Everyone is talking about the “social web”, due to the rise of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google Plus. But is it actually the “social” factor that drives this enormous success?

Mark Zukerberg claims that people like to do things with their friends online, and he has stood on that claim for a long time. The social web, therefore, is all the social networks and their embedded buttons and controls into other websites that enable people to interact with their friends and acquaintances.

I argue, though, that this has less to do with “social” than it has to do with two other major factors.

• There are more and more internet users. 10 years ago it was only geeks that were actively on the internet. Now it’s everybody. That’s why services like pinterest and 9gag are possible now, and were not possible 10 years ago. That’s also the reason social networks from the dawn of the internet were not that successful – they did not and could not have the critical mass. With more users online they have to do something there, and simple-to-use services like facebook are ideal for them.
• The social networks that we know today heavily rely on broadcasting. You post one thing and it reaches many people using the same channel. That’s way more powerful than the “doing things with your friends” mantra. I have 350 “friends”, but I don’t communicate with more than 15 of them. Most of them are simply acquaintances, and they don’t differ much from strangers. Especially with Google+ the realization came that all these people are not in fact your friends. They are your audience. The audience of your broadcast. You are broadcasting all sorts of things – thoughts, news, pictures. Instead of sending them personally to people that are interested, you push it out there for everyone to see. This saves a lot of time deciding who to share with, and increases engagement.

So, “social” is in fact “personal broadcasting to a large internet audience” and has nothing to do with friendship. You may argue that it is important to know and trust the person when, for example, you use your friends to get recommendations. In fact the same thing is true if you post on a public forum, with one exception – you are certain that the person is not a bot or a sales person advocating his own product. So here comes an important third factor – online identity. Social networks give users an identity that was not possible before.

I’ve already argued that things like social gaming are not social at all, or at least not anything new, due to very similar factor – scale. Social widgets on the web are simply a means of pushing more content to social networks, not a way of making the web more social.

Ultimately, the “social web” is not in any way more social than the one from 10 years ago, that had basic forums and mailing lists. But it is bigger, allows broadcasting and assigns identities.
That’s why I would prefer to use the term “broadcast web”, as it better defines contemporary social networks.

==== About the Author ====
Bozhidar Bozhanov is a software engineer and creator of welshare – a tool for social network power users.

Yes, you heard that right! The digital music service provider Spotify has teamed up with two dating websites and has released two new apps called Tastebuds and Fellody, basically to create a social dating platform that not only matches and filters out users with similar tastes in music, but also provides matches based on their personalized playlist.

By installing the new Spotify apps, users can find their potential partners based on their musical likes and dislikes. Both the apps work in a similar fashion. Once you are connected with Facebook or with a unique username, the apps examines through your music playlists and library to find your favorite artists and songs.

Once this is done, the app then presents you with a list of profiles (Spotify users) with similar taste in music. This search can, however, be refined based on your preferences like gender, age, and location. This match-making feature has been provided by the two dating websites, Tastebuds.fm and Fellody.com.

For instance, here’s how the Fellody app will work. It uses a mechanism, or rather a technique in finding your potential partner. It first begins by dropping your music library on the app, and will start rating potential love interest. Along with that, the app will generate a ‘compatibility’ score, and also enables you to send a ‘flirt’ (very much similar to Facebook’s Poke feature), while browsing your matches’ tastes.

The Tastebuds app on the other hand will help find a user his/her potential partner based on the artists they’ve been listening to on Spotify. It also scans through the user’s playlists. The app then filters out a list of profiles based on matches by gender, age and location, and message matches in real-time. Users can also arrange an offline meet-up by showing their tracking with the Songkick Spotify concert app.

Tastebuds.fm helps you ‘meet people who share your love for music’. Of late, Tastebuds.fm has been creating a lot of buzz around the Web with an increasing number of users, mainly in the UK. The social dating site was founded by two musicians – Alex Parish and Julian Keenaghan from London, who are the founder members of the band Years Of Rice And Salt.

According to Tastebuds.fm co-founder Alex Parish, 43% of first messages get a reply on Tastebuds. He also states this is “a much higher response rate than non-music based dating sites.”

Fellody founder Robin Simon says, “After our successful launch with Spotify in Germany, we are now very happy to welcome all Spotify users on Fellody, where they might get more groupies with their taste in music than Robbie Williams during the 90’s.”

So, all you single fellas out there, are you all set to mingle?

Facebook plans to bring in the file-sharing feature to all Facebook Groups as the company made and announcement that it will soon roll out the new file sharing feature to all Groups, enabling members to send and receive files to each other.

The new feature started to roll out yesterday to a small number of Facebook groups, and will eventually be rolled out to all Groups in the next few days, according to Kate Freeman of Mashable. As Freeman got in touch with Facebook, the company said that groups that don’t yet have the file sharing abilities will get it “soon,” perhaps in by next week.

Users can upload files up to 25 MB in size and make the uploaded files available to anyone inside a group, however, music and executable files are not allowed to be uploaded. E-books, comics, and video files are fine up to 25MB.

The restriction to 25MB is to eliminate users from uploading copyrighted video, and also not allowing them to upload music files is probably because the social networking giant seems to be trying to avoid being associated with any disreputable activity like piracy. It is also trying to keep hackers at bay by eliminating executable files from being uploaded.

Like its conventional feature where users can report problems, users can as well be able to report files as a way for the social network to try to prevent sharing of copyrighted or malicious files.

Earlier in April, Facebook launched Groups for Schools, and Facebook did mention about the file sharing feature then. The file sharing service is designed “to make it even easier to share lecture notes, sports schedules, or class assignments,” according to the announcement. Now it pretty much looks like all Groups are getting the feature.

Also Read: Why Facebook Groups is a Powerful Tool for Teachers

Facebook acquired the file-sharing service Drop.io for around $10 million in October 2010, but that didn’t last for a long time. The company had to close down the site’s operations in December in the same year. On that note, Mashable speculates that Facebook will use Drop.io’s services to add a conference calling service to groups, but before predicting anything further, its best that we wait and see on that one.

Image Credits: Mashable

Believe it or not, we have all become slaves of various social media sites. Not a single day passes when we don’t open our social accounts. Some use these sites to stay in touch with friends and relatives, some use it to keep an eye on competitors, and some may use it just for entertainment. It’s a bitter truth that we cannot live without social media.

Normally people open different browsing tabs for different sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, but how about an easy way to access your favorite services directly from your Desktop?

Enter Pokki, an app for Windows PC that can install shortcuts to these services on your Desktop. The Pokki store includes vast range of different apps. Some of these are Facebook, Tweeki (Twitter), Instagrille (Instagram), Gmail, Headlines, Mixtape, myTube (YouTube), Calculator, Wikipedia and more. All these apps are based on the latest technologies, like HTML5. What’s more, you can save your browser tabs and use these apps instead which can be easily accessed from taskbar, also these apps are very lightweight and doesn’t consume much resources. They open in a snap and can remain running in the background.

To start with, you can browse, search and discover useful apps on Pokki. Click on category names like education, games, music, health, social, shopping, etc from the sidebar or click on “Popular” to browse popular apps on Pokki marketplace. Hover your mouse over an app to know more about that app.

If you find an app interesting, click on it to see detailed information and screenshots of the app. These screenshots help you understand what the app looks like and what features it has.

To understand this better, let’s look at Tweeki, which is a lightweight app for Twitter. Click on the “Download” button to download and install this app. After installing, you will be able to see the shortcut on your taskbar. This app brings the functions of Twitter into a clean and clear interface. Call it a mini or mobile version of Twitter.

This app can display the timeline, direct messages, trending topics, top users, mentions, searches, and more. When starting this app for the first time, you will be prompted to sign-in with Twitter and authorize it to access information from your account. After you authorize it, you will be logged-in immediately. The first tab which you will be able to see is the “trends” tab. This tab will display trends, suggested users and top tweets. The second tab is your Twitter Timeline from where you can read tweets, reply, favorite, send a direct message, retweet and compose a new tweet. This is where most functions of Twitter can be performed. The third tab displays tweets that have mentioned you. The fourth tab displays direct messages, and the last tab allows you to search on Twitter. Overall it can be said that this app can do pretty much everything that Twitter’s online interface offers.

Tweeki is just one example but you can find many such apps on Pokki. These apps are lightweight, can be accessed from taskbar and can save your tab in browser. So go ahead, install these apps and get access to your social life faster wthi Pokki.

==== About the author ====
Saqib is a technology writer and loves writing on web apps, social media, Android apps and anything that makes computing and mobile life easier. He writes on Technostarry. You can also follow him on Twitter.

It’s not just Robert Scoble who faced problems while posting comments on Facebook, I faced the same problem and a few other Facebook users as well. For an unknown reason, Facebook’s automated spam filter stopped my comment from being published and flagged it as “irrelevant or inappropriate” comment.

The problem I faced was when a friend of mine on Facebook shared a scam message about “free online recharge,” and I tried adding the comment — “This is a fake offer.” Facebook blocked me right there from posting the comment with the following message:

This Comment Can’t Be Posted

This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.

Robert Scoble faced the same problem while posting a comment. However, according to Facebook, Scoble’s comment was specifically blocked because of its length, and the length of the comment thread it was on.

When the issue was reported by major blogs, Facebook stated that it is not censoring comments, but the limitation was caused due to Facebook’s automated spam filter system.

Here’s the official statement that Facebook posted -

To protect the millions of people who connect and share on Facebook every day, we have automated systems that work in the background to maintain a trusted environment and protect our users from bad actors who often use links to spread spam and malware. These systems are so effective that most people who use Facebook will never encounter spam.

They’re not perfect, though, and in rare instances they make mistakes. This comment was mistakenly blocked as spammy, and we have already started to make adjustments to our classifier. We look forward to learning from rare cases such as these to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake in the future.

Scammers usually target long threaded comments to post malicious links and scam messages. The automated spam filter monitors such threads and makes sure that it filters out spammy comments to keep the thread clean and safe. Of course the system also blocks comments that have inappropriate words, but other types of comments that go against positive conversation, which includes some ASCII art are also blocked.

In my case, my comment was blocked either because I used the word “fake,” or maybe because I tried commenting on a spam post. Facebook also mentioned that “the error message made it sound like the message was blocked because of the content of the message, not because it looked spammy.”

A phenomenon such as online advertising has gradually moved into the mainstream and has become one of the major marketing methods for companies to reach out to their current and prospective customers. Being a questionable marketing methodology in its introductory phase, businesses soon realized that it beholds the future of advertising. The tremendous amount of advertising being carried out in the social sphere is testimony to the former affirmation. Consequently, the amount of competition has become fiercer and fiercer regardless of whether there are small or big players.

The rivalry between Facebook and Google has been of utmost prominence in the present day era and it is of no exception to competition. Both players have been competing head-to-head with each other for quite a while now. They have not only become competitors but they have converted into worthy adversaries. From time to time, both Google and Facebook have been demanding attention from customers and to do so, they have been playing “pucker-up” with each other. The latest episode in this supposedly never-ending war is an initiative by Facebook. It recognizes Google’s competitive advantage is its search engine and its ultimate attempt to oust it is by portraying this giant advertisement of Microsoft’s search engine “Bing”. Take a look!

The social networking giant revolutionized the media industry and acquired an enviable consumer base in a short passage of time. The way it accomplished it motivated Google to introduce its own social network, Google+. However, its success index is still under examination. What remains interesting in this eternal clash between both these players is what they will keep on doing in the future with respect to each other in order to remain on top.

Flickr today announced that  it has partnered with the newly launched social networking site, Pinterest, providing users a new way to share Flickr photos, favourites, groups and galleries, in order to attribute them appropriately.

On the Flickr blog, Kay Kremerskothen, a Flickr community manager, announced that Flickr, having worked closely with Pinterest, will now allow users to easily share content to Pinterest.

Along with the other social networking buttons including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, the new social networking site’s social button will appear in the share menu above the photos. This button will only be visible if the Flickr user has allowed the photo or video to be shared with other users.

When a user pins Flickr photo to Pinterest, a proper attribution statement will be seen under the pin’s description. This attribution will contain the name of the Flickr user or photographer, the title of the photo, and a link back to the photo page on Flickr.

Whatsoever, this attribution cannot be edited, and taking that into consideration Flickr assures that pins and repins of their images will be credited and linked back as well, ensuring people can leave comments, fave the photo, or contact you directly on Flickr. Here’s how it looks in real -

The attribution will be included for embedded photos as well. For instance, a photo that has been posted or embedded on a blog and then shared to Pinterest will still contain the attribution with a link back to the original Flickr photo page.

“Attribution is a work in progress and we’ll continue to add additional sources,” Pinterest said in a statement. The company is also today rolling out attribution for Behance, Vimeo and YouTube.

With this partnership, Flickr hopes that its users’ photos will get more visibility and exposure, and also make see a rise in the number of visits. Flickr also anticipates a significant pop in the rate at which images are pinned to Pinterest.

Facebook‘s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new feature for the social networking site, which he claims that it will help save lives of thousands of people all over the world. The new feature – Organ Donor, will enable users to register as an organ donor through the website and share their intentions with family and friends.

According to a press release published by Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, the new feature provides an ability to add your organ donor status on your Timeline, which may inspire others to sign up as donors as well. It is also said that there are over 14,000 people in the US are waiting for a heart, kidney or liver transplant, and millions of people worldwide are waiting for a similar organ donation. A huge percentage of people die, since the required organ is not available. Zuckerberg and Sandberg write:

Medical experts believe that broader awareness about organ donation could go a long way toward solving this crisis. And we believe that by simply telling people that you’re an organ donor, the power of sharing and connection can play an important role.

Zuckerberg stated that the idea was first inspired from his girlfriend Priscilla Chan, but the motivation to start the project came from his friendship with the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, who passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2011.

The organ donor feature lets users Facebook users share their experience and own personal stories with their friends on their Timeline. They can share the reasons why they opted to become an organ donor and how they did it. If any user on Facebook is interested in donating his/her organ to save a life, then Facebook has a provided a way to sign up for their state or national organ donor registry.

Follow the steps below to add that you’re an organ donor to your Timeline -

• Click Life Event at the top of your timeline
• Select Health & Wellness
• Select Organ Donor
• Select your audience and click Save

The new organ donor status feature is now available in the United States and the United Kingdom, and will eventually be rolled out to other countries in the future. Apart from this, Facebook also has other life-saving features like, sets of suicide prevention and anti-cyber bullying tools.

Here’s how the feature works –

Google has officially shut down Google Wave, a real-time service for sharing docs, sending emails and messages with friends and relatives. Google announced about the shutdown in November 2011, stating that – from January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. As a part of the shutdown, all Waves will be deleted automatically.

Google launched the online real-time sharing tool back in August 2009. That year, Google Wave was the most anticipated product of the year with people desperate to get their hands on an invite. Google Wave was then released to the general public on May 19, 2010. Despite the hype and intensive publicity, Google Wave failed to survive.

Google Wave was launched in order to compete with Facebook, however, the new networking site didn’t offer features as advanced as Facebook, and it is where it failed to pick up its user base.

Google Wave did have some great features in terms of collaboration and editing documents. However, users showed no interest, since they found the service confusing and perhaps not very intuitive. A year after the launch, Google realized that Wave was going nowhere towards success, and thus it finally announced that the Wave project was getting killed.

Later, it was announced that Wave was going to end up as an open source project hosted by the Apache Foundation. Wave did have a lot of great features for collaboration, and the move to open source was welcomed by many.

Now that Google has shut down Wave completely, visiting the page – google.com/wave will redirect you to a support page, where Google explains the two stages of closing down of Google Wave -

Stage 1: Google Wave is read-only — January 31, 2012

In this stage, you will no longer be able to create or edit waves. Marking a wave as read will also not be saved. Robots that try to write to a wave will stop functioning.

During this time, you will continue to be able to export your waves using the existing PDF export feature. You’ll still be able to read existing waves and access the Google Wave client.

If you want to continue using Wave, there is an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature to import all your waves from Google.

Stage 2: Google Wave shut down — April 30, 2012

In this stage, all the Google Wave servers will be shut down and you will no longer be able to get to your waves. Make sure to export any waves you want to save before that time.

For those users who really loved Google Wave and are interested in continuing to use Google Wave service, the service can be found at the Apache Software Foundation, where development of Wave has continued since 2010. You can take a look at it - Wave In A Box.

Are you fond of giving gifts? Are you fond of receiving gifts? Well, if you are fond of either of these, Wrapp has made the process easier. Wrapp is a Swedish startup that has smartly capitalized and leveraged the gigantic social presence of people on Facebook to help them give gifts in a “fun and easy way”  to friends.  The company was founded a year ago. Since then, it has remained as one of the hottest startups. It officially launched operations in Sweden on November 15, 2011 where it hooked up with local retailers to not only gain initial publicity but also to help retail brands increase revenues, customers and grow their businesses in general. It gained venture capital from Atomico and Skype co-founder, Niklas Zennström, embarked the Wrapp board on the very same date of launch. This massively helped the company

The current COO of Wrapp, Carl Fritjofsson, describes Wrapp as  ”a social gifting service to celebrate your Facebook friends with free and paid gifts through a simple and beautiful web and mobile application. Retailers are intrigued by Wrapp as it provides a platform to drive customers into stores and generates sales, through a performance-based business model without diluting brand value.”

As clear as Fritjofsson states, the service can be used via both the web and mobile app, which is available for Android and iPhone. It started out quietly in central Stockholm and gradually started to attain massive exposure through the media. A couple of months into its launch, on March 12, 2012, it started operations in the UK, supposedly a market with a huge potential. One would think this might have created challenges for the company. To Wrapp’s delight, this was coupled with a launch in Norway days later. And they don’t intend to stop there! There are plenty of countries where Wrapp wants to establish a presence. USA, first up! After that, Canada, Italy, Japan, Germany, Netherlands, France, Denmark, Finland, Australia, Taiwan, Brazil, Poland and Turkey are major targets for Wrapp as of now. Their aim is to “go global”, stated the company’s co-founder, Andreas Ehn, at Stockholm University on February 15, 2012.

A number of famous retailers have partnered up with Wrapp. These include “Karen Millen, Coast, Pizza Express, ASOS, Warehouse, Dixon’s Elgiganten, Amazon’s LOVEFiLM and Stadium, Sweden’s largest sports retailer” and plenty more are to join the party.

Strategically thinking, Wrapp is on its way to become the first company that makes complete and effective use of Facebook without posing a threat to the social networking giant or any of the retail brands that work with it. Instead, Wrapp’s growth would be beneficial to Facebook as it can allow it to enlarge its user base.

Wrapp is on its way to be anywhere and everywhere. The upcoming days will belong to players who inspire and invite more people to be part of its eco-system. The odds indicate that this is very much within its reach. Wrapp inspires people to share, to give gifts that are yet to be given, show affection in a way yet to be shown, experience happiness in a new manner in an effortless manner.

You have an opportunity to show a token of affection to your friends in a new manner. For those of you who still anticipate Wrapp’s presence in your territory, they promise to land there soon.