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When choosing a map - especially a social network map - which do you prefer - pretty or useful? In an ideal world I would take pretty useful, but forced to choose between the two I'll take useful. Here are two social graphs taken from my Twitter following data. -Valdis Krebs, InFlow, Social Network Analysis Expert

Social Profiles is a Wordpress plugin which lets you add links to your commenters' social profiles. The links can be text links or graphical ones, but only registered users of your Wordpress site can input these, thus allowing these profiles to show in their comments on your blog posts.12 different social networks are included - Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, being some.

Organizations that want benefits from social network tools will need to make some selective, deliberate and thoughtful choices that are different from the most highly restrictive "need to know" policies. For some more high-level thoughts on the relationship between social network and the org chart, see some high level thoughts on that topic, see: http://www.alevin.com/?p=1280

"Because social-networking tools are forums for personalized, socially focused conversations, the communities that spring from these tools are person/people-centered. As Porter explained, this person/people-centeredness results in the value of participation being opaque for anyone who is not participating. To address this problem, we made sure that students who chose not to participate (because the value of participation is opaque for them) had access to our tweets by incorporating an RSS feed-like Twitter widget in our LMS. (See Figure 5.) Many widgets like these can be found online, although we should note that this particular widget has limitations. As seen in the example in Figure 5, the widget only displays Joni's posts, not the back-and-forth exchanges between her and members of her network. Students might incorrectly assume that the interaction is one-sided and less than dynamic. Besides keeping students apprised of the resources we shared via Twitter, however, this widget allowed them to vicariously discover Twitter's value. Some students later chose to join us in Twitter because they had a better understanding of what they were getting into because its value was less opaque. Ultimately, we found that Twitter helped us achieve our student-engagement objective, but we also quickly discovered that students' Twitter participation led to other notable instructional outcomes."

4 online tools to monitor and optimize your social networking activities.

This blog is focused on "exploding" old concepts and thinking about economies, organizations, communities, and groups. We will focus on patterns of connectivity and self-organizing behavior in economic and social networks and how these new structures lead to resilience, adaptability, agility, and innovation.

"Alpha.app.net is an ad-free social network. It's your real-time feed, a home for meaningful conversation, where you control your data."

Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.

Tool for updating all of your social networks at once. I know you can set up twiiter to update facebook and linkedin, and your blog to tweet your posts, this just brings an extra level

Abstract: Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.

This is a great article about twitter. And I really like the idea that it is a LOT about what we can DO with twitter data that makes it so compelling (all those great apps out there). "Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit. Put those three elements together - social networks, live searching and link-sharing - and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching."

Power.com, a Web start-up from Brazil with some prominent backers, aims to become the portal through which people access their online social lives. It's up against no less than the world's biggest Internet companies.

As the recession looms on, more and more people are turning to social media and blogs to look for jobs. Jamie Varon (@jamievaron) has generated buzz in the Twitter community with her new website called Twitter Should Hire Me, where she blogs candidly about her attempts to get a job at Twitter. In this interview, she shares her tips on how to use social media to land the job of your dreams, even in a recession.

Is there a numerical cap on how many friends we can have? Many cite the so-called Dunbar's number, 150, as a ceiling on personal contacts, but social-networking sites may enable users to burst past that number for friends."

This Social Ribbon Generator allows you to create ribbon ads that invite your visitors to check out your social networking profiles.

Upload and manage your photos, videos and documents, and share them on all your favorite social networks from one location. TwitC also lets you import your favorite or personal content from YouTube, Docstoc, Slide, TED, Break, Hulu, Google Docs, Viddler, Soundcloud, Kickstarter, SlideShare, Blip.tv, Ustream, Vimeo, College Humor, Break, Meefedia, Funny or Die, Metacafe, Daily Motion, Livestream, The Onion, National Geographic, eHow, and dozens more sites.

In a new report, Nielsen reveals that Facebook users spent an extraordinary 13.9 billion minutes on the site - in the month of April alone. Lagging far behind, at 5 billion user minutes, is MySpace, the network launched in 2003, and purchased by News Corp. in 2005. For years, MySpace was the go-to networking site, but it recently lost significant ground to Facebook and Twitter.

If you're feeling great today, you may end up inadvertently spreading the joy to someone you don't even know.

Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope

Before you write off Twitter as just the latest social media "fad," take a look at how some clever educators are using it to enrich their classrooms and even forge informal professional networks.