SpeedPlexer Blog

The L.A. Times Tech Blog has compiled a list of the Top 10 Moments in Social Media in 2009. Here are a few of them.

“Word of Web” replaces “word of mouth” — buzz surrounding product and entertainment releases became instantly quantifiable. The elusive word-of-mouth promotion could now be measured, and marketers love to use the word “viral.”

The Whopper Sacrifice – a promotional game from Burger King that asked Facebook users to delete 10 friends in exchange for a free burger. In just a couple of weeks, 233,906 friends were dropped–a hilariously successful way to promote a brand.

Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN — The former star of “That 70s Show,” under the guise of his Twitter alias @aplusk, led a high-profile campaign, challenging the news network to a race to a million subscribers. The winner would donate money to a malaria charity. (Kutcher won.)

Susan Boyle launches career — Perhaps the most notable product of that “word of Web” we talked about earlier, this 48-year-old Scottish singer rose from absolute obscurity after low-key appearances on “Britain’s Got Talent.”

News of Celebrity Deaths — TMZ was the first to confirm Michael Jackson’s death. The death of one of the biggest pop stars in recent history was a perfect example of how quickly big news can spread on the Web. However, many notable people didn’t die this year but had their “obitweets” spread far and wide.

Hudson River plane landing — Demonstrating the true power of social media, the iPhone snapshot of the rescue mission in the Hudson River was legendary. No moment has to be missed just because a reporter or photographer didn’t happen to be near the scene. Anyone can be a reporter for a moment and broadcast to the world. And it’s all possible because of internet speed!

We thought we knew what we’d find when we checked to see what people were most interested in over the past week, based on what they searched for online.  We were surprised by all but the #1 entry on Yahoo’s Buzz Log, which was “After Christmas Sales”.  Those searches increased by 712%!

Not terribly surprising were searches for how to make Eggnog (up 489%) and, up 258%, “Obama Christmas Card”.  But we were surprised to find that also in the top five were the trailer for “Sex and the City 2” (up 668%) and “Giant Squid”—up 480%! 

Those are strange juxtapositions.

So we thought we’d check other such sites to see what else people might be thinking about in the days between Christmas and the new year.

Alexa.com’s list of what’s hot shows that movies, videogames, and sports are on people’s minds.

Digg.com’s community of people who give certain topics the thumbs-up seem to be more concerned with low-cost health care, New York not being iPhone ready, travel photos, the cost of legalizing marijuana, and neuroscientists’ breakthroughs on short-term memory.

Care2.com’s news network, is “socially conscious news and video shared and rated by the community”. Some of the top stories there include: “100 Excellent Twitter Feeds for Tech-Savvy Students”, beached whales in New Zealand, a newly discovered bird species, oil spills off the Alaskan coast, and a Christmas tree made from Recycled bottles.

So there you have it!  The more we become accustomed to getting information with internet speed, the further our interests seem to range!

If you’ve got friends and family around the world that you’d like to call on Christmas Day, or perhaps to wish a happy new year, you’ll want to look into some calling options that utilize internet speed.

Skype  is a favorite of people all across the globe.  Download their free software and enjoy free calls, video calls and instant messaging over the internet. Plus great value calls to phones anywhere in the world. If you are calling someone who also has Skype on their computer, the call is free. If you’ve got webcams connected with your Skype account, you can see each other for free!  Calling to phones is inexpensive, and you can even use the software from some mobile phones.  This blogger has found Skype to be consistently reliable and a great way to keep in touch with loved ones the world over. You can download it now and be making calls within minutes!

Another way to make inexpensive calls over the internet is by using Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. Sites like MyVoIPprovider.com have reviews of a number of service providers.  There is a small piece of hardware to buy, but once it’s done, you can make inexpensive calls over the internet—often using a real phone rather than your computer’s microphone or headset.  That being said, Skype also offers a Skype phone and other hardware if this is something that interests you.

Vonage is a well-known VoIP service provider.  For a reasonable monthly fee you can make phone calls from a phone using your internet connection for much less than a standard phone line would cost. This is especially true of long distance calls. And now they’re offering unlimited international calling using your smartphone over your cellular or WiFi connection to over 60 countries!

If you haven’t already utilized the magic of internet speed in your holiday shopping, now is the time to make the most of it.  Rather than buying whatever you can find at the local gas station mini-mart, get online and do a search for online gift cards—or use the helpful information we’ve gathered for you!

PayPal is even offering $10 off if you buy from 1-800-flowers.com. And if you go to their website, they say they can help you find up to 30% off.  They also suggest shopping at Toys ‘R’ Us, Circuit City.com, iTunes, Walmart, Barnes & Noble and many more.

And to entice you further, PayPal is running a sweepstakes that could win you $50,000 in cash or thousands of other prizes.  All you have to do is give them your e-mail address and tell them what your wish is, and you’re entered. Then, you can make the choice to make additional entries every time you pay with PayPal.

Gift Certificates.com has e-super certificate gifts that are easy to personalize and send so your friends and loved ones can redeem them whenever they want from well-known stores like Macy’s, Old Navy, AMC Theaters, and more!  Order by 5:00 p.m. on December 24th and your gift will arrive just in time for Christmas.

Gift Card Mall.com lets you email a personalized gift card in an instant to that special someone, and delivery is always FREE. Sending last minute gifts is simple! Choose an E-Gift card from one of their selected retailers, checkout and your gift is sent! They’ve got cards from places like Best Buy, iTunes, Footlocker, Pizza Hut, Kmart and Sears.

So don’t worry, but hurry!

The debate over whether or not to capitalize the words “internet” and “web” has been raging for quite some time. 

In 2004, Wired News declared that it would no longer capitalize either word. And the same would go for “net.”  Their rationale was based on the idea that though “[t]rue believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies…in the case of internet, web and net, a change…was necessary to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and receiving information. That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television.”

In 2007, Grammar Girl suggested that these words ought to be capitalized, because “[m]ost language experts believe the Internet is one big specific place that people visit.” Of course, she did mention that there is some disagreement over whether or not the Internet is one specific place.

Now in February of 2009, a writer for the Chicago Tribune blogged an appropriate answer to Grammar Girl’s question, saying “But, of course, it’s not a place at all. It’s an international network of computers — analogous to the interstate highway system, which does not take a capital letter, or the railroad, which does not take a capital letter. Another way to think of it is as a medium for transmission of information– like the airwaves, which does not take a capital letter, or satellites, which does not take a capital letter, or cable, which does not take a capital letter. We listen to the radio, not Radio.”

But still, the debate rages on even at the Speedplexer blog.

We found a list of reasons to use e-cards rather than sending paper cards through snail mail. 

10– They are interactive: Recipients stay involved as they enjoy your greeting.
  9 – They use multimedia: Experience movement, music, and be part of a story.
  8 – They are online: Anyone in the world with internet access can enjoy them.
  7 – They allow unlimited recipients: Send to as many email addresses as you have.
  6 – There’s no postage: Save the price of a postage stamp for each recipient.
  5 – They can be forwarded: Family and friends can share your greeting with others.
  4 – They are green: No paper or card-stock to dispose of.
  3 – They are reasonable: a one-time fee returns a surprising value, and many are free.
  2 – You have choices: Choose from several rich, professional designs.
 1 –  They are personalized: Include your logo or family photo, your greeting, and a link to your website.

But we also found an argument against the use of e-cards. They say that eCards have been used by scammers to get you and your list of friends to click on links, sending them to a website that could hold malware. It can be difficult to tell the difference between a legitimate eCard sent by your friend of family and one sent by a scammer.

They suggest that you can still make use of the convenience of internet speed by instead simply sending your friends and family a standard email. You can attach photos or links to videos, and don’t have to worry if you’re exposing your loved ones to any kind of computer threat.  But if you use a site you trust, then your only worry may be that the recipient may be too wary to open the card!

But it’s the thought that counts, right?

Ars Technica reported yesterday that Vice President Joe Biden held a roundtable discussion with “all stakeholders” on enforcing copyright in a changing digital world. “Invited—MPAA, RIAA, movie studios, music labels, publishers, the FBI, the Secret Service, and Homeland Security. Not invited—everyone else.”

But though the event billed itself “the first of its kind, and will bring together all of the stakeholders to discuss ways to combat piracy in this rapidly changing technological age,” they didn’t manage to invite any public interest groups or academics—people who can most definitely be considered stakeholders.

The Internet was a key topic of conversation, and groups like Public Knowledge, a Washington DC based public interest group working to defend your rights in the emerging digital culture, weren’t keen about giving content owners a venue for lobbying high-level officials on topics like three-strikes laws, ISP liability, and Internet filtering.

Public Knowledge’s Gigi Sohn said, “It is unclear why three cabinet officers, several subcabinet officers, the directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Secret Service are needed to tend to the worries of the big media companies, particularly the motion picture industry which is completing a year in which it will set box-office records.

“No consumer or public-interest groups, technology companies, technology associations or Internet Service Providers are on the guest list. No one who questions the need for Draconian governmental policies on behalf of the privileged special interest group for whom this meeting is being held is on the guest list.”

Check out what Public Knowledge has to say about copyright and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement at Public Knowledge.org.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Facebook users are saying that they are being blocked from sharing Seppukoo.com with friends. As mentioned in our previous post, Seppukoo.com offers ritual suicide for the virtual selves of Facebook users by deactivating their account, giving them a memorial page and informing all their Facebook friends. But it can all be restored with internet speed by logging in to Facebook again.

Simon Axten, spokesman for Facebook, said in an e-mail to the L.A. Times Tech Blog that Facebook has an automated system that blocks links for known spam, malware and phishing sites. So it must be nothing personal, right?

Well we think the idea is funny. It’s named for the ancient Japanese samurai act of “seppuku,” in which the samurai would voluntarily kill themselves rather than fall into the hands of their enemies.

“As the seppuku restores the samurai’s honour as a warrior, Seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body,” the site says.

Because it’s a spoof, the design and layout of Seppukoo.com is strikingly similar to Facebook – though Seppukoo is red and gray, and features paintings of sword-wielding samurai instead of profile photos.

The site was produced by an Italian “imaginary art group,” called Les Liens Invisibles (translated from French: The Invisible Links). When asked for an interview, Guy McMusker, art director of the group, replied in an e-mail that Les Liens Invisibles couldn’t do it on the phone. The group couldn’t speak, he said, “because of its invisible nature.”

But he insists that Seppukoo.com was not started to attack Facebook. In fact, Les Liens Invisibles has a Facebook page.

“We’re not Luddites,” McMusker said.

But once he discovered that any mention of the site has been blocked since Dec 10th, he wrote in an e-mail, “we’re studying a counter-strategy.”

Rights advocate groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are not fans of Facebook’s new privacy policies. Yahoo news reports that the controversy came a day after Facebook began requiring users to refine settings to specify who gets to be privy to each piece of content uploaded to the website.

The ACLU’s Northern California technology and civil liberties policy director, Nicole Ozer, said, “If users aren’t careful, the transition tool will transition them to less privacy.”

EFF lawyer Kevin Bankston said in a blog post, “The Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome development that will likely cause a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook’s users, whether intentionally or inadvertently.”

But Facebook director of global communications Barry Schnitt says,”It is not that big of a change…. The process is more transparent and transformative than they give us credit for. When they see how many people around the world have made choices about privacy this will be hailed as a giant step forward.”

For those who may be pushed too far by this, or other Facebook-related issues such as too many strangers wanting to be your friend, or even too many people you know wanting to be in contact, we have a drastic solution:  virtual identity suicide.

The L.A. Times Tech Blog told us about Seppukoo.com, which offers ritual suicide for Facebook users’ virtual profiles by deactivating your account. And if you are indeed willing to end it all, the site will give you a RIP memorial page and send the page to all your Facebook friends. But it can all be restored with internet speed.  Just log in and your account is reactivated!

Yesterday TechCrunch reported that the iTunes Facebook Fan page rolled out a “nifty” new feature that allows you to create custom iTunes gift cards and send them directly to a friend through Facebook or via Email.”  Fun!

The great thing about it is that this appears to be one of the only ways to purchase a digital iTunes giftcard. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid found that the Apple site itself only offers physical versions, and sites like Gifts.com and Giftcards.com don’t have digital options either. So aside from this fabulous Facebook app, the only place we can find the e-mail-able digital gift cards option is from within the iTunes desktop app itself. And if you’re not already a customer, it probably requires additional set up.

Using the iTunes Gifts Facebook app is pretty straightforward:
• Pick from one of six different templates, which include designs for the holidays, birthdays, and a few with those ubiquitous colorful iPod colorful dancers.
• Then choose how much you’d like to give (options run from $5 to $50) and the names of your Facebook friends or Email addresses as recipients.
• Finally, customize the card with your own personal message.
• Once you’re done, you can choose to send it immediately, or specify a day in the future for it to be sent (which makes it great for holiday/birthday shopping).

Social networking seems to be increasing the opportunities daily to live our lives not only with internet speed, but with the convenience of doing it all in one fun, fabulous place.