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Social media and networking has become one of the most popular forms of interaction. Before the days of the internet people had no choice but to meet face-to-face or use snail mail or telephones for correspondence. Children as young as ten now have access to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Blackberry handsets as well as other social media sites. The question is; does this do harm to their school grades? On one hand we could argue that social media can actually help youngsters to achieve better grades, because the nature of the interaction can also be used for study purposes and information [...]

It appears, turbulence in the stock market has forced Zynga to postpone its IPO for couple of months. With lingering fears of double dip recession, Zynga does not want to risk a poor response from the market. As Gamasutra points out, “For an entity as closely watched as Zynga will be, a tepid start on Wall Street could make potential investors doubt the company’s power in the gaming industry.” Alan Patricof, managing director of Greycroft Partners LLC told Bloomberg that the IPO may be delayed until November. He also points out that consumer based tech companies need a certain euphoria before [...]

It’s no surprise that growth in social gaming has slowed down over the years. User fatigue could be the main reason for that. But,  if we go by the numbers, it’s still a huge market to be in. Zynga’s new games Cityville and Empire and Allies continue to grow like crazy with 75,693,658 users and 42,601,172 users respectively. The two games currently occupy the first and the third spot in top Facebook apps. eMarketer estimates social gaming to reach 61.9 million US internet users by the end of this year, or over a quarter of the online population. That’s an increase of [...]

Have you ever wondered why some of your tweets go viral while some others go completely unnoticed. One of the biggest factors for success on social networks is timing. Sharing links and posts when everybody is listening allows a greater visibility for the content and a greater chance of them being re-shared or re-tweeted. KISS Metrics has prepared an infographic which details the best times to share content on Facebook and Twitter.

Latest statistics from the Inside Facebook services validates the results of eMarketer which had predicted social networking plateauing. But the drop has happened sooner than expected with Facebook witnessing a massive fall in traffic in North America. According to Inside Facebook, the company gained 11.8 million more people over May, following 13.9 million over April. In contrast, it grew by at least 20 million new users over the typical month in the past 12. What’s different this time is that the decline is seen in back-to-back months which has never been the case before. Also, North America lost nearly 6 [...]

InboxQ conducted a survey to determine the effect Twitter had on business and why it is so important for any company to manitain an active presence on Twitter. It found 80% of users believed that the quality of answers they receive from businesses on Twitter is as good or better than the answers they receive from their followers. Separately, 80% of respondents also said that they trust the answers received from businesses on Twitter as much or more than the answers they receive from their followers. Also, answering questions on Twitter will earn your business account more followers.  59% of [...]

‘Social media is classrooms” is a hot topic for a debate now. People opposed to the idea say, social media ends up distracting the students. A study conducted by Pearson Learning supports their belief. It found that Facebook and Twitter are not seen as having value for class use. A large proportion of faculty say Facebook (53%) and Twitter (46%) have “negative” value for use in class. Supporters of social media believe, social media opens up a back channel for those students who are too shy to ask questions in a class. An experiment was conducted to ascertain the benefits [...]

Buddy Media, the Facebook management system of choice for eight out of the ten top global advertisers, today announced it has acquired Spinback, a New York-based company that provides comprehensive social commerce and analytics tools. Spinback helps retailers quickly launch social features and measure its effectiveness. SpinBack’s EasyShare Plugin, allows customers to easily share content, products and purchases to Facebook, email, Twitter and blogs in just a few clicks. The second, EasyTrack Analytics, measures and tracks how consumers share and recommend content and products across the social web and closes the loop on conversions. “Spinback is very excited to join the [...]

According to a new report from eMarketer, the days of double-digit growth in social network users are over and social networking is reaching a saturation point in some age groups. A closer look at the graph reveals that the growth has been slowing down when compared to previous years and it is now expected to grow at a very small percentage till 2013.  Year 2009-10 witnessed the highest jump in number of users while 2012-13 is expected to be the sluggiest of them all. eMarketer estimates nearly 150 million US web users will use social networks via any device at least monthly [...]