The Social Path

Twitter's privacy lost, teens' purity found (in the iPhone app store).

As I finish a few weeks of nonstop travel, Luckie intern Whitney Sides Mitchell keeps the blog stocked with her weekly roundup of social media news, The Social Pathology Report:

This week has been a rough one.

It was jamp-acked with top secret business plans falling from the cloud, entire new OSes in the works and yet another reason to show off your iPhone.

• People from all over gather behind a worthy cause: the complete obliteration of IE6. [Mashable]
• App-stinence: Someone just getting a little too close at the weekend BBQ? Give 'em a little peek at your newest download: a Purity Ring app. [Switched]
• UNBELIEVABLE: Twitter's entire internal strategy was stored using Google Docs. As our IT guy clenches in horror, I'm sure you can imagine what happens (or gets emailed to all 300-400 contacts) next. [TechCrunch]
• Despite the aforementioned security fiasco, I return to Google for a fix of their newest innovations: an entire Google operating system and Google Reader's addition of social tech! [Google OS blog]

  This week's photo credit: Holster®/Flickr

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Company, founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

Robots and Supermen among us...

...and other wacky tech news this week of June 22nd - 26th.

• News of the popstar's sudden death spread the world over like lightning -- and almost took the earth's axis with it. [Canada.com]
• The dreamiest incarnation of Superman made a return this week, when we started seeing ads for Microsoft's Internet Explorer featuring none of than Dean Cain? [Switched]
• Social site Mashable launches the Twitter Guide Book, which gives you every possible bit of information you'd need for starting, understanding or hanging tough on Twitter. [Mashable]
• Talk about being ahead of the curve... one blog has compiled a wishlist of apps that have yet to be invented. The suggestions start at searching people and faces in your immediate vicinity to letting your smartphone FIND your keys or car for you. Wow. [ReadWriteWeb]
• AdFreak reports on robot spottings worldwide lending promotional support to the new Transformers movie. Yes, I'm serious. Robots. Hopping on motorcycles and stuff. [AdFreak]

This week's photo credit: tipoyock/Flickr

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Company, founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

Twitter fights, subpoenas and Twilight

I was inspired this week to share links that were in some cases dramatic and in others just plain unbelievable.

• A city in Montana has been asking recent job applicants to turn over information about their social networking activity online. And by information, I mean, they are requiring passwords to Facebook, Myspace and even forums! [Switched]
• Guess what doesn't stay in Vegas? Internet anonymity! In other surprisingly similar news, a Las Vegas newspaper has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury to release information on the identities of their commenters. [ReadWriteWeb]
• Guy tweets "so my apartment just collapsed". Luckily he was way across the country at the time, but woooow. [Mashable]
• This year's graduates are being documented by MTV News as to their hopes and fears, milestones and defining moments. Of these defining attributes, one is America's election of its first biracial president, while another is a popstar wearing a suit made out of sequin bubbles who sings about disco sticks. Priorities, folks. [MTV News]
• DRAMA INDEED: Infamous gossip blogger Perez Hilton was in Toronto covering the MuchMusic awards when he claimed on Twitter that he was physically attacked by Black Eyed Peas' frontman Will.i.am. It gets stranger: instead of immediately calling the police about the incident, he begged his thousands of followers to summon the police to his hotel. As of Monday morning, Will.i.am had already taken to videoblogging his side of the story on his very own account. [Daily Contributor]

This week's photo credit: dpdixon/Flickr

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Company, founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

The looming Twitpocalypse (and other overhyped news).

Whitney Mitchell again brings us her weekly wrapup of social media news, The Social Pathology Report:

The end of the world is nigh, at least on Twitter, and at least as of Friday afternoon, according to Twitpocalypse.com.

Apparently, a bug similar to Y2K (geez, really?) is going to wipe out the social drug known as Twitter, and people will no longer be able to share with the world their shouts of expertise or the fact that they just found a parking space.

I'm sure Griner will be back to comment on Monday on this weekend's events, but I'll be on a beach somewhere delighting in the suspense!

NOW, onto the week that was.

• Almost every graphic designer here was glued to the computer this week to see the newest of the Mac new, the soon-to-be-released iPhone 3G S. Here's a guided tour, courtesy of GearLive.com.  [Video]
• The internet also brought us the news that Japan's Kaguya lunar probe went out in a blaze of glory, by crashing into the moon's surface at 4,000 mph! [Scientific American]
• Switched raises a pretty haunting question for gamers everywhere: Will Digital Downloads kill video game stores? [Switched]
• Following in this post's tradition of laughing at Twitter hysteria, check out Conan O'Brien's newest endeavor, the Tweet Tracker. [Business Insider]
• Nowadays with Bing, WolframAlpha and LetSimonDecide, it seems decisions are being outsourced as much as some jobs. [ReadWriteWeb]
• Speaking of brainy li'' search engine WolframAlpha, it's now available in app form. Great, now arguments will be settled even more by my husband stopping the conversation while typing away on his iPhone. Thanks guys. [Mashable]

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Company, founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

Questionable bus routes, gardenias and bad news bears...

So, after a month of Mondays (or more like half a Friday) off, here I am with my little links and useful urls. As you can probably tell from the alliteration, I'm glad to be back. I'm in a fantastic mood, mostly because one of my coworkers left a fresh gardenia on my desk this morning. Viva la Friday!

• Smart phone users have been all over the search engine made especially for mobile devices, Taptu. ReadWriteWeb breaks it down and lets us know if it's any good. [RWW]
• BAD NEWS BEARS: All you pirates (of the musical persuasion), the MPAA has now trained dogs to sniff out "fresh from falling off of the truck" CDs by identifying chemicals "integral to the bootlegging process." [Switched]
• Headline of the week: "Back Up The Porn Bus." Got your attention? The newest wunderkid of the Google-killer kind, Microsoft's search engine Bing has been in some pretty hot water over one little fluke: its easy access to porn. [DownloadSquad]
• In the past few months at Luckie, some of my favorite moments have been spent with our digital communications planner, Keith Browder. I'm surprisingly interested in metrics, purchasing and parking domain names. Here's a primer for everyone who is wondering about the Do's and Don'ts of company URLs. [ReadWriteWeb]
• The professional golfers of the LPGA have refused to tweet while competing, citing the opinion that it shouldn't happen in ANY sport. What do YOU think? [Mashable]

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Company, founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

This week's photo credit: futurowoman/Flickr

Social media remembrances for Memorial Day.

At the end of each week, Luckie's Whitney Mitchell brings us The Social Pathology Report, a recap of noteworthy occurrences in the world of social media.

I know everyone's jetting out to their respective lakehouses, vacations or graduation ceremony after-parties. But alas, I am here to bring you some interesting linkage that just might be the best thing you read... on Tuesday morning.

• A company named Biz360 claimed it could use social analytics to predict Danny Gokey as the winner of this season's American Idol. How'd that work out for 'em? [Sys-Con]
• A smart phone app called "Copious Inc" allows you to locally pinpoint mobile coupons for stores/restaurants. Too bad it's only available in Lafayette, Indiana. Weird. [Mashable]
• UH OH: Switched helps you find out if your common online habits may be illegal. Behaviors include: "dissing people", insider tweets and surfing for drugs. In no particular order... [Switched]
• His Holiness The Pope gets in on the iPhone & Facebook action. Now we can all boringly superpoke him. [ReadWriteWeb]
• Want to sound like you're hard at work on some super-important project, but really just play some keyboard quiz full of Office Space quotes? You're welcome. [Lemondrop]
• Ever wanted to put Youtube sensational and British songbird Susan Boyle into a room with no doors and watch the magic happen? Me either. But those waiting in anticipation of Sims 3 will get a teaser of that in the franchise's newest promo. [Kotaku]

As always, if you have any tips or links worth mentioning, send me some social aggregation fodder via the e-mail or on the Twitters.
 

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Co., founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

This week's photo credit: rmaxwell/Flickr

Weekly social media wrapup: Mob Mentality edition.

Another week over, another installment of The Social Pathology Report from Luckie's intrepid Whitney Mitchell:

While trying to stay on top of news this week, I kept getting distracted by all the people being "up in arms" about certain topics. Some were lobbying for change, while some were just "mad as hell" and "not gonna take it anymore". Either way, I hope those guys found a nice place under a shade tree and a cold, refreshing glass of Riesling because it was drama week with a capital D in Internet land.

• "THE REPLIES KERFUFFLE": Twitter sparked a random riot by eliminating a little-used feature that let you see all your friends' posts that were in reply to people you don't know. (I know, it's hard to even explain, but some people thought it helped them find new friends.) This vocal minority flooded the Web with demands that Twitter bring back the old system, but to no avail. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone put it thusly: "For the 3% who wanted to see replies to people they don't follow, we cannot turn this setting back on in its original form for technical reasons and we won't rebuild it exactly the same for product design reasons." OH SNAP! [blog.twitter.com]
• Google FAIL!: 14% of Google users worldwide couldn't access parts of Google-affiliated sites this past Thursday morning. Based on the noise in my personal Twitter feed, however, the outage actually affected 117% of the Web-browsing community. Here's what ABC News dug up about the problem, and as usual, Asia was to blame. [ABC NEWS]
• SORE SUBJECT CITY: Facebook WILL allow thousand of users who were members of disbanded Holocaust-denial groups to remain on the popular social network. Thousands? Wow... painful to believe. [SFGate.com]
• TWIBES: As if my aunt bogarting the computer to update her "Tweetster" weren't enough, you can now join a "Twibe" (Yes, they're serious) for other folks on Twitter with common interests. [Twibes.com}
• PO-HATE-TOES: Green bloggers came after Lay's with torches and pitchforks for its new "local potatoes" marketing initiative. [GreenBiz]
  
• FREE THE HOPS: Alabama-based grassroots movement Free The Hops lobbied on behalf of craft brewers (and beer lovers alike) to pass a bill that would allow for the purchase of beer with a higher than 6% alcohol ratio. SUCCESS! Now Free the Hops is using Twitter and its blog to drive e-mails to Alabama Governer Bob Riley, who must decide whether to sign the bill into law. [Free The Hops]

As always, if you have any tips or links worth mentioning, send me some social aggregation fodder via the e-mail or on the Twitters.
 

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Co., founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

This week's photo credit: nothing/Flickr

Is your cute new Facebook friend actually a repo man?

Another week's end means another installment of The Social Pathology Report, Whitney Mitchell's weekly wrap-up of buzzworthy bits from the world of social media.

It's May 9th. I thought I'd just put that out there, since 2010 is a weird year for me to comprehend and we're nearly halfway there. This Alabama warm weather's getting to me.

Enough with my sudden-onset nostalgia and on to what caught my eye Web-wise this week:

• Hundreds of Facebook users got a little treat recently when they discovered a cute, Aussie blonde they'd "friended" was actually a collection agency out to retrieve information over past debts. That's got to burn. [Consumerist]
• It's not often that I get to post about my long lost friend, Last.fm. It's a streaming music service that collects data on what you listen to on and off of it's site via a service called scrobbling. This week, Mashable broke down the site's new feature, "visual radio". Anyone else reminded of old-school Windows Media Player? Just me, I guess. [Mashable]
• News that MySears.com and MyKmart.com will attempt to engage customers through their own social networks reminded MediaPost of the dire situation Wal-Mart got itself into back in 2006 with it's own attempt to micromanage social media, "The Hub". [MediaPost]
• FINALLY: An aggregated list of websites that will make my decisions for me. Now all I need is some text-to-speech and cheesepuff-to-mouth technology and I'd have this blog covered. [ReadWriteWeb]
• Because we all enjoy lists (as shown by Griner's awesome 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media posted/megatweeted earlier this week), here's a way to devote more time than you ever thought you would to emotions, all thanks to Neatorama and their  "10 Things You Didn't Know About Emoticons". [Neatorama]

As always, if you have any tips or links worth mentioning, send me some social aggregation fodder via the e-mail or on the Twitters.
 

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Co., founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

Special thanks to Admirable Ackbar and lamont_cranston/Flickr for this week's photo.

Getting internationally social with Whitney: Palestine, Twitterland and the Isle of Man

After a great weekend of food, people and some pretty wild weather, the best thing to do is settle in to the work week with some palette refreshers. Kind of like ginger, but for your brain.

Wow, I've got you thinking outside that Monday box already.

Here's what "went down" -- if you will -- over the past few days.

• FOLLOW vs. FOLLOW THROUGH: 60% of Twitter users don't return the month after their first foray. [Nielsen]
• Apparently hate found a place (but not for very long) in the digital age as Facebook recently had to shut down a Isle of Man KKK group from organizing on its site. [Mashable]
• A friend introduced me to a site out of Palestine where people from all over the word can input a message for volunteers to spray paint along the separation fence (wall) that Israel has built in the West Bank. [http://sendamessage.nl]
• If you were anywhere north of a secret bunker this week, you were hand sanitizing like crazy to ward off the Swine Flu. Well, Mashable shares the tools to keep you up-to-date your fears in check -- all from the comfort of your desktop. [Mashable]
• Members of the infamous 4chan internet forum skewed the results of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential poll by voting the site's founder "moot" into the top spot, surpassing Oprah and megachurch pastor Rick Warren. (Word of advice, don't follow any links you might find by Googling 4chan during business hours. It's VERY VERY NSFW)  [PCMag] 

  This week's photo credit: upyernoz/Flickr

  
  And as always, if you have any tips or links worth mentioning, send me some social aggregation fodder via the e-mail or on the Twitterz.
  

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Co., founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

Weekly social media recap: Recap edition.

This week's installment of The Social Pathology Report seemed a good a time as any to catch you up on stories that first broke a while back. All the links have to do with ongoing issues and how they developed this week.

• Aussie actor and celebrity Twitterer Hugh Jackman picked two charities deserving of $50K a piece after soliciting charity pitches in less than 140 characters. [Mashable]
• Amid a hemorrhaging user base that seemed to herald a network mass exodus, MySpace's CEO has been ousted in favor of former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta. [WSJ's All Things Digital]
• Much to the chagrin of companies the world over, the technological gulf seems to be widening between Gen Y and the Boomers. All this despite the fact that my mom, aunt and mother-in-law all reached out to me "on the e-mail" today. [ReadWriteWeb]
• Back in mid-March, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was the largest newspaper ever to halt its presses and go strictly digital. So why has its site traffic DECREASED by 23%? [Switched]

and finally... a Friday laugh to hopefully lift my pollen-ated spirits:

• Grammy winning DJ and label head Paul Van Dyk has released an iPhone app (a la Tony Hawk's video game series) that allows you to make some "dope" and "funky" beats on your "telephone". Like my grandmother says: If you don't believe him, just ask him. He's pitching it himself and yes, you guys are all very welcome for me bringing his awesome accent into your life. [Gizmodo]

This week's photo credit: SkagitIMS/Flickr

If you have any tips or links worth mentioning, send me some social aggregation fodder via the e-mail or on the Twitter.

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Co., founder of the local-music blog Bham.Fm and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.