The U.S. military in Afghanistan is launching a Facebook page, a YouTube site and feeds on Twitter as part of a new communications effort to reach readers who get their information on the Internet rather than in newspapers.

Officials described this a way to counter Taliban propaganda, represents a sea change in how the military can communicate its message. The army posts the news on Twitter hours before announcing it in a more formal press statement.

Facebook page of U.S. forces:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kabul-Afghanistan/US-Forces-Afghanistan/69621718453

Twitter page:

http://twitter.com/usfora

YouTube page:

http://www.youtube.com/usfora

“In the year 3000, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will merge into one super time wasting Web site called YouTweetFace.” -Conan O’Brien, The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien

This prediction came this week on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. While “YouTweetFace” is a quite humorous interpretation of the multitude of social media platforms available, this was not the part of O’Brien’s statement that most caught my attention.  

“Time wasting” seemed to be the underlying message. The degree of ridiculousness put behind all of these new media tools would certainly come to mind for outsiders not familiar with the impact of digital media. According to comScore, Twitter grew 3,000 percent over the past year. Businesses are rapidly tapping into this market to promote their messages and to find new customers.

While it may be a waste of time for some, those interested in profiting from the social media wave are finding the time invested in it to be worthwhile. At many organizations today, there are full time social media experts on staff. Marketing and PR companies have entire departments dedicated to using such online tools. The proof is in the pudding – or the YouTweetFace platforms. Bottom line: companies are willing to pay for these experts. This shows that businesses perceive a value in the digital media Web sites that O’Brien lightheartedly jokes about. 

For anyone looking to join the social media space, YouTweetFace.com is no longer an available domain name. However, there are many other options: YouTweetFaceNow.com, YouTweetFaceStore.com and YouTweetFaceToday.com. Endless possibilities to waste time.

When people share more and more content on social media platforms, the search engines of different social media platforms go diversely as well. These search engines give the audiences diverse perspectives to discover, watch, and enjoy the content on social media. Different search engine also performs as differ service for the users.  For example, Compfight provides the creative comment filter for the users to find the photos which they can put on their blogs.

The common way to find a photo is to search the keywords just like what people do on Google Search. Several Flickr search engines follow this way. The users can search for the tag and the text related to the photos. Read more…

I received an invite to join “mylife” from a friend, never heard of it before. At first glance it looked interesting, advertised as a “people search” place, also aggregator of other social media sites. Alarming flags went up as I noticed the “service” they offer and cost associated. It turns out, they are in the business of collecting personal information and selling those same personal information for anybody who is willing to pay.

The same company owns wink.com, which sells people search reports plus property information, death records, marriage records, divorce records and reverse phone lookup; and a $39.95 background report with all other information plus, aliases & maiden names, birth date, address history, property ownership information, relatives & neighbors and ‘much more”. Read more…

Just started five years ago, Taiwan based Uschool (www.uschool.com.tw) has already found their recipe for success.  Uschool essentially is Facebook for elementary school and junior high school students.  Their secret to success lies within their strict target user base of 5-12 year olds.  As to date about 80% of all elementary schools and junior high schools in Taiwan use Uschool as their official social-networking platform.  The general idea is to create a safe online social-networking platform in which the teachers can use to bond with their students even when they are not at school.  Uschool provides their services freely to schools where teachers can create an online class board and students can have their own little blog spaces.  Parents can also register and essentially be involved in the happenings of their child’s education.  Students are encouraged to utilize this online space for school and for social purposes. Read more…

This month, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones announced they plan to establish a joint
venture to launch a WSJ Japanese edition in Japan. The site’s main offerings
are expected to include WSJ articles and columns translated into Japanese,
as well as a complete lineup of the paper’s multimedia content. It will also
set up a mobile service to deliver news through cell phones. WSJ has already
launched Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese editions. Known as the most profitable
newspaper in the United States, The Wall Street Journal seems to be trying to survive the journalism
cataclysm by expanding to become multilingual. This is a smart move, but is this a way all newspapers and media can find a means of survival? Maybe not. I think this
is a strategy only WSJ can adopt. WSJ is selling a commodity that shares a common
global concern, the “economy”. Other newspapers are “local” in a sense, in terms that all the newspapers are mainly focused on domestic issues.

Ace Team, a video game company in Chile in the effort to fight piracy is using the P2P model: “All the games are there to be pirated.  We were not going to be the exception.  Once we saw the game being distributed by BitTorrent, we started to post comments in these pages appealing to those who downloaded the games” Stated a member of Ace Team.  The statement they post on this pages says that they cannot do anything to stop piracy, but if who ever is downloading the game likes to test the game and likes it, they encourage them to buy the game.

This may sound crazy, but it is actually working according to Ace Team. P2P members are posting messages stating that they have bought the game, and that they do it because of Ace Team attitude!

Would this be a new marketing model in the internet for video games, e-books, movies and music?

In response to low prime time ratings, multimedia giant MTV is now creating a live talk show that uses various social media platforms during the program.  Advertisers were convinced that this would be MTVs biggest daytime talk show since TRL ended in November 2008.

As traditional media outlets battle to engage their audiences and produce relevant content, cable network MTV answered the call with the Alexa Chung Show. Read more…