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Africans are active participants in the social media industry, here are a few examples: Motribe - This South African company enables you to create your own mobile social network with speed and ease and offers you great social tools to power your mobile social network MXit - A South Africa-based mobile social network. Over 27 million registered users, adding over 40,000 every day. Check out this cool infographic about MXit Adloopz - An innovative Nigerian startup that puts a social twist to advertising on the internet Personera - Personera lets you create custom artifacts from your content on social networking sites like Facebook Nikohapa - A Kenyan startup that offers Foursquare-like checkins made simple and that reward you with discounts for checking in to partner stores Ushahidi - Crowdsources information using multiple channels including social networking platforms like Twitter  Swift River - An Ushahidi project that adds super data processing to data coming from sources of unstructured information such as a twitter feed Zoopy - Another South African company that focuses on mobile video ForgetMeNot Africa: bridges the huge gap between the internet and mobile messaging worlds allowing any mobile phone to send and receive email and chat message on any carriers network. Quirk eMarketing - A digital marketing agency that also helps companies make use of social media for great results. Quirk has also spawned other cool companies in social media such as BrandsEye that creates great tools for online reputation management and crowdsourcing company IdeaBounty. And as far as group buying is concerned, Groupon has inspired many an African groupon clone. There are numerous African companies playing in this area - Rupu and Zetu in Kenya, DealDey in Nigeria, and a whole lot of others in South Africa

In looking at the world around, us, the shift that is the most apparent to many is the pace of technological change, with in the order of 100-fold increases in processing power, storage efficiency, and fixed and mobile bandwidth over the last decade. However I believe that the degree of social change over the last decade has been at least as much as that of technological change, if not more, across countries, cultures, and contexts. On the face of it, much of this social change has been driven by technology. The freer flow of information, enablement of expression and participation, ability to connect across boundaries, and rise of powerful open source technologies have helped to shape new values. Openness, transparency, authenticity, participation, opportunity are values that stem from the technologies that have dominated the last decade. Yet it could rather be that our shifting social values (or perhaps our underlying values that have long been yearning for expression) are shaping the technologies we develop.

Singapore is one of the most "evolved" social media markets around the world, according to market research firm Firefly Millward Brown. The global study, which was conducted in 15 countries between October and December last year,

The explosion in popularity of social enterprises recently is a direct consequence of the inability of existing companies to grasp the new reality that a company's core purpose must be to deliver positive social impact and not to simply minimise negative impacts while ultimately focusing on maximising profit in the short-term. As esteemed Professor at Harvard Business School, Michael E Porter wrote corporations must "create economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges".

"The conditions under which our armed forces conduct operations are rapidly changing with the spread of blogs, social networking sites, and media-sharing technology, and further accelerated by the proliferation of mobile technology," writes Darpa in the SMISC announcement document. "Changes to the nature of conflict resulting from the use of social media are likely to be as profound as those resulting from previous communications revolutions. The effective use of social media has the potential to help the armed forces better understand the environment in which it operates and to allow more agile use of information in support of operations."

In the years since the first social networks went online, the disruption had spread to government, creating shifts in power structures as large as those enabled by the introduction of the printing press centuries ago. "Connection technologies, including social media, tend to devolve power from the nation state and large institutions to individuals and small institutions," said Alec J. Ross, senior innovation advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in an interview. "Nothing demonstrated that more than the power to publish and distribute at great scale by historically disempowered individuals with inexpensive devices."

International Network of Crisis Mappers

The state of Veracruz in Mexico wants to change its penal code to apply a lower charge against the jailed Twitter and Facebook users accused of terrorism for spreading unconfirmed rumors of an attack on local schools (link in Spanish). A proposed change in Veracruz's laws would permit the government to punish the two social-networking users now behind bars, but for a lesser offense of "disruption of public order," rather than the original charges of terrorism and sabotage. Those charges carry a maximum sentence of 30 years.