nice infographics

"Service data. Service data is the data you need to give to a social networking site in order to use it. It might include your legal name, your age, and your credit card number. Disclosed data. This is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on. Entrusted data. This is what you post on other people's pages. It's basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don't have control over the data -- someone else does. Incidental data. Incidental data is data the other people post about you. Again, it's basically same same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that 1) you don't have control over it, and 2) you didn't create it in the first place. Behavioral data. This is data that the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with."

" how these online scams work on Facebook and other social networks – the mechanics of how the money is made, some of the people involved, and who is actually clicking on ads. If you’re reading this article, there is a good chance that you are not the type of person actually clicking on these spam ads, but are you curious as to who actually is?"

findings of three years of research on kids' informal learning with digital media.

"Stack Overflow was built on what Spolsky calls the nine "building blocks" in an effort to create a site that was anthropologically correct and would encourage people to behave in a way that would work. He also pointed out that every single one is copied from somewhere else. Voting, Tags, Editing, Badges, Karma, Pre-search, Google is UI, Performance, Critical Mass"

opensource social network

like ping.fm meets yahoo pipes.

oh, they'll be acquired! very sticky location-based social connection utility (my that's a lot of adjectives, sorry)

Social consumption (wine, books, music, movies, tv, etc) "bar appears right on your current page to show you friends who looked at the same things and what they thought"

Talks about design patterns in social software a la Christopher Alexander et al.

"You can now use Facebook Connect on your iPhone in the same way you can for a website. Simply download any application featuring Facebook Connect and log in using your Facebook account from your iPhone. Then, you'll be able to easily find your Facebook friends. They will be able to see the same profile information as they can on the site, controlled by your privacy settings. You can also share what you're doing with your iPhone applications with all of your Facebook friends by publishing stories back to your profile."

"we're forced to contend with a society in which things are being truly reconfigured. ... this creates all new questions about context & privacy, about our relationship to space & to the people around us. Specific genres of social media may come & go, but these underlying properties are here to stay. We won't turn the clock back on these. Social network sites may end up being a fad from the first decade of the 21st century, but new forms of technology will continue to leverage social network as we go forward. If we get away from thinking about the specific technologies & focus on the properties & dynamics, we can see how change is unfolding before our eyes. One of the key challenges is learning how to adapt to an environment in which these properties & dynamics play a key role. This is a systems problem. We are all implicated in it - as developers & policy makers, as parents & friends, as individuals & as citizens. Social media is here to stay. Now we just have to evolve with it."

"These 100 social networks offer the chance to get involved, make a difference and meet people that share your ideals and ambitions. You won’t just be building good karma, but also making a real impact on the world of tomorrow."

"a social networking site for people under the age of 27 who like to connect based on deeper interests than Paris Hilton's wardrobe and want to get engaged within a cause. Find a cause, join the discussion and get involved."

"developing an open spec for exchange of contact info" would be nice to see this succeed

"a core pattern for Web 2.0, in which a social network user can have many people following them without a need for reciprocity. Assmmetric Follow is unlike email for example, which tends to be within small groups, with all users knowing each other (newsletters are a clear exception here)." the comments are just as interesting.

"I'm a voracious learner. In addition to reading magazines, books, blogs, tweets, and faces, I persistently look for patterns, connections, anomalies and what's new. I tolerated school only because it was where my friends were and because occasionally I could talk with adults who seemed to know a bit about topics that might someday matter... As we build relationships with other people, we tap into their networks of knowledge and sense, creating learning webs, making our compound knowledge more valuable than compound interest."

A place for speakers of other languages to meet "Connect with native speakers and learn directly from other members of the busuu.com community!"

big list of corporate presence in sns

"Walter Benajmin believed that modern media permitted a revolution in perception that made us prey to dictators and false gods. He might have been talking about Facebook." "the difference between "follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon" and experiencing that same mountain range at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing ("Gosh, this mountain is beautiful! Just like a postcard!"), social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship. By ignoring that difference, as Shirky mostly does, we keep moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on--talking, being introduced to new people by friends--are threatened."

Infographic showing the global variation among most popular social networking services

The budding Community Manager industry holds 4 tenets; these values resonate as a common thread within the role. The include community advocation, brand ambassadorship, online communication skills, and product requirements gathering and improvements.

Covering several popular foreign language social networks. (Naver, Baidu, Mixi, Mediapart.fr)

This is Facebeg! Everyone Can Join! Sign Up Now! - Excuse me? This is Facebeg! Get Connected! Stay Connected! - I’m not really a joiner— This is Facebeg! Everyone Can Join! Sign Up Now, Comrade! - Well, you’re very compelling, as a brand, I’ll give you th

"Publishing content into a third party proprietary application is nothing more than sharecropping. You don’t truly own what you are doing, and you are not the primary beneficiary of your actions."

i'm looking forward to lots of innovation in the signal/noise/attention space in NEAR future

The social network provides important lessons for executives—and a key forum for innovation and experimentation

Innovation happens at edges Youth shouldn’t be discounted, their demographic group has edges as well, edges where innovation takes place We need to build platforms that sustain many open edges in order to foster innovation

"To be successful at social software implementations in business you need firstly to have a solid understanding of how people work and relate to computers, tools, and each other." exactly!

affinity groups for medical issues

identity aggregator

"The Social Graph API looks for two types of publicly declared connections: It looks for all public URLs that belong to you and are interconnected. It looks for publicly declared connections between people."

all your media are belong to us

In less than five years, nearly half of all U.S. Internet users will visit at least one social networking site on a monthly basis, as will more than 80 percent of all teenagers

An ego-centric social network places the individual as the core of the network experience (Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster) while the object-centric network places a non-ego element at the center of the network. Examples of object-centric networks i

good overview and intro

a project of more than 30 leading youth organizations throughout the U.S. and Canada. The Challenge leverages the power of young people to organize on college campuses and high schools across Canada and the U.S. to win 100% Clean Energy policies at their

looks at the predictors of SNS usage, with particular focus on Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster

"Applying game mechanics to functional software" Decent collection of ways that games can influence other designs.

To be sustainable is to consciously and systematically strive to improve our environmental, economic and financial future for an individual, family and community

It’s a simple, FREE and easy way to ask questions of any community you belong to and get back a single organized result to use and share instead of a blizzard of emails and instant messages.

A lot of my friends and readers are technophiles. They believe that social networking and other technologies can make the world a much better place. I'd like to believe it, but I don't.

a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You'll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.

and hanging out with my friends, and we actually ended up sleeping together that night... And then the next day, she came over again, and ended up meeting the girl who she ended up becoming long-term girlfriends with.

Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. [...] it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

"how the architecture that frames social life is changing and what it means for a generation growing up knowing that this shift is here to stay"

WHAT SMALLER ONLINE COMMUNITIES LACK in size they can often make up for in stronger engagement levels, according to new research from online community developer Communispace.