Social Networking sites are popular all over the world. Why is this popular and how do companies benefit from it? The research gives you some surprising findings.

Surprising finding of social networking sites (not including LinkedIn)

• People love to look at pictures and profiles
• Men likes to look at females that they don't know
  
• Females like to look at females that they know

Similar to a search engine BitTorrent uses indexed databases allowing users to download files for free. During the last six years BitTorrent has worked to gain monetary success. The private company has achieved some profits which can be mainly attributed to Google and its partners. Some examples of companies on the partners list are MTV, Paramount, and Warner Brothers. Google has helped BitTorrent by indexing torrent sites and storing them in its huge databases. From there on when you search for a torrent the Googlebot can retrieve these search results in mere seconds. The bulk of the income BitTorrent generates is due to advertising. The ads are placed on heavy traffic torrent sites that receive millions of hits daily. A percentage of the income generated from ads is then given back to BitTorrent. In short even though file sharing is widely illegal BitTorrent is able to make money by Google looking the other way.

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This article is about Apple's release of its iPad video during the Superbowl. With all other previous videos, Apple kept a very tight control and didn't allow the videos to be posted on any other website besides their own. With the iPad, they went for a different strategy and posted the video in about 100 different places including YouTube. This strategy of using viral marketing was a huge success and the video became the second most viewed video. The article also explores the top 10 videos in the past week.

View the full article here.

Facebook users should be wary of any e-mails they receive advising that their account has been reset and asking for their password. This recent attack on Facebook users is potentially very damaging as it steals your passwords just by clicking on the link. Once the phishing agent is installed, it can actually access any username and password entered on your computer or mobile device.

This is just one of the weekly attacks on Facebook users, who are very appealing to hackers considering there are 400 million users worldwide. Security software vendor McAfee recommends installing their latest version of antivirus protection and never clicking on a link in an unsolicited email no matter how authentic it looks. They don't see an end to these attacks in sight.

Full story here

A study of 1,000 online users shows the responses of those younger/older than age 25 and their experiences with Facebook and Twitter. Almost half of the responders admitted to checking their Fbook or Twitter during the night or as soon as they wake up in the morning. Also a factor, Iphones. When asked if users check Fbook or Twitter before they leave their bed, 28% of Iphone users responded with 'yes,' which is a 10% increase over those less than age 25 and a 20% increase over those who are older than 25.

This article is about how the website Digg has created a successful business model that has allowed them to make revenue. Digg is a social news site where people share content that they have discovered on the internet and other users comment and vote on the post. Digg was faced with the challenge of making a profit until they created Digg Ads in October of 2009. Digg Ads is a system where advertisers submit or sponsor content that goes along with the look and feel of the Digg site. Now after five months, Digg Ads are making up 25%-30% of the company's overall revenue. Another 10% of the company's revenue is generated from other ads that are located in the standard advertising spots on the site. This contributed to the company's success of doubling their revenue and becoming profitable in 2009.

Check out the article here.

Teachers at schools such as the University of Texas and Purdue are using Twitter to get their lecture classes more involved. When class sizes are large, less people seem to participate. Twitter is changing that. Instead of the teacher standing in front of a large lecture hall for 50 minutes, students are encouraged to supplement the discussion with Tweets from their laptops or cell phones. The screen will update live for the teacher to address and talk about further.

An interesting article about the popular Pandora radio. Since the initial creation of Pandora internet radio about 9 years ago the popularity of the user based radio station creator has seen massive growth in the number of users that use the service. About two years ago Pandora radio introduced a mobile version of there internet radio. In the past two years with the ever gowing popularity of smart phones and the inevitable future growth of smart phone pandora mobile has collected about 6million users for the mobile app. This growing popularity has intrigue many large companies to purchase add time or in a sense commercials that would be played to the user after so many songs. Another reason many companies are interested in working with Pandora is that its users play around with the service a lot, creating radio stations, rating songs which companies like target and best buy could look at to see what is popular with the general public and market to them accordingly. Another example of how these companies are advertising to users is Domino's, for example, puts up ads that urge people to call in for a pizza directly from their phones. Other companies are using coupons. Docker's offered a 20% discount if visitors went to the brand's site and entered the promotional code "Pandora."

Not only does this method create a high customer response to the adds retail companies can gain very valuable information from user inputs that they may use to market there product more effectively to them.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_22/b4133052597112.htm

Today, sealed documents in the copyright infringement lawsuit (Viacom vs. YouTube) were made public. YouTube's main defense against Viacom's attack is that Viacom secretly uploaded content to YouTube and publicly complained about it being there. Viacom also tried to buy YouTube a bunch of times, suggesting that the $1 billion lawsuit is an attempt to cash in after the fact.

If this is true, Viacom forced bad PR on YouTube with unethical tactics when they couldn't profit off of them initially in order to steal revenue.

This move is going to cause a backlash of rescinded goodwill against Viacom. The public hates unearthed schemes more than just about anything.