Social networking sites allow us to maintain a web presence long after death
It is a most basic fact of life: we will all die. There are no creams, no pills, no incantations that can change this. However, more and more of us have the opportunity to perpetuate ourselves by the grace of overenthusiastic automated Facebook reminders and the digital archives of identity that we upload with pieces of us.
After we die, we leave behind an estate that tells a particular story of who we were. We have no control over how we are represented, perceived or passed around: the post-death identities of highly public, controversial figures such as Muammar Gaddafi are appropriated for political agendas and images ricochet around news outlets and the web; more popular people such as Steve Jobs are bequeathed elevated cachet offline and on; and the less well-known but just as deserving, such as recently deceased computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, maintain an afterlife among the faithful who cluster around biographies and tributes.
As for the rest of us, pre-web, we'd have faded away pretty quickly. Now, it's possible to have our own public perpetuity. This can be disconcerting to those we leave behind. Many of the stories I've heard about digital death experiences come from bereaved people who are jolted by the activity surrounding a loved one's online profile, or the skeletons that were hidden in an online closet. One person who contacted me about his experience of 21st-century death commented: "It's a very weird thing, Facebook after death: it's a strange, living memorial to which anyone can add and contribute – and which the family cannot control." Social network accounts become windows into the worlds of their former owners, exposing the good and the devastating facts – such as hidden relationships or mental health problems – of a person's life.
Most social network services allow family members to access a deceased loved one's account, to turn it into a memorial page, to archive it or to delete it. This can preserve the online identity as part of the whole person, something that, pre-Facebook, wouldn't have been part of the mainstream idea of "self". Virtual memorials can be a real source of comfort to loved ones. The same commenter told me: "Following the recent first anniversary of [my brother's] death, it was emotional – and not unpleasant – to log back on and see people posting anniversary messages and to see that he was still in the thoughts of so many people."
We are now embedded in online social networks, which means they can be speedy conduits for informing people whose lives were touched by the deceased person. Others told me that, although they'd only known someone online, when they'd heard about their death, they felt compelled to go to their funeral.
Death is big business and there is an emerging industry that wants to help us deal with our digital assets before we die. The fourth Digital Death Day conference takes place in Amsterdam in November, aimed at a motley crew of undertakers, human-computer interaction researchers and social network administrators. It hopes to answer questions about new forms of estate and legacy planning, the implications of the web for end-of-life and after-death care and the ways the terms and conditions of online tools are constructed to take into consideration the end-of-account requirements of their customers.
People are already lining up to advise us on what should and shouldn't be included in a last will and testament, offer hacking services for the bereaved to gain access to locked-down computers and social networking accounts, and flog augmented headstones so grave site visitors can discover more about an entombed person's life by scanning it with a smartphone. Our digital assets are incredibly rich resources, and the archive of emotional and biographical assets that we leave behind is growing every day. Parents document everything about their children's lives and upload it to the web, from first moments to first days at school, and beyond.
Once we have control of our online selves, we continue to pour the minutiae of us into infinitely deep memory books. "I'm not espousing that we chronicle every little aspect of our lives: that would be ridiculous, redundant and boring," says John Romano, one of the authors of Your Digital Afterlife, "but there are things that we value that we put online. And there are times when representation online is the only way that it's stored."
"It used to be the things that were most important to us had tangibility," continues Evan Carroll, Romano's co-author. "Now that we're doing these things digitally, the content – no matter what format it's in – is still important." These are potentially valuable emotional assets, personally and socially, and their worth only truly realised by the people who survive us. For this reason, Carroll and Romano recommend taking a regular audit of what's important – photos, videos, status updates, blog posts, online banking passwords – and entrusting an executor with the details of how to access them.
Death in the age of the web reminds us how much the technology has become part of the fabric of our personal and social identities. Once we're gone, what we leave behind is a rich resource of who we are. We may not survive beyond the release of the next social network, but our inevitable ends are being extended by our digital lives.
InternetAleks Krotoskiguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Adnan Nevic, 12, hopes child seven billion will see world peace. Is it possible in a world of growing competition for resources?
In a modest flat in Visoko, near Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 12-year-old Adnan Nevic is playing with a globe. "America, Australia, Asia," he says, pointing out the places he would like to visit on the slightly deflated blow-up toy.
His favourite subject at school is geography and he wants to be a pilot when he grows up, the better to fulfil his dreams of global travel.
That Adnan has such an international outlook is hardly surprising: at only two days old, he was held aloft in a Sarajevo hospital by the then United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, to be snapped by the world's news photographers.
Of all the 80 million babies born that year, Adnan was chosen as the world's six billionth living person.
The UN calculates that the world will have its seventh billion person on 31 October; the global population will hit nine billion by 2050; and, according to a UN report due on Wednesday, by the end of the century there could be 16 billion people on the planet, although most experts consider this an unlikely scenario, at the very top end of the range of expectations.
Adnan was born in 1999, chosen ostensibly at random but really as a symbol of hope after a bloody decade in the former Yugoslavia, which was also the birthplace of the five billionth baby, born in Zagreb in 1987.
The four billionth person was born in 1974, and the three billionth in 1960, according to the UN.
Before that, the world took much longer to add so many people: there were two billion people in 1927, and it took the whole of human history until 1804 to reach the point at which a whole billion people inhabited the planet at the same time.
Adnan, as well as being a 12-year-old boy with aspirations to travel the globe, is an emblem of the rapidly growing world population that until recently has shown few signs of abating.
Rising birth rates in many countries, particularly in the developing world, have combined with longer life expectancy and successes in reducing infant mortality to produce a total population that few used to predict was even possible.
Adnan lives in a modest flat in the historic city. The cars parked outside are mid-range models not more than a few years old, the blocks are well-kept and the surroundings are pleasant though not affluent. Outside the block there is a solitary piece of graffiti, in blue spraypaint. It reads "Adnan". He is a local celebrity.
Most of the 78 million children born this year – and of the two to three billion expected in the next 40 years – will not be so lucky. The vast majority will be born into appalling privation, in slums in developing countries.
Is the world failing these children?
Last year, although enough food was produced to satisfy the world's needs, at least one billion people went hungry, according to UN estimates.
The same number lacked access to clean water and more than 2.6 billion people still have no adequate sanitation. Most of the world's population now live in towns and cities, not the countryside, for the first time in history. But the urban centres that people are joining are the world's burgeoning megacities, in each of which tens of millions of people live in penury without electricity, water, toilets or enough to eat.
Child seven billion will be born into a different world to that which Adnan entered – one threatened by terrorism, economic crisis, climate change and new wars unthought of in 1999. But the problems that the exploding population will unleash may, according to some commentators, make today's crises seem mild.
"Of all the interconnected problems we face, perhaps the most serious is the proliferation of our own species," says Sir Crispin Tickell, a former British ambassador to the UN, now an environmental guru. "We are like a species out of control."
As population rises, this argument runs, consumption will increase and place an impossible strain on natural resources, from water supplies and agricultural land to fish in the ocean, as well as giving rise to runaway climate change as we burn ever more fossil fuels.
One example of the kind of problem the planet will face has been this year's devastating famine in the Horn of Africa. Drought was the primary cause, but it has been exacerbated by pressure on the land; the population of the region has doubled since the early 1970s.
Mary Robinson, the former Irish president, told a recent meeting of the Aspen Institute: "Somalia shows the extent to which failure to learn from the famine in 1992, and our failure to prioritise the health of women and children, has become a global problem, one none of us can ignore."
This view is derided in some quarters, especially the US right, as "neo-Malthusian" – a pessimistic assumption of limit to the world's bounty that has always been proved wrong in the past. Productivity – squeezing more food from less land, more energy from fewer resources – has kept pace with or exceeded population growth in the past, so why not in the future?
Although fertility rates have declined slightly from their 1960s peak, there is now a demographic "bulge", a boom in the number of young people, that will ensure growth continues at a clip for the next few decades. By around mid-century, if the predictions are right, population will for the first time in centuries begin a slow decline.
These are just guesses. Many experts believe the UN's nine billion to be a gross underestimate, and predict 11 billion or 12 billion as more likely.
Previous predictions have been too low: the UN's forecast in the early 1990s was that population would peak in 2050 at 7.8 billion, a level now virtually certain to be exceeded in the next 15 years.
This year, the seven billionth person will not be named; instead, the UN is merely celebrating the arrival on 31 October.
According to the UN, this is because all babies born around the time will be equally marked. But Adnan's family suspect the real reason may be embarrassment. His parents have been bewildered by the way the UN has behaved since singling out their only child for attention. Since that day, they have received almost no communication from the organisation and certainly no support.
"We saw Kofi Annan as almost like a godfather to him," says Adnan's father, Jasminko.
"He held me up when I was two days old, but since then we have heard nothing from them," says Adnan. The disappointment is palpable. Adan's father is unwell, and his pension and a small stipend paid by Sarajevo as long as Adnan remains in education are the family's only income.
For the boy singled out as the five billionth person, the story is remarkably similar. Matej Gaspar is also aggrieved at the way the UN picked him out at birth and then ignored him for the rest of his life. Adnan and Gaspar are friends on Facebook and have discussed what they regard as their unfair treatment.
It would not be surprising if the UN is touchy about its approach to population questions. For two decades, population concerns have been pushed to one side as governments have become increasingly sensitive about the issue.
There are several reasons – fear on the part of rich countries of being seen to attempt to control the fertility of developing nations; an emphasis on other problems, such as diseases, that seemed less intractable; and religion, which took population firmly off the international aid agenda for the whole of George W Bush's US presidency.
Even usually outspoken green groups have censored themselves on the subject, avoiding the question of whether the number of people on the planet has an impact on our ecology in favour of pointing out that the west consumes a far larger share of available resources than the south.
Some of this reticence is well-founded. Previous discussions under the heading of "overpopulation" implied that some of the world's inhabitants were surplus to requirements, an unpleasant suggestion that carried overtones of eugenics. Population experts lament that these fears prevented a frank discussion for years of whether we should be trying to curb the growth of population in our own interests.
Women's rights are central to this framing of the argument. Hundreds of millions of women around the world, but mainly in developing countries, have families bigger than they wish, because they are being denied the ability to control their own reproductive health, according to Population Action International.
Although the planet may be able to support billions more people than are forecast to join us, the question of how all of those new people can live decently, rather than in unnecessary misery, will not be answered by nature or technology but by politics.
Whether our political systems can cope with the strain – of competition for resources, of the distribution of Earth's natural wealth, of the potential for runaway climate change, and of the economic and social crises that will follow – without collapsing into destitution or war is a matter for conjecture.
Asked what he hopes for the seven billionth child, Adnan is unhesitating: "I wish that the birth of the seven billionth child brings peace to the planet."
From someone else, this might sound like a pious cliche. But from Adnan's fourth-floor bedroom window, you can look out to see another block of flats close by. More than 15 years after the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina officially ended, the walls still bear the scars of hundreds of bullets.
PopulationBosnia and HerzegovinaUnited NationsFiona Harveyguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Are you a techie looking for work? We recently offered some tips on landing jobs at Google, Apple and Facebook, but there are more companies in the Valley than those three. And you might be wondering what the culture is like at each of these companies, as well as at LinkedIn, Twitter, Eventbrite, Gaia and Tagged.

Back in August, we brought you word of awesome perks at various startups; now, we bring you perks at a number of Silicon Valley’s largest and finest. From yoga to catered lunches, 401(k)s to dry cleaning, sports teams to vacation days, these tech companies seem to understand that quality of life affects productivity — and that having to run fewer errands after work means you’re more likely to stay at the office.

Check out the infographic below from ResumeBear for a breakdown of who offers what perks. Do you work at any of these companies and take advantage of any of these perks? Let us know in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Interactive Designer at Weber Shandwick / Powell Tate in Washington, DC
Digital Producer at Adkeeper in New York
Software Engineer — Front End at Yelp, Inc. in San Francisco

Infographic courtesy of ResumeBear

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The groundbreaking work he did with Ken Thompson led to the operating system behind everything from set-top boxes to the iPhone, but who sings the praises of the late Dennis Ritchie?
It's funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agendas in dozens of countries. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody – except for a few geeks – notices. And yet his work touched the lives of far more people than anything Steve Jobs ever did. In fact if you're reading this online then the chances are that the router which connects you to the internet is running a descendant of the software that Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson created in 1969.
The software in question is an operating system called Unix and the record of how it achieved its current unacknowledged dominance is one of the great untold stories of our time. It emerged from Bell Labs – the R&D facility of AT&T, the lightly regulated monopoly that ran the US telehone network for generations. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were two ferociously bright Bell programmers who had been assigned to work with MIT on the design of an impossibly complex multi-user operating system called Multics. In the end, the plug was pulled on the project, with the result that Bell Labs found itself with two pissed-off hackers on its books. Ritchie and Thompson badly needed a new operating system to provide an environment for their own programming, had hoped that Multics would provide it and had greatly enjoyed working on the project. Back in the lab they decided that they would just have to build the operating system themselves. So in a fantastic burst of creativity (and without asking anyone's permission) they wrote Unics (as a counterpart to Multics). Inevitably the 'cs' became 'x' and Unix was born.
Thus did AT&T find itself the astonished proprietor of a uniquely powerful and innovative operating system. The problem was that it couldn't sell it, because under the Consent Decree that gave it the telephone monopoly AT&T was not allowed to be in the computer business. So the researchers in Bell Labs did what geeks do – they gave it away to their peers in university research labs, under a licence that permitted the recipients to modify and improve it. In doing this Ritchie and Thompson unwittingly launched the academic discipline of computer science, because university departments were suddenly able to give their students software that was not only powerful (and malleable) but also free. The result was that virtually every computer science student in the world became a Unix geek in the course of his or her education. Unix was to computer science what the Bible is to divinity students. The difference was that geeks were free to modify and improve their bible – which is what Bill Joy and his fellow students at Berkeley did when they created their own version of Unix, codenamed BSD (for Berkeley Software Distribution) – of which more in a moment.
In due course, AT&T escaped the shackles of the Consent Decree and started to assert proprietary rights over Unix. This spurred an MIT programmer named Richard Stallman to embark on a project to change the world. He founded the free software movement, invented a clever way of using copyright law to preserve the freedom of programmers to modify software, and embarked on the GNU project to create a functional clone of Unix that would be free of proprietary constraints. (GNU stands for "Gnu's not Unix" which is the kind of recursive joke only programmers enjoy.) Stallman, who is one of the great figures of our time, built most of the software tools needed for his great project, but before he could write the kernel of the operating system a Finnish hacker named Linus Torvalds did it – and released it in 1991 as Linux.
The rest, as they say, is history. Linux became one of the greatest collaborative ventures the world has seen (second only to Wikipedia), in which geographically dispersed programmers collaborate over the internet to debug, improve, extend and enhance a complex operating system that is not only remarkably stable and reliable but is also free. Because it's free and malleable, every manufacturer in the world who needs a stable and flexible operating system to run an electronic device tends to use Linux – which is how your TV's set-top box and your broadband router and maybe also your smartphone comes to be a Linux box. The same goes for the millions of PCs that make up Google's server farms. In that sense, we are all now Linux (and, by inference, Unix) users.
The neatest twist of all, however, involves Apple. OS X – the operating system that now powers every Apple product – is actually built on the Berkeley distribution of Unix, so if you hack into your iPhone what you'll find is BSD 4.2. You could say, therefore, that what Apple really did was to give Unix a pretty face. I've often wondered what Dennis Ritchie would have made of that. Now that he's gone, we'll never know. What we do know, though, is that we owe him more than we realised.
LinuxComputingOpen sourceSoftwareAppleSteve JobsJohn Naughtonguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Jonathan Rick is a social media strategist in Arlington, VA. You can follow him on Twitter @jrick and read his blog at JonathanRick.com.

The pace and power of web-fueled innovation is stunning. One day we’re swearing by Outlook, the next, we can’t live without Gmail. These changes exemplify the beauty of the Internet — the possibility that greener pastures are but a click away.

On the other hand, the list of tech innovations that could have been is quite long. Before we get into those, a few caveats:

Some of the companies below may not have missed the boat so much as skipped the ride. Oftentimes, these businesses simply chose to perfect their core businesses instead of tacking on new features.
None of these companies has been “MySpaced.” To the contrary, each remains well-regarded and innovative in its own right.

So, how did tech companies miss the boat?

1. Google Docs missed the SlideShare boat. Sure, Google Docs can display PDFs and PPTs, but documents are slow to load, maximized by default, and can’t easily be shared or embedded. By contrast, SlideShare is known as “YouTube for documents” because it’s fast, user-friendly and social.

2. Google Docs missed the Dropbox boat. The search giant passed on adding synchronization to Google Docs (or GDrive). Meanwhile, Dropbox pioneered this feature, for which it’s now the gold standard. And, in an ironic twist, during a five-day, company-wide hackathon, Dropbox developed the ability to sync its accounts with Google Docs. (Although Google may soon unleash a Dropbox killer.)

3. Microsoft Office missed the Google Docs boat. Only after companies, governments and non-profits had “gone Google” did Redmond release a cloud-based, collaborative version of its cash cow, Office (along with a few videos that contrast Office with Docs).

4. iTunes missed the Spotify boat. Apple cornered the digital music market years ago, but besides the all-important $0.99 per song price tag, Cupertino never really innovated with iTunes. Specifically, the software’s lack of social and streaming services created massive opportunities that Spotify — and Pandora, Amazon, Google, and Facebook — pounced on. Apple now is playing catch-up with Ping (pathetic) and iCloud (promising).

5. Mapquest missed the Google Maps boat. When I was in college, “Mapquest” was so popular that we used it as a verb. Today, it seems the only people who use this site are those who still have an AOL email address. The reason: thanks to relentless innovation (mash-ups, Street View, GPS-enabled mobile apps), Google Maps has presented itself everywhere you want to travel.

6. Google Latitude missed the Foursquare boat. Ironically, the founder of Foursquare was a former Googler who left because Mountain View wouldn’t allocate enough resources to his team, “leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.” Google still hasn’t made it with Latitude, whereas Foursquare’s points system, partnership with American Express, and merchant features have generated growth of a million users per month. (Perhaps this is why Google may want to buy Foursquare instead of compete with it.)

7. Facebook missed the LinkedIn boat. When I learned of LinkedIn, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Well, yes, but not without some hassle. Reed Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, recognized that, while we want to be hip in our personal lives, we strive to be practical and maybe even a little boring in our careers. This is why we use one email address for pleasure and one for business, and why we use Facebook to socialize with friends and LinkedIn to network with colleagues. Recognizing this, Facebook continues to hype its business pages, while such professional credibility comes naturally to LinkedIn.

8. Facebook missed the Twitter boat. When I learned of Twitter, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Indeed, at its core, Twitter is merely the Facebook status update. Yet Facebook lacked Twitter’s simplicity and pith, a void that ascetic Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, was keen to fill. Apparently, 100 million people agree.

9. Blogger and WordPress missed the Tumblr boat. Finally, when I learned of Tumblr, I thought, can’t you already do this with Blogger or WordPress? Just write shorter. Again, you could, but not with Tumblr’s base-bones simplicity, dynamic community and effective reblogging feature. Microblogging, it turns out, is different from blogging. (No doubt, this is why Blogger just announced Dynamic Views.)

10. Yelp missed the Foodspotting boat. Even though Yelp remains the top social network for restaurant reviews, it overlooked an essential facet of the dining experience: pictures. Foodspotting seized this opening, made it mobile, and now is expanding its focus beyond foodies.

So why do these examples matter?

The beauty of the web is that it dramatically lowers the traditional barriers to entry, so an entrepreneur can penetrate an already saturated market. For instance, despite heavy competition from the likes of LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook, Google-owned Aardvark, and Answers.com, Quora plunged into the Q&A fray. In short order, it carved out and capitalized on a niche.

Examine the above list and you arrive at an under-appreciated conclusion: Internet innovation is so fierce and constant that it undermines the notion of zero-sum market share. Instead of vying for a piece of the same fixed and static pie, webtrepreneurs bake whole new pies. Not for nothing does Jeff Bezos insist that the Kindle comprises a “different product category” than the iPad. Just because a company maintains a seeming monopoly on a market doesn’t mean the market is devoid of opportunities. When there’s an innovator, there’s a way. With the web, Goliath is always vulnerable.

Sure, tech giants are somewhat limited. Just reference the lawsuit from the Justice Department, the investigation from the Federal Trade Commission or the hearing from Congress.

Internet innovation comes in tidal waves, big and bold. By contrast, when’s the last time your microwave got a radical upgrade? Or your shower head? And how’s that electric car coming along?

In the end, the web’s rising tides lift the only ship that matters: the user’s.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, aluxum

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The only thing cooler than a million dollars is, well, a billion dollars.

Fortunately for social game creators, that’s just how much the industry is set to rake in this year. Indeed, it’s big business, and it’s not just for Internet nerds. In fact, one out of every five Americans over the age of six has played an online social game at least once — that’s 56 million people, all told.

Zynga alone has 232 million monthly players and nearly $600 million in revenue, and the industry is poised to keep on growing. Check out the infographic below to learn more about the economics of this booming industry.

Are you a social gamer? Let us know your favorite one in the comments below, and tell us whether you’ve shelled out some green for the love of the game.

Infographic design by Nick Sigler

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Ari Meisel is co-founder at Less Doing, where he works on making every task in life and business more efficient. You can follow him on Twitter @liontex and read his blog at arimeisel.com.

People spend a lot of time on email — way too much for their own good and productivity. Email is a disruptive technology that can take you on a tangent you never intended, and eat up time faster than most other voluntary activities.

Email has addictive qualities. Most of us receive email that is unimportant, and yet we continue to check our inboxes incessantly.

To free you from email burden, try these simple techniques.

1. Optimize

To optimize email, you need less of it. Try using a service called Unsubscribe.com to get yourself removed from mailing lists, promotional emails, etc. It uses a Gmail plugin, or you can just forward emails to mail@unsubscribe.com.

Try aggregating. Sometimes you receive non-essential emails that are actually beneficial. Aggregating and unsubscribing will cut down on a lot of the incoming mail you receive to begin with. Services such as FriendFeed send a daily summary of social media activity. Dealery will send all the best daily deals, so you don’t need to individually subscribe to Groupon, LivingSocial, etc. For good measure, sign up for a Google Alert on yourself, as well as a news aggregator like The Daily Beast.

Next comes organization. I’m a huge fan of OtherInbox, which integrates with Gmail and automatically organizes your messages into folders like “Shopping” and “Business.” Imagine an inbox with 1,000 messages; after initiating OtherInbox, you can watch that inbox shrink to 14 emails — in one click. Furthermore, OtherInbox will learn from you, and therefore, get better over time. As an added benefit, OtherInbox has its own unsubscribe service. It will also automatically recognize tracking numbers in an email, then put the delivery date in your calendar alongside relevant shipment information.

Become a filtering ninja. Whether Gmail, Outlook or another service, most email systems allow for filtering. Any type of email you get with some regularity (and some you don’t) should have a filter assigned to it. Sometimes accounts forward emails with certain keywords to an assistant, or provide a specific automated response. Regardless, use filters often.

Answer questions ahead of time. Take away the need for people to email you in the first place. Try including an FAQ section on your website, for example. Answer those mundane, repetitive questions ahead of time. Or, try putting relevant information in your signature. I use UnityFax to get faxes by email. I like Virtual Post Mail to get postal mail in my email inbox.

Finally, use WiseStamp to generate nice little icons that link to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blog. I also like to include a link to Tungle in my signature, which gives people access to an appointment book synced with my calendar in real time. That way, I never have to waste time or emails setting up meetings.

Include a sentence in your email signature stating that you only check your email once a day, but if the matter is urgent, the sender can use AwayFind. This service creates an emergency contact page that routes messages to you by voice or text.

Now that you’ve optimized your emails, you’ll need to get better at “processing” them. Check out The Email Game, which adds game dynamics to email processing. When you get an email you have a few seconds to decide what to do: whether to defer it to a later time, delete it or reply to it. If you decide to reply, you have only a short time to craft your response. Depending on how well you do, the game rewards points, all the while training you to process email faster.

If you really want to geek out, go to Read Fast, which trains you, little by little, to speed read. I gained 30 words per minute after one article.

2. Automate

I use FollowUp.cc to keep track of deadlines within the email realm. It’s a simple concept: Whenever you send an email, you can set an email reminder for any time period. For instance, if you write an email to a potential client, you can choose to CC “3days@followup.cc.” Three days later, if that client hasn’t responded, he’ll get a reminder email, as will you. If you BCC “3days@followup.cc,” only you get the reminder. You’ll find that after a couple weeks of using FollowUp.cc, you’ll stop worrying about follow-ups. It’s out of sight, and out of mind — the way it should be.

Gmail plugin Canned Responses is indispensable. The plugin lets you create template emails. For example, if you frequently get requests for product information, you can create a template email with all the info. That way, it only takes two clicks to send, rather than five minutes spent writing the email. In combination with filters, you can set automatic template responses to certain keywords, completely removing the task from your plate.

Another great plugin is Boomerang. Among other things, the tool allows you to delay sending certain emails until a later date. Deferring emails makes you more productive by corralling people into your schedule. If you respond to an email immediately, you’ll likely just get more email. But, if you send at a more strategic time, you may be in a better position to deal with that message more efficiently.

The last tool in the automation process is an autoresponder. Your autoresponder should take the same route as your email signature by anticipating people’s needs and provide solutions beforehand. Tell them whom to contact for certain requests, and let them know where to get the information they want.

3. Outsource

Once you’ve worked up the email ladder of optimization and automation, you will undoubtedly still be left with messages that require human interaction — but maybe not your own. That’s where virtual assistance comes into play. I use FancyHands to deal with nagging tasks I don’t have time for. Simply forward an email with one line of instructions. Then the service calls people to request information and organizes files into something more useful.

The most important thing to remember is that every problem has a solution. When you examine tasks within the framework above, you can get technology working for you, instead of the other way around

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock

More About: contributor, email, features, How-To, productivity

Across the board, early reviewers of the iPhone 4S have singled out Siri as a standout feature. And a number of them have tried to test it with silly questions as well.

For the uninitiated, Siri is the 4S’s voice-recognition technology. The feature is designed to let you pose questions like “Is there an Italian restaurant nearby?” or give commands like “Change my meeting to Monday at 11,” but mischievous Apple engineers have also loaded a few easter eggs in the feature — responses to anticipated, abstract questions.

Above you’ll find the top 10 Siri comebacks so far.

More About: apple, features, iPhone 4S, siri, trending
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Despite the challenges social media presents for human resources professionals, it plays a growing role in talent recruitment. The big question, though, is where to find talent.

While employers continue to use professional networking site LinkedIn for recruiting, especially when hand-picking for executive positions, they prefer interacting with students and graduates via Facebook rather than LinkedIn, according to a study by online recruiting research lab Potentialpark.

For the study, Potentialpark surveyed more than 30,000 students and graduates worldwide and analyzed the online career presence of more than 500 companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Since the data has not yet been published online, Mashable spoke with Potentialpark about its findings.

Within the European survey respondents, 48% said they prefer to connect with recruiters via LinkedIn, while only 25% said they prefer connecting via Facebook. When asked to explain their reservations about Facebook, the majority of respondents said Facebook is “not the right place” to interact with employers or that they are “uncomfortable sharing private information.”

These findings aren’t shocking, as privacy seems to be a common theme when it comes to employment and Facebook. But these reservations aren’t keeping employers from getting active on Facebook. Potentialpark found that more than one-third of the top 100 employers in Europe have a Facebook Page for recruitment purposes, many of them with more than 1,000 fans.

So, why are employers so interested in connecting with recruits on the world’s largest social network if candidates seem creeped out by Facebooking with recruiters?

Potentialpark interviewed HR professionals about their motivation to be active on Facebook and found that they had multiple reasons for involvement. Here’s an overview of reasons why recruiters cited a preference for Facebook when dealing with young talent:

1. It’s more engaging. With Facebook, employers can follow a “let them come to us” strategy by setting up a business page for recruitment and career purposes. Recruiters noted that the interesting content on pages leads to comments, discussions and more personal interactions. With LinkedIn, the communication is very much one-way in the recruiting world, as employers proactively search for candidates and message them.
2. Facebook is where the action is. Recruiters perceive that few students and recent graduates actively update their LinkedIn profiles, whereas they are quite active on Facebook. Therefore, it just makes sense to connect with them where they already hang out online.
3. It’s free. Employers like that Facebook enables them to upload advanced recruitment content, such as testimonials, videos, pictures or a job search — and it’s all free of charge. This broad range of tools enables a company to showcase itself as an attractive employer.
4. It’s a bigger network. Facebook offers a larger audience, with more than 800 million active users worldwide, compared with LinkedIn’s user base of around 120 million members.
5. It’s more open. Facebook is free for all members and requires no premium accounts to use certain features. As a result, it’s a more open network than LinkedIn.
6. The Like button. When it comes to career website integration, Facebook takes the cake — Facebook feeds and the Like button are easier to integrate.
7. It’s better for branding. Recruiters report they tend toward LinkedIn and other business networks for networking, screening and recruiting. However, when it comes to employer branding activities and talent communication — especially with students, graduates and early career professionals — many prefer Facebook.

Having an active presence on Facebook is certainly a great start for employers looking to attract and communicate with young talent.

Do you think Facebook trumps LinkedIn when it comes to interacting with employers? Tell us in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Social Media Specialist at The Madison Square Garden Company in New York
Senior Vice President – Digital at Edelman PR in Los Angeles
Senior Social Media Manager at DocuSign in San Francisco

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ilbusca

More About: Facebook, features, job search series, linkedin, mashable, Recruiting

One of the most important rules in software is to eat your own dog food. The concept is simple: If you have confidence in your product, you use it.

Perhaps somebody should tell that to Google’s senior management, because the people in it are not eating their own dog food when it comes to Google+.

During the madness that was the launch of the iPhone 4S, we stumbled across an interesting post by Michael DeGusta. DeGusta decided to analyze how often Google’s senior management uses Google+. He counted how many times the company’s senior management, SVPs and board members have publicly posted on Google+.

The results aren’t pretty. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have posted publicly on Google+ 22 times. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt doesn’t even have a Google+ account, nothing short of an embarrassment when company bonuses are tied to social media success.

SEE ALSO: Google+: The Complete Guide

The rest of Google’s senior management isn’t any better. Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora has never posted on Google+ and Chief Legal Officer David C. Drummond doesn’t even have an account. CFO Patrick Pichette, to his credit, has posted several times publicly.

When you get to Google’s six SVPs, the story doesn’t change much. SVP of Video Salar Kamangar and SVP of Search Alan Eustace have never publicly posted. SVP of Ads Susan Wojcicki has publicly posted once and SVP of Mobile Andy Rubin has posted eight times (neither have posted since August). The only two people on Google’s management team I’d consider “active” are SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai (58 posts) and SVP of Social Vic Gundotra (150+ posts).

Here’s another shocker: Not one of Google’s six independent board members have ever posted publicly on Google+.

Leading By Example

Let’s start out with addressing a few caveats. First, these senior Googlers could be posting a ton privately and we simply don’t know it. But it’s more likely that their lack of public engagement is indicative of their lack of engagement overall. This is especially true of Google’s management, which has an incentive to promote Google+ publicly.

You could also argue that the SVP of search or ads shouldn’t be expected to be heavily engaged on Google+, but given the fact that Google intends to integrate Google+ into everything it does, I don’t buy that argument either. When Google+ first launched, Gundotra told me personally that Google+ is an extension of Google itself, thus why the company chose the name.

It doesn’t matter how you slice it: If Google’s management truly believed in Google+ as the future of the company, they would be more engaged. Not being connected to a product that has such a direct correlation to the company’s future is dangerous. This is about leading by example. Why should Google employees be excited about Google+ if their managers aren’t excited?

The same rule applies to Google+’s million of users. The social network has more than 43 million users now and is being heavily promoted by Google. But if its creators aren’t interested enough in staying active, what’s to say its users won’t get bored just as fast?

Google’s management is a busy group, but having only three members of its management team post more than 10 times sends a terrible message. It makes people question the commitment Google has to social.

Our message to Google’s management is simple: Eat your own dog food.


Google+ Logo


This is the Google+ logo.

Google+ Icons


The Google+ icons. Starting top left and circling to the right: Circles, Hangouts, Home, Sparks, Profile, Photos.

New Google+ Navigation Bar


All Google sites will sport the new Google+ navigation bar. It includes notifications, profile information and content sharing options.

Google+ Stream


This is the Google+ Stream, where users share content and see what their friends are sharing. It is similar to the Facebook News Feed.

Google+ Circles


Google+ Circles is Google's version of the Facebook friend list or the Twitter List. Users can select multiple friends and drag-and-drop them into groups. This makes it easier to send stuff to friends, family or the entire world.

Google+ Circles Editor


This is the Google+ Circles editor in action. Google has created unique animations for adding and removing friends through HTML5.

Google+ Sparks


Google+ Sparks is Google's content recommendation and discovery engine. Users can search different topics and find relevant articles, videos and photos. Users can then share that content with their friends.

Google+ Hangouts


Google+ has a unique video chat feature called Hangouts, which lets you chat with up to 10 people at the ame time.

Google+ Photos


Google+ allows you to upload and share photos with your friends. It includes photo tagging and a simple browser-based image editor.

Google+ Profile


Google+ Profiles are like most profile pages -- it includes basic information about the user like interests, occupation and profile photos.

Lead image courtesy of Flickr, jremsikjr

More About: eric schmidt, features, Google, larry page, Opinion, Sergey Brin

An openly lesbian PM, affordable childcare and a formidable women's movement – Iceland may just be a feminist paradise
On a wet day in Reykjavik, the rain battering the fishing boats, the tourist shops and the young male artists with their improbable moustaches, Iceland's minister of industry, energy and tourism is explaining to me that the country needs to be "more badass" about the gender pay gap. The minister is Katrin Juliusdottir, a warm, attractive woman in her mid-30s, pregnant with twins. As she speaks, a hint of frustration enters her voice. Icelandic legislation supposedly guarantees equal pay for equal work, as in the UK, "so why don't we have more penalties?" she says. "Maybe we need to be even more badass when it comes to people breaking the rules."
We are sitting in Katrin's office (all Icelanders go by their first names), in an anonymous building a few hundred yards from Reykjavik harbour, and she is talking about women's rights with no-nonsense passion. Yes, of course she is a feminist; no, she wasn't in the country for the last major women's march, otherwise she would certainly have attended; yes, it's good that the current Icelandic cabinet has four women and six men, but it's not enough. She would like to see it reach the perfect 50/50. (The current UK cabinet is 86% male.) Following the disastrous collapse of the Icelandic banks in 2008, she says, the country "wants balance in our lives, and a big part of that is the balance between men and women."
Some would say this balance already exists in Iceland – that the country is, in fact, the closest the world has to a feminist paradise. For the last two years it has topped the World Economic Forum's report on equality between the sexes, and last month Newsweek named it the best place in the world for women. The Newsweek survey looked at health, education, economics, politics and justice, and found that in all areas, and the last one in particular, Iceland is about as good as it gets. The prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, tells me via email that she's proud of the survey's outcome, "and not only for women, [but because] we know that gender equality is one of the best indicators for the overall quality of societies."
Through the cold mist on Laugavegur, Reykjavik's main drag, I ask Icelandic women what they think. Gudrun, 72, peers shyly from her voluminous hood and says while she loves Iceland – its cleanliness, beauty, the proximity of hot springs, volcanoes, glaciers – it can't possibly be the best place in the world for women "because we don't get the same salary as men".
Awareness of this issue is running high because of a campaign by the commercial and office workers' trade union, VR. To emphasise and redress the fact that Icelandic women are paid, on average, 10% less than their male colleagues, it last month set up a temporary discount of exactly that amount for all female customers at a range of major shops. Berglind, a young shop worker with a metal bar through her septum, tells me she'd like to see classes for teenage girls on how to negotiate hard with bosses.
Erla, 37, a lawyer, swaddled in a thick, red mac, says that as an Icelandic woman you can always count on the support of your sisters, and it was in this spirit she attended the Women Strike Back march last year, a protest against the pay gap and sexual violence. "I don't think I suffer from unfair pay now," she says, "but I have done, and I felt I needed to support women, because we didn't come this far as a society by accident. It was because people went out and worked for women's rights."
To an outsider's eye, the power of Iceland's feminist movement is astonishing. The country was the poorest in Europe before the second world war, but saw a boom afterwards, and by the late 1960s a whole generation of educated women was coming of age and feeling angry about wage inequality. Those who remained in the home felt similarly undervalued. In 1975, a one-day women's strike was proposed by radical feminist group the Red Stockings. The concept was then softened to a "day off", and on 24 October of that year an estimated 90% of the country's women downed tools, in both the workplace and the home. In Reykjavik, 25,000 women gathered for speeches, talks and singing – at a time when the entire Icelandic population numbered less than 220,000.
Thorunn Sveinbjarnardóttir, 45, was the country's minister for the environment between 2007 and 2009, and is now studying for a master's degree. She was 10 at the time of the original Women's Day Off, and went with her mother. "I just remember the feeling of being among this mass of women, who were all so happy," she says, as we sit in a cafe on Laugavegur. "That was a lesson for my generation, and I think the secret ingredient was that we managed to get women from all corners of society – from both the left and right, politically, and from all social classes. That was very important. It was a euphoric day."
The ability to mobilise women of all stripes – a really unusual feat – is still much in evidence. Last year Women Strike Back revived the spirit of the Women's Day Off, and despite storm warnings, 50,000 women flooded the Reykjavik streets, a third of the country's female population. (In the UK, it is considered a strong, successful feminist protest when 2,000 of the country's 30 million women come out.) Video of the event shows women in padded jackets, pink catsuits or Lopapeysa (traditional Icelandic jumpers), their hair, scarves and capes being whipped by the wind. One woman is dressed as a Viking. Some are laughing, many brandish signs, all look determined.
Out in the Reykjavik suburbs, I spend an afternoon with Sigrídur Magnúsdóttir, Andrea Halldorsdottir and Eva Gunnbjornsdottir. When I ask which women's issues upset them most Eva, 31, a postgraduate student, plumps for the pay gap, while Sigrídur and Andrea talk passionately about the problem of sexual violence. "If I could change one thing," says Sigrídur, 35, an office cleaner, "it would be the sexual crimes against children and women. Men will have to fight for themselves." Andrea, 27, a music teacher, says even in cases where someone is raped and almost left for dead, the reported punishment seems shockingly low.
I talk to Gudrun Jónsdóttir, a veteran feminist campaigner in Iceland, who works for Stígamót, a counselling organisation for victims of sexual violence. She says the country is certainly "a paradise of gender equality on paper", but that the reality doesn't quite match. Each year, Stígamót and the rape crisis unit at Reykjavik hospital work with around 250 women "but we can count the annual rape sentences on one woman's fingers".
She says there is still a huge problem with people's attitudes, "within the justice system, among the public, and with the women who come to our place, who are filled with shame and guilt". Last year the head of the city's sex crime division, Björgvin Björgvinsson, resigned from that position after a newspaper interview in which he said many rape victims had been drinking or taking drugs, and therefore bore some responsibility for being assaulted. In November 2010, he was reinstated.
So Iceland isn't perfect, but there seems to be the public pressure and political will to tackle its problems. The prime minister tells me the country has "a very strong and vocal women's movement, which keeps gender equality at the forefront of the debate. The movement has held the political system accountable to a degree where we can say that no politician who wants to be taken seriously can ignore the issue."
In its two and a half years in power, the government – a coalition of social democrats and left-greens – has been impressively active. It has criminalised the purchase of sex, introduced an action plan on the trafficking of women, and banned all strip clubs. When it comes to domestic violence, Katrin tells me, they have moved towards "the Austrian way", in which whoever committed the violence has to leave the home, rather than the victim going to a refuge. They have also introduced a law to take force in 2013, obliging corporations to have at least 40% of each gender on their boards.
Iceland has a history of progressive female politicians. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the country's president from 1980 to 1996, was the world's first democratically elected female head of state. At the time of her initial victory, the number of female politicians in the country was very low – just 5% of MPs – and so in 1983 the Women's Alliance was formed, an explicitly feminist party, which at its highest point, in 1987, held six seats, out of a total of 63. They fought for better wages for women, and, says Thorunn, who was a member, "spent the 1980s talking about all the taboos – rape, incest, domestic violence, putting in place legislation to protect women and children. All those issues are mainstream now, but it took a lot of courage."
In 1994, Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir, who had been a politician with the Women's Alliance for more than a decade, became mayor of Reykjavik, a position she held until 2003. And in 2009, after the financial crisis, and at a time when the country was questioning the values that had led them there – risk-taking and bravado, for example, which many defined as specifically masculine – there was much talk of women cleaning up the mess. Women were appointed to lead two of the disgraced banks, New Landsbanki and New Glitnir, and Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir became Iceland's first female prime minister. I ask Gudrun Jónsdóttir whether she thinks Jóhanna is a feminist, and she says: "Perhaps not primarily – she comes from the labour movement, she was a flight stewardess – but she's been around in politics for decades and has a great personal respect for the movement. Through the years she has supported our work as well as she can, and we really feel she is in our corner."
This support for f[…]

Facebook’s new Timeline design gives users a large “cover photo” space at the top of the page. We think this revamp is a great opportunity to get creative with your profile presentation.

We recently asked the Mashable readership to share how they’ve played with the new design. Here are 10 examples of Facebook Timeline cover photo designs we think are particularly creative, and that offer a witty take on the new layout.

SEE ALSO: How to Enable the New Facebook Timeline NOW | HOW TO: Make the Most of the New Facebook Timeline Cover Photo

Take a look through the image gallery below. Share your new Timeline designs in the comments and don’t despair if yours didn’t get chosen this time around. Our coverage of the new Facebook continues, so keep your submissions coming!


1. Ekkapong Techawongthaworn



Playful and fun, we're big fans of Ekkapong's rainy creation.


2. Andrew Grojean


This is a cunning way to keep the old Facebook design.


3. Mathew Barker


Mathew makes us smile with a big photo / little photo visual gag.


4. Rodney Hess


This concept is simple, but very effective.


5. Victor Zapanta


A profile within a profile within a profile...and so on.


6. Mohammad L. Azzam


Here's some mini-me fun from Mohammad.


7. Vinh Nguyen


Vinh offers an imaginative take on the "Timeline" with a look into the future.


8. Lawson Hembree V


Lawson sees his profile pic as a snapshot, with more images spanning out across the cover photo.


9. Maggie Lin


Maggie is mixing up her social networks with a Facebook / Google+ profile.


10. Ekkapong Techawongthaworn


The low placement of the profile pic box doesn't necessarily lend itself to a full body shot, but Ekkapong found a good way to work around that.

More About: Facebook, features, gallery, photography, trending
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'Why do you keep doing this to me?' I shout at my phone
It is Saturday morning and I have been sent to the fish shop. We are having people to stay for the weekend, and more people to dinner. The woman behind the counter is trying not to smile as she reads out the total. "It's not actually that bad," she says, biting her lip.
"Well, it's not as bad as I'd feared," I say. This is a lie. My phone dings twice in my pocket, but when I pull it out and look at it, I can't figure out what it wants from me.
"How was the fish shop?" my wife asks when I get home.
"I didn't let them see me cry," I say.
"Don't say how much," she says.
"I just hope I bought enough," I say. "I was trying to up the recipe from six people to eight in my head, but my phone kept..."
"Actually, we've got 10 coming."
"Ten? We're incapable of having 10 people to supper. We haven't even got 10 forks."
"It'll be fine."
"That's easy for you to say, because you don't have to..." My phone dings in my pocket. "Why do you keep doing this to me?" I shout.
"What are you talking about?"
"It's my phone," I say. "It's been dinging for three days, but when I look at it there's nothing."
"Relax," she says. I take my phone to my office and try to figure out what it's trying to tell me. I have no new messages, no texts, no missed calls, no emails. The battery isn't running low. And yet it continues to ding, at random intervals, for no reason. Only hours later, while cooking, am I struck by a thought: "Facebook!" I say.
"What about it?" my wife says.
I check my phone, which I discover is logged on to the middle one's Facebook account. Could it be that I'm receiving a notification whenever somebody in Year 9 breaks up with someone? I call the middle one into the kitchen.
"Yeah?" he says.
I hand him my phone. "Please sign out of your Facebook account on this," I say.
"Are you crazy?" says my wife, who has been unfriended by the middle one for posting arch comments on his wall.
"I understand the importance of spying on our children," I say, "but I need to stop this dinging."
He hands back the phone. "Done."
"How's your girlfriend?" my wife says.
"I don't have a girlfriend," he says.
The next day, with the dinner party safely behind us, we are having a late lunch. Only one of our house guests, Anna, is present. All of the children apart from the oldest have left the table.
"So when do you write your column?" Anna asks.
"First thing in the morning," I say.
"And what's it going to be about, this one?" she says.
"No idea," I say. "Nothing's happened to me."
"You don't seem very panicked about it," Anna says.
"He's panicking on the inside," my wife says.
"A little, but over the years I've learned to manage the stress that comes with..." My phone dings in my pocket. "Christ!" I scream, rising from my chair. "Can you not leave me alone for one second? If it's not Facebook, then what the hell is it?"
"Who's he talking to?" Anna asks.
"While you're up," the oldest one says, "pour me some apple juice."
That night I wake up at 4am with a brilliant idea for a column. I've already composed the first paragraph by the time I realise that the anecdote about sharing a taxi with a horse was only a dream. In the terrible silence that follows, I hear my phone ding twice from the pocket of the trousers draped over a chair in the bathroom.
Mobile phonesFacebookFamilyTim Dowlingguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The Social Media Infographics Series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free, six-step online tool that lets you build a custom social media framework tailored to your organization’s goals.

Since its launch in the summer of 2006, Twitter has become the leader in microblogging, limiting even its most famous users to a concise 140 characters. This infographic details Twitter’s most influential content creators, staggering adoption rates, and struggle to turn a profit.

Curious about The Biebs‘ first tweet? Wondering which event caused the latest tweets-per-second record? Scroll on down for a bird’s eye view (see what we did there?) of the world’s favorite real-time information network.

Infographic design by Emily Caufield

Series supported by Vocus

This series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free online tool which lets you build your own custom social media framework in six easy steps. It helps you determine your organization’s goals, explore the latest MarketingSherpa research data, and create your own workbook packed with the strategies, tactics and resources you need. Try it today!

More About: features, infographics, mashable, Mashable Infographics, Social Media, Social Media Infographics Series, Twitter
For more Social Media coverage:Follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Social Media channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

"The end result is a list of 25 items ordered from least important to most important in a reverse countdown. We also included what we think are the odds of Apple actually implementing each request."

Unified inbox support and/or better inbox switching: If you have more than one mail account, you know what a pain it is to switch between accounts. Currently it takes a minimum of four taps to switch from one inbox to another. Allow unification, or make it easy to switch between accounts. Or how about both?