When is the last time anyone got a real letter in the mail?
It’s possible that some of us just received our annual Christmas cards with wishes of merriment and a newsletter with pictures of kids and tales of the past year. For the most part, the days of letters is gone.
Social Networking on the internet has changed the way we stay in touch. If you belong to Facebook, you essentially know what’s going on in the lives of your friends and family across the globe. Even the smallest of posts gives you some idea of what’s going on in other people’s lives.
Had a great day skiing today
Watched the Raiders game this afternoon
Cooked a family dinner today, the kids were crazy and grannie complained about the pie
All of these phrases are examples of posts that can be on Facebook. Within just a few moments, you know a few things about what’s going on with friends.
Skype is another social medium that people are using to stay connected. Not all families live in the same city, state or even country. For those that have struggles for years to stay connected through phone calls, skype allows people to verbally communicate while they see each other on the computer screen. This internet mechanism is especially effective for extended families who live in different countries and don’t get to see each other very often.
The internet allows us to use file sharing programs like Ares to share and send photos, sound recordings of babies first word or steps and even send emails without ever stepping foot into a post office.
Of course nothing beats the real thing when it comes to seeing friends and family. A Social medium like Facebook gives you glimpses of what’s going on, but only with face-to face contact can you really know what’s going on. Perhaps that’s the next technological advance for the internet.
Keeping away from social network muggers
- Image via Wikipedia
Social networking is a new age phenomenon. It has opened the doors to people from different cultures, and backgrounds to network positively. In an open social networking space, it is imperative that restrictions are cut-down to add more value to the social networking technology experience. You have so many groups, common interest forums and what not in social networking sites. You can create your own common interest group as well. Thanks to the internet, all these things are possible.
Examples of social networks on the Internet are MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Facebook, Spoke, Ryze and so on. One may also use social networking technology to share multimedia content on YouTube, or add contents on Wikipedia pages, after a registration process.
When sites use self-publishing mechanisms, and also have a high-interactivity index courtesy the technology, it also opens up loopholes for hackers to get in. Given the enormous amount of content being circulated into personal mailboxes, it seems to be getting easier. RSS feeds, podcasts, are some of the ways that hackers can use to breach security.
When more online participation is invoked, more content needs to be circulated. Spyware is targeted to operate in these situations. There could be spyware that you could accidentally download from the Internet. Some spyware have technology to log your keystrokes; which means your passwords are out in the open.
There some good habits to follow when on social networks. Prevention is better than cure. Don’t just use discussion forums to type-in your personal information. Don’t give out banking info, passwords, and personal details and so on. Plenty of touts are present on the internet, flaying genuine addresses and a certain degree of credibility.
Spammers are now able to get through to inboxes. Spam filters are not able to control the spam mails, because it is recommended by your social networking site. Spam mails will have links that register your IP details, when you click on them. After accessing your IP location, all that the hackers need to do is some digging to get through to your bank accounts and other digital lockers.
Free Online Advertising
So let’s say you have a new business and it’s in the infancy stages. You want to see if succeed and you know that the best place to get your name and your company out to is on the net. It’s the only place to reach billions of people and you can do it right from your own home. You have everything you need. You have the great product. You have the top of the line website, and you have the workers to help you when your sales start exploding. There is just one thing you are missing. You don’t seem to have the money you need to put your business at the center of the online marketplace.
So how do you get your name out there if you lack the funds of your competitors? It won’t be as easy but there are ways to get your business up and running online. Starting by advertising on social media sites like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. These sites are great and reach millions of people. You can pay for advertising like “click to pay advertising” which means you only get charged if someone clicks on the ad and then you can set a limit. However you can forego that and just start a grass roots movement to get people to know your name. You can create business pages that can be sent to friends and family who can encourage their friends and family to add your page and this makes it a great way to get people buzzing about your business.
There are local and free marketplace sites like Craigslist that can be a smaller, but also effective, source of advertising. There you can place new ads first thing in the morning and attract those in a local area who may be in need of exactly what you have. You can even put the web address in the advertisement.
There are a millions ways to advertise online for cheap. These are just a few of them but they could help you see an sales increase in no time.
Share Widgets for Blogs and Websites
- Image via CrunchBase
Share Widgets are those little icons you see on sites where you can submit an article or website to certain other sites such as social networking pages and news sites. Many popular sites are a part of this type of article sharing. Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon and others all have icons that allow users to submit a story, photograph or idea they saw on another website. If you own and blog or website for your business or even a personal blog or website that you plan to monetize, these share buttons are a perfect tool to help you network what you have to offer.
How they are used is that if a site or blog has these buttons on their page then after a person sees something they like they simply click the button and share it with any of the popular sites mentioned. What this can mean to a website owner or blog writer is that their material is now seen by more people than just their usual readers or someone who came across their site by accident. This can mean more traffic for your site since people can view the content on the website it was shared on and go directly to where the material originated. This is how your blog or site can get new traffic.
Most of the sites that can be submitted to have analytics showing how many times the material was “liked” or viewed. Some of the share buttons even offer than on the widget by using the special HTML code. This is especially true for sites such as Facebook and Twitter. You can view how many times your article or material was retweeted or shared on Facebook. These are excellent tools for showing what your audience likes the best and what material is the most popular.
