social

Apparently LinkedIn wants to move away from its status as a pure career network towards establishing itself as a more social network. LinkedIn has been overhauling the look of its homepage with a cleaner and simpler interface, which now closely resembles the designs of Facebook and Google+. Some of the new features include a newer, simpler, and more modern design, more relevant updates on top of the news feed, and a richer, cleaner comment / update / post stream. As with Facebook and Google+ there’s a line on top of the stream that shows which people — and how many — commented and liked a post. Also, the sidebar now lists statistical information on your network and other related info like jobs you may be interested in and other people you may know.

What do you think about the new design and features?

Interesting TEDTalk by Sherry Turkle on Social Media and its impact on human interaction and communication: Checking email during meetings. Shopping on your smartphone in the middle of class. Texting at funerals. These are a few of the examples that MIT professor Sherry Turkle offered during her TEDTalk, in which she argued that “technology is taking us places we don’t want to go.” Turkle, a psychologist who leads MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, believes that while our constant communication and social media engagement does make us more connected, it’s coming at the sacrifice of real conversation. And she thinks that will have some serious consequences for our relationships, our self-perceptions and our emotions.

This post on TechCrunch discusses the fast growth of interest-based social networks and how their emergence may affect top dogs such as Facebook for example. Interest-based social services like Pinterest, Instagram, Thumb, or Foodspotting are raking up new users at the speed of light. According to the author, Jay Jamison, part of their success can be attributed to the fact that these newcomers have a markedly different focus and approach. While traditional social networks focus primarily on users personal relationships, these new kids on the block have in common that they enable the user to focus and organize around their interests first. The crucial difference is probably the users opportunity to express his or her interests in new, engaging ways and the possibility to connect – in an authentic fashion – with people they do not already know.

Facebook today announced Timeline, a total redesign of the current profile page. Timeline chronicles your Facebook history and enables you to look at everything that has ever happened in your Facebook lifespan. Here’s a Mashable post that offers some great snapshots of Facebook’s new appearance and discusses some of the novelties. What do you think?

Picture courtesy of Mashable

Some of the new features include:

• “Timeline” – a stream of information about you (the photos you’ve posted, all your status updates, the apps you’ve used, even the places you’ve visited) that scrolls all the way back to your birth.
• You don’t have to just like something – “Facebook Gestures” enables users to express various kinds of reactions or emotions.
• Facebook apps will only ask for permission once to post content on your behalf – before apps had to ask each time before sharing information about you.
• Lightweight or trivial information is going to the “Ticker” – only the more relevant things such as status updates, photos from a wedding or a vacation, or changes in relationship status will appear in your news feed.
• And lastly, you can watch TV and movies, listen to music, and read news with your friends — all within Facebook.

Google+, Facebook’s newest challenger, has been available for a while now. Some interesting new features include: “Circles” – which enables users to organize contacts into groups for sharing, “Hangouts”  - which are places used to facilitate group video chat, “Sparks” – which enables users to identify topics they might be interested in sharing with others, or ”Huddle” – which is a feature available to Android, iPhone, and SMS devices for communicating through instant messaging within circles. If you have an account and plan to use it professionally, here are some things that might be helpful for you to know.

Portfolios trump resumes, more workers telecommute, social media continues its spread, and mobile marches over desktop: Online magazine CIO provides technology and business leaders with insight and analysis on information technology developments and gives an interesting forecast of some of the key trends for the next year.

According to CIO, the workplace has evolved in new and exciting ways and has become even more centered on the Web. In 2010, mobile applications gained on desktop apps as many companies focused on facilitating smartphones and tablet PCs. Traditional marketing techniques were edged out by web-based marketing via search engines and social media. However, one of the most important trends is the continuous growth of online work. According to the CEO of one of the leading marketplaces for online talent: “It’s a digital world, and the smart companies will hire more flexibly and get more work done online in 2011″. Read the full post on CIO.com.

Technology-centered work trends for 2011:

• Digital portfolios replacing resumes
• Mobile is the new desktop
• Online work: Hiring in the could
• The HTML5/Flash War: Programmers needed
• Businesses will get even more social
• The decline of traditional marketing

The austrian motivation-trainer Peter F. Kinauer found out how to make your professional life more relaxed. He wrote a whole book about it: “So macht Arbeit Spass! 60 Impulse für mehr Motivation im Job”. We put together 9 steps he figured out to ease your working life.

Our life’s get more stressful and a whole lot of general problems stress everybody out. Political problems, climate change and financial crisis all over the world put mental pressure on every person who reads the news. It makes especially the working life easier to remember the positive things in life. This kind of motivation is free and nearly everybody is able to realise it.

Step one: Make yourself smile! You can arrange your office new, e.g. with new decoration.

According to a recent survey from office services firm Regus, SMB’s are increasingly successful at customer acquisition via social networks. Bigger firms, despite a generally larger marketing budget, are not quite as successful in social acquisition.

While customer service and interaction remains the main function, more and more companies utilize social networks for acquisition and retention. Because of its sizeable business opportunities, social marketing will continue to grow. Read the full article on emarketer.

image: courtesy of emarkete

“if you’re job hunting, you may be tired of everyone telling you to network, network, network. sorry. but it’s a fact: networking is the no. 1 way to find a job. and now, thanks to a new invention you may have heard of, “the internet,” you have a bigger and better way to network: social media …”

“if you can’t tweet, you might get beat — in the job hunt, that is. the landscape of today’s job market is shifting, and the shift favors individuals who are savvy in social media…” …read full article.