Lots of Women on Facebook, Few Kids on Twitter, no Marines Anywhere
This Week in Facebook
Female/Male Ratio Hits New High
Nearly 10 million American women 26-34 are active on Facebook every month, compared to under 7.2 million men. Almost 8 million women 35-44 are active Facebook users, but just over 5.7 million men in that range. And amongst users 45-54, women outnumber men 5.3 million to 3.3 million.
Read the full report at Inside Facebook
Video Guide to the Facebook Help Center
Facebook just created this video to let wants you to know that its Help Center is the place to go for Facebook troubleshooting.
New Facebook Page Widgets
Facebook is now offering widgets to page owners. Distribution of these widgets throughout the Internet will dramatically increase Facebook’s search engine rankings.
This Week in Twitter
Twitter Denial of Service Attack
In case you noticed a slowdown on Thursday, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, and a number of sites were gummed up fighting denial of service attacks. All appears to be back to normal now.
Supposedly, the attack was launched by a group of Russian hackers attempting to silence a Georgian blogger.
Nielsen: Tweens Don’t Tweet
Twitter’s lack of adoption by people under 24 isn’t exactly news, but it’s nice to have some fresh Nielsen numbers to lean on as we plan content for our audience.
ESPN’s Draconian Twitter policy
The hammer just came down, tweeps: ESPN memo prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN. Kinda figured this was coming. Not sure what this means but…
from ESPN’s @ricbucher
Essentially, ESPN employees are only allowed to tweet about ESPN now. I’m confident this untenable policy will be tempered before long. Full story at Mashable.
Twitter Transforms Language
The NY Times highlights how language has been influenced by posting a sample of “The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code,” a strange shorthand created in response to restrictions imposed by telegraphs. The obvious parallel being how Twitter is introducing terms like “RT” and strange things like hashtags into interpersonal communication.
On that note, enjoy this cartoon:
This Week Elsewhere
DoD weighing social networking pros and cons
Price Floyd, the military’s new social-networking czar, weighs in on the chatter about DoD’s plans to block access to social networking sites from military computers, particularly from computers used by Marines:
“[Internet] security is important,” Floyd said. “Opsec [operational security] is paramount. We will have procedures in place to deal with that. The DoD is, in that sense, no different than any big company in America. What we can’t do is let security concerns trump doing business. We have to do business… We need to be everywhere men and women in uniform are and the public is. If that’s MySpace and YouTube, that’s where we need to be, too.”
He added, “I don’t want to minimize security [concerns]. But this is not a DoD-only issue. It’s not a question of total security or total access to everything. There is a place we need to find [in the middle] where we’re able to go where we need to go and people can come in and see us, and yet we’re also protecting the network.”
Smithsonian Publishes their Web and New Media Strategy on Wikispaces
Read the Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy here. Thanks to Michelle Chronister for this one.
Advanced Google Search Options
I’m not sure how new this is, but it’s news to me. Google search results now include an expandable options column that allows users to easily refine their searches by content type and time.
