The Status update of the NFL

By

Chris Hotzak

With every new NFL season, there is optimism and hope for your favorite team.  Facebook statuses and Twitter accounts were updated constantly today with football notes and quotes.  Mine was updated all about my Giants. (They won today btw).   Social Media is a huge part of athletes lives and different sports teams. OchoCinco was even fined by the NFL for tweeting when he shouldn’t this preseason. (Not the first time, or second, or third this has happened).   This post will be my attempt to compare some social media aspects, to various NFL teams, and various aspects of the NFL.

The Jets have run their mouth all preseason, which makes them a target for everyone that they play.  By knowing that they think they are the best, every team is given extra incentive to try and go and rob some wins from them.  Correlation? Please Rob Me.  This website allows you to see which users of Foursquare and Facebook Places are not home, and as a consequence, there has been a big robbery ring that uses this information to take tons of money from these users.  It’s basically the concept of over-sharing.  Rex, keep your mouth shut before you get robbed.

The Seattle Seahawks? Their leader is Pete Carroll, who has fled from USC, while probably knowing fully that the USC program was going to get sanctioned.  Correlation? Mark Hurd signing with HP, after being CEO for Oracle.

So who or what do you think I’m going to compare Mark Zuckerberg’s latest proclamation that Facebook isn’t going public? Yup! Bill Belichick and the Patriots.  Bill coaches and makes decisions however he wants, doesn’t care who he has to answer to or what the consequences are going to be.  Him and Zuck could never work together.

Let’s compare my NY Giants to Facebook.  The mecca of social networks.  Bias? Maybe.  The Giants are always going to have competition, whether the other team is going to be better, well that’s a question for Sunday.  Ping could eventually be Facebook’s competition, with 1 million users in 48 hours, but for right now…Facebook remains the social media Giant.

Maybe later in the week, more social media news can be compared to the NFL.  For now, I’ll stick to the teams I outlined.  Lets go Giants!

The Average Age of a Facebook User Is…

By Steve Pessah

Facebook started as a network for Harvard students to connect (was thefacebook in the beginning). Then, it opened up to other universities, then high school students were given the keys to the kingdom (ugh, that was a bummer at the time). Soon enough it was open to everyone. Your parents could now find you both physically and virtually. There was no place to hide.

Fast forward to now, and parents being on Facebook isn’t such a big deal anymore. I’m Facebook friends with my parents, extended family, and even some of my old high school teachers. From the start, Facebook could only get older, not younger.

38 is now the average age of a Facebook user. Flowtown, the company that put together a great infographic seen below, found out that the vast majority of users are now older than 38 years old.

What does this mean for the youngins who used to run to the Facebook community to get away from mommy and daddy? Your parents are now there waiting for you, along with potential employers, and even that crazy aunt who always calls but can’t get through to you because of caller ID.

Hide those racy pictures of you from college, watch what your friends say on your wall, and get ready for the first holiday dinner via Facebook video chat (should be here by the end of the year.. just a prediction).

Google’s first strike back against Facebook

By Steve Pessah

With Facebook recently reaching 500 million users, many thoughts about Google and the importance of SEO have been turning sour. People are spending more and more time on social networks, and the trend isn’t slowing down. Today though, Google confirmed a test that could have a fairly large impact if integrated: search results that update as you type.

This essentially creates a new page for every letter that you type. This means the search results are always changing now, instead of before where there was a fight for the top search results. Increasing the amount of search results (almost exponentially), increases the importance of SEO, which directly affects social networks (mostly their advertising dollars). Facebook tried to edge Google by integrating the “Like” button, which attempts to replace links. This is Google’s response back to them.

But is this enough to deter people away from social searches and recommendations from their friends? This feature may help Google make more personalized searches, but remember, this is only a test.

With Google’s rumored social network project Google Me being pegged as a full-fledged competitor to Facebook, let’s hope to see tests like these become fully integrated. These seem to be the stepping stones to the introduction of their last gasp in social networking.

(via TechCrunch)