Bloomberg News recently interviewed Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable.com, on social media, web 2.0 and the rising success and profitability of the Mashable brand.

Some facts about Pete Cashmore and Mashable:

- Cashmore founded Mashable.com in 2005 at the age of 19.

- The Mashable blog is focused almost exclusively on Social Networks, Social Media and Web 2.0 news.

- Mashable.com gets over 10 million monthly pageviews.

- Pete Cashmore was named one of the Web’s top 25 celebrities by Forbes in 2009.

- Mashable.com is listed by Technorati as one of the top 10 blogs in the world.

- Mashable was ranked as one of the world’s most profitable blogs by BusinessWeek.

You can view the Pete Cashmore interview by Bloomberg News below:

Google Earth is being used with CCTV video to view people and vehicles in real time by students from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The potential and possible use of this new search technology will be viewed with excitement by some people and fear by others.

Right now the technology makes the people and vehicles anonymous and virtual; but the future of this technology along with the proliferation of CCTV cameras and RFID tagging technology could make for an advanced people search and car tracking system.

You can watch a video of this new search and tracking technology below:

Source: Gizmodo.com

A Tennessee woman has been arrested for “poking” someone on the Facebook social network.

Shannon D. Jackson was arrested on September 25th for allegedly violating a court order of protection.

Jackson is accused of using a virtual Facebook “poke” to communicate with a Hendersonville woman, which violates a court order of protection, that states “no telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating with the petitioner.”

Poking is a social networking feature that is unique to Facebook that allows one user to virtually “poke” another user on the popular social network.

Hendersonville, TN police have copies of the page that shows the alleged victim was “poked,” according to a filed affidavit.

If convicted, Shannon D. Jackson could get up to 11 months, 29 days in prison and fined up to $2,500.

Source: Tennessean.com

Online dating site Gelato is fast becoming the Facebook & Twitter of singles sites.

Gelato mixes social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and others with real-time search into it’s online dating site to give people a new way to find a date.

The idea behind Gelato’s social dating 2.0 site is to give people insights into a potential date by allowing them to search for people based on their Facebook updates, Twitter tweets, Flickr pictures etc.

Gelato users simply sign up for an account and connect it to their Facebook or Twitter profiles, then users answer some typical demographic questions common on dating sites like: relationship status, relationship interests, ethnicity, religion, politics etc.

The interesting mix to this new online dating site is users can then link a number of their other social networking and Web 2.0 accounts to Gelato, including: Netflix, Hulu, Flickr, Amazon, Pandora, and Last.fm.

In addition, people can specify public or restricted access to their network activity and updates on Gelato. All of your profile updates on the linked sites will appear in your Gelato “lifestream”. This personal information and potential date bait is then searchable by other Gelato users – as long as you have approved your feeds for public viewing.

Gelato users can then search Gelato for recent profile updates on any topic from entertainment to politics to find a like-minded mate or ( since opposites attract ) someone with totally different views and interests.

However, the only people you will find through a Gelato search will be other Gelato members who have agreed to open their social network updates and Web 2.0 feeds to the public.

If you are comfortable with allowing Gelato’s online dating site access to your Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Hulu updates and feeds and other profile information, then Gelato may be a good option for finding your next date.

A real-time dating and love search. What will they think of next.

You can visit the Gelato online dating site @ ge.la.to

Source:Yahoo.com

The real-time search wars are getting bigger each day –

Twitter is reportedly in separate negotiations with both Google and Microsoft to supply their social network’s huge amount of real-time tweet data to the two big search engines.

Sources state that the deals would include a license of Twitter’s complete tweet feed and using it for real-time search results in the Bing and Google search engines. The deals could involve millions of dollars in revenue for Twitter.

Twitter has a large and possibly lucrative collection of fresh, user-generated data that is the driving force behind real-time search results. The Twitter social network collects this constant stream of new information from its 54 million monthly users in the form of tweets.

Sources say the deals would be nonexclusive, since Twitter’s management wants to stay independent in the escalating search engine struggle between Google and Bing.

Source: Seattle PI

The New York City Police Department is building a database of cell phone numbers and their owners. NYPD officers have been advised to record the serial numbers on suspects’ cell phones in an effort to track them against past or future criminal activity.

The cell phone database could be a powerful tool for police investigations into drug networks and other crimes, according to police.

An internal NYPD memo states that police officers should record the International Mobile Equipment Identity number on a suspect’s cell phone during or after an arrest.

The International Mobile Equipment Identity number is recorded by cell phone service providers when mobile calls are made.

This cell phone information could allow police to match a cell phone calls made by one suspect to a phone used by other criminals.

Some limitations on the usefulness of this information – Chinese-made cell phones sold in India have the same number and some other foreign sold cell phones are encoded with false numbers.

Civil libertarians are concerned by the cell phone database, since normally a warrant is required to access calls made by a person or phone numbers in a person’s address book.

One civil libertarian said that it looks like New York police officers are “taking phones apart to get information” without the required warrants.

The cell phone data will be joined with another records database of over 20 million 911 calls that the NYPD has been collecting.

The New York Police Department began building the 911 call database for incidents involving a police response in 2003.

Source: NY Daily News

Along with the rise in social networks like Twitter and Facebook has come a constant stream of fresh information from these new social media sites.

As a result, real time search engines have arrived on the search scene to index and organize the latest news buzz from these online social circuits. We review some of the better real time search engines below.

– Twitter Real Time Search – Twitter’s own real time search is somewhat limited to just the freshest tweets on any given subject and trending topics, including any shortened links that appear in the tweets. Twitters own social network search is good if you don’t mind tweet overload in your search topic, but the results are pretty limited as far as real time search goes.

– TweetMeme [ US Alexa Rank: 1,189 ] – One of the first real time search engines and, according to Alexa rankings, the most trafficked real time search engines out of the standalone real time search engines on our list. Users can browse popular links by subject or search on a topic. A great search engine for finding the freshest real-time news, map and video links determined by Tweet popularity.

– Topsy [ US Alexa Rank: 5,126 ] – Topsy is another very busy real-time search engine for finding trending topics and fresh search results based on Tweet popularity. Topsy’s real time search results also include top authors and news sources for a given topic.

– OneRiot [ US Alexa Rank: 6,704 ] – OneRiot is a real rising star in the real-time search space. Topsy allows users to browse trending topics from the real-time web or search for web and video results as ranked by popularity on social media sites like Twitter and Digg. OneRiot is one of the best real-time search engines on the scene.

– CrowdEye [ US Alexa Rank: 22,695 ] – The CrowdEye real-time search results are a bit, shall we say “crowded”, search results pages show graphs of tweet volume; popular links; current tweets; related topics; related searches ( which often do not seem at all related to the original search ) as well as Google display ads, which often times do not seem related to the real-time search or results. This is definitely not one of our favorite real time search engines.

– Collecta [ US Alexa Rank: 34,414 ] – The Collecta real-time search engine seems just like a slow copy of Twitter’s own social network search, filled with Tweet overload. Collecta will need to speed up and innovate to stay in the real-time search engine race.

– Scoopler [ US Alexa Rank: 81,729 ] – The Scoopler real-time search engine has “real” potential. Though, as of yet, not one of our top pics for real-time search. Scoopler’s real-time search results show both popular links, video and image results next to live Tweet and Digg updates side by side.

While we encourage readers to try out all of the real time search engines above and experiment with searching for people, topics and current events on all the search engines, a few of the real time searches stand out above the rest.

Our favorite real time search engines are Tweetmeme, Topsy and OneRiot, due to their speed of service and innovation in delivering real time search results for users.

The rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, with their constant streams of fresh user updates have given rise to a new type of web search engine that is challenging Google’s dominance in the area of internet search – the real-time search engine.

According to a recent Wired.com article, the internet is changing rapidly thanks to the popularity of social networks and social media.

People are increasingly searching the web for fresh, up-to-the-minute information on timely topics like celebrity gossip, current news events, profile updates from family and friends, current political events ( ex. Iranian election protests ). Web metrics show that searches for these types of subjects is rising.

It is commonly called the “real-time” web.

The real-time web is shaking up the internet as we have experienced it in the past, and it’s a trend that Google needs to take seriously if it wants to compete in this new search engine arena.

For over a decade, Google has indexed the internet by determining which site had credibility. Google measures the popularity of sites in part by measuring the links that point to them, a big part in Google’s PageRank measurement.

Google checks to see whether a site grew in popularity naturally, which tends to show credibility. However, if a site gets a lot of inbound links overnight, it’s could be due to link spamming, a practice that is frowned upon by the Google search algorithm.

In contrast, real-time web search works the opposite. Real-time search is about “trending topics” and current news items — which can create a huge number of inbound links and comments in minutes. Real-time search engines can’t wait days to determine what is the most popular real-time news source or blog post.

People who search the real-time web want to know the source of trending topics immediately.

Real-time search engines like OneRiot, Tweetmeme, CrowdEye, Topsy, Scoopler, and Collecta are in the process of redefining what the rules that determine what makes a current piece of information on the web relevant.

The majority of these up and coming real-time search engines use Twitter data to drive their search results. Whenever an explosion of Twitter tweets on a particular topic or site links emerge, it’s considered a “signaling event” for trending topics on real-time search engines.

Collecta’s CTO Jack Moffitt says: “We want to be limited only by the speed of light.”

Search results on the real-time web is vastly different from those on a typical search engine. If you search for a celebrity on a traditional engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing, the majority of the search results stay constant from day to day.

Rankings change slowly on a traditional web search. However, real-time search engines serve fresh results by the minute.

Developers of real-time search engines say that their goal isn’t to answer questions like Google, Yahoo and Bing do, but rather to give people a fresh snapshot of current web buzz.

In a nutshell, Google is still top dog when it comes to topical research, but a new group of real-time search engines are better equipped to give you a front row seat at the global water cooler.

Source: Wired.com

Facebook has mined user data from their social network and produced a graphical representation of the collective happiness of Facebook’s millions of U.S. users.

Facebook analyzed information from their database of user updates and scanned for words indicating a particular mood of happy or sad and correlated the updates to the day they were posted.

Analysis of the Facebook profile updates showed that holidays tend to make people feel happy and celebrity deaths make people sad.

Facebook noted that Thanksgiving and Christmas are some of the happiest days for profile updates, while the deaths of Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson ranked among the saddest for user updates.

Although these findings seem pretty obvious, Facebook’s collection and analysis of users’ “mood demographics” could become more useful with years of data mining — especially when this information is associated with economic indicators.

However, Facebook’s data mining of user updates makes some people wonder if it is a good idea for large social networks to use personal profile updates for demographic research.

If you publish personal data on the Facebook social network, no matter how private your profile settings are, Facebook.com can still save it, mine it, analyze it and use it for their own purposes.

Some people feel that Facebook’s so-called “Gross National Happiness” indicator is Orwellian and intrusive.

Mint, a personal finance site, also mines uers data and runs this type of information analysis. The company tracks and analyzes millions of bank and credit card accounts that its users input for personal finance purposes in order to rank the most frugal urban areas as well as geographic wealth distribution.

Regardless of privacy concerns, the trend among many social networks and web 2.0 sites will be to mine user data and analyze the information for business, social, market and maybe even political purposes.

Source: LA Times

Social network sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are blocked on over half ( 54% ) of corporate networks, according to a recent survey of Chief Information Officers that was conducted by Robert Half Technology.

Furthermore, this 54% represents the percentage of CIOs surveyed who say that their corporations do not allow use of popular social networks by employees for any reason while on the job.

The officers were asked the following question: “Which of the following most closely describes your company’s policy on visiting social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work?”

The CIOs’ responded to the social network question as follows:

- Prohibited completely – 54%
- Permitted for business purposes only – 19%
- Permitted for limited personal use – 16%
- Permitted for any type of personal use – 10%
- Don’t know/no answer – 1%

Source: Robert Half Technology