United Nations, New York. Photo by Mark Garten.

The United Nations Special Envoy for Malaria, Ray Chambers, announced today the formation of a Social Media Envoy group chartered with inspiring and activating social media audiences throughout the year in support of malaria control.  The Social Media Envoys are dedicated to utilizing their social profile to keep online and offline media audiences focused on the movement, milestones and resources required to achieve the Secretary-General's goal of providing all endemic African countries with malaria control interventions by the end of 2010.

I came across HootSuite Twitter client earlier this year, which is a simple web-based application for managing single or multiple Twitter profiles through one interface. This application does more than just tweeting outside Twitter. HootSuite, enables users to manage their profiles with multiple editors on each profile (if more than one), schedule tweets, track stats, RSS their content to submit into blogs and websites. The interface is built on AJAX, displaying vertical columns of a user's tweets timeline, with drag-and-drop functionality and embeddable columns.

Though, my personal favourite feature of HootSuite is its integrated Facebook, LinkedIn and Ping.fm status updates, which allows users to manage their various social profiles from one location, and to schedule updates in advance. In addition, the system allows users to update GTalk, Tumblr and several other social networks, which are particularly popular amongst businesses. In essence, HootSuite is more of a social media account management tool, which I think is very useful for entrepreneurs and business professionals and, indeed, marketers and sales executives who rely heavily on social media to engage with their audience. As of today, all of these features are available through HootSuite's new iPhone application that was unveiled yesterday by the developers (watch the video below for further details).

MSN Juku Home Page - http://club.msn.cn

Microsoft have released a beta edition of a new service in China called MSN Juku, a microblogging-style service based on Windows Live Messenger. The new service, developed by MSN China, has quite a different user interface to Twitter, though with very similar functionalities such as the 140-character user posts sent to an update screen. Unlike in Twitter, however, user's posts slowly scroll older posts to the right (a scrolling timeline).

Also, user posts are stacked top-to-bottom, as you would exepct from a microblog, only displaying the first few words of each post when they appear close together. These summarized posts expand to their full versions by simply hovering over them with the mouse. Additionally, MSN Juku automatically links members with their Live Messenger contact lists, also displaying updates from all contacts on the scrolling timeline.

Google Wave User Interface

In its official blog, Google released details of its online survey, which the company launched to get feedback from its Google Wave users about what they liked and disliked about its new real-time communication and collaboration platform.

In a statement by Aaron Cheang, User Experience Researcher for Google Wave, the company is thankful that people were willing to try out Google Wave in a host of different areas, including personal, business, government, education and not-for-profit. "We've been glad to see positive responses, especially since we're still in a limited preview and not quite ready to give accounts to everyone who has requested one," said Cheang.

According to the blog post, Google distributed the survey through email (to a random sample of those that volunteered to help), a link in their help center and a tweet. "While this may not be a completely representative sample of all Google Wave users, the results have been interesting to us, and we'd like to share them," continued Cheang.

twitter.com Home Page

Social networking and microblogging is still making its way into the enterprise. Many employers still see such online social media as Twitter as a "personal" tool and should not be used during working hours. I know this through many of my colleagues who work for larger enterprises and indeed others who own companies where microblogging is simply not part of their business agendas.

However, businesses of all sizes should not ignore the fact that Twitter use is up nearly 1,400 percent this year, according to the Nielsen Company, and Gartner predicts 80 percent of social software platforms will include enterprise microblogging as a standard feature by 2011. NewsGator, the company which helps enterprises and media companies leverage social computing solutions to deliver real business value, explores the business case for microblogging, the applicability of Twitter, and a framework for evaluating microblogging products through its latest whitepaper, "The Benefits of Microblogging in the Enterprise."

"Jump Seat," a new interactive Facebook game launched by Air New Zealand that tasks Facebook players with various missions and fast-paced adventures to be completed en route.

"Jump Seat" players can upload pictures to create their very own avatars as Air New Zealand Flight Attendants or First Officers. Once en route, players answer trivia questions, play mini games and complete onboard tasks. Each completed task or correct answer is rewarded with energy points - the faster the response, the more points, which unlocks new levels of the game.

Recruit Facebook friends to help fluff pillows for the lie-flat beds; recommend and refill New Zealand wine, a key component of the airline's world-class service; send fellow flight attendants gifts of energy points for a boost; and tag team to ensure all passengers have an excellent in-flight experience.

A new international study reveals that the use of social networking and collaborative applications for business purposes has skyrocketed in the last six month. According to the fourth Application Usage and Risk Report (Fall Edition 2009), increased adoption of Web-based applications poses new business and security risks that go far beyond potential productivity losses. Yet most companies still operate with outdated IT infrastructure and usage policies that may fail to protect them from such growing risks.

This report, published by Palo Alto Networks, analyses application usage on enterprise networks, highlighting the applications that are in use, as well as identifying emerging trends and discussing the associated business benefits and risks. This edition of the report summarizes traffic assessments performed between March and September 2009 in over 200 organizations worldwide that span markets including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, government, retail, and education.

Twitter has become the tool of choice for millions around the world to express and share their thoughts. It has given users a voice, and companies are listening. When users are frustrated with a product or a company's poor services, they storm to Twitter and tell the world about it. This is also the case with online media. If a web hosting company has issues, for example, you would hear about it on Twitter.

In other words, Twitter has become a discovery engine for service issues. But only if people effectively let the world know about those issues in the first place, according to Pingdom, a service that monitors the reliability of websites and services on the Internet.

Business.com unveiled today the results of its 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study. Based on insights from 2,948 professionals across North America, the study provides extensive information on how businesses and business people use social media in the workplace.

The survey was conducted online from August 11 to September 4, 2009, with 2,948 unique respondents from the United States or Canada currently using social media as part of their 'normal' work routine (e.g., read blogs, use Twitter to find business-related information, etc.) and/or work for a company involved in social media initiatives participated in the study.

In an announcement posted on Twitter's official blog, the company is revealed that they were putting the finishing touches on Twitter's new Lists feature, which allows users to create lists of specific interests or topics and group their tweets accordingly.

The blog post included a number of interesting examples, such as the @time list of funny people and the @BBC/radio1-1xtra list (BBC's radio hosts). This feature increases discovery and adds value in lots of ways to publishers, as well as groups and organizations, who use Twitter as part of their marketing efforts and staying in touch with their members and customers.

According to Griffith University, the social micro-blogging giant, Twitter, is being used by over 340 first-year journalism students at the university’s Nathan and Gold Coast campuses. Journalism lecturer, Dr Jacqui Ewart believes that Griffith University was the only Australian university to use the social network application this way.

“Another university used it last year in the course of students reporting an election, but I’ve not heard of any universities using it as a teaching tool like this,” Dr Ewart said. Students are using it as part of their assessment in the course News and Politics where they have to post six tweets for each of the news stories they write, reflecting on challenges experienced in the course of gathering and writing their stories and how they overcame those problems.

 A new study from conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that 19% of U.S. Internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. The company says these figures represent a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of Internet users said they use a status-update service.

The study shows that three groups of Internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of such activity: social network website users, those who connect to the Internet via mobile devices, and younger Internet users, under the age of 44.