Before today, UpMo primarily focused on providing its members with a guided road map for success in their professional endeavors. They asked you questions about your networking style, combined that info with your professional role model, and presented you with an action plan designed to get you from novice to notable mover and shaker status.
Now they’re expanding their personalized career service to not only push you down the right path, but actually land you a better job. The company has just launched Intelligent Job Hunt, and the new product aims to do one very useful thing — find you a dream job within reach.
Intelligent Job Hunt is akin your own professional agent, but their job search engine claims to combine sophisticated algorithms with scientific analysis. They then combine that with the information you’ve provided to present you with the targeted opportunities that are right for your desired career path. It’s an intelligent job search that doesn’t totally suck the life out of you and your professional quest.
The subscription-based service pieces together your professional interests and aspirations to deliver job matches in six self-explanatory categories: In My Range, On My Roadmap, Boost My Ego, Expand My Horizons, Connected to My Network, and Near My Home. The results are like sophisticated filters that intelligently sort job search results in ways that you can actually process. The Connected to My Network results are especially interesting, as job matches are based on companies only associated with your contacts.
Of course, UpMo would also like you to land that job and move up your career ladder, so they’ll also equip you with next-step guidance, tailored to you and the position you want. Their goal is to help you ace the interview process and put you on a path to success in 100 days.
Like the rest of you, we’ve wanted a better job search for years, so we’re anxious to see if UpMo’s Intelligent Job Hunt can deliver what it promises.
Last monday, we announced Global Geek Week, an initiative by the Society for Geek Advancement and the Summer of Social Good to show the world how geeks can change the world for the better. Core to the Global Geek Week initiative was a YouTube competition that asked you to show off not only how geeky you are, but how geeks can help the world. The result? A wave of amazing, hilarious, inspiring, and geeky YouTube videos.
While the winner of the contest (and those Virgin America tickets) is not yet announced (and I’m not a judge, so I have no idea about the winner), there were too many classic moments in these videos not to feature a few. So I have picked out ten that tickled my fancy – and that show what it really means to be a geek. These videos will make you laugh, cry, and pull out your old Star Trek DVDs.
So without further ado, here are 10 incredibly geeky YouTube videos, courtesy of #GeeksforGood. Once you’re done with these 10 videos, be sure to watch the rest on the Global Geek Week YouTube Group.
1. WhatTravisSays
Geeks to the rescue! The name tag gets you bonus points. Too bad I’m not judging this competition, Travis.
2. Safferoonicle
I’m partial to the video because of her glasses. Aren’t geek glasses reason enough?
3. Conservco
Egad…this man hits on every stereotype that encompasses a geek. I don’t know if he’s good or bad for the geek movement.
4. BillTvMacon
There is never a dull moment in a BillTvMacon video. He also makes a convincing case for geekdom.
5. TheUmbrellaBoy
He talks to a duck in the middle of this video. And a stuffed bear. ‘Nuff said.
6. KTentacles
Lists make things easy to digest. Oh, and somehow she managed to get in references to Kim Kardashian’s ass. Nice.
7. sheppardde
Good message. Scary hats. Really scary rap.
8. giantlawnmower
So many nerd toys…
9. Rareconservation
Unlike the other videos, this one features an entire company – RARE Conservation – complete with the Sybill Trelawney glasses. Working together is so geeky. Go Earth!
10. IconifiedEpic
She knows her geek stats.
BONUS: Tay Zonday’s Geek Palace
Shira Lazar has a chat with Tay Zonday (aka Lord of Chocolate Rain) in his “Geek Palace.” I want a Geek Palace. I just have a Geek Office. And a Wii. And a 360. And a USB lava lamp. And my famous Luminglass. I’m going to stop there, because the full list would need another page.
As Twitter and its 140 character limit has skyrocketed to popularity, another type of service rode grew exponentially as well: URL shorteners. From Bit.ly to TinyURL, the quality and number of link shorteners has ballooned.
The debate’s about to heat up again though, as Tr.im, a URL shortener with nearly a million unique visitors per month, is shutting down. And by January 1st, 2010, all Tr.im links could be out of service. The URL shortener’s demise exposes a major flaw in all URL shorteners and reopens the debate over whether they are good or bad for the web.
Tr.im’s Somber Message
If you visit Tr.im’s homepage, you will see a short, four paragraph statement announcing Tr.im has been discontinued, effective immediately. Here’s the full text. I have bolded the most interesting parts:
Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.
We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.
There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further devleopment since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.
We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.
This is one of the most interesting shutdown announcements I’ve ever read. The key points are that links will work until the end of the year, that tr.im believes Bit.ly has won, and that they believe there is NO WAY to monetize URL shorteners.
It’s a very stark and powerful message. But is Tr.im correct?
What Does Tr.im’s Shutdown Mean for the Web?
While Tr.im didn’t have anywhere near the traffic that Bit.ly and TinyURL had, it still had a significant userbase, as you can find millions of Tr.im URLs spread across Twitter. If Tr.im shuts down its servers, millions of links will simply die. Poof, just like that. Someone could even buy Tr.im and redirect all the links to spam, porn, or malware. Our bet however is that someone reputable buys Tr.im before December 31st. There is just too much value in those links for there to be no bidders.
Tr.im’s demise renews the debate over URL shorteners. What happens if Bit.ly or TinyURL were to be hacked or lost their URL data? An entire ecosystem of links would suddenly be swept away. Millions upon millions of links could suddenly vanish, leaving users confused and a possibly uncleanable mess.
It also opens up the debate on monetizing URL shorteners. TinyURL has survived for years just fine, while Bit.ly’s preparing to launch a new product that will compete directly with Digg. Will users pay for URL shorteners? No, probably not. However, they might pay for the information that URL shorteners possess.
Tr.im’s shutdown is going to result in a mess unless it’s bought. Its death reopens a very real and very important debate on the future of URL shorteners and the entire link-sharing ecosystem that Twitter has built.
Scribd has quietly become one of the world’s most popular websites. The service lets you share documents, presentations, and PDFs online; its embedding feature alone has revolutionized how documents are used and shared. Still, many pieces of Scribd have been a silo; many users search for a document (often finding it via Google), download it, and leave. So how do you keep users engaged with your product? By launching a new wave of social features, of course.
That’s exactly what Scribd has done. The website now sports an array of social features designed to improve user engagement, build community, and get people to come back. This includes the addition of a homepage feed, the ability to follow other users, a new profile news feed, reading lists, status updates, and more.
Scribd Gets a Social Media Makeover
The changes are immediately apparent, starting with the homepage. The old homepage has been replaced with a news feed of the activity of your friends. It’s just like the news feed you find on Facebook or FriendFeed – you can see what people are uploading, what they’ve favorited, and reply to any of these news feed events.
There’s also a new navigation system on the left hand side. What’s immediately apparent is the ability to follow and be followed by other Scribd users. Like Twitter, Scribd hopes to increase user engagement by getting users invested in the activity of their friends and the figures they admire.
Profiles have also changed. Not only does it display your pictures and recent documents, but it provides a public feed of your activity – once again, like Facebook. More information is on display, including your interests, what you’ve been reading, and stats like the number of followers you have. And in the middle is the “scribble box,” which is nearly identical to the Facebook publisher box.
The entire thing is a social media makeover. Scribd is trying to break down the walls between documents by encouraging users to become friends and comment on documents. Most of the new features are inspired by features on other popular social media websites, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t great additions to the social document sharing website.
While a lot of users will still just drop in, grab documents, and leave, we wouldn’t be surprised if user engagement on the site gets a strong boost. After a rocky few months in terms of traffic, Scribd could use an upswing.
It’s been three days since the attacks. Everything’s back to normal, right? No, not exactly. While Twitter, YouTube, Livejournal, and others are working again, the attacks are still ongoing. This has resulted in the Twitter API and third party apps being hit hard as the social media company tries to resolve the DDoS crisis.
An Update From Twitter
Over the last few days, we’ve received multiple complaints from 3rd party Twitter developers over issues with their Twitter applications – things like OAuth not working correctly, blocking server requests, etc. Twitter is very aware of the situation and in fact has been posting updates on the Twitter Development Talk Google Group.
Here is some of what Ryan Sarver, the Twitter API Product Manager, said at 10 AM PT this morning:
I wanted to send an update to everyone who is monitoring this thread and keep you abreast of where we stand. First of all, the attack is still on going. We continue to work with our service provider and the other companies who are being attacked to resolve the issue as best we can. But it is continuing and as Chad stated, we are thus going to have continued and varied issues with access to the Twitter APIs.
Second, we have been monitoring every email and Chad and John have done a great job responding to the threads where we have new information to add or where we can clarify. As Chad stated in his last email there are known issues that we are continuing to work on. We are trying to provide updates when we have new information, but sadly there isn’t a lot new to report. Please know that we can’t respond to each and every thread as our teams time, in your best interest, should be put towards getting you all back online as soon as possible. Please help each other answer questions if someone already knows the answer. I will continue to give ongoing updates every 5-6 hours throughout the day even if nothing has changed so that you know we are still focused on it.
To be clear we have a large group of people working on this throughout the weekend and our developer ecosystem is incredibly important to us. Please believe us that this hurts us as much as it hurts you and we want to get you back online as soon as possible. We are endlessly appreciative for the hard work that each of you put into your applications and supporting Twitter users and we want those services to be online and back to normal.
With that being said, this attack is continuing, almost 3 days later, and we need to continue to do all that we can to defend it. Have faith that we have the best people on it both at Twitter and at our partner’s companies.
He also mentions some of the common issues Twitter apps are experiencing, which include OAuth not working properly, request timeouts, and rate limiting and blacklisting issues. However, as of noon PT, it seems that many of these issues are resolved. Twitter apps are slowly coming back to normal.
Let the Twitter Team Work
Developer outrage has centered around a lack of updates from the Twitter team on the status of the API. Lots of developers depend on the API for their businesses, so their passion is understandable.
But let’s put this all into perspective. Twitter was part an unprecedented social media meltdown. The attack even managed to knock Facebook offline – a feat that’s impressive considering they have 250 million users, over a thousand employees, and many more servers. Twitter has far fewer users, less servers, and well shy of 100 employees at last count. The fact that they were able to restore things in a few hours is a big deal.
The attack is still ongoing. Twitter needs to defend itself. One of those ways was to cut down on the API so that the platform could limit requests to the servers and focus on the attack. And while extra communication might have quelled some of the outrage, I’d rather have them working on the API than writing long posts on the status of their work.
Twitter apps are slowly coming back to normal. Twitter is not broken. Let’s let the Twitter team work to thwart this attack instead of attacking the service that made all of these apps possible in the first place.
We already know that Facebook can be an incredible tool for building and strengthening friendships and relationships. We also know that it can be a relationship buster. And now, a recent study makes the claim that “increased Facebook use significantly predicts Facebook-related jealousy” in romantic relationships.
The study, published in the CyberPsychology & Behavior Journal, analyzed the effect of Facebook use on the romantic relationships of college students. The report concludes that there is a “significant association between time spent on Facebook and jealousy-related feelings and behaviors experienced on Facebook.”
Is Facebook destroying our relationships?
An Overview of the Study
The research, conducted as part of a larger study on Facebook use by college students, identified items that could contribute to romantic jealousy. 308 respondents (skewed female, 231 to be exact) were then surveyed on if any of those factors were present. These include gems like “How likely are you to monitor your partner’s activities on Facebook? and “How likely are you to become jealous after your partner has added an unknown member of the opposite sex?”
The result? Specific factors make Facebook a breeding ground for relationship jealousy. The researchers identified four themes that contributed to jealousy on Facebook. They are as follows:
- Accessibility of information: Increased info about the interactions of significant others lead to increased monitoring and jealousy for 19.1% of participants
- Relationship jealousy: 16.2% of respondents were explicityl linked to Facebook use contributing to jealousy
- Facebook as an addiction: 10.3% of participants had major difficulty limiting the amount of time he or she looked at his or her partner’s Facebook profile.
- Lack of context: 7.4% of respondents referenced how Facebook can be ambiguous and that, without context, jealousy can be spurred over misunderstandings.
If you’re interested to learn more about the study, we’ve included the entire CyberPsychology & Behavior article below:
What’s to Blame: The Technology, or the Personality?
The sample size and the gender skew don’t make this a concrete and irrefutable study, despite regression analysis being used to address the gender skew. Still, the conclusions do make sense. With more information at a partner’s fingertips, he or she has more events (i.e. the friending of the opposite sex) that can spur jealous feelings.
In the end, it’s more about the personality type than the technology. Certain personalities have a tougher time trusting significant others. The technology is simply an enabler of his or her personality issues. Obsessive types will still check someone’s phone or accuse others of cheating.
The entire issue’s thorny. That’s why we agree with the study’s final conclusion:
This study provides evidence of a relationship between Facebook use and the experience of jealousy in that context, though further research is needed to better understand this feedback loop because the nature of our data could not fully explain this process. Future research must directly examine the effects of various triggers on the experience of jealousy and on the time individuals spend on Facebook.
We’d be interested in studying this issue further. In the meantime, what do you think? Is Facebook the cause of increased jealousy, or is it more about the personality? Let us know in the comments.
It’s been an unusual week in social media, most notable because many of us had to learn to live without it. A DDoS attack targeting Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and many other sites knocked the leading micro-messaging service offline and caused numerous problems with the leading social network, too.
In other news, we looked into the age demographics of Twitter users, a mindblowing combination of Twitter and GPS, ESPN’s controversial social media policy and a plot to kill IE6. We also ventured to answer that age-old question: “What the F**k is social media?”.
Without further ado, we present the top social media stories this week.
Social Media DDoS Attacks
1. Twitter Down – The biggest story of the week: Twitter was taken completely offline in what later transpired to be a denial of service attack. More than 250 people piled into the comment thread.
2. Facebook Down. Twitter Down. Social Media Meltdown. – While Twitter continued to be completely offline, users also began to notice outages and errors on Thursday with Facebook: “network error” was a common problem. It later emerged that Facebook was also under a DDoS attack.
3. Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) – Later on Thursday, it transpired that Twitter was being hit by a Denial of Service attack that also appeared to be affecting other social media websites. More than 160 people expressed their views in the comment section.
4. Twitter and Facebook DDoS Attacks Targeted One Man – The DDoS attacks on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LiveJournal and other social media sites appear to have been politically motivated…and aimed at a single Georgian blogger. We dig deeper into this surprising turn of events.
The Best of the Rest
5. IE6 No More! Popular Web Companies Start Project to Kill IE6 – A new project is trying to rid the world of the outdated Internet Explorer 6 browser by asking website owners to display a special message to IE6 users. Ben Parr reports on the movement.
8. Why Teens Don't Tweet – Ben Parr revisits the Tweets of youth, asking why young people might not favor the messaging service.
9. George Sodini's Chilling Blog Foretold Health Club Shootings – Fitness center killer George Sodini kept a blog and other online presences, it emerged this week. Adam Ostrow asks what, if anything, could have been done to stop the tragedy.
12. Augmented Reality Twitter is the Coolest Thing Ever – A breathtaking video shows Tweets overlaid on the landscape on an iPhone screen…and these augmented reality Twitter apps could be on a phone near you soon.
Did you know Microsoft owns one of the largest online interactive ad agencies in the world? Razorfish has had some big clients, including AT&T, Kraft, and Best Buy. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2007 as part of a larger deal for its parent company, aQuantive. And now, its history of being acquired and sold will get another chapter, as Microsoft has agreed to sell Razorfish for between $500 and $600 million.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal will see Razorfish switch hands from Microsoft Corp. to Publicis Groupe SA, a French advertising firm. Razorfish has been on the selling blocks for weeks, but Microsoft has finally gotten the big deal it was looking for.
The bidding was between several advertising conglomorates. It’s even rumored that Japan’s biggest ad agency, Dentsu, made a bid higher than the Publicis bid – which leaves room for speculation as to why Microsoft would turn down a higher offer from a very reputable agency.
Why the Deal Makes Sense
Still, this deal unloads a company that wasn’t part of Microsoft’s core competencies. It acquired aQuantive as a countermeasure to Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, but while aQuantive’s ad technology has served Microsoft, owning the Razorfish ad agency didn’t really make sense.
One last interesting detail: Publicis has agreed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising on Microsoft’s web properties, most notably Bing. This definitely provides a nice ad boost to the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal announced last month. Not a bad cherry on top of the $500+ million Microsoft’s going to get.
Rumors are flying around this weekend about three potential features of iTunes 9, the next major iteration of Apple’s popular music software. While iTunes 8 introduced features such as the Genius sidebar, the buzz is that iTunes 9 will introduce the ability to organize your iPhone apps (right now, it’s a mess) and support for Blu-ray discs. Oh, and here’s the kicker: there will supposedly be some form of social media integration, specifically with Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm.
All of this is according to a “reliable source” over at Boy Genius Report. And while these new features are just unconfirmed rumors, they would be major additions to the popular music player.
Here’s the basic lowdown on each of these rumored features:
Blu-ray: Yes, the Sony-backed disc format may finally see support from iTunes. There’s speculation that this makes sense because of reports that the next generation of iMacs will support Blu-Ray. Again, this is unconfirmed.
iPhone App Organization: When you get well north of 100 iPhone apps, you really do need a way to organize them. Right now, it’s alphabetical and mostly useless. Categorization not only makes perfect sense, but is almost essential to make iTunes app management feasible for the common consumer.
Twitter/Last.fm/Facebook Integration: We’re hoping this one is true, but the Boy Genius Report is completely unclear as to what this integration could be. Tweeting out what songs you play? The ability to automatically scrobble and favorite songs in Last.fm? Links to iTune store downloads via Facebook? Any integration could shake-up the entire social music industry and mean significant income for Apple.
This is all rumor, but we should get confirmation or denial on these rumors next month, when Apple traditionally launches its new line of iPods and other devices. What do you think? Would you use these features? We welcome you to speculate in the comments.
Ice-T is the star of a YouTube video circulating around the blogosphere this week in which the rapper is seen “repairing” – or more correctly destroying – an old Mac Powerbook with a claw hammer.
After explaining that the Mac has a broken screen, the Grammy Award-winner is seen prying open the machine and pulling out its components as wife Coco films. Only the hard drive and battery are spared from destruction.
It’s a painful video for Mac lovers to watch, and we can only hope it doesn’t start a trend. Vanilla Ice annihilates an iPhone? Snoop Dogg obliterates an iPod? We hope not.
Warning:contains strong language and images of Mac destruction that may be disturbing to Apple fans.
Before today, 
Last monday, we announced 
As Twitter and its 140 character limit has skyrocketed to popularity, another type of service rode grew exponentially as well: URL shorteners. From 
It was the big social media story of the week; on Thursday, 
Over the last few days, we’ve received multiple complaints from 3rd party Twitter developers over issues with their Twitter applications – things like OAuth not working correctly, blocking server requests, etc. Twitter is very aware of the situation and in fact has been posting updates on the 
We already know that Facebook can be an incredible tool for building and strengthening friendships and relationships. We also know that it can 
It’s been an unusual week in social media, most notable because many of us had to learn to live without it. A DDoS attack targeting Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and many other sites knocked the leading micro-messaging service offline and caused numerous problems with the leading social network, too. 
5. 
6. 
10. 
Did you know Microsoft owns one of the largest online interactive ad agencies in the world? 
Rumors are flying around this weekend about three potential features of iTunes 9, the next major iteration of Apple’s popular music software. While iTunes 8 introduced features such as the Genius sidebar, the buzz is that iTunes 9 will introduce the ability to organize your iPhone apps (right now, it’s a mess) and support for Blu-ray discs. Oh, and here’s the kicker: there will supposedly be some form of social media integration, specifically with Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm.
Twitter/Last.fm/Facebook Integration: We’re hoping this one is true, but the Boy Genius Report is completely unclear as to what this integration could be. Tweeting out what songs you play? The ability to automatically scrobble and favorite songs in 
Ice-T is the star of a YouTube video circulating around the blogosphere this week in which the rapper is seen “repairing” – or more correctly destroying – an old Mac Powerbook with a claw hammer.
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