Social media has affected a lot of change on the internet today. We find that they have become very popular and more and more people use it. Facebook and Twitter are very famous and millions of people use them. There are ways one can become popular on these sites. But to make things interesting trying ways to loose it all on one of the most popular one seems to be the way to go.

The best way to do everything is in the reverse. Doing things differently or in the other way ensures that your popularity goes out of the window.

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Recently Twitter revised its ‘Terms of service’ that covered issues like tweet ownership, API and spam. The note-worthy point is the one on who owns tweets.

Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder says, «The revisions more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter and convey key issues such as ownership. For example, your tweets belong to you, not to Twitter.»

Twitter’s guidelines for API are still under construction. The present API guidelines are:

• Identify the user that authored or provided the Tweet, unless you are providing Tweets in an aggregate form or in anonymous form in those exceptional cases where concerns over user security and anonymity are involved.

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Real-time search is still taking its first steps. Even though the concept is exciting and offers immense scope, much work needs to be done to make it really useful. Relevancy is one factor ignored by real-time search now. The results we get now are based only on time and date.

As time/date and search queries are the only criteria for the search results, let us see how to rank well in real-time searches now.

1. Keywords: Use them not only in the content, but also in titles and updates. By doing so, the chances of the keywords appearing in tweets and Facebook updates go up.

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Twitter had tried its hand at local search in the past, but the attempts fell short in many ways. Now, it has come out with Idearc’s Superpages on Twitter through Twitter.com/sp411.

Twitter users can run local searches of Superpages database and receive direct messages on Twitter itself. As a Twitter user, it is possible to retweet and share the results, which makes the whole setup fascinating. This is how you can do it.

1. You follow sp411 and then it will automatically follow you a few seconds later

2. You then send a direct message to sp411 (”d sp411″) with a query and location. Example: pizza in Seattle, “d sp411 pizza Seattle”.

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The rising popularity of social networks like Twitter is posing enormous problems in the area of security to the Net users. The spurt of security risks in the past few weeks are proof for this.

A recent study released by AVG and CMO Council says that a majority of social network users do not perform the basic security measures regularly, some of which are:

1. Changing passwords (64% infrequently or never)
2. Adjusting privacy settings (57% infrequently or never)
3. Informing their social network administrator (90% infrequently or never)

Some more statistics revealed by the study are:

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TweetMeme has been a busy since launch of rival Retweet.com last week. After informing all-concerned, that it is still the most trusted brand, it has kept itself busy by envisaging and implementing improvements and additions.

The new URL-shortening service introduced by TweetMeme called Retwt.me will provide the following functions:

1. Shorten a link
2. Share the link on your favorite sites
3. Provide simple and easy to understand analytics

TweetMeme is not looking beyond these three functions and is planning to use it within TweetMeme to shorten comment links.

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The role of social networks as an online marketing and business strategies tool is gaining ground day-by-day. This demands spending considerable time on social media. It is important to find a balance between the social media activities and other marketing strategies.

The time spent on social media can be utilized in a gainful way by using it to find new talent for your business. When you want to expand your team, this is the ideal place to search for a candidate.

TweetPhoto owner Rodney Rumford’s advice on how to find your new team member sums it up well:

“Fish where your audience is and make personal connections with the talent pool that you want to hire…”

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GeoLocation is the latest craze among online users. Google has already jumped on the bandwagon with a host of services. iPhone users have at their service a horde of applications that enable them to be location-aware.

Twitter has been working on APIs to bring the service to Twitter. A recent blog post from official Twitter blog reveals the possibility of seeing them in near future. Excerpts from the post:

We’re gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.


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ReTweeting or RT offers immense potential for businesses. With its rising popularity, ReTweets have captured the imagination of Twitterers.

Tweets are the status updates posted by Twitter users. When another user likes the status and wants to share it with others, they use the same update and ReTweet it by adding the user’s name. As RT is done for Tweets containing links, it offers a viral means of link exposure.

The idea of RT was started by someone who wanted to use another user’s tweet. As more and more users started (mis)using tweets for their own gain and posting RT as their own, the idea caught on like wildfire. Now there are services that use RT as a backdrop to gain advantage.

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