Some universities in the United States made an experiment that lasted for more than a year. A content was deleted from the profile but the URL of the content is saved. It turns out that even after a year after the date of the deletion supposedly has happened, the content is still available through the use of the URL.

This can potentially be devastating to a certain group of people that has embarrassing contents about themselves. The risk of the content being found out by unwanted people such as future employers or even stalkers is high due to the information being available in the Internet without the possibility of deleting it.

This may also be due to the fact that some of the share of Facebook is under CIA control. A lot have been said about this and has been covered by quite a substantial amount of media. Speculations also arise on whether the CIA wishes to keep all these information for future usage.

Although this doesn’t mean that Facebook qualifies to be on top with major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo Search, it does mean that people are using Facebook a lot to search for information.

In fact, Facebook is one of the few major websites that experienced an increase in the number of search queries conducted by its users. The number of search queries in Facebook for the month of February was a whopping 436 million although it is still far from Google’s 13.5 billion searches. Bing and Google also experienced an increase in its market share with Google increasing it by 0.1% while Bing by 0.2%.

Sobees is a program that allow users to login and get update of not one or two but 4 social networking websites. These are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Linkedin. These aren’t just any social networking website but some of the most famous websites on the planet.

Sobees is currently in Alpha version meaning that there is still much development to be done. However, this doesn’t restrict its users in using the program as well. Users may encounter some bugs or problems but these aren’t very significant as well.

This handy program allows the user to view real time updates on these social networking website and keeps them updated of what is currently going on. If there are any new tweets made by someone that the user is currently following or if somebody posts something on the user’s wall, he or she will be able to check them out.

A lot of customizations can be done to suit the user’s need. Some examples include but do not restrict to the language, skin customization and many more. The program is currently supported by Windows XP and above and one of the major requirements is to have the .NET installed. Those that are interested can check out sobees.com

Google wave promises communication and collaboration tools that could reshape the future of the internet. In other words Google wave is a real-time communication tool and Its main features include email, IM, wikis, web chat, social networking and project management to build an elegant common client.

On Google wave you can bring in a group of friends/business partners together to discuss about the day at work or just to share files. Therefore facebook has become a perennially favored website of social networking. Google wave does not restrict like facebook where you can choose the people you want to socialize with. Today facebook has become the face of the virtual world of social networking. More and more people are dependent on facebook for online communication and sharing needs. On the other hand facebook is also popular with various websites which get the maximum number of hits from either facebook or twitter users.

Google wave is yet to materialize hence take time to show its real use. Google wave has many huge promises for the future. It has the potential to change the entire face of knowledge sharing, collaboration and working over the internet. Therefore facebook can anticipate some fierce competition from Google wave, where facebook would be measured constantly against it. It’s distinguishing features are that it is like email but does not work on existing email, it also has IM but is not an application. It’s like facebook messaging but isn’t facebook. It resembles twitter but isn’t a public facing feed. It’s like IRC but is less temporal.

Google wave is an open source so eventually everybody who is associated with facebook can probably move to it because of its expected flexibility. It also has it’s own set of drawbacks, but with Google at its back, its sure to overcome them. In other words facebook and Google are on a collision course and will witness a tough fight. I would like to conclude by stating that as the saying goes it is useless building castles in the air, therefore it would be a waste of time waiting for Google wave and if given a chance it is best to choose the real over the imaginary.

Social Media explained

The term in itself is made up of two words: social and media.  The first means something that is strictly related to society and the media defines all communication standards from printed such as newspapers and magazines to audiovisual such as television and radio.

In the internet world, a social media site is an interactive website that doesn’t just offer information but asks for your opinions through comments or a poll about the latest trends.  Flixter, for example recommends movies you might like based on others’ opinions but share the same interests with you.

As opposed to other types of media, social media lets you take part in the process. If you are watching the evening news, you cannot comment directly to the television newscaster of the reporter.  You are given the opportunity to communicate and express your opinions with social media.

The difference between Social Media and Social News

Journalists and reporters and radio presenters are referred to as people working in the media. A social news site is a website which gives news but lets you comment about it.  It therefore falls under social media sites. However social media and social news are not the same.  A social news site is part of the social media group, but even a wiki and a social networking site belong to it.  This means that social media is a very broad definition under which a variety on interactive actions and services take place.

Examples of Social Media sites

Social media sites are becoming more popular, since, as we said earlier, they give the opportunity to the general public to participate actively.  You can interact with other people as well: you are not simply typing or clicking on your computer.  There are thousands of sites on the internet that can be defined as social media and the trend of creating more similar sites is increasing because it is giving a chance to people to discover new things and making contact with others at the same time.

Here is a list of categories and a few social media websites included in each:

• Social Bookmarking. (Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Simpy) You can bookmark and tag websites you like and other people can browse through your list and vice versa.
• Social News. (Digg, Propeller, Reddit) Comment or vote (or in some cases both) on news items and articles.
• Social Networking. (Facebook, Hi5, Last.FM) Create a community of friends with which to interact, comment share events, discuss and create groups.
• Social Photo and Video Sharing. (YouTube, Flickr) Share your photos and videos online with the general public and let them comment on your photos and videos and in turn you can comment on theirs.
• Wikis. (Wikipedia, Wikia) Add new articles or edit the ones already in the database.

There are many other social media sites.  These are just an example.  If you can directly interact on a website, then it is social media site.