Ning, the network of social networks that boasted 20 million visitors a month, is making massive staff cutbacks and has announced a complete end to free services for its users. Those who pay for premium services will be asked to pay more, and those who are getting their social networks free of charge will be asked to fork over or phase off the Ning platform.
For a while now, we’ve been seeing Ning through rose-colored glasses. One year ago to the day, the company announced it had attained 1 million …

As a mostly virtual team with offices spread across three countries in two hemispheres, the entire WooThemes.com staff only gets together twice per year. During their first biannual corporate retreat of 2010, the company, which specializes in premium WordPress themes, saw a unique opportunity to use social media to connect with their customers and “eat their own dogfood,” so to speak, by testing out their own products in a real-world, and very public environment.
This year, the team met for a week-long, working ski trip in the Austrian Alps, which …

There’s been a lot of coverage lately about the location “war” between Gowalla and Foursquare. Nobody is arguing that Gowalla and Foursquare aren’t, on some levels, competing, but I do think a lot of people are missing the big picture here. Which is the impending location gold rush.
My cofounder, Matt Galligan, and I firmly believe that location is in a similar position as social was in 2001 or so. By that I mean that, at the time, social was very nascent, but exciting as it gave us a whole …

On the campus of Penn State University, a rivalry between a rogue campus blog and the official newspaper has become a fascinating mirror of the strife between old and new media. In only a matter of months, the unofficial campus blog Onward State, has marshaled the power of social media to compete with the award winning 112-year-old campus paper The Daily Collegian. With one-tenth of the Collegian’s staff size, Onward State has constructed a virtual newsroom that collaborates in real-time with Google Wave, outsourced its tip-line to Twitter, and …

There will be lots of news leaking about Facebook’s product announcements at their upcoming F8 Developer Conference in April. That’s because they’re already starting to test out a lot of the new stuff with third party developers, and once two people know a secret, it isn’t really a secret any more.
One of the new features we’ve been hearing about is the extension of Facebook Connect and the Facebook API to allow publishers to add a “Like” button to any piece of content on their site.
Sound trivial? It isn’t. This …

Here’s how it works:

We’re asking our readers to submit their best pro-social digital ideas to us by Sunday, March 7, at 11:59 p.m. ET. For an idea of what we mean by “pro-social,” check out some of the submissions already on the Refresh Project site.
We’ll select our favorite, and work with the winning team to formalize an application to Pepsi. Because this is Mashable, our criteria will focus both on the idea and its proposed social media strategy.
We’ll be competing against other “digital influencers” to win the $50,000 in …

With over 9 million posts and comments in two days, Google Buzz (Google Buzz) has stormed the web like a swarm of locusts. An array of strong features, integration with Gmail (Gmail), and lots of press have turned Buzz into an overnight phenomenon.
If you’re like a lot of us, you’ve suddenly found yourself using your Gmail even more than you already were. Spending so much time in Gmail and Buzz though inevitably takes away from your Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter), and who wants to sacrifice their tweeting and …

An overnight success ten years in the making, social media is as transformative as it is evolutionary. At last, 2010 is expected to be the year that social media goes mainstream for business. In speaking with many executives and entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that the path towards new media enlightenment often hinges on corporate culture and specific marketplace conditions. Full social media integration often happens in stages — it’s an evolutionary process for companies and consumers alike.
Here are the ten most common stages that businesses experience as they travel the …

Simply having a presence on various online networking platforms won’t work in the social media sphere. The key is spending time to build relationships to not only engage with site users, but to get them to interact with each other. While a lot has been said about how to do it, there are also ways to kill off an online community effort.
Here are some pitfalls that online organizations should avoid when trying to foster engagement.
Read more at: Mashable
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{Photography by Grant Laird Jr}

Vitrue’s Social Media Index (SMI) assigns brands and products a score based on overall buzz from status updates, videos, photos and blog posts. The company has tallied its results for 2009 and released its top 100 social brands based on index scoring, with last year’s winner — the iPhone — reigning supreme once again.

Although the index focuses on consumer mentions and reactions — as opposed to indexing brand engagement via social media — the list is still a veritable powerhouse of information in terms of consumer buzz and word-of-mouth …

Over the past few months, we’ve talked about whether you should have a social media policy and what should be included in that policy. It only seems logical to discuss the next step in the process, which is what to consider when implementing a social media strategy in your workplace.
Just having a policy isn’t good enough — you need a plan to put it in place. Here are five areas to discuss when implementing a social media strategy.
Read more at: Mashable
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{Photography by geoftheref}

I’d be wishing everyone a happier New Year if it were easier to mail out greeting cards to friends on Facebook and colleagues on LinkedIn. I’d like to use knx.to, our free, real-time social address book, but their ‘privacy’ policies prevent us from downloading contact information, even for my own friends.
At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?
Wrong. …

GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration has steadily gained an impressive amount of users and added compelling features to its application. The social network platform has just hit 2 million users, adding another million members in just 6 months.
And GROU.PS has amped up its offering for publishers by launching Elastic Modules, which gives publishers the ability to change the way the data is displayed to their visitors. To date, the highest reach of look and feel customization was at the template level; the
publisher could only …

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced on the company blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. In a nutshell, GeoAPI provides developers with the ability to query the world through services which include a reverse geocoder; deep data about 16 million businesses and tens of thousands of points of interest; a writable layer for developers to annotate the world and do complex geo-queries; and location-enabled media layers (e.g., Twitter and Flickr). Just recently, they added an iPhone SDK to speed up mobile development as well.
GeoAPI will …

We know that some of you have been eyeing the special Meebo features we launched earlier this year on Mashable with envy. Who doesn’t want to add Meebo Chat, drag and drop content sharing, and extra analytics to their site?
Today, Meebo is handing out an early Christmas present — Meebo Bar — and gifting all those extra special features to anyone that wants them on their own sites.
Read more at: Mashable
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http://Discuss2010.com

. . . . This would be a far cry from e-mails from folks in some faraway country telling me a long lost relative with the same last name has died and the money could be mine soon. All I have to do is send them some money. Clearly they don’t understand social networking, venture capital and the new marketing order at all. It’s not about the money, it’s about the network!
A few days later, I was forced to face reality. My friends and followers just weren’t doing the …

Getting people to interact with others and upload content to a community-driven site enough may sound easy, but engagement doesn’t happen automatically. It takes time and work, and much of the right formula is deduced through trial and error.
Here are 10 tips for increasing user engagement that work for news community web sites, but can apply to all types of online user-engagement communities.
Read more at: Mashable
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{Photography by lulugaia}

Social Media and Identity
We are witnessing a profound change in the media and advertising industries due to the emergence of social media. Companies that did not exist ten years ago, like Facebook and Twitter, have captured significant share of the attention economy from traditional publishers. Underscoring this trend is the fact that at the same time that Businessweek was selling for less than $5 million  (plus assumption of debts) to Bloomberg, Foursquare’s pretty cousin Gowalla drove up Sand Hill road and collected $8.4 million for a minority stake.
Amidst this disruption, …

The Interwebs are buzzing, and by now you’ve probably heard about a social network called Foursquare that’s apparently a big deal. So you cracked open your smartphone (or at least, gingerly removed it from its dock) and downloaded the Foursquare app. After signing up, you scrolled through the tabs and figured out how to “check in” at whatever restaurant, bar, store, or train station you happened to be at. And then you said, “Now what?”
Just like Twitter, at first glance Foursquare may seem a bit inert. To really understand …