If you thought Google+ use is on the decline, think again. The Google+ team just made two exciting announcements. The first is that there’s no need to wait for an invite – Google+ is now open to the public, and anyone can easily sign up for an account. The second announcement is that its video conferencing service Google+ Hangout just got even better. You can now “Hangout” with your friends on your Android 2.3 device, and their new feature called Hangouts on Air allows you to broadcast your video session to anyone who’s interested. Other awesome features include:

* Screensharing. Now you can easily show off your vacation photos or a computer how-to.
* Sketchpad. Collaborate with fellow artists as you doodle and draw together.
* Google Docs. You can work with your colleagues from wherever you are and write or plan on Google Docs
* Named hangouts. Like the chatrooms of old, you can join or create a hangout for topics like music, fashion, or sports.

Enjoy these features as soon as you sign up for an account at plus.google.com.

Give your favorite online media personality the recognition he or she deserves with the first ever Tatt Awards, sponsored by the Globe Internet brand Tattoo. This award is designed to celebrate the accomplishments of influential bloggers and Twitterers who use their respective platforms to ignite passion and awareness about current events or issues that are dear to them. It’s not a mere popularity contest; the Tatt Awards will look beyond a person’s online followers and see how he or she expressed opinions or spurred socially relevant messages or changes that have influenced their followers to act.

You can send in your nominations for the Tatt Awards by going to www.tattoo.globe.com.ph/tattawards. Nominations are open for the following categories:

* The One – the most influential trendsetter that shaped opinion, moved people and prompted action
* Ballbreaker – a blogger or a Twitter user who started a debate, sparked conversations or a revolution of opinions with just one hard-hitting post
* Stylisimo - a person that not only reviewed fashion but also set a trend one that everyone followed
* Indie Rocker – a musical band or indie artist who fought hard to claim their space in the hearts of Filipino audience via webtime
* Wordslayer – a blogger whose mastery of words showed wit, humor and grit to the Philippine blogosphere
* Artiste - an inspiring person whose fiery passion for creating visual art through original graphic design, animation or photography has caught fire in the Philippine online art scene
* Tech Junkie – a blogger, podcaster or Twitter user who shares access to the latest in trends and the fast pace world of e-knowledge
* Thought-mover – a Twitter user who sparked a fire in the Philippine Twittersphere with one unique hashtag
* Video Slinger – an individual or group who shook the Pinoy web space with thought-provoking or entertaining video.
* The Advocate – a person or a group of individuals who worked to improve the state of societal cause in the Philippines through social media

As soon as the nominations are closed, a Tatt Award Council will determine the winner for the categories, who will receive 100,000 Pesos in cash each and premium broadband products from Tattoo. Expect the big announcements within August 2011! The Tatt Award Council is led by Dong Ronquillo, who will collectively serve as judges to determine the winners in ten Tatt Awards categories. The Council members are award-winning journalist and ABS-CBN News & Public Affairs social media pioneer News and Current Affairs Maria Ressa, revolutionary online educator and Rock Ed Philippines founder Gang Badoy, prolific lifestyle blogger and entrepreneur Cecile Zamora-Van Straten, esteemed tech blogger and Tattoo ambassador Rico Mossesgeld, popular video blogger and director Kring Elenzano, RX radio DJ Chico Garcia and President of the Internet and Mobile Marketing Association Hans Roxas-Chua.

You only have until July 14 to nominate your favorite social media personality, so head to www.tattoo.globe.com.ph/tattawards now!

With the launch of the Nokia C7 smartphone, Nokia kicked off a global competition, the Nokia C7 Social Challenge to find the world’s biggest users of social media. You think you can be one of them? Read on…

What is the Nokia C7 Social Challenge?

Facebook users can gather votes for themselves through Nokia’s fan page. The top five people around the world with the most votes by January 3, 2011 will each be given 21 Nokia C7 smartphones for themselves and their friends, as well as the opportunity to host the party of a lifetime with assistance from Nokia and a designated party planner. Just join this Facebook page for the Nokia C7 Social Challenge.

The stunning Nokia C7 social media function allows you to receive live feeds from Facebook and Twitter directly to the device’s homescreen.

The Nokia Soci@lite Report

Nokia commissioned Oxford University Consulting to put together a report into the secrets of online popularity. The Nokia Soci@lite Report, written by Dr. Bernie Hogan, investigates the secrets to the popularity of a new group of digital social media networkers, named ‘Soci@lites’ defined as people with 5,000 friends.

According to the research, a 19 year-old person with 970 or more online friends who has an interest in music and provides advice to others has the greatest chance of winning the Nokia C7 Social Challenge. The study also implies that potential winners in the making enjoy outdoor activities, do not like to follow crowds, and frequently visit online discussion forums.

The study shows that on average, an individual remains in contact with less than 50 online friends at any given time. A well-known fact is women appear to have closer relationships with their online friends than men. Women keep in contact with an average of 47 of their online friends while men interact with only 39 online friends on average.

Think you can be one of these ‘Soci@lites’ ?

Google is changing the way women shop online (at least, if you live in the States) with the launch of Boutiques.Com. This website aggregates inventory from various designers, online boutiques, and small online store owners, and makes suggestions based on your style preferences.

The first step to creating an account is to establish your style using their “Stylizer”. Basically, this shows you two images pulled from the red carpet or websites like Weardrobe and Cuturious. Boutiques.Com remembers what you like using computer vision and machine learning technology, and makes style suggestions based on your results. You can also say which cut, silhouettes, patterns, and colors you prefer in the succeeding steps.

You can start shopping away after you’ve established your style preferences. These are the shoe suggestions Boutiques gave after I said which shoe styles I like, and it narrows my tastes down even further with the “Love” and “Hate” button.

I kind of wish Filipino shoppers could start shopping through Boutiques (without paying hefty shipping fees and customs taxes), but it’s a fun way to window shop nonetheless. Try it out for yourself at Boutiques.Com and see if it works as well as for you.

Looks like animals aren’t far behind in using Web 2.0! Early this month, the female Orangutan Nonja from the Schönbrunn Zoo just made her own Facebook account. No, it’s not the kind of account that the zookeepers keep; many of the photos of the ape’s everyday life are to be found there, taken and uploaded onto Facebook by Nonja herself. Aside from the fact that she’s kind of a genius (she’s already created more than 250 paintings), this Facebook account was made possible by the new Samsung ST1000, the first and only digital camera with a WiFi connection with social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. The 12-megapixel ST1000 also comes with Intelli-Studio Software so you can edit and upload pictures without having to attach them to a computer. You can even use the device to send emails! Moreover, the ST1000 also has geo-tagging so that platforms like Google Map can display these photos onto the world map. Simple usability is guaranteed by the 3.5″ LCD touchscreen and multiple functions like Face Detection.

It’s so easy that an ape pcan use it, and use it well! Check out Nonja’s Facebook account at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nonja/190010092116.

A couple of weeks ago, I deleted my Friendster account because I got annoyed at all the email updates I kept on receiving. Even though Friendster was the pioneer of social networking sites, I eventually disliked using it because of the confusing user interface, the slew of advertisements that greeted me as I browsed, and the messy dashboard. Besides, one social networking site is enough; what am I going to do with two? Then last week, Friendster just relaunched a cleaner website and a whole new social networking experience that got me interested in reviving my account. The new Friendster is targeted towards the Asian youth market and centered around their core interest, which is enjoying themselves with their friends. The first visible change you’ll observe is an invigorating new logo, the Friendster wordmark housed inside a green cloud. The cloud represents communication within the community (think word cloud), which is further emphasized by the new tagline and Friendster’s new brand promise, Connecting Smiles.

More important than the new logo is a website interface that places emphasis on features that are favored by the Friendster community—like shoutouts, profile personalization, photo sharing, games, finding friends, and messaging. Every user’s logged-in homepage includes a redesigned network activity Stream and Shoutout publishing box, making it easier to keep track of everything friends are doing, what content is being shared, what new photos have been uploaded and more. Each user also has a new Shoutout history page called the Shoutout Stream, where Shoutouts are aggregated, allowing users and their friends to view historical Shoutouts, especially the ones they missed when they were gone.

There are also some exciting new products in store for Friendster users:

• The Friendster Wallet is a new micro-payments platform that allows users to purchase products and services on Friendster such as virtual gifts, and to send and receive money to one another. The Friendster Wallet enables users to store account balances and supports a variety of payment methods including pre-paid cards, mobile payments, online payments and credit card payments. Moving forward, Friendster will enable users to make purchases surrounding online games and other offerings. The Friendster Wallet is powered via a partnership with MOL AccessPortal Berhad (MOL)*, a leading payments provider leveraging a network of over 500,000 physical and virtual paymentchannels worldwide. If this takes off, then Friendster might be the new Multiply, in terms of being an informal ecommerce hub where people buy and sell goods.

• The Friendster Gift Shop enables the Friendster community to send virtual gifts to one another, quickly and conveniently. Friendster Gifts are used to send personal gestures of kindness, celebrate significant accomplishments, and recognize friends and family on special days, like birthdays, or just for fun. A variety of gift themes are supported and more will be added over time. Currently, users can choose from virtual birthday gifts, collectible gifts, greeting gifts, premium gifts, romance gifts, seasonal gifts, thank you gifts and more.

• Friendster Games is an online games destination, which will offer Friendster users a wide variety of fun, entertaining games and applications to play online with their friends. Building on the games already available on the site (through the ‘Fun’ menu on the Navbar), users will be able to easily search and bookmark the games they like to play. Game developers will be able to incorporate The Friendster Wallet into their games, allowing them to participate in the Friendster micro-payments ecosystem.

So what are you waiting for? It’s time to dust the cobwebs off your old Friendster account and check out the new features! And for those of you who don’t know where it is, it’s at www.friendster.com.

As if there weren’t already enough self-proclaimed social media experts spamming uninterested Twitterers with links to badly written blog posts, a new mobile phone from INQ lets people Twitter on the go by default. The INQ Mini 3G, also dubbed as the “Twitter phone”, is designed around the two most widely used social networking sites – Facebook and Twitter – so that people can update their status, poke friends, re-Tweet Tweets, and do other social networking things away from their desk. It runs on 3G so you don’t have to find a WiFi hotspot to get connected, and it can also be used as a USB modem. The INQ Mini 3G comes in black and five other candy colors, but you can’t find it in the Philippines yet.

Source

Google Wave could be the next big thing in social media, and the lucky 100,000 who got invites to beta-test this new communication platform are probably having a blast playing around with it. For those of you who don’t know, Google Wave combines email, instant messaging, social networking, web chat, and wikis into one real-time communication platform. Through Google Wave, you can converse in real time (as in see what your friends are saying as they type them out), drag and drop files, enjoy applications and games from third-party developers, and embed your “wave” (conversation) onto your blog. These are just some of the many features of Google Wave, and it’s easy to see how this can possibly change the face of social media if it takes off.

People have a lot of questions about Google Wave, but the question that keeps popping up everywhere is, How do I get a Google Wave invite? According to Google’s support, there are four ways for you to get a Google Wave invite.

1) You signed up to get a Google Wave account. Back in May when Google Wave was first announced, Google put up a request form for invites. Most of the 100,000 invites went to those who were able to put their names on that list early on.

2) You have a Developer Preview of Wave account. For some months, the Sandbox version of Google Wave has been open for a group of developers who are in charge of testing Wave, reporting bugs, and building Wave extensions. All of them are getting Wave accounts.

3) Paid users of Google Apps might get Wave accounts. It’s likely that Google will also prioritize companies who requested for invites, such as schools that use Google Apps.

4) You receive an invite from someone with a Wave account. Remember how Gmail was initially open to a few people who were given early invites? Those first users of Gmail (I was one of them) were given several invites so they could get their friends to try out the service too. The same thing goes for Google Wave. According to Google,

We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.”

So these are the only four ways you can start using Google Wave now. I think most people will have to be content with begging other people for Google Wave invites.

The National Disaster Coordinating Council was swamped with calls during the height of Tropical Storm Ondoy last weekend. Dozens of people were stuck in homes or trapped on their rooftops as flash floods turned streets into rivers. Rescue from the authorities seemed very unlikely, because if there’s anything we Filipinos know about our government, it’s the fact that they’re completely unreliable.

So we took it upon ourselves to help our neighbors using social networking sites. On Facebook, friends removed their Mafia Wars updates in order to give way to emergency numbers to call for rescue, the names and addresses of missing loved ones, alternate routes that were not flooded, and drop-off sites for donations. The same volume of information was passed on via Twitter and Plurk. A Tumblr page documented the photos of the destruction left by Ondoy, as personal accounts of people who survived the flood, and missing persons alert. Videos of flooded streets were uploaded onto YouTube before the evening news. Every single person who could log onto the internet over the weekend was aware of the damage caused by Ondoy, and those who seemed insensitive to the plight of the displaced and the dead were swiftly subjected to Internet vigilanteism.

Although information obtained through social networking sites were definitely more helpful than damaging, it would be wise to take some of the rumors with a grain of salt. News like the Marikina dam opening turned out to be false, but it caused needless worry among those affected by the flood before it was disproved. And then there’s the OFW Jacque Bermejo, who quickly became an Internet meme for an insensitive, troll-like comment someone left on her hacked Facebook account. I guess what I’m trying to say is that just because it’s published on the internet, doesn’t mean it’s true. And sure, some people will be indifferent to the damage caused by Ondoy, and they will make their opinions known. But try to be a little bit more discerning before dispensing Internet justice. And instead of wasting your time joining hate groups for people who are insensitive about the tragedy, focus on doing your part to help the displaced families.

That being said, there are plenty of ways where you can help the victims of Ondoy. OndoyManila contains Google documents on donation drop-off points and authorized bank accounts where you can deposit your donation. You can also send donations via Paypal to PhilippineAid at donations at philippineaid dot com. In the span of two days, PhilippineAid has been able to raise over $2,000+ – almost half of the $5,000 targeted amount. All your donations to PhilippineAid will be given to the Red Cross for the victims of Ondoy.

You may have noticed some downtime on Twitter and Facebook Thursday evening (or Thursday morning, for those in the West). I assumed it was because too many users were logged on to both services at that particular time but according to Symantec, what happened last night was a “Distributed Denial of Service” (DDOS) attack. A DDOS attack is when unknown web users purposely flood a site with “hits”, overloading the server and making the site unavailable to legitimate users for several hours. This is why you couldn’t even see the Twitter fail whale when the site was down last night.

DDOS attacks are not new; in fact, they’ve been happening for about ten years to websites small and large. Back in the DOS days, a single hacker or a team of hackers could ping a domain over and over and over again manually. Today, hackers can now use networks of infected computers and use hundreds or thousands of these devices to slam the target website with domain requests, which overloads servers and routers and shits the site down. It is not yet known if malware was involved in last night’s DDOS attack, but Symantec is still monitoring the situation.

Although Twitter and Facebook are now up and running, the DDOS attack made ordinary PC users more aware of a serious threat. DDOS attacks come from regular computers infected with bots, effectively turning the PC into a zombie computer obeying their cyercrimminal master’s bidding. Keep your PC protected from the zombie computer threat and follow these tried and tested tips from Symantec’s Norton team: