@NowSourcing.Com

(image credit: xyzzy)

What a year it has been for StumbleUpon.

First, having it break away from eBay (who’s been on a divestiture streak as it is, also recently spinning off Skype) and be repurchased by the original founders seems to be paying off.  Since then, we’ve seen:

• A new UI (in beta for a while and rolled out fully as of yesterday)
• Su.pr,  a url shortner that also allows you to schedule posts as well as excellent analytics

The latest SU innovation is the addition of new topics.  While this may not sound like much, it actually makes all the difference.  Let me explain.

Let’s say you were at your local library and you wanted to find books about cooking.  But wait … there is no cooking section! So, you have to go to a more generalized/unrelated section of the library (dining out? hobbies? food?) to find what you’re looking for.

And that’s exactly what has plagued Stumbleupon for so long.

Granted, part of the issue is that users aren’t typically librarians and really don’t know how to categorize things for the betterment of others.  Now, we as SU users have more options:

• Arts/History: Design, Photoshop, Quotes, Woodworking
• Commerce: Home Business, Luxury
• Computers: Facebook
• Hobbies: Crochet, Quilting, Scrapbooking
• Sci/Tech: Gadgets, Technology
• Society: Christmas

As far as social media goes, the noteworthy update in there is that you now can have an interest called Facebook.

Keep up the good work, StumbleUpon!  We appreciate it.

Facebook just started adding an option for your brand pages to choose your audience visibility on  wall postings:

Fan page country and language choice

While this may seem like not that big a deal, think of the possibilities.  Users targeting multiple countries and languages can now have multi-purpose brand pages that can reach all, rather than making smaller, localized one-off versions of the brand page.

It will be interesting to see what direction Facebook goes with this functionality – imagine what you could do if it was brought to a city/state/region/mile radius level.  Would this challenge the Facebook Ad network too much? We shall see.

Anyone that sees me on Facebook probably thinks I’m a Mafia Wars addict.  If I were to tell you I was doing research, you’d probably laugh – but I am.

I’ve been closely watching the frequency of social interactions that Zynga, the makers of Mafia Wars and several other popular titles put into the game.

It’s really incredible when you see all of the different ways that they have users interact.  Consider this:

In a world where social media gets chastised all the time about the same things the early web did (Will it make money?) – it’s incredible that we don’t read more about Zynga.

In FaceReviews’ interview with Mark Pincus, Mark makes a great point in utilization of Facebook as a platform for social gaming.  You may wish to reconnect with old friends or acquaintances, but where do you take it from there? Once you’ve caught up on each other’s lives, will you just go your separate ways? Perhaps, but that’s part of where social gaming fits in.  You can communicate with them by playing games together.

Businessweek reports Zynga brings in close to $100 million in annual revenue.

David Berkowitz, friend and fellow Mafia Wars addict (I hear he is also Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy for 360i when he’s not playing) can attest to Zynga’s success with Mafia Wars:

“I think what’s great with Zynga here is that you either buy your way to the top – like getting godfather points to have a huge mafia and buy lots of weapons – or you have to play your butt off and thus rack up ad impressions.  Either way Zynga wins bigtime.”

Related posts:

• Zynga leaves Yahoo Games in the dust, becomes No. 1 in online games (games.venturebeat.com)
• Zynga is the #1 App Developer on Facebook (sociableblog.com)
• Social Game Developers Spending Millions on Facebook Advertising (insidefacebook.com)
• Inside Zynga (feld.com)
• How the Mafia conquered social networks (news.cnet.com)
• Mafia Wars Marriage Proposal (thegongshow.tumblr.com)

Following many controversial updates and revamps of Facebook’s user interface design, their team finally seems to get something right. Announcing Facebook Usernames, which basically will act as part of your profile’s slug/url.

Ideally, your username will make it easier for friends and family to distinguish you from a crowd of other “John Smiths.” It will also likely affect the ranking of your Facebook profile in a search, which is especially important for companies that utilize Facebook Pages. The positive is you will now have yet another method to shape your online identity. Negatives include possible exposure of private information if you’re not careful with how you do so. There are services on the web that provide overall online reputation management, and if this is a concern of yours (as it well should be), do check it out.

Facebook is, however, taking measures to prevent online squatting and a sort of online identity theft. The measures include being able to choose only one username per account and page, plus a mandatory wait period for member profiles and pages that have been created after a certain date (May 31st for Facebook Pages and June 9th for Facebook profiles). Will this stop imposters and squatters from doing their misdeeds? Likely not, but at least it seems that Facebook is starting to care about their users’ needs, for now.

Already Facebook is starting to receive lots of inquiries into issues relating to the upcoming added feature. Apparently for every step forward in user interface development, they’re taking about ten steps backwards, mostly in dealing with all of the issues they either didn’t think about beforehand, or just don’t care enough to handle. For example:

The time when usernames will become available is likely one of the most ridiculous times they could have chosen. Forget that it goes against founder Mark Zuckerberg’s religious laws, but it is also extremely inconvenient for real companies and their representitives to secure their name. The other two questions really show a great amount of inconsideration from Facebook towards their users. They’re not allowing for human error, on a user’s part or their’s.

Despite all of this, are you excited for this long-awaited feature? Check out Facebook’s username countdown page (try it in Pirate English for some fun).

P.S. Doesn’t this remind you of an older social network we all used to use during high school? …

At one point or another you’ve probably come across motivational posters.  Whether in a corporate boardroom or an email chain forward, some are meant to be meaningful and heartfelt, while others are downright funny.  Here’s our collection of the 7 best social media motivator posters:

Be sure to make a motivational poster of your own with the parody motivator generator.

LinkedIn

[source]

StumbleUpon

[source]

Twitter

[source]

Digg

[source]

Facebook

[source]

Delicious

[source]

The Internet (says it all)

[source]

Related posts

• 10 Rules of Social Media (nowsourcing.com)
• Quasi-motivational posters (dougbelshaw.com)
• SEO Motivators (wiep.net)