Facebook At Age Five

The social networking site now boasts 250 million users, but has yet to make a single dollar in profit. Five years after its inception, a look at whether it can last another five.

Facebook Video: Now Serving 1 Billion Views A Month, Including This Amazing Zuck Impression

There's also one nice piece of data tucked away in the video: Facebook saw over 1 billion video views last month. That's still far less than that 1.2 billion YouTube sees every day, but it undoubtedly makes Facebook one of the top video sharing sites on the web (it's also the largest photo sharing site).

Is Twitter A Job Qualification #FAIL?

More companies are asking for followers and friends, Rosen says, but even more want lots of experience in social media. "It's only a matter of seconds, minutes or hours before marketers look at what is a natural phenomenon like viral marketing and seek to institutionalize it," she says. "Once we see signs of brand loyalty and engagement, we try to create that artificially."

YouTube Insight: Share Detailed Stats For Your Videos

When you upload a video to YouTube, you get access to YouTube Insight, a powerful analytics tool that shows you a bunch of interesting metrics about your video: who's watching it, where, its ratings, total number of views and the like.

This info, however, was -- until now -- hidden from the rest of the general population, but not any more. By switching it on in the the privacy settings for your videos (located under "My Account") you can now share this data with everyone. It'll become visible in the "Statistics & Data" section, located under the video.

Republicans, wireless companies object to broadband package, Ars Technica.

"That's because the speaker wants the entire stimulus package on the House floor next week," Baron continued. "We all understand that if we don't accommodate her timetable, she'll yank the bill away and handle it herself, and the decline of our committee's status and influence will accelerate.

Obama is a "Miserable Failure", Search Engline Land.

I told you so. Or I told anyone who cared. I even tried to reach the Obama
administration in four or five different ways. Do a search on Yahoo right now for miserable failure, and you'll find President Barack Obama's page ranking in the top spot or the second spot.

America's Most Wired Cities, Forbes.

D.C. scoops up another honor this year, as the most wired city to watch, thanks to technopile president Barack Obama. Obama's support for universal broadband and fluency with mobile devices is expected to boost Internet and wi-fi access nationwide.

Nothing Interesting to Say? Plinky Hopes to Change That, Read Write Web.

Like it or not. You're a writer. You're creating content on a daily basis, updating your Facebook status, commenting on blogs, sending tweets. Social networking requires that level of communication. But as a writer, you're also a potential victim for writer's block, a condition that plagues even the most prolific authors. 

GOP Thoughts On Obama's New Website, National Journal Online.

"Obama's design efforts have gotten progressively more workmanlike since the campaign site was refreshed with ethereal, cloud-like design in early 2008. I was expecting a return to something more like that now that Obama actually is the president, rather than pretending to be president with fake seals and federal imagery."

Cherple Links Instant Messaging With SMS, TechCrunch.

Cherple , a new service from San Diego based Glogaltel Media, wants to connect the world’s 1.5 billion Internet users to the 3.3 billion wireless devices via an instant message-to-SMS platform.

21 Excellent Web Apps for College Students, Dumb Little Man.

The following list includes 21 great tools/sites for school and college students. The tools are completely web based and almost all of them are free to use.

Internet Providers Move to Shape Broadband Push, Wall Street Journal.

Lawmakers in Congress want a plan that will create jobs over the next two to three years while also tackling the longer-term goal of improving the availability and quality of high-speed Web access in the U.S. The U.S. has slipped to 15th from fourth place since 2001 in broadband penetration, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The iPhones Golden Touch, Washington Post.

Ge Wang never dreamed of becoming a high-tech Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He's an assistant professor at Stanford, a specialist in computer science and music whose biggest passion has been organizing nerdy "laptop orchestras" composed of 20 people each "playing" a notebook computer.

Obama Policymakers Turn to Campaign Tools, The Washington Post.

The health-care mobilization taking shape before Obama even takes office will include online videos, blogs and e-mail alerts as well as traditional public forums. Already, several thousand people have posted comments on health on the Obama transition Web site.

Web Marketing That Hopes to Learn What Attracts a Click, New York Times.

Now, a new breed of companies is trying to tackle all of those options and determine what ad works for a specific audience. They are creating hundreds of versions of clients’ online ads, changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience.

Rise of the Twitterati, The Washington Post.

The Obama campaign revolutionized political communication and fundraising. Fireside chats and radio addresses may nurture our nostalgia, but blogs and twitters feed our need for speed. They also give an impression of human contact without the muss and fuss of actual intimacy.

Facebook Aims to Extend Its Reach Across the Web, NY Times.

Facebook has detailed information about its users: their real identities, what they like and dislike and whom they associate with. With a member’s permission, it could use that data to help other Web sites deliver more personalized ads. Similarly, those sites could tell Facebook what its users are doing elsewhere, helping to make its own ads more targeted.

Israeli Candidate Borrows a (Web) Page From Obama, The New York Times.

Mr. Sanilevich said the Netanyahu campaign plans to make use of Twitter, the mass text-messaging service that sends out short “tweets.

“There are a couple thousand in Israel on Twitter,” he said. “We have lots of people using the Web sites registered as volunteers, and I am sure we will be able to use Twitter, which is an amazing tool. I have it on my phone, and I go around with Bibi and everywhere we go he gives me things to say on Twitter.”

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs, The New York Times.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego’s television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown’s glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.

A New Voice Rises In the Red States, NewsWeek.

After suffering demoralizing losses in the Nov. 4 election, the GOP is searching for new voices to spur a comeback. But the party's right wing tends to distrust anyone who's too comfortable inside the Beltway, which is partly why Erickson—White House visits aside—has built such a following. The worldwide headquarters of his RedState.com is a sleepy coffee shop in Macon, Ga., 700 miles from Washington. They must brew a strong cup of joe there, because from his remote perch, Erickson has grabbed his party's power brokers by their elephant-stitched suspenders.

Youth vote edges up 1 percentage point, Politico.

"Everybody voted at a higher rate," said Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE. "It was a big year for everyone else to turn out as well."Levine said he thought the youth made a good showing, though."The youth vote was pretty high in 2004," Levine said. "It's hard to improve that much over it.

Can Facebook be Presidential, Politico.

With the campaign over, though, the president-elect is in uncharted territory. He has figured out how to use the Web in order to get elected. Now he must determine how the Internet can aid in governing.So how should the president-elect craft a plan for the Web?The process won't be easy. One problem is that campaign finance rules likely keep the president-elect from simply keeping my.barackobama.com.

Twitterank Creator Speaks, ZDNet.

That, is the “secwet” behind Twitterank. Similar to how Google’s PageRank algorithm judged a web page based on the number of inbound links and the origin of those links, Twitterank attempts to quantify a Twitter user by analyzing their incoming @replies. In essence, the more people talk to you, the higher your score.

Chatting about the Internet and the 2008 Elections, The Bivings Report.

The secret of the success of Barack Obama’s social network is that at its heart it is really a social action center.  When you login to My.BarackObama, you are pushed to make phone calls to undecided voters, knock on doors and raise money for the campaign, not to produce content.