We wanted to post Olivia Olson’s performance from “Love
Actually,” but it’s been blocked by NBC. Bah humbug! Seriously,
NBC? Alas, during our quest for a decent video by Miss Olivia, we
happened upon this little lady, and l.o.v.e. Enjoy 🙂
OK. It’s not viral (and therefore doesn’t fall within our
“Viral Christmas Video” theme), but it should be. Were sharing
because it’s Chreeestmas. Who’s getting your basket of
forgiveness?
It’s December, which for many of us means the holidays, excessive drinking and eating, Ugly Christmas Sweater parties and reflection. If you’re writing for a blog or publication, it means pumping out a barrage of lists summing up the year. So, thank you Tumblr. Your utter failure for more than a day inspired this list we’ve compiled of the Top 5 Social Media Blunders of 2010.
Google Buzz
Part email, part Facebook, part Twitter, part Friendfeed, part Foursquare, fully lame. Google launched this social network on Feb. 9 and by Feb. 16 it was slapped with a major lawsuit. Google Buzz was integrated into Gmail, irritating many users, who were automatically signed up, revealing private information without permission. After many privacy violations, a class action lawsuit, Google Buzz has recently settled for $8.5 million. Buzz is still around, but has yet to make any sort of splash.
Twitter Hack
September 2010, hackers exploited a security flaw on the popular micro-blogging site, retweeting malicious code, activating pop-ups, and even exposing users to hard-core pornography.
Tumblr
Earlier this month, blogging host site Tumblrcrashed for more than 24 hours, leaving millions of users shut out from their accounts, unable to access the nearly 11 million blogs run through Tumblr.
“During planned maintenance that was not intended to interrupt service, an issue arose that took down a critical database cluster. This brought down our entire network while our engineers worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online.”
Facebook Crash
A technical glitch blocked or slowed access to Facebook for several hours in late September, blocking many of the site’s (at the time) 500 million users from the news feed of updates from their friends.
Facebook called it the worst outage they’d had in over four years and blamed a software flaw that caused a cluster of its databases to be overwhelmed. Facebook said it had to shut down the entire site to stop traffic to the databases.
Ping Apple’s stab at social media. Debuted in September with their iTunes 10, Ping allows you to follow friends, musicians and others and read about what music they “Ping” and “Like.” Failures here are that you can’t follow your Facebook friends and you can only comment on music purchased through the iTunes store, which for me is not an accurate portrait of my music collection. Though it’s taken a while to catch on, it does feel like the early days of Twitter to me, where people are following others, trying to sort out the purpose of this new social network. It’s definitely a great marketing platform for those in the music industry.
It’s not all negativity at BuzzRocket. All of these failures are a result of the tremendous growth and innovation of social media.
“Failure is the tuition you pay for success,” Walter Brunell
Congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg, who, today, was named “Person of the Year” by Time magazine. This is a well-deserved achievement for the 26-year-old Facebook co-founder, who in seven short years has completely revolutionized the way in which we communicate. Facebook now boasts more than 550 million users – if it were a country would be the third largest on the planet.
Facebook is so much a part of our lives that it’s become a verb. According to Facebook stats, people spend more than 700 billion minutes a month on the social networking site. Facebook has quickly become the place to not only gather with friends online, but also email, share pictures, stories and get news.
Zuckerberg has had a crazy year. On the heels of the Oscar-buzzworthy film The Social Network, where he was portrayed as a socially awkward, morally questionable hacker genius, Zuckerberg announced he was making a $100 million donation to Newark NJ’s public school system.
More recently, Zuckerberg pledged to donate the majority of his estimated $4.9 million to charity.
Congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg, who, today, was named “Person of the Year” by Time magazine. This is a well-deserved achievement for the 26-year-old Facebook co-founder, who in seven short years has completely revolutionized the way in which we communicate. Facebook now boasts more than 550 million users – if it were a country would be the third largest on the planet.
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