Latest Post

Japanese people remain quite aloof when it comes to social networking websites and of those who do use them, hardly anyone is willing to reveal their photograph or even their first name, the Los Angles Times has reported.

On Mixi, Japan’s predominant online hangout, users have not only blocked their profiles to outsiders but many 20-somethings show themselves as 80-odd year old women. Mixi has around 15 million users and a large number of them follow this pattern.

YouTube is a very popular website, but users who opt for ‘Broadcast Yourself’ are rare. It is much more common for them to post videos of their pets. If websites such as Match.com are used, where the entire idea is to meet strangers, less than half of the members of Match.com in Japan are inclined to post their photographs. This is incredibly low when compared to the US where almost every member posts their photographs.

The scenario in Japan is much more similar to their real world where spontaneous exchanges of information are very uncommon, even in places like the jam-packed streets and trains of Tokyo, and the television news shows usually blur faces in the background to protect their privacy.

The person in charge of YouTube’s Japan site’s partner development, Tomoe Makino, has said:

“We cannot change the mindset of Japanese people. It’s the uniqueness of Japanese culture - anonymous works in Japan.”

If experts such as Catrina Fake are to be believed, social networking is still in its early stages and it will prove to be much more exciting in years to come. Fake is the co-founder of the pioneering photograph sharing website Flickr and has been into online communities and blogging since the 1990s. She sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005 in a multi million dollar deal.

She told CNN that it is not some passing fashion but is going to stay. She said:

“Online sociality is really the nature of the Internet. The first thing that made people love the Internet was instant messaging, email and all the communication tools.  I have read that 25% of all Internet traffic is social networking, and the reason is that people have an incredibly powerful desire to communicate with each other, and that will never go away.”

Her belief stems comes from her observations and experience. She explains:

“I think there is a kind of over-connecting happening. People are starting to realise that having so many contacts and keeping on top of so many people’s lives is actually quite a lot of work. I think there is a trend.”

According to her, the rigid networks of friends are not the future of social networking but subtle social collaborations are.

“I think that in many ways the ‘explicit’ social networks are less powerful than the less-social networks.”

Networking website LinkedIn has made some modifications to its native iPhone application. An announcement from them was as follows:

“This is a quick post to announce the fact that we have made additional changes to our native iPhone app to optimise its performance.”

Jerry Luk stated:

“You may have read some of my earlier posts on LinkedIn Mobile as well as the native iPhone app that we launched recently.”

The three enhancements made to the Native iPhone application of LinkedIn, which will significantly improve the user experience are:

1.    Faster loading for profiles as well as status updates
2.    Numerous stability and optimisation fixes
3.    Faster list scrolling

Here are the more important features users will be able to access on LinkedIn’s native iPhone application:

1.    Status: Broadcast your status to your professional network while you are on the road
2.    Address Book: Pull up relevant information on any of your key contacts as you travel
3.    Search: Saving search history/results by keywords, company, name and title
4.    Add: Invite colleagues and peers you meet at LinkedIn events
5.    Research: View public profiles of people you meet at conferences

All iPhone and iPod touch users who also happen to use the social bookmarking services provided by Delicious, can use Red Delicious to manage the service. Red Delicious is a new application that is available for download from the App Store for a little more than a pound.

Users will be able to see the bookmarks they have recently added as soon as they launch the application, which also features optimised bookmark fetching via Delicious. The application allows users to browse their tags and bundles, view the bookmarks that are most popular in the Delicious community and also their own bookmarks, even if they are offline.

Usernames and passwords are safe as the communication is safely handled via Secure Sockets Layer technology (SSL). Also, internet access is optimised by Red Delicious so that the battery drain is reduced as much as possible. Landscape orientation is also supported which makes it easier to read long bookmarks.
The requirements for Red Delicious are iPhones or iPod touch, which have iPhone 2.0 or competent software running on it.

YouTube has provided its users a “Video File Upload” page (beta), to let them upload multiple files together. It might be remembered that around 10 months ago they came out with new downloadable software that provided the same function but now, with the beta page, there is no need to download special software to do this. They tested this particular beta and now have introduced it to the general public.

It may not be a major development, considering simultaneous and multiple uploads of videos does happen already, but the number of users who do that are few. YouTube seems to banking on the fact that the service can be run without the need to download additional extensions in existing software.

This upload page is not the page set as default, however. The process to upload is very simple and the users have to just choose the files and the upload will begin automatically. Also, while the data is being transferred, users can attach descriptions, standard titles, categories, privacy options and tags. The number of videos allowed to be uploaded collectively is 10 (with the size limit being limited up to 1GB).