In a BBC article coming out of  SxSW, David Sacks, the founder of business social network Yammer, is quoted as saying that social network users are in “the process of creating email 2.0″. Granted, for the most part, people are posting status updates on their social media sites, but I disagree with the comment that Sacks thinks “it’s all people want to do.” Especially when I get up in the morning and take a look at the mounting pile of email sitting in my inbox. [source]
While the growth in such services is heralded as the start of the “real-time, …read more

Guy told me this was coming a while back when I’d asked about being able to save certain feeds and rearrange them as I saw fit, so MyAlltop didn’t come as a surprise to me.
Tomorrow, the “online magazine rack”, (one which all of my sites are on!) launches MyAlltop , allowing people to create custom collections of Alltop feeds. For me, it’s basically going to be replacing Google reader – at least for the sites I read regularly for news for the sites. I also suspect I’ll discover a whole ton of new sites as well.
Every custom MyAlltop collection is …read more

The popularity of LinkedIn has soared – the year over year growth is 200%, and the economy is the culprit. I’m seeing people on Twitter talking about their education, and looking for work, asking for leads. Facebook has seen growth as well, with people friending others, no matter how remote, in order to cash in on their social capital as a job strategy.
While the popularity of online social networking is transforming the nature of traditional business networking and the way people manage their careers, it also is heralding in change in the way that social networking work as well. It …read more

I awoke early on Monday morning, to see twitter alive with Skittles comments, posts and tweets crowding my screen. I knew something was going on, but didn’t bother to look until the hubbub had died down, at least a little.
In fact, it didn’t even cross my mind again until this afternoon, during a business meeting, where for the second time in as many weeks, I brought up something that the others hadn’t heard about, that I’d seen on Twitter or other social networking platforms. I honestly can’t remember what the first situation was – something silly that people were jumping …read more

“Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users.” Stay tuned, this and more deadly news at 11.
Once again, parents are being warned that something else in the world will harm/kill or otherwise damage their children. A neuroscientist, Susan Greenfield, from the UK is claiming that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centered.
I’ve read the article in full three times, and I am still having trouble taking the whole thing seriously.
Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, believes repeated exposure …read more

"What magazines are you reading now?"
"Share the longest road trip you’ve ever been on"
"Have you ever gone a day without your cell phone?"

Plinky, possibly a "smarter Twitter", is a new micro-blogging platform, which, instead of asking the ubiquitous "What are you doing?" (which, like most, I tend to ignore…), provides a prompt you can answer or move onto the next question.
I signed up for Plinky (and you can find me there under colleencoplick, as you can under many other social networks), but I haven’t determined exactly where the communications and conversations part of Plinky is – which is what …read more

I can admit it – I geek out over statistics. I pour over my Google Analytics reports, and I ogle Omniture. I also get a little gooshy over seeing compete.com come out with statistics for social networks as a whole… oh, and my hands down guilty pleasure has got to be all of those Twitter statistics measurement APIs floating about like Twitter Grader and Twinfluence. I can’t help it, deep down, I am a dork.
Compete.com recently released their January 2009 statistics for traffic ranks to the various social networks.

I find this endlessly fascinating. Look at Twitter’s skyrocketing hurtle …read more

Maybe it was Obama’s inauguration. Maybe it was the Hudson River "landing" that did it. Whatever the event, something catapulted Twitter even higher into the mainstream.  For the first time last week, the market share of traffic to Twitter beat out Digg, according to Hitwise. [source]
Hitwise also says that Twitter’s rise to power is due to increased traffic to the site from 25-35 year olds. This demographic is now making up 45% of Twitter traffic, vs a meager 12% from a year ago. Digg depends primarily on traffic from Google, but Twitter gets a larger share of traffic from social …read more

Millions of people are converging onto the city of Washington DC for the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States. It’s a watershed moment – we all remember where we were at the end of Apartheid, the day the Berlin Wall came down, and, we’ll all remember where we were when President Obama was sworn in.
Nadia Nascimento, the head of Vancouver’s User Generated Video Contest Platform, memelabs, is in Washington DC for Obama’s inauguration. "I realized that we were part of a story." Nascimento came up with the plan to record users hopes dreams and allowing them …read more

I spend a lot of time wandering about the interwebs and reading articles that interest me. It makes some sense – as a writer, I’ve got an insatiable curiosity about the world, so when I stumbled across an article titled  "The mother and son torn apart by web ‘cult’ that destroys families: Teenage follower of a controversial internet philosopher tells how he walked out on his family and why he now despises them" I was easily distracted and rather enthralled.
Turns out there’s a guy named Stefan Molyneux, who claims to be an Internet philosopher, who advocates, or perhaps just …read more