We know that social networks all use metadata to pull in a preview of your content to determine interests, buying practices, etc. We know this, but we still look at content in a silo. We write blog posts, update our Facebook status, or retweet our favorite music artists' latest snarky comment and forget that someone is watching and paying close attention.
Social media has gone to college. College libraries, that is. Reaching beyond the relationship status updates on Facebook, Harvard libraries set up Twitter feeds to broadcast the titles of books being checked out from campus libraries. Readers can return books to the “Awesome Box,” creating a data trail about what they consider great. “Awesomed” selections are then publicized via Twitter.
The two giants of social media have always been Facebook and Twitter. A recent change on Facebook's part looks an awful lot like a Twitter tradition. Looking to improve its search and indexing capabilities, Facebook is now adding the hashtag symbol. Admittedly, many users have brought that habit with them from Twitter but for it to be embraced by the rival giant is interesting, to say the least.
Brand Embassy is acquiring Beepl in a consolidation of social media services and technology. The plan is for Brand Embassy to integrate Beepl's technology into its platform.
Gravity has built a semantic analysis engine intended to gauge a site visitor's interest by looking beyond just the articles they read, and into their behavior. This technology has attracted various funders, so apparently someone thinks there is a future for Gravity.
Sprylogics recently announced that its semantic search technology will be integrated into its chat and search application, 2ya for Facebook.
Jetlore is launching a platform designed to power the development of a social application. This sets a new path from the past when developers would have to basically reinvent the wheel over and over again.
Automation is a good thing, or even a great thing. With the onslaught of metadata being created every moment of every day, automated indexing and storage for findability later is more than a great thing. Having said that, don't be surprised when we acknowledge that sometimes automation is not the solution. Gasp, I know!
The Pope tweeted. Yes, you read correctly. Pope Benedict XVI, now known in the Twitter-sphere as @pontifex, tweeted for the first time on December 12, 2012. What did the Bishop of Rome have to talk about? Expert System analyzed a sample of over 15,000 tweets that followed the Pope's first official tweet and ranking at the top in topics were Jesus, faith and prayer, as well as hope, family, life, love, work and the gospel.