Here are some of the most intriguing stats from LinkedIn, our popular professional networking site:

56% of LinkedIn’s users are outside of the United States. LinkedIn is experiencing its fastest growth internationally.
 
LinkedIn’s fastest-growing country is Brazil, with 428% growth year-over-year. Brazil is followed by Mexico, India and France.
 
The height of LinkedIn activity happens during the workday, peaking at around noon. Mobile usage, on the other hand, typically peaks around 8:00 p.m.
 
There are almost 1 million teachers on LinkedIn; 20% of the site’s users work in the service sector, while 9% work in finance and another 9% are in the high-tech industry.
 
For most of its 7-plus years of existence, LinkedIn has dominated its niche of social business users. The result is a valuation nearing $3 billion and 5.5 billion monthly pageviews.  LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s has a reason to smile !

Interesting Infographic:

Courtesy: Linkedin

End of Digital Life after our Physical Life

In the future, we will invariably die two deaths: The first will be physical and the second, and potentially more noticeable death will be digital (Facebook memorializing, stagnant Twitter accounts, lost passwords). Just recently, Twitter established a policy to handle accounts after the death of a user. Family members and close friends can now petition for the removal of a loved one’s account, after filing the right paperwork.

According to the new policy page, requests must be sent to the site along with:

1. Your full name, contact information (including e-mail address), and your relationship to the deceased user.

2. The username of the Twitter account, or a link to the profile page of the Twitter account.

3. A link to a public obituary or news article

If the paperwork checks out, Twitter can opt to either delete a deceased user’s account, or create an archive of the user’s tweets for family members. Similarly, Facebook’s deceased user policy, which was put in place in October, includes an option to deactivate. Alternatively, the policy also offers to keep the account open as a digital memorial, meaning that the user’s profile is still visible (only) to friends, though all status updates and contact information have been removed.

Jeremy Toeman, who is the CEO and founder of Legacy Locker–a site that acts as a digital safe  for things like Web site log-ins, and messages to family members that can be accessed after a person dies–thinks Facebook’s relationship requirements just aren’t good enough. In a post on Legacy Locker’s company blog Toeman notes:

“This policy lacks the concept of desired intent. What if an individual wanted their Twitter stream archived (and not just by the Library of Congress)? What if another user wanted it wiped out (a challenge with any service, we acknowledge) completely? What about any situation wherein the desires of the user who dies are in conflict with those who support them, or a conflict within the surviving family members?”

Facebook will not just give your next-of-kin access.  They clearly state that it’s against their Privacy Policy to do so.   Furthermore, the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act prevents the disclosure of stored communications unless there is a court order.  This means litigation.

So, with these 2 lives, Physical and Digital, time has come when we would be required to have the formalities to end the digital life !!You never know, maybe we would soon have e-will (to pass the digital estates) like Adsense revenues, Followers, Subscribers and Fans to be transfered to someone, mentioned in the will.

eLearning through YouTube and Free !

Few weeks back one of my close friend Navin shared this interesting story of an One Many Army who has started a unique way to teach millions of people or students through the medium of YouTube channel, and that too totally FREE !

His name is Salman Khan and google his name to know more about his ‘Khan Academy‘

Check out this video to learn more …

Express your views…

World around Twitter – sending multiple DMs

Direct messages (DM) are like private tweets that can be sent to one Twitter user at a time and also only to those users who are following you. It is quite similar to sending emails. Once a direct message is sent, it will not be available for public viewing, the tweet pops up in the Tweet user inbox. The sender can see that in the sent items.

However, the bigggest limitation of sending DMs through twitter is that tweets are restricted to only single user. Additionally, Twitter does not allow to send direct messages to people who don’t follow you.

But now you can send direct messages to multiple users with TweetGuru MultiDM web service/application.

To send direct messages to multiple users, you can log in to TweetGuru.com using your Twitter account details. TweetGuru is nothing but an application based on twitter. Grant access to Tweetguru to connect to your Twitter account. Again, TweetGuru is fully compatible with your mobile browsers as well.

Aha ! From your iPhone or Blackberry, you can send replies for the birthday wishes that you have received with Direct Messages. But, here again there is a limitation and that is the multiple DMs can be sent to not more than 12 users at a time.

Go ahead and begin sending DMs now to more than one tweet user…. for over enthusiastic Twitter users, you can try ScreenTweet.com for a range of image, video based tweeting !

What a digital age we are now into… interesting ? amazing !  Yes… it is but there are questions and thoughts around it as well which in others words can be put as concerns as well.

Most of us have been growing with the computing evolution in terms of social media way, as we have first learnt about ‘email account’ and what it does and slowly adopted emails as part of our daily life like other daily activities. Email has been working fine to express all our eMotions in the electronic way, official communication became blessed with the emailing stuff and we almost made the retirement of the postal services.

And then … we were still not satisfied maybe with long, boring emails to express our needs. As the mantra today with almost every product or service is ‘Do More with Less’, we started playing with this and Jack Dorsey translated this idea into action by creating ‘Twitter’.

Cool … now we have learnt rephrasing our expressions internally to produce it with a ‘Limited Edition’ of only 140 characters. Wow … they say Life is short and now expressions are shorter and gosh… don’t know what is waiting for us when we become smarter.

We need to think and express ourselves with character limitations when we need to be social in the internet domain. Forget about the character limitation in the text box to enter but also our ears and mind will get tuned to listen and understand the first 140 or shorter characters that you say or write.

Folks, we are lucky that in 2010 we still have 140 words but be prepared to do (express) the same maybe in next few years with 100, 80 or 60 character limitations in gradual way.

With the addiction to get hooked onto the social networking services, a person is now incomplete if he/she is does not maintain a Facebook, twitter or Linkedin profile. I met my neighbor the other day, in line with our social networking bondage, she asked me ‘is everything okay … as I don’t see you tweeting these days ?”

So, if you find a friend of yours who is not doing the tweets, posts, commenting on the wall, scraps etc for some days spare some minutes out of your hectic life to give him/her a buzz (not again restricting to your mobile plan of pulse/minute etc) or visit him/her to say ‘hey! How are you?” and carry on with the conversation beyond any expressive limitation.

Facebook launches Facebook Lite

Facebook goes on diet with its new version, the Facebook Lite. It is a simpler, lighter, cleaner, crispier and faster Facebook. This step by Facebook,  is seen as a milestone to take a leading edge in the sphere of real-time streaming web. The beta version is launched for specific regions like US and India, where the traffic of people joining this social networking site is heavy.

 Why Facebook Lite ?

• The main focus of the Lite version is writing on walls, sending messages, viewing and posting photos and videos, the crux of a social networking site.
• Facebook classic imbibes a whole set of versatile third-party applications making it richer and heavier whereas we find most of these applications missing in Lite, making it easier to load in a slower internet connection.
• Newer version is specifically targeted for the new users who might find the older version overwhelming with too much of information on a single page.

The changes in Facebook lite:

• The navigation and info buttons on the left of the page, highlights on the right is missing.
• There is no requests other than suggested friends and the friends request.
• The friends tab on the facebook tab is replaced by events tab that is meant for seeing and creating events.
• Another add-on is ‘View Top Stories’ instead of viewing all the post listed in order.
• Updates appear real-time along the bottom of the page, this is something worth experiencing.
• As mentioned earlier, most of the third-party applications are taken away and there is no tool bar and chat available in bottom as well.

This is considered as twitter-like site with no word count limit in posting a message and in comment. Also, a normal facebook page has a size of 778 KB while a page of facebook Lite weighs only 113 KB. Though this depends on the photos and videos a profile has.

A lot of users who enjoyed the various games and quizzes coupled with Facebook Classic might not be very enthusiastic about it.

Check out http://lite.facebook.com/ to have hands-on the newer Facebook and see if you are one of the beta testers!! Users who don’t have an access to Facebook Lite will be automatically linked to Facebook Classic.

This definitely is going to be a hit among folks who love speed. Who doesn’t?

Social Networking Site Facebook gets more popular with Live Streaming

Be it the funeral procession of the King of Pops or Obama’s oath taking ceremony, millions of people tuned in online to catch a glimpse to be sad or happy and just to be a part of these great occasions. Live streaming is the most popular way to participate in these moments of life.

It is here, that people realized the need of live streaming in social networking site. The live stream box launched by Facebook brings in streaming video and chats to any site that will need it. This live streaming application from facebook called Justin.tv not only helps you watch it but allows for broadcasting as well.

This live streaming application in Facebook is minimalist and quite straightforward. This provides with a live stream, can broadcast information and most importantly users can experience real time live chat by integrating the application of Justin.tv with live streaming chat box of facebook.

The launch of this application is pitted against its adversary Ustream. However, Ustream requires an application to run live streaming while Justin.tv application in Facebook is open to all.

So, in the battle of dominating Facebook, we need to check out who wins it – Ustream or Justin.tv