When is too much “social” just too much? The announcement today by Google that it is starting to mix in “social” results in its searches might be considered a good thing, particularly to those who are really into social networks and are tuned into making sure they’re synchronized with their friends. The addition is just [...]
As much as we write about and cover the many social networking sites, companies, applications, and efforts of folks here in Southern California, sometimes we’re not quite as aggressive on our social media outreach as we ought to be. That said, we wanted to point out our Facebook fan page, which until recently was just [...]
The big news today is bound to center around Facebook (which just raised $200M, at a $10 billion valuation). That is — despite the huge valuation — a drop from the prior, $15 billion valuation that Microsoft gave the firm back in October of 2007. My only question: how the heck do you earn a [...]
Michael Jones and Jason Hirschhorn have just been appointed COO and Chief Product Officer, respectively, over at MySpace. Most of the folks in Los Angeles will know Michael well, from his days bootstrapping Userplane (sold to AOL), as well as his recent efforts with both Tsavo, as well as his efforts (along with Peter Pham [...]
It may be obvious to everyone else, but I’ve suddenly realized that social media and blogging is much more closely linked with evangelism than with personal expression. While blogging started out really as a way to communicate and express personal thoughts and ideas, it seems to me that blogging’s current incarnation is much closer to [...]
I’ve recently been making it a habit to take photographs at the conferences I’ve been attending, and in some cases have begun posting some of those pictures to socalTECH’s Facebook profile and the photo sharing site Flickr, for use in stories and blog posts. In doing so, I’ve run across a very, very distinct “generation [...]
One of the interesting stories I gathered from this week’s AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference in Beverly Hills came from a off-the-beaten path session focused on what it takes to launch yourself as a “branded web personality.” The panel — which included an eclectic mix of “web celebrities,” including Hooman Khalili, a Bay Area DJ who runs [...]
I’m showing my technical background here, but I was recently browsing through my ever growing backlog of “friend updates” from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. and started thinking about the poor signal to noise ratio in social communications. The signal to noise ratio–in electrical engineering–is a measure of how much useful signal you are actually getting [...]
There’s been a lot of startups I’ve seen lately, focused on creating standalone companies around Facebook. The rush to create applications for Facebook reminds me a lot of the plug-in market. For those who aren’t familiar with plug-ins, those are the various software widgets that plug into larger applications — for example, in the photo [...]
Here’s an interesting piece in USA Today (of all places!) about the perils of mixed social- and work-related social networks; the lead in story is from a local technology PR person, Wadooah Wali, at a high profile Internet company (which I’ve covered fairly regularly) in Los Angeles. As I said before, I’ve been amused (and [...]
Thoughts and commentary from Benjamin F. Kuo, publisher of socalTECH.com.
