social media

If you aren't already following WIRED or VICE, these two magazines are about as different as you can get. WIRED features polite commentary on technology culture and gadgetry, with a slight amount of snark. VICE's focus is unabashed and uncensored urban culture, and is (refreshingly) politically incorrect and honest.

There's a glut of online music streaming services battling for your social timeline. Spotify, Grooveshark, Last.fm and Rdio all exist to annoy your Facebook and Twitter friends with the latest tune you listened to and what you think everyone else needs to hear. It's like cranking tunes in your bedroom as a teenager, except the echo-chamber is the entire online world. What's better than indiscriminately forcing your musical taste on your drinking buddies, high school aged cousins and accountant uncle?

If you hate the new Facebook changes right now, you’re really going to hate what Mark Zuckerberg announced this morning at the annual f8 conference in San Francisco. The Facebook that you know and love will be gone, and those irritating minor changes will be here to stay—plus many, many before. Basically, Facebook is getting an overhaul that coincides with a shift from user growth to user engagement. The last five years have been focused on signing people up and getting connections in place, and now that Facebook has half a billion users, the only thing left to do is get those users to share more.

What would the Social Media landscape look like if legendary painter Bob Ross painted it? Bob Ross is mostly known for rocking a sweet afro and effortlessly painting masterpieces on his TV show while expecting the rest of the world to somehow be able to keep up. This infographic from the folks over at Flowtown, makers of some cool social media tools, explains how Bob Ross would paint the different social networking platforms.

Even though Egypt is in the midst of an Internet and SMS blackout, the rest of the world is glued to the web, watching. Protesters and journalists have found ways around these roadblocks and are using social media to inform and organize.

Following #jan25 or #egypt on Twitter produces an amazing amount of results. By the time you read the first few, you’re already five hundred tweets behind. Many protesters are posting via proxy server, and some journalists are even using landlines to phone tweets back to their headquarters.