But, whoever is a part of human society knows one fact for sure – “There is nothing called a Free lunch”. May be Karl Marx cannot detect it, but the pennies are slipping through the cracks somewhere. Somebody is paying for the hyper-involvement in the social networks.

(Image Credit: www.cartoonstock.com)

Who is at the receiving end?

It’s time for the big bosses to raise a brow….

The UK social media office engagement figures look like this -

2 millions x 1 hour / day = Social involvement during the office hours [Sample size = 1000 British workers]. = $23 billion dollars

Its is estimated that the US social engagement index during the office hours will be higher the British figure and China might be catching up fast – It’s a different reason china decided to ban Google, when in fact Facebook might be making a dent in its productivity as well as communist ideology on an hourly basis.

Well, let’s for a moment jump to the other side of the fence, where the employees are perched – The intelligence that you get out of the chorus is that the social networking is cost-free, global, knowledge-sharing university where years are saved every day – as employees, trouble-shooters and academia share the latest data, theories and algorithm – thus making every desktop a vibrant R&D hub – well, can you beat that?

Well, I agree with this cross-pollination potential of social and professional networks….

Once again, going back to the original spot. Looking from here, the corporate honchos would be in serious doubt whether millisecond is spent in knowledge dissemination and not personal frivolities…leaving it here for the moment….

As expected, it’s a spiraling debate  with too many angles and intangibles….

Adios…

The mind reading technology is one such technology that will make our lives (social media lives) very easy. Controlling an interface without using your fine motor skills will have huge implications for human computer communication. Imagine being able to tweet what you are thinking without having to pick up your phone, key in your message and hit send. Also, by just thinking ‘Facebook’ your screen will show a summary of your friend’s action stream.

How the system works?

The new mind-reading system works by displaying letters on the computer screen that flickers one at a time. When a person thinks of a letter, and then that letter flickers on the screen, brain waves propel a signal to the computer that it identifies. While this form of communication is at a very experimental phase and is also quite slow, it does work for sending short messages such as tweets for Twitter. Twitter messages are restricted to only 140 character limits, and you really have to think hard about what you want to say. However, with mind reading technology thinking is all that you would require.

This new form of communication is currently meant to help people who have restricted motor skills, and not lazy social media fanatics! There is also a scope of applying this technology to senses other than vision. In the future, this technology can also help read feelings and complex emotional states. And one day people who cannot otherwise communicate will eventually interact with the outside world.

Whoever said mind reading was impossible are in for a pleasant surprise!

The first successful communication on the internet was implemented on 25 December 1990. In 1992 internet access was made available to the common public and its use exploded. Until recently, websites were a great advertising platform. However, with the introducing of the first social networking site in 1995, and its widespread use today, websites have started to become invisible on the internet.

If you come up with a new website on the internet, then you would probably have to spend a lot of your time and resources to bring your website on the first page of the goggle search engine. However, a simpler way to let people know about your website or your company is through social media.

Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace.com, Twitter, LinkedIn.com, etc. are very popular and so are great sources of promoting your website and products.

Gone are the days of “have a website and advertise”

Today, it is too costly to be noticed on an internet that is already full. Social media is the only way for new websites to get traction. If Darren Rowse, the guy behind ProBlogger, or Brian Clark, the guy who founded Copyblogger, talks about your website, then it’s visible. If your website comes up on the front page of Digg, then it’s visible. Once your website starts getting incoming links and lots of regular traffic, then you can use traditional SEO practices for staying visible.

Some of the companies that benefited from social media are:

Rubbermaid: A survey conducted by BazaarVoice reported that when the company Rubbermaid added customer reviews to their website, their sales increased and returns of their products decreased.

Fog Creek software: This company has achieved great success with no advertising because its founder has built an amazingly popular blog about writing software.

Nike: This company allowed customers to build and order custom shoes on their website. This move was a great hit with people and generated a lot of profit for Nike.

Will social media survive in the long run? Not sure. But today and for the near future, you can’t do without it. You have to jump in even if you do not fully understand it, or you will go the way of print media.

You got it right, Yahoo has struck a twitter deal. These two have decided to face the Buzz challenge by coming together. Yahoo and Twitter have come to an agreement to share data between their properties. Hope this is no knee jerk reaction to the Google Buzz. This was hardly called for, as Bing is about to take the data aspect for Yahoo, and, which will very likely include the Twitter data as well. Moreover, Yahoo’s front end elements already include Twitter integration including Flickr. How far will it work? This is a million dollar question?

Even if this is all the rest against Google, it would in no way be an easy proposition. Buzz, although is new, has a very strong backing of Gmail, which just cannot be ignored. With a solid Gmail presence on the internet, it is unlikely that no matter how you set the table, Buzz will only get to be a very strong word.

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Out of every 140 chars – only about 80 of them have some meaning – The rest 60, web-junk….That’s what the stats say.

Now, the legion of web marketers are thinking, as to how these 80 chars can  be tapped for some intelligence – if it is at all there. Web semantics holds a bright light for the tweets out there.  We all know that Twitter is one of the first places to look for any developing story – be it the Iranian elections, the Hudson river United airlines landing, or a simple remark from Matt about Google Caffeine…Twitter is the the most democratic billboard of the web.

Image credit: sylvianickerson.ca

The sweet stuff will be – if the tweets can be bundled into blocks of information and this blocks of trends / info are visible graphically. So, for example, you are looking for the latest on MJ burial, then in one corner – Let’s say ‘Tweet Corner’ – One balloon / 3D cube exists for the tag  ‘MJ burial’. The size of the info-block will obviously be in the ratio of the number of tweets & the number of meaningful  characters in the tweets…

So long from CopperBridge corridors..

Image Credit: www.trampolinebranding.com

When Twitter requested for the reasons of denial – it was a surprise to them too.

Apparently, many other companies had applied for trademarks of terms which were very similar to ‘tweet’. According to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) “Other trademark applications by the firms TweetMarks, Cotweet and Tweetphoto, and said there was a “likelihood of confusion.” ”

So, it seems that the followers have overtaken the leader as far as ‘tweet’ is concerned, But Biz Stone, founder of Twitter was far from worried and even appreciated the legion of twitter related firms like TweetDeck, TweetMeme, Tweetie, BackTweets, Tweetboard -who have been instrumental in making ‘Tweet’ a household name….