that are available. When Twitter launched in 2006 and began receiving some decent attention, copycats came out of the woodwork. Fortunately for Twitter, no direct competitors really had the staying power to launch any kind of real threat to the little birdie. Compete’s latest stats show that Twitter’s monthly unique visitors is up by 39% yet many of its direct competitors are dead or barely breathing. Read more »

The more I think about FriendFeed as a Twitter application the more sense it makes. FriendFeed has the potential to become the go-to communication service for 140+ characters. Currently when you need to continue a Twitter discussion elsewhere (because of 140 character limit), you only have two options: chat or email. Both of those choices are really inconvenient however because they require that you move the discussion to another location. Read more »

The explosion of new social networks and web applications that occurred several years ago created a need for people to keep track of one’s web content/activity over many different online services. The lifestreaming/social aggregation solution seemed to address that problem quite well and soon there were almost too many to choose from. Read more »

In case you haven’t heard, John Mayer was dumped by Jennifer Anniston because he Twitters too much and president Obama has returned to the Twittersphere. These are just a few of the many examples of how the world is becoming so infatuated with the tech juggernaut known as Twitter. Many others including well known politicians, musicians, actors, athletes, bloggers, major news sources, and television personalities are embracing Twitter to effectively connect with their fans. Read more »