That social networking sites and applications such as Facebook, Twitter and their competitors can facilitate communication and information sharing amongst diverse groups and individuals is by now a cliché.

It should come as no surprise then, that the secret state and the capitalist grifters whom they serve, have zeroed-in on the explosive growth of these technologies. One can be certain however, securocrats aren’t tweeting their restaurant preferences or finalizing plans for after work drinks.

No, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy as proverbial bees building a “total information” surveillance system, one that will, so they hope, provide police and security agencies with what they euphemistically call “actionable intelligence.”

There are several stand-alone augmented reality apps that have been developed for our mobiles, but similar to our cellphone being Internet-enabled, when will technology advance our smartphones to become totally integrated with augmented reality? (Videos)

Now that compasses and cameras have become commonplace on our iPhones and Blackberrys, we can’t be that far off from viewing an overlay of additional data on top of what we see in the real world. On phone, AR uses GPS coordinates and the mobile camera to activate additional text, photos or hyperlinks relevant to a location

Many believe AR is the tipping point for mobile phones to supplant desktop searches in the next few years. PewInternet predicts 2020, but others like Joe Wilcox from BetaNews are looking more towards 2015.

While monetizing a business network, community or marketplace, a successful company would be one which knows what the central proposition of the product is and would know how to monetize that particular proposition. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the central proposition for a marketplace is the transaction happening between two parties on it.

Normal 0 A study by the University of Northampton's Business School, Cranfield School of Management and AJM Associates says that social networking is turning into an addiction for many young people. Researchers also found that using such sites, particularly via mobile phones, was hindering spelling skills, encouraging plagiarism and disrupting classes. Among the 260, 11 to 18 year olds researchers surveyed many left classes to use their phones from school toilets.

First GCC social media survey to kick off this month in cooperation with leading publishing house

Social networks are increasingly becoming the key platforms for content creation and content sharing as social media continue to thrive around the world. A significant growth in the ways consumers are using the internet to create and share thoughts, pictures and videos indicates that social media is likely to become synonymous with social networking not too far in the future, according to a new global survey.

In the light of the opinion voiced by youth marketing expert Ian Stewart, head of Asia, Friendster (ex Coke and MTV), in this insightful interview on mobile marketing to teens in Asia, mobiThinking asked:
What needs to happen to make mobile a viable channel to reach the youth segment – i.e. teens, students, school leavers, graduates? What follows is a summary of the responses received back from experts around the world. These fall neatly into two categories:
A) Five things you should know about mobile and youth
B) Eight tips for successful engagement with young people via mobile

In September 2008, when Nielsen Mobile announced that teenagers with cellphones each sent and received, on average, 1,742 text messages a month, the number sounded high, but just a few months later Nielsen raised the tally to 2,272. A year earlier, the National School Boards Association estimated that middle- and high-school students devoted an average of nine hours to social networking each week. Add email, blogging, IM, tweets and other digital customs and you realize what kind of hurried, 24/7 communications system young people experience today.

Unfortunately, nearly all of their communication tools involve the exchange of written words alone. At least phones, cellular and otherwise, allow the transmission of tone of voice, pauses and the like. But even these clues are absent in the text-dependent world. Users insert smiley-faces into emails, but they don't see each others' actual faces. They read comments on Facebook, but they don't "read" each others' posture, hand gestures, eye movements, shifts in personal space and other nonverbal—and expressive—behaviors.

Popular social networking websites' users could be leaking their personal information to tracking sites, warn researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).

They have found that the practices of many popular social networking sites typically make that personal information available to companies that track Web users' browsing habits, and allow them to link anonymous browsing habits to specific people.

"When you sign up with a social networking site, you are assigned a unique identifier," said Craig Wills, professor of computer science at WPI, who conducted the study with an industry colleague.

"This is a string of numbers or characters that points to your profile. We found that when social networking sites pass information to tracking sites about your activities, they often include this unique identifier.

Whenever you meet social media sceptics you can use some of these stats and the following video to help explain whats going on here:

Facebook currently has over 250 million users. 120 million users log onto Facebook at least once each day. 30 million users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices. In fact, people that use Facebook via their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on the social network than non-mobile users.

The day before yesterday, I read a post that Google Korea began to twit. It was very much interesting news. Since I knew a little about Google Adsense concept, It was attractive post. The contents of posting was so simple. Google began to twitt and it addressed to use the twitter as a general communication tool between Google Adsense and its users. So far so good. Nothing special. Adsense is is the unique business model for Google and it is based on the traditional Google search technology, that is to say, relation. Google reads the contents of web page and put “related” advertisement into it.