Social networking has clearly reached a tipping point. Sites like MySpace and Facebook boast hundreds of millions of members. Barack Obama's presidential victory demonstrated that platforms like YouTube and Twitter could transform electoral politics. Yet in corporations where such tools have been expected to bring profound transformations, there has been strong resistance to change.

Many corporate executives either dismiss social networking as a time-wasting distraction or regard it as a risk management problem. Much of their fear has focused on potential risks like security breaches and data privacy.

Web 2.0 evangelists, on the other hand, argue that social software can be used to boost productivity. They say it can facilitate an open-ended corporate culture that values transparency, collaboration and innovation. Most important, it can be an effective way to build a customer-centric organization that not only communicates authentically but also listens to customers and learns from that interaction.

In the current stormy economy, as companies look for new ways to market their products and engage their customers, chief executive officers are finally looking more and more at how social networking tools can extend their brands, create corporate cultures based on listening and learning, and establish their own leadership profiles.

Nonetheless, big brands, generally speaking, haven't successfully tapped the potential of social media; they tend to regard Web 2.0 platforms as just another way to push out short-term marketing campaigns. They fail to grasp that the new media require new ways of doing business. Old ways need to be tossed out.

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Another related articles from Forbes.com :

1. Facebook : your company's intranet ?
2. Facebook Plays Nice
3. Trapped in Facebook

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LONDON - Word around the water cooler is that massive search engine Google is in talks to buy Twitter, the free micro-blogging Web site. According to a Thursday posting on TechCrunch, Twitter's price tag could be as high as $250.0 million.

"[Twitter] holds the keys to the best real-time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn't even have a horse in the game," the blog said.

The Web site also reported Google would pay for Twitter in cash or stock or a combination of the two, citing two unnamed sources close to the negotiations.

"[California-based] Twitter's value is in its content, growing by 6.0 million tweets [posts] per day. Twitter is attractive because it has built a service that attracts this much volume, creating a constantly growing, twitching, seething real-time source of comments, news and opinions," said Jeff Mann of Gartner research.

"The culture and ambitions of Twitter and Google match," he said. "Now is the time for Twitter to sell. It is at the top of its hype range now. Monetizing on its own would be a long, hard slog."

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I just added this gadget into my Firefox 3 Browser.

What is Yoono ?

Yoono is a powerful but easy to use sidebar for Firefox. It helps you simplifies your social life on the web by centralizing all your social networks and instant messaging in one easy to use browser sidebar. Get all your friend updates automatically wherever you are on the web and update your status instantly across Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more. Yoono also shows you personalized recommendations for related websites, products, videos, and more based on the page you are viewing. Easily share these discoveries with your friends via your social networks!

Explore further and grab it  from here >>

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The next version of Firefox is almost fully baked, with the release of what one would assume is the penultimate beta test version on Thursday.

Some of the major differences from beta 2 involve the browser's Private Browsing Mode, TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, and new standards support. The release comes just a week before the expected final release of Microsoft's market-leading Internet Explorer 8.

One oddity on Mozilla's Developer Center Web pages is that the browser version is called 3.5. Has the foundation decided that its upcoming version deserves a bigger bump? When PCMag.com questioned Mozilla reps, they pointed us to a post by Firefox head honcho Mike Beltzner, entitled "Firefox 3.1 may become Firefox 3.5."

In the post, Beltzner posits that "Shireteko," the codename for the next browser version, is far more than a small incremental improvement and therefore may merit a larger version jump. The post goes on to propose that the next beta of what was version 3.1 be called Firefox 3.5 beta 4—somewhat confusing, but with its own logic nevertheless. The nomenclature on the developer pages indicates that this proposal has taken hold.

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An article published in PCMag.com, facebook engineer Ari Steinberg talks with PCMag.com about the recent homepage redesign, as well as some other changes to the social network.

This article was published on March 14, 2009, written by Kyle Monson.

There's a lot of crazy Facebook stuff going down—a fairly controversial new homepage, new Facebook Connect for the iPhone, etc. I sat down with Facebook Software Engineer Ari Steinberg at SXSW Interactive today to talk about some of the changes to the News Feed and the homepage. Here are the best nuggets of info from that conversation:

PCMag: Let's get to the hard stuff first. In a panel earlier today, Yammer's David Sacks said "One great thing about Facebook is that when they see something that works, they aren't afraid to steal it." And honestly, the new homepage redesign does look a lot like Twitter.

Steinberg: There are certainly some things that we have in common with Twitter, but we're also trying to do our own thing, and there are a lot of parts to the site that are very different. Facebook is so much more than just status—photos, videos, events, links that a lot of people have all commented on. That kind of stuff doesn't really makes sense in the context of a fast-moving stream.

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Good news for iPhone user. Facebook on Saturday, Marc 14, 2009 announced the new Facebook connect for iPhone.

From Facebook Developers website :

We're really excited to launch Facebook Connect for iPhone today. Facebook Connect easily lets developers make their websites and desktop applications more social. And with the explosion of iPhone apps over the last year, we want iPhone developers to reap all the benefits Facebook provides.

If you develop apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can now start making those apps more social. With just a few lines of Objective-C code, your users can log in to Facebook from within your app, find their friends, then share what they do in your app back on Facebook, which opens up exciting new opportunities for your users.

Now your iPhone apps can enjoy the benefits that Facebook Connect sites and Facebook Platform apps already enjoy, including:

• Making API calls so your app can access users' profiles and share information on Facebook.
• Publishing to Facebook via Feed forms.
• Asking users for extended permissions, like offline access, so you can still interact with their data when they're offline.

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Go here >> for antoher related article.

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Twitter now become business gadget. Many company use Twitter as a social media to get in touch with their customers. Starbucks is using Twitter, Dunkin' Donuts too. Here is the story from Forbes.com, written by Helen Coster :

Jenny Cisney has 3,833 followers on Twitter. What do those people want to learn from Cisney in her 140-character "tweets"? They like hearing about Cisney's travels, which the photographer-loving party-goer chirps about in as many as 70 posts a week, like this one after the recent Academy Awards: "Heading over to the Slumdog after-party to get some pics of the gift lounge ... " Cisney, 33, made sure to mention that the swag included Kodak Zi6 video cameras.

Cisney works for Eastman Kodak. The Rochester, N.Y., company hopes its "chief blogger" will inject a little razzle-dazzle into the 121-year-old brand. She is among thousands of employees who use Twitter to communicate with consumers on behalf of marketers like Kodak. The companies aim to connect with customers and cast their brands as cutting-edge by embracing the Twittersphere.

At Dunkin' Donuts, "Dunkin' Dave"--that's Dave Puner, 35--posts as many as 12 tweets a day during the workweek to 9,589 followers, or people who are signed up to receive his messages. His posts are laid-back, uncensored riffs on the weather, songs that contain coffee lyrics and thoughts about his own caffeine addiction. His easygoing Twitter tone is supposed to mirror the "average Joe" Dunkin' Donuts seeks to attract.

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Here is another Twitter story written by Julia Angwin (she is an award-winning journalist at The Wall Street Journal, where she writes about the convergence of technology and media), published by The Wall Street Journal on March 14, 2009.

Titled "My New Twitter Flock", she wrote that :

After I wrote about Twitter last week, I went almost overnight from feeling like no one was listening to having 1,683 followers.

My large flock of followers, or people who signed up to receive my Twitter messages, showed me that Twitter wasn't just people shouting into a virtual abyss. Actual conversations were going on. Members of my newfound audience were soon sending me messages, or tweets, constantly, letting me know they welcomed, expected and wanted my feedback. It was part of being part of a community, they said.

I realized Twitter - the mass text-messaging service that lets you send out 140-character messages to a group of followers - wasn't just about broadcasting. While I had held off replying to people in the past for fear my replies would be viewed as spam since they hit everyone, my new flock was telling me to start hitting reply all.

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The Twitter image source >>

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A really good article about Twitter, written by Julia Angwin. You must read this article if you like the social-networking and micro-blogging service tool, TWITTER.

When I first joined Twitter, I felt like I was in a noisy bar where everyone was shouting and nobody was listening.

Soon, I began to decode its many mysteries: how to find a flock of followers, how to talk to them in a medium that blasts to lots of people at once and how to be witty in very tiny doses.

Twitter is a mass text-messaging service that allows you to send short 140-character updates -- or "tweets" -- to a bunch of people at once. They are your "followers." It was designed to be read on a cellphone, though many people read it online, too.

Suddenly a lot of non-tweeters are starting to feel left out. On "The Daily Show" this week, host Jon Stewart reported on Twitter with a wink (or was it a twink?) at the narcissism of the personal broadcasting system. It has a world-wide audience of six million unique visitors a month, up from 1.2 million a year ago, according to ComScore Media Metrix.

But I have to admit I didn't understand the appeal of Twitter when I joined, at the prodding of friends, in November. One answer that explains its popularity: It's not about chatting with your friends -- it's about promoting yourself.

My name was available, so I set up a profile at twitter.com/JuliaAngwin. On Twitter, however, you do not exist without followers, who subscribe to receive your messages. So I set out to follow some people in the hope that they would follow me.

I had to learn the crucial distinction between a "follower" and a "friend." On Facebook, if I'm your friend, you're my friend, and we can read all about each other. Relationships on Twitter are not reciprocal: People you follow do not have to follow you or give you permission to follow them. You just sign up and start following them. It's a bit like stalking. Heather Gold, a comedian and Twitter devotee, points out that for all its flaws, the term follower "is more honest than friend."

At first, I was the loneliest of social creatures -- a leader without followers. I tried searching for my actual real-world friends using Twitter's "Find People" function, but it was down the day I joined. (Twitter is growing so fast that short outages are not unusual.)

So I asked a few colleagues for their Twitter addresses and began following them. I also searched their public lists of followers and who they followed.

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The Twitter Image Source >>

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As Facebook works to make itself more relevant and timely for its growing member base with a profile page makeover, attackers seem to be working overtime to steal the identities of the friends, fans and brands that connect though the social-networking site.

Indeed, Facebook has seen five different security threats in the past week. According to Trend Micro, four new hoax applications are attempting to trick members into divulging their usernames and passwords. And a new variant of the Koobface worm is running wild on the site, installing malware on the computers of victims who click on a link to a fake YouTube video.

The Koobface worm is dangerous. It can be dropped by other malware and downloaded unknowingly by a user when visiting malicious Web sites, Trend Micro reports. When attackers execute the malware, it searches for cookies created by online social networks. The latest variant is targeting Facebook, but earlier variants have also plagued MySpace.

Koobface's Wicked Agenda

Once Koobface finds the social-networking cookies, it makes a DNS query to check IP addresses that correspond to remote domains. Trend Micro explains that those servers can send and receive information about the affected machine. Once connected, the malicious user can remotely perform commands on the victim's machine.

"Once cookies related to the monitored social-networking Web sites are located, it connects to these Web sites using the user log-in session stored in the cookies. It then navigates through pages to search for the user's friends. If a friend has been located, it sends an HTTP POST request to the server," Trend Micro reports.

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Sometimes when I found an interesting article while browsing and eager to share with friends in my Facebook. But, hey, I can't find the web publisher provided button to share the article.

Then, I dig out with Google and find the Shareaholic add-ons for my Firefox browser.

What a woderful and really useful tool.

Shareaholic is the ultimate add-on for the link sharing addict!

If you use sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Google Gmail, StumbleUpon, etc you'll likely enjoy having Shareaholic by your side. Grand Prize winner of the Extend Firefox contest, this add-on enables you to quickly, and very easily share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via a wide array of your favorite web 2.0 social networking, bookmarking, blogging, and email services.

Download this tool (for firefox) from here >>

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What is Netbook ?

A Netbook is a new type of laptop computer, defined by size, price, horsepower, and operating system. They are small, cheap, under-powered, and run either an old or unfamiliar operating system.

Netbooks run either Windows XP Home edition or Linux (not only is Linux unfamiliar to many, but the versions of Linux on Netbooks are not the mainstream popular distributions). They do not run XP Professional, Vista, or OS X. Microsoft arbitrarily restricts Netbooks from running the Professional Edition of Windows XP. Likewise, Apple arbitrarily restricts OS X to Apple hardware and it has never played in the low-end realm that Netbooks occupy.* Vista requires too much horsepower to run well on a Netbook. HP has been the only company to offer Vista on a Netbook. The price, however, was so high that it's debatable whether such a machine qualifies as a Netbook.

Netbooks sacrifice optical drives (CD/DVD drives) and have generally modest hardware specifications, smaller screen sizes and shrunken keyboards. They also tend toward smaller hard drive sizes ... oftentimes much, much smaller. What you get in return is a small PC that is truly ultra-portable, weighing less than two pounds in some cases. In other words, a netbook is an ideal travel companion.

Read more about Netbook Buying Guide in here >>

Another story from YAHOO! Tech

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Netbook Web surfers beware. That low-cost netbook you're using could be a high-speed gateway into your life, bank accounts, passwords and other personal data.

Netbooks have made headlines since their 2007 launch, making PCs accessible to millions of non-traditional users. But their cheap cost could also carry a steep price tag due to lax security that makes them easier prey for viruses and hackers.

Since their introduction less than two years ago by Taiwan's Asustek, nearly all major PC makers, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer and Lenovo, have jumped on the netbook bandwagon.

But their no frills nature, combined with low computing power and relative lack of sophistication among their users could combine to create the perfect storm for hackers and virus creators looking for easy targets, analysts say.

"The Internet is full of dangers, regardless of what computer you are using," said Sam Yen, greater China marketing manager at anti-virus software maker Symantec.

"But keeping in mind that the netbook is primarily used to surf the Internet, those dangers are possibly multiplied many-fold, especially if there is no anti-virus software installed in the machine."

Price tags as low as $300 mean that netbooks often lack such standard gear as firewalls and other anti-virus software typically found in other computers, leaving them highly vulnerable to attacks.

"Frankly, netbook security is not there yet," said Pranab Sarmah, an analyst at the Daiwa Institute of Research.

"The positioning of the netbook means PC brands are going to do whatever it takes to make the price point attractive to consumers, which means keeping costs low."

Many netbook users are relative Internet newcomers, and may not be aware of precautions they can take to protect themselves. Low computing power also means savvy netbook users may shut down critical security programs to boost speed.

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Are you a blogger or a website owner ? Are you looking for cool widget to add into your blog or webpage ? If you do, you should check out this site.

In this website, Google provides lots of useful and cute gadget/widget to beautify and

So, what is the advantage of these Google gadget ?

First, You can use gadgets to make your webpages even more interesting and useful to your visitors. For instance, you can add your city’s current temperature or a quote of the day to your own page. Just pick the gadget you want from our directory of “gadgets for your webpage,” customize that gadget, and copy-and-paste the HTML into your page's source code. Then, reload to see the gadget on your page.

Another advantage is Gadgets can be a great way to present information you care about to web surfers everywhere. People can add your gadget to iGoogle or to their other pages across the web (which countless other web surfers can then see). Gadgets can be quick and simple, like the countdown gadget, or complex and professional, like the Entertainment Weekly gadget. And creating a gadget is easy — anyone with even a little experience with web design or programming can do it.

Still don't have any idea what the gadget is ?  Go here >> to find out.

Grab all of the cool Google Gadget in here >>>

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