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"People's social worlds are enhanced by new communication technologies.

"People use the technology to stay in touch and share information in ways that keep them socially active and connected to their communities."

Now the role of mobile phones is expanding to support forming and maintaining “community”—both geographic based communities and communities based on diverse cultural interests—creating new ways for people to connect and communicate.

Today anyone working in the converging worlds of communications, media, and technology knows that communities are perhaps the most influential factor and value-added service in the emerging market,

they will expect applications to be aware of users’ context—both their physical environment as well as their virtual environment: their location, the tasks in which they are engaged, the information they are browsing, the people with whom they are interacting, and the history of each.

This year's technology is Internet video, which protesters have leveraged to self-report their protests. The Drudge Report had at least four links to such videos yesterday, and Instapundit, which has reported on continuing "tea parties" since they started, has more.

Among the six major news threads studied in depth -- which included stories about budgets, crime, a plan involving transit buses, and the sale of a local theater -- fully 83% of stories were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information. Of the 17% that did contain new information, nearly all came from traditional media either in their legacy platforms or in new digital ones.

I was serving on a grant proposal committee, and I watched as a fellow judge asked his Twitter followers if a certain project had been tried before. In 15 seconds, his followers replied with Web links to the information he needed. No e-mail message, phone call or Web site could have achieved the same effect.

Twitter, in other words, is precisely what you want it to be. It can be a business tool, a teenage time-killer, a research assistant, a news source — whatever. There are no rules, or at least none that apply equally well to everyone.

The masses also came up with conventions

What's the social utility to Facebook—why should you join? Like with e-mail and cell phones, there are many, and as you begin to use it, you'll notice more and different situations in which it proves helpful. In general, Facebook is a lubricant of social connections. With so many people on it, it's now the best, fastest place online to find and connect with a specific person—think of it as a worldwide directory, or a Wikipedia of people. As a result, people now expect to find you on Facebook—whether they're contacting you for a job or scouting you out for a genius grant.

True, you might not want people to be able to follow your life—it's no great loss to you if your long-lost college frenemy can't find you. But what about your old fling, your new fling, your next employer, or that friend-of-a-friend you just met at a party who says he can give you some great tips on your golf swing? Sure, you can trade e-mail addresses or phone numbers, but in many circles Facebook is now the expected way to make these connections. By being on Facebook, you're facilitating such ties; without it, you're missing them and making life difficult for those who went looking for you there.

Short, continuous, low-content updates about the particulars of your friends' lives—Bob has the flu, Barbara can't believe what just happened on Mad Men, Sally and Ned are no longer on speaking terms—deepen your bonds with them. Writer Clive Thompson has explored this phenomenon, what social scientists call "ambient awareness." Following someone through his status updates is not unlike sitting in a room with him and semiconsciously taking note of his body language, Thompson points out. Just as you can sense his mood from the rhythm of his breathing, sighing, and swearing, you can get the broad outlines of his life from short updates, making for a deeper conversation the next time you do meet up.It's this benefit of Facebook that seems to hook people in the end: Their friendships seem to demand signing up.

computer-mediated communication use and research are proliferating rapidly, findings offer contrasting images regarding the interpersonal character of this technology.

SPONSORED BY: placeAd2(commercialNode,'88x31|5',false,''); Google’s Orwell Moment On the Web, privacy has its price. &nbsp; TECHNOLOGY How Well Do You Know Google? Can you pass this trivia test—without looking up the answers on you-know-what? &nbsp; By Daniel Lyons | NEWSWEEK Published Feb&nbsp;17, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010 Share: Facebook Digg (5) Tweet LinkedIn newsweek:http://www.newsweek.com/id/233773Buzz up!&nbsp;(8) Tools: 19 Post Your Comment Print Email NWK.widget.EmailArticle.init(); SPONSORED BY placeAd2('printthis','88x31',false,''); &nbsp; Email To A Friend Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link. Your Email Address Recipient's Email Address Separate multiple addresses with commas SPONSORED BY &nbsp; Google recently introduced a new service that adds social-networking features to its popular Gmail system. The service is called Buzz, and within hours of its release, people were howling about privacy issues—because, in its original form, Buzz showed everyone the list of people you e-mail most frequently. Even people who weren't cheating on their spouses or secretly applying for new jobs found this a little unnerving. SUBSCRIBE <script languag

The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they've created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them. Now the trick is to get people to give up more—in effect, to keep raising the price of the service.

These companies will never stop trying to chip away at our information. Their entire business model is based on the notion of "monetizing" our privacy. To succeed they must slowly change the notion of privacy itself—the "social norm," as Facebook puts it—so that what we're giving up doesn't seem so valuable.

Across the internet economy, companies are compiling masses of data on people, their activities, their likes and dislikes, their relationships with others and even where they are at any particular moment—and keeping mum.

“They are uncomfortable bringing so much attention to this because it is at the heart of their competitive advantage,” says Tim O’Reilly, a technology insider and publisher. “Data are the coin of the realm. They have a big lead over other companies that do not ‘get’ this.”

Amazon and Netflix, a site that offers films for hire, use a statistical technique called collaborative filtering to make recommendations to users based on what other users like. The technique they came up with has produced millions of dollars of additional sales. Nearly two-thirds of the film selections by Netflix’s customer come from the referrals made by computer. EBay, which at first sight looks like nothing more than a neutral platform for commercial exchanges, makes myriad adjustments based on information culled from listing activity, bidding behaviour, pricing trends, search terms and the length of time users look at a page. Every product category is treated as a micro-economy that is actively managed. Lots of searches but few sales for an expensive item may signal unmet demand, so eBay will find a partner to offer sellers insurance to increase listings. The company that gets the most out of its data is Google. Creating new economic value from unthinkably large amounts of information is its lifeblood. That helps explain why, on inspection, the market capitalisation of the 11-year-old firm, of around $170 billion, is not so outlandish. Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product.

Analytics—performing statistical operations for forecasting or uncovering correlations such as between Pop-Tarts and hurricanes—can have a big pay-off. In Britain the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) sifted through seven years of sales data for a marketing campaign that increased regular visitors by 70%. By examining more than 2m transaction records, the RSC discovered a lot more about its best customers: not just income, but things like occupation and family status, which allowed it to target its marketing more precisely. That was of crucial importance, says the RSC’s Mary Butlin, because it substantially boosted membership as well as fund-raising revenue.

Most CIOs admit that their data are of poor quality. In a study by IBM half the managers quizzed did not trust the information on which they had to base decisions. Many say that the technology meant to make sense of it often just produces more data. Instead of finding a needle in the haystack, they are making more hay

Many new business insights come from “dead data”: stored information about past transactions that are examined to reveal hidden correlations. But now companies are increasingly moving to analysing real-time information flows.

A CUSTOM NEWS FEED By the time Bridget Baker, who works in public relations in Seattle, checks Google Reader while eating lunch at her desk, she has already read most of the articles in her feed because she saw them on Twitter.

People with shared interests become your editor and Twitter becomes an alternative RSS feed.

One-fifth of posts and 57 percent of repeat messages contain a link, proving that this is an increasingly popular way to spread news, said Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist who works at a software company called HubSpot.