While some organizations are still considering a basic social media facelift for their intranet, perhaps incorporating some blogs for corporate communication or a wiki area for some shared content authoring, it's almost certain that this is too little and too late for many companies. Over the last three years, the world has undergone a social media revolution that has changed the behaviors of most of the developed world that have gone on to be validated as beneficial for the workplace.

RSS disappearing from Twitter and Facebook means you must access via APIs. 

At Google IO today, Google announced the availability of the Android Open Accessory Development Kit, a new way to extend the Android platform so that other devices can be controlled via phones or tablets. Similar to the SDK, the ADK will allow hardware developers to take advantage of Android so that the OS can control or monitor external devices.

Online screencasting tool that even has a place to upload the screen casts to if you want.  Pro version allows for private screencasts.  

Infographic about a culture of collaboration in the workplace`

A review of two recent studies (Gallup and Aberdeen Group) summarizes some of the key findings of the value of internal social networks.   18% boost in employee engagement streamlined operations better, faster innovation failing to engage employees costs $300B in wasted productivity

Before May 1st, not even the smartest of machine learning algorithms could have predicted Keith Urbahn's online relevancy score, or his potential to spark an incredibly viral information flow. While politicos "in the know" certainly knew him or of him, his previous interactions and size and nature of his social graph did little to reflect his potential to generate thousands of people's willingness to trust within a matter of minutes. While connections, authority, trust and persuasiveness play a key role in influencing others, they are only part of a complex set of dynamics that affect people's perception of a person, a piece of information or a product. Timing, initiating a network effect at the right time, and frankly, a dash of pure luck matter equally.

"From the makers of AppScale comes an open source platform that provides customizable gamification elements designed to increase user interaction on websites. The project involves badging, points, live notifications, and leaderboards. Additonally, the platform provides analytics to track user participation."

In this case, there are four key players. Two of them are a couple: a journalist who lives in New York and a social media specialist who lives in London. The other two have roots in Pakistan: a journalist and documentary filmmaker who recently moved to the U.S. and a political commentator in Islamabad. Each of them contributed to a chain of information that turned one man's offhand comments about a helicopter in the middle of the night into an internationally known work of citizen journalism.

A new social network launched today around the sharing and engagement of news. XYDO takes the social graph and turns it into a network of news that is automatically curated through users Twitter and Facebook streams. Think Digg and Reddit, add social news feeds automatically and you have XYDO.

Update: @TwitterGlobalPR has tweeted some factoids this afternoon. Twitter saw its highest rate of tweets per second last night with the peak coming with 5,106 at 11:00 p.m. EST. Between 10:45 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. EST Twitter average 3440 tweets per second. It is notable that Twitter did not crash under the load. A year ago at this time Twitter was having problems surrounding people tweeting about the soccer World Cup. This year the most notorious man in the world is killed and the company can handle it fine.

What to do if your gmail account gets hacked and tips for avoiding getting hacked in the first place. 

How to force Google to search for creative commons licensed stuff only.  

As some time passes we're getting a better understanding of what's going on with the iphone and android tracking data.  This post summarizes the research done as of 24 April, 2011. 

Samsung and Korea's "KT" announces first NFC payment system that will be available to users. 

Dropbox explains changes to their Terms of Service and their various policies and approaches to protecting user data

So many cloud pundits are piling on to the misfortunes of Amazon Web Services this week as a response to the massive failures in the AWS Virginia region. If you think this week exposed weakness in the cloud, you don't get it: it was the cloud's shining moment, exposing the strength of cloud computing. In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model.