A few months ago, I stumbled upon Pinterest, an image-sharing, link-loving social network.  I loved the site’s simplicity and visual beauty.   The beautiful imagery that pinners post hooked me immediately.
It turns out, I was not alone in discovering the site.  While Pinterest has been around for two years, it wasn’t until the end of 2011 that the site started to catch on — and in 2012, it started to grow exponentially seeing over 11 million unique visitors in January 2012 alone according to … Read more

A week after launching Buzz, Google’s new social network product, the company faced an avalanche of criticism for its privacy violations and forced them to make changes on the fly, set up a war room to monitor the negative feedback and issue this public apology on the Gmail blog this weekend:
“We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear, and since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we’ve been working around the clock to address the concerns you’ve raised. Today, we wanted to let you know … Read more

Last week, Nicholas Patten turned me on to Personas, a component of MIT’s Social Media Group’s Metropath(ologies) exhibit which enables users to visual their online identities.   According to the site, Personas “uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data picture of one’s aggregated online identity.”

It’s a brilliant way to look at how the internet — or anyone who is going to google you — sees you.  The site is simple — you enter in your name and Personas scours the web for every instance of your … Read more