Pope Benedict XVI, the 84 year old leader of more than a billion Catholics around the world, gave his blessing to social media, Twitter in particular, in his World Communications Day address.
 
The pope did not mention Twitter by name, but his comments about the way we communicate in today’s world of websites and social media clearly referenced the micro-blogging website: “In concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible, profound thoughts can be communicated, as long as …

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2011 was the year of the online environment. On average, there was over 2.1 billion different Internet users in 2011 and over 555 million websites were “counted” by people from Pingdom (U.S. statistics company). But here are the statistics for 2011:
E-mail
- 3.146 billion e-mail accounts
- 27.6% represents the popularity of the most used email client – Microsoft Outlook
- 19% is the percentage of SPAM e-mails delivered to corporate email accounts despite spam filters
- …

Online video sharing is big and Yowie know this. This is why the online video chat provider has jumped into the online video sharing and recommendation space with the release of its Facebook live chat app. The service will allow users to talk to each other as they watch videos. Yowie sees this as an opportunity to tie in its video chat service with social media dynamics that more or less rule the Internet these days.
This launch comes behind the launch of similar services such as Google Hangout …

Facebook pages have been growing in popularity as more businesses turn to social media and transform into what is now popularly known as social enterprise. Tracking Facebook page growth has however been tedious and onerous as it required you to track individual pages separately. Well, not any more. A German-based startup has launched a web service that allows you to track over 36 million Facebook pages all from one console.
The service called SocialMedia-Live tracks millions of Facebook pages …

Professional networking website LinkedIn, which staged its IPO in May, saw its share price increase as much as 7.2 percent on Thursday after 8 million LinkedIn shares were added to the market, 1.3 million of which came from the company. Insiders and early holders added the remaining 6.7m shares.
 

Demand for LinkedIn shares continues as 8m shares come to market.

The price rise shows that investors are still motivated to buy into LinkedIn even with market experts cautioning the stock may …

Jobvite, a recruiting platform for the social web based in Burlingame, California, published results of a new survey showing that job seekers are increasingly turning to social media in an effort to find employment.
 

Jobvite survey shows job hunters increasingly turning to social media. image source: Wikimedia Commons – Michael Rafael

Jobvite’s survey found that 22 million Americans found jobs over the past year through their contacts on social networking websites like Facebook, …

In light of the roll social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook played in the Middle East social uprisings, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been reviewing how best to make use of data gathered from monitoring these social media sites.
 

DHS is developing guidelines for monitoring social media.

According to an Associated Press (AP) report on Tuesday, Caryn Wagner, DHS Undersecretary, said: “We’re still trying to figure out how to use things like …

“They [customers] read Facebook like it’s a nicotine addiction” said Chase Manhattan’s general manager for card services, who was explaining the advantages of an advertising and marketing campaign centered around its Facebook page for the Chase Freedom credit card.  Matt Kane said: “Our reach is much broader because of sharing.”
 

Banks moving customers towards banking with social media

New York based Chase held a sweepstakes between October 3rd and October 23rd, that gave …

Social networking giant Facebook saw its mobile audience increase by 50 percent, to more than 57 million users over the past year.
 

Mobile social networking grows 37pc: comScore

Micro-blogging website Twitter saw its mobile users increase by 75 percent to 13.4 million people, and LinkedIn, which has the smallest number of mobile users of the three most popular social networking websites, saw its mobile audience jump by 69 percent over the past year, to 5.4 million …

The United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has updated its Debt Collection Guidance rules by declaring that debt collectors can not go after debtors using social media websites like Twitter and Facebook.
The new OFT rules aim to prevent people from being embarrassed by debt collectors making their debt problems publicly known on social media websites. An OFT spokesman, said the practice by debt collectors of communicating with debtors via social networking websites is similar to the …