Thoughtpick: A unique perspective of the Web and social media...
A unique perspective of the Web and social media...

December 3, 2009

Google Dashboard: Google’s Answer To Privacy Concerns?

Google has consistently tried to battle privacy concerns regarding their tools and services. Users naturally are always skeptical about how the information that Google stores about them is being used. We, at Thoughtpick, raised the issue of privacy concerns that users have and most recently tackled this issue in the article discussing Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5.

To counteract this seasonal hailstorm of concerns, this time, Google has introduced the Google Dashboard. The Dashboard will include all the information they have about your Google accounts and offer one central location for you to manage the settings of all your Google services and accounts.

So does the dashboard deliver?

I was actually really looking forward to the Dashboard and interested in the features they will include in it: What kind of dirty little secrets does Google know about me? So when it was open for use, I excitedly went to google.com/dashboard and entered my account information to log into it and discover the much outed and unprecedented privacy central that Google is giving to me.

[read full article >>]

November 25, 2009

NYPD Teaches Criminals a New Way to Fool the Legal System: Facebook Updates!

“The toilets at a local police station have been stolen. Police say they have nothing to go on.” Ronnie Baker

Wild goose chases are constantly going on all over the place: criminals running away from justice and never being caught, criminals playing the law and pinning their crimes on someone else or even more so, criminals being offered the proper tools to commit “perfect” crimes! And here’s where Facebook status updates come in!

A recent article entitled: “His Facebook Status Now? Charges Dropped” describes how the charges on Mr. Bradford were dropped just because his lawyer used Mr. Bradford’s status update as part of the evidence that the defendant was at home the time the crime was committed!

The way I see it, this is ridiculous!

Criminals & Theft

Criminals & Theft

If you really take a moment to contemplate the elements of any crime, you are sure to find that any criminal, despite his/her “experience in the field” would be smart enough to have someone else change the status update in order to establish an alibi! It is as easy as going for a walk through the park for anyone to enter: “Where’s my pancakes” instead of Mr. Bradford!

What I wonder now is how could the judge, and the police, miss that point? Especially that “another robbery charge was already pending against Mr. Bradford”.

John Browning says, “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.”

Therefore, what is even more intriguing to me at now is the following: Through the way this particular case has come to an end, would criminals have more ideas about how to manipulate the legal system through social media? Will the NY Times, the source of this piece of news, become more of a criminal reference for the tips and how to’s of committing crime rather than being your local newspaper?

Looking forward to hear your arguments about this serious issue.

November 3, 2009

Social Media & Tourism: Playing the Right Cards!

In the current times we are living, social media occupies almost every part and aspect of our daily lives and decision making processes. There is now a way to use  each and any social media channel, or a combination of them, to promote any product, place, person, service and so on.

Tourism...

Tourism...

Based on the above generalization, we can easily grasp the importance of social media, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising. It is now just a matter of how to promote a certain product, service or place, to whom and the creativity of the content of the message being sent out.

So what about tourism? Does it have any place in this equation? Is it, also, able to benefit from social media? And how can social media be best utilized to promote countries in general and cities or certain sites in specific?

Tourism: The Basics!

How about we start with the simple basics of tourism; the building blocks?

To begin with, we must be able to determine why people travel and how they are able to judge if a country is worth visiting and touring or not.

Basically, people travel for two main reasons: Business and leisure (which includes tourism). Now, since business destinations are usually predetermined, we need to identify what makes a person choose a certain country over another for vacationing purposes. This falls under 5 main reasons and they are:

[read full article >>]

October 22, 2009

Is Social Media Enough for Maintaining Friendships?

A friend is one who knows us, but loves us anyway“. Fr. Jerome Cummings

With that said, I found myself asking the following questions: How well do we REALLY know our friends whom we have been connected to only through social media channels for the past months or even years? Can strong, real and long-term friendships be maintained only through social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter? What is the cost we are paying for compromising the sincerity of our friendships my limiting them to brief, limited interactions over the web?

What are friendships, anyway?

Friendship...

Friendship...

As Wikipedia states: a friendships is “a relatively long-term association between two or more people. This association may be based on emotions like love and liking, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment.

Therefore, if a friendship needs the element of time as an essential part of its broad meaning, then there should be some kind of distinction between the quality and value of time rather than its actual duration!

Accordingly, I must strongly stress the fact that valuable and quality time, at least the way I see it, is spent through sharing experiences, face-to-face conversations and adventures carried out together.

Social media maintained friendships have a different meaning!

Speaking from my own personal experience, and taking some stories I’ve heard from a few “friends” into account, it seems to me that friendships maintained over social media take on the following forms of interaction:

  • The Occasional Poke: Facebook people are smart! They thought about everything when designing their unique platform up to the tiniest detail! Thus, if you want to show someone that you remember them or want to grab their attention yet don’t feel like writing them anything in specific, you have the poke feature! And the pokes keep going back and forth! [read full article >>]

September 8, 2009

50 Top Noise-Free Twitter Tips & Links in Social Media, Marketing, SEO, Design & More! Part 3

Wouldn’t it be just great if you could find the most useful tweets and links about the hottest most interesting topics online, all in one place? Wouldn’t it be just convenient if you could link that valuable information to the tweeple who posted it so you can have continuous access to his/her tweets by following him/her accordingly?tips

Below you will find our third specialized well researched list of 50 Top Twitter Tips and Links divided into 5 distinctive categories: 1) Social Media & Technology, 2) Marketing & Advertising 3) Design, 4) SEO, 5) Motivational & More.

1. Social Media & Technology Tips & Links:

2. Marketing & Advertising Tips & Links:

September 4, 2009

Follower Trafficking: Would You Sell Your Twitter Followers – Discreetly?

Twitter Followers for Money?

Twitter Followers for Money?

I am 100% positive that most of you have read about, or at least heard of, human trafficking: “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, illegally or legally, in order to control them for the purpose of exploitation.”

But the question is: Have you ever heard of Twitter followers trafficking? I would have to assume not.

So, what do I mean by the “trafficking of followers”? Is it as bad as it sounds? And if given the chance, would you actually try to discreetly exploit your Twitter followers by selling them for a certain amount of money, without their knowledge?



Twitter Followers: Their real, undisclosed value…

Imagine that on a given day, you take a one minute break from your tweeting activities and decide to check the inbox in your direct messages. To your surprise, you find the following message: Are you interested in selling your Twitter followers? Contact me through e-mail for negotiations.What would you do?

[read full article >>]

August 25, 2009

What are you working on? Top 5 Enterprise 2.0 Platforms Reviewed

Communication has always been a key factor in determining the efficiency of how companies do business. For a long time, fax, telephone and email managed to facilitate business communications and saved companies a lot of time and effort. Today, social media comes into play, it opens new channels that give any company’s communication methods a whole new untapped dimension. From Wikis and shared feeds, to online real-time collaboration and microblogging, there is a new generation of platforms that aim to tackle this area and give your business the tools it needs to fit as a 2.0 enterprise.

Most Popular Enterprise 2.0 Social Platforms

We, here at Thoughtpick, were interested in researching the Enterprise 2.0 social platforms out there. Obviously we found many, we checked out most of them and decided to bring you the 5 most popular ones according to compete stats, with Yammer being the most popular.

Below are the top 5 picks along with our opinion:

1. Yammer: It takes microblogging to the Enterprise Arena. It provides a simple way for employees to connect and share by posting short – 140 char - messages. It builds on Twitter’s concept that we have all grown accustomed to, and adds corporate necessary options such as employee profiles, file sharing, groups and organizational charts. Recently it rolled out some new features that include a revamped iPhone app, “like” options, threads and an improved search.

Thoughtpickers’ opinion: The power of Yammer - like Twitter – lies in its simplicity. It provides a very simple and clean interface that allows for easy flowing interaction between employees – interaction that is built on 140 char text messages. Yammer is mainly a microblogging tool and thus it lacks some features that other Enterprise 2.0 social platforms offer such as wikis and feeds. With over 40,000 companies worldwide signed to Yammer, one should not neglect the power of this tool. It’s worth checking out.

[read full article >>]

August 13, 2009

Social Media & NGOs: Crossing Boundaries & Building Bridges!

Can social media help Non-Governmental Organizations achieve their humane goals and reach their charitable objectives? How could social media be utilized efficiently and effectively in order to promote noble causes and humanitarian concerns? Could social media negatively harm the messages that NGOs try to spread throughout the world?

A Brief Introduction

In one of my recent posts, I discussed, in details, my thoughts about the great power that social media possesses in addition to my sincere faith that it has the ability to pave the path for world peace. The thought reoccurred to me yesterday in a rather different face and form: the power social media has to cross boundaries and build bridges especially in relation to the humanitarian causes that hundreds of NGOs peruse.

Jump on! Image By: Matt Hamm

Jump on! Image By: Matt Hamm

After the usual extensive research cycle every idea of mine needs to go through, I found myself able to list a hundred reasons why social media should be embraced by NGOs and how it could highly be benefited from in order to harness collective collaboration and bring about change.

Social Media & It’s Power…

We all know, for a fact, that the “new web” has transformed the way people interact and even the way they think! We also realize how social media platforms are now occupying a vital portion of many organizational and business strategies at different levels. Day by day, the need for utilizing these technologies for non profits is becoming more evident.

Social media platforms seem to have the ability to help NGOs through various ways, namely:

  • Providing various strategic tools for engagement.
  • Creating a means for building relationships with stakeholders and communities.
  • Promoting networking and fundraising.
  • Facilitating campaigning to a large, and sometimes even targeted, audience.
  • Allowing for more space to spread the word at a cheaper cost.
  • Reaching younger generations and having higher chances of getting them involved.
  • Transparently telling a story through sound and visuals.

[read full article >>]

August 7, 2009

50 Top Noise-free Twitter Tips & Links in Social Media, Marketing, SEO, Design & More! Part 2

Wouldn’t it be just great if you could find the most useful tweets and links about the hottest most interesting topics online, all in one place? Wouldn’t it be just convenient if you could link that valuable information to the tweeple who posted it so you can have continuous access to his/her tweets by following him/her accordingly?

Below you will find our second specialized well researched list of 50 Top Twitter Tips and Links divided into 5 distinctive categories: 1) Social Media & Technology, 2) Marketing & Advertising 3) Design, 4) SEO, 5) Motivational & More.

1. Technology & Social Media Tips:

[read full article >>]

August 6, 2009

Social Media Dead in 2020: May it “Rest in Peace”!

Has social media “worn out its welcome“? Are people getting tired of social media? Is social media changing who we are? Are the arguments against and the threats imposed by social media able to bring it down to its knees? How long will social media users tolerate the negative effects of utilizing its sites, tools and channels?

A brief introduction…

Yes I admit it: I'm a Twitter Addict!

Yes I admit it: I'm a Twitter Addict!

I’m a dreamer and have always been since as long as I can remember. A common activity dreamers partake in is continuously wondering about the future: What is it going to be like? What are the things that are going to change or become obsolete? Is it going to be better or worse? And so on…

A few days ago, while carrying out a tremendously boring task, the idea of the future came to haunt my thoughts and I found myself strangely wondering about social media in 2020 – I might need to emphasize that working with a team of geeky computer addicts contributed to this!

As I thought of social media, I drifted off to my childhood days and recalled the need to buy a certain toy or another, play with it and then, just like that, throwing it away and forgetting it even existed! In some ways, I think what it happening with social media users is similar! To social media new comers, every single tool, site or channel represents a toy; a new discovery, a fresh challenge and an intriguing experience yet the question which we ought to ask is: For how long could this interesting social media last, given all the issues social media is facing and the problems it’s creating, day by day?

A Deeper Analysis…

To prove my unbiased opinion, it is rather essential for me to mention that I am who you may like to call a social media “addict” (please see figure above). I developed habits such as checking my Mixx, Twitter and Facebook accounts every single morning before my coffee, during the day and right before I lay my head down to sleep. Come to think of it, I truly believe that many of my dreams revolve around social media as well!

So, why do I believe social media will be dead is 2020? Here is a list of reasons that I’d like to share with you:

  1. Identity Alteration: Although many of us do not recognize the seriousness of this issue, the fact of the matter remains to be that our personalities are constantly being altered or even more so sabotaged through the prolonged use of social media. Since you can choose to be whoever we want, impersonate whomever you desire and say almost everything on your mind, it is rather easy to forget who you really are and get lost into the image that you have created online!
    [read full article >>]
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