“Maybe it’s because I pinned it to my Pinterest board,” commented Chuck Titone, iMedia’s VP of Business Development and COO.

Once introduced to the concept of Pinterest, suddenly I was reading about it everywhere. From a Facebook friend who claimed to be addicted to it, to a business colleague who was polling her circle to find out who was using it, to this morning, when my LinkedIn “5 things you need to know in the news this week” featured it in three of the five links provided.

So what is Pinterest, anyway? According to Jason Falls of Entrepreneur:

Pinterest allows you to organize images — maybe pretty sunrises or wines you’ve tasted — into boards for specific categories. When you “pin” something new, your followers will see it. They can like, comment or re-pin it to their boards. Like Facebook content, your Pinterest pins can go viral.

The design is part of the appeal.  It fills the screen, organizes images and content by interest, and breaks the mold of reverse chronology that is used by Twitter and Facebook. “It’s almost like window-shopping mode,” Mashable’s Sara Kessler quotes Kohi Vinh, former director for NYTimes.com.  Kessler says:

Pinterest, as far as the designers Mashable spoke with could remember, was the first site to take the idea to mainstream success. It showed how the design could solve certain challenges eloquently and how the traditional reverse chronology layout could be broken without scaring users away. In fact, it was attracting them in invitation-only droves.

The site is a runaway success. TechCrunch’s Josh Constine writes that “Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment” and cites a comScore survey that shows that “Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history.”

The demographics of the site are interesting. This time, the tech savvy users on either coast are not the ones leading the charge. Instead, most of the users are now found in East South Central and West North Central States, such as Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Mississippi, and most users are “18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland.”

Constine further cites comScore by saying: “the average Pinterest user spend 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook.”

Entrepreneur’s article talks about how small businesses can capitalize on Pinterest to post images of products or services and link users back to their site. Of course, they also quickly follow that advice with the social media maxim that any strategy that is wholly promotional will backfire – so that marketers who are using Pinterest need to be subtle enough to include images and content from other sources, not just their own site.

Yet, even in the throes of this period of wild expansion and seemingly limitless possibility, there has been one notable bump in Pinterest’s path. According to BusinessWeek, Pinterest is under fire from some of its users for “decisions that put their interests ahead of their users and a lack of disclosure about what was going on behind the scenes or under the hood of their services.”  Specifically, “Since popular posts can drive a lot of traffic to websites that sell these products, Pinterest has been adding affiliate links that generate revenue for the site when users click on them.”

While Pinterest’s proponents argue that “this behavior makes a huge amount of sense for Pinterest, since it is providing a free service and needs to generate revenue somehow,” users of the application do feel that their trust has been violated. Pinterest will need to regain that trust and to learn that transparency is a vital part of any social media application.

To do this, clients look to companies like Tradeweb. And to create the online presence that showcases these capabilities, Tradeweb, a company that operates many of the world’s leading fixed income and derivatives markets, creating more efficient ways to trade, looked to iMedia.

Tradeweb’s newly launched website features a uniquely dynamic homepage with a rotating background and real-time market information. Full-length pull-down menus make it easy for site visitors to find precisely what they are looking for and internal pages are organized in user friendly tabular fashion. Interior pages take full advantage of Ektron Pagebuilder technology, utilizing widgets that allow site editors to include exactly the right content on every page, including an array of market-fed features, related links and company news, economic calendars, blog teasers, and more.  And the site was coded using Ektron’s multilingual support, so that additional languages can be added in the future, along with the current sites in English and Japanese.

Visit http://www.tradeweb.com to view the new site.

Zuckerberg, in a letter attached to Facebook’s regulatory filings, outlined how the “Hacker Way” helps the company embody their five core values: “focus on impact, move fast, be bold, be open and build social value.” His letter is being compared in the press to what Andy Greenberg in Forbes calls Google’s “‘Don’t Be Evil’ mantra” written by Larry Page and Sergy Brin, as well as the letters written by other tech firms. As CNNMoney explains:

It’s become common for tech entrepreneurs to include these kinds of missives in their IPO filings. The documents are half-warning, half-plea: ‘Hey shareholders, here’s the culture you’re about to buy into. Please don’t break it.’

CNNMoney picks up on the term “mantra” as well, when quoting Zuckerberg’s letter: “There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: ‘Code wins arguments.’” The article continues: “It’s a line that captures the spirit of the company’s engineering-driven culture, where all-night coding sessions and “hackathons” are popular.”

In his article in Venture Beat, “How the ‘The Hacker  Way’ helped propel Facebook to market dominance,” Dylan Tweney says that Zuckerberg’s including this statement in his letter is “a sign of how deeply the hacker ethos has transformed the way the tech industry works.” He pulls out some of the main points from Zuckerberg’s letter into bullet points:

• “Done is better than perfect.”
•  “Code wins arguments.”
•  “Move fast and break things.”
•  “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.”

Zuckerberg’s so-called meritocracy, where ideas win out over office politics and speed is considered more important than completeness, is criticized by some who note that Zuckerberg will continue to hold the majority share in the company. Some pundits – including Bloomberg’s Douglas MacMillian – even claim that his level of control may constitute the greatest danger to the success of a public company. Others point out that “The Hacker Way” has already resulted in user dissatisfaction in changes to the interface and privacy concerns.

Zuckerberg’s entire letter has been reprinted by several media outlets. Read it on Bloomberg here.

Ever since the Timeline was made available worldwide, back in mid-December, users have been vocal about their complaints. A quick Facebook search on “Facebook Timeline” brings up dozens of “I Hate the Facebook Timeline” groups, housed, ironically enough, on Facebook itself. The numbers of these hater groups range from the several thousands to a mere handful, but clearly there’s a lot of dissatisfaction out there. This is borne out in Computer World’s “Facebook Timeline – Your Complete Guide,” which cited that, in a poll of more than 800 people, “88% responded that they dislike the new profile design.”

(Though, to be fair, there were plenty of vocal haters with any change to the Facebook interface – a whole lot of people  simply don’t appreciate change, a fact most application and social media developers tend to willfully ignore.)

Rebecca Greenfield’s article, which appeared in The Atlantic Wire on December 15, 2011, “Everything You’ll Hate About the New Facebook Timeline” was quick to list many of Timeline’s negatives: too many photos, nothing is in the right order, too much work to set it up. Because her piece was published early on, Ms. Greenfield missed one major complaint of Facebook users who hopped on the opportunity to “try it out” before the Timeline became mandatory – once you did, there was no reset button to go back to the regular profile.

The lack of privacy is among the top complaints of users – particularly with the introduction of some 60 new “frictionless” apps, developed to publicize more of the users’ activities to their friends. According to the Huffington Post’s article, “Facebook Timeline Becoming Mandatory for All Users:”

‘Frictionless’ apps are so named because they do not require the user to take any action in order for the app to share its information to Facebook — the sharing occurs automatically and instantaneously after you give the app permission to do so.” For example, if the user reads a story via the Washington Post’s social app, and has granted that app access to the Timeline, that story will appear in the user’s news ticker and will be posted to his or her Timeline for friends to see.

The article continues by stating that users should avail themselves of the new privacy settings to restrict their sharing by these new apps. And with more employers using social networks such as Facebook to locate employees – nearly 90%, according to a Forbes article, “More Employers Using Social Media to Hunt for Talent” – this is undoubtedly an important step to take.

There are a lot of articles out there that give you good advice about how to set up your now-inevitable Facebook Timeline. Some of the good ones are the aforementioned Computer World “Facebook Timeline – Your Complete Guide,” Mashable’s “Facebook Timeline: The Complete Guide,” Boston.com’s step-by-step slideshow, “Take the time to curate Facebook Timeline,” and, of course, Facebook’s own, “Introducing Timeline.”

And, one last note. As a “curator” (Facebook’s term, not mine) of a number of brand pages, I wonder at the decision to hold off on using the Timeline on pages. According to Mashable’s Todd Wasserman:

The social networking giant isn’t letting brands create Timeline pages just yet and hasn’t given a date on when that will happen. “We are currently focused on Timeline for individuals and will consider how to make consistent experiences for Pages,” says a Facebook rep, “but we have nothing to announce at this time.”

In his article, “No Timeline Pages for Brands Yet, Facebook Says,” Wasserman shows several examples of how the Facebook timeline would transform brand pages, created by brand agencies. Clearly, this is one opportunity that page “curators” will be delighted to adopt – and it’s odd that Facebook is so focused on the personal that they have lost sight of a perfect opportunity to gain more “likes.”

Jagdish has worked on a wide variety of development projects throughout his career. Most recently, he created the sophisticated web spidering tools. He also developed a Link Building Database tool to help SEO experts manage their targets and a blog search engine that reports and analyzes daily activity in the blogosphere.

When not working on a project or keeping an eye on technical blogs, Jagdish loves to play cricket and basketball. He is also an avid sports fan, especially of the NBA’s Lakers and the NFL’s Giants, and particularly enjoys watching their games with his four year-old son.

The entire team is delighted to welcome Jagdish to iMedia!

The Mail Online summarized these results at the top of their article, including:

• 18 senators withdraw support for controversial bills
• Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg opposes censorship law
• And says internet is ‘powerful tool for creating open and connected world’
• 7,000 sites across the net joined protest
• Founder Jimmy Wales calls the strike an ‘extraordinary action’
• Hollywood movie moguls stop donations for Obama re-election campaign
• Studio chiefs’ move in protest against his ‘lack of support’ for the two bills
• Twitter exposes ‘morons’ who didn’t know why Wikipedia was shut down

The Mail also publshed a comprehensive list of some of the major sites that were either entirely blacked out, such as Wikipedia and Reddit, or which featured the protest on their live pages, including Google’s black patch and WordPress’s homepage filled with “Censored Sites.”

According to Wikipedia, 162 million web users saw its protest and:

You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. Your voice was loud and strong. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet.

The National Post reported that, in light of the protest, major supporters of the bill were now backing away from it. Many of them blamed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for rushing the Senate version of the bill. Those who continued to support taking action against online piracy spoke of the need to change the legislation to address the protestors’ concerns.

The free online encyclopedia – powered by volunteer collaborators who write, edit, and fact check the articles – consists of 3,848,870 articles in English. And every one of these pages are going black on Wednesday at midnight Eastern Standard Time for 24 hours.

The reason is that Wikipedia is joining a protest against two Congressional bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The reason? According to The New York Times:

Opponents say several of the provisions in the legislation, including those that may force search engines and Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that offer or link to copyrighted material, would stifle innovation, enable censorship and tamper with the livelihood of businesses on the Internet.

Wikipedia won’t be protesting alone. Several other sites, including the user-generated news site Reddit and the technology and cultural blog Boing Boing, will be blacked out.  Some sites won’t shut down but will offer more subtle ways to oppose the bills – such as WordPress, a blogging platform, that will supply its users with a widget to support the protest.

Other Internet companies, such as Facebook or Google, have not yet said if they will participate. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, has tweeted: “Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.” When challenged, said the BBC, Mr. Costolo clarified that his tweet was not intended to be a “value judgment.”

According to the Washington Post blog, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, calls the move “a community decision.” The protest, he says, hopes “to draw attention to language in SOPA that…is too broad and could hurt free speech and innovation.” Wales is also quoted in BBC News as saying: “Proponents of SOPA have characterized the opposition as being people who want to enable piracy or defend piracy. But that’s not really the point. The point is the bill is so over broad and so badly written that it’s going to impact all kinds of things that…don’t have anything to do with stopping piracy.”

Even the White House has weighed in on the issue. The White House issued a statement that showed their concerns with the bill, saying:

While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet.

The Wikimedia statement speaks to the inevitable criticism that this may be perceived as abandoning Wiki’s vaunted neutrality:  “We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them. But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not.”

It’s fairly clear that, of all the organizations taking part in the protest, Wikipedia probably will reach the most people. In the New York Times interview, Jimmy Wales estimated that the blackout could reach as many as one million people, who will be encouraged to make their own voices heard. He claims that the technology industry, which has been largely inactive in terms of lobbying Washington, is in the midst of changing, citing Arab Spring for showing people how technology can mobilize like-minded individuals and groups.

So, no Wikipedia tomorrow. Gotta do some research? As Jimmy Wales tweeted to students who rely on the site: “Do your homework early.”

Google’s Inside Search Page explains what you get with the new search:

Search has always brought you information from across the web. Now, search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends. When signed in with Google+, you’ll find personal results and profiles of people you know or follow. You can even expand your world by discovering people related to your search.

In other words, this is search with “a little help from your friends.”

Google includes an extraordinary little video to show you how your personal results will change:

And they explain – several times – that these results are personal and private: “No one else will see your private content in their results unless you’ve shared it with them.”  In “Google Merges Search and Google+ Into Social Media Juggernaut,” Lance Ulanoff of Mashable calls this “a significant blurring of the line between the web as we know it and the web as you and your Circles of friends know it.” But he also points out that Google has been careful to annotate personal posts with a silhouetted figure, so that users can tell the difference between “authoritative results” and posts you or your friends have created.

But the Associated Press report  – which was picked up by ABC News, the Washington Post, and Newsday, among other media outlets, introduces some caveats:

Facebook and Twitter pose a threat to Google because they don’t allow Google’s search engine to log the avalanche of photos, links and observations tumbling through those services. That’s troublesome to Google because its search engine could become less useful if its system can’t analyze what people are signaling is important to them so those preferences can be factoring into the results.

In fact, AP says, Google is “tackling that challenge” with the new “Search, Plus Your World.” AP points out that Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, was already mining personal data including Facebook information since May. Yet Google’s enormous user base gives it a tremendous advantage:

Google’s emphasis on more personal results figures to attract more attention because its search engine is so dominant. It handles about two-thirds of the Internet search requests made in the U.S. while Bing processes less than one-third, including the activity that it comes through a partnership with Yahoo Inc.

While Google hopes that you will find this inclusion of personal search results – including photos from your friends, content from your Google+ circles, Profiles in search, and related people and pages, an attractive and useful addition to search, AP points out that “the changes could also spook some people as they realize how much information is being compiled about them.”  And Ulanoff concludes his piece by wondering: “Is it time for Facebook to finally launch that fabled Facebook Search Engine?”

Oh, and by the way, if, like me, you’re not seeing personal results when you go to search on either Google or Google+ , Google says: “Don’t worry. We’re rolling the feature out over the next few days.”

And on that note, just as we did last year in that holiday week between Christmas and the new year, we’ve come up with some online predictions that encompass applications and social networks, digital media and mobile. Here’s what we think is coming up in the next year:

• HTML5 will be everywhere, providing a platform that allows media rich applications to be displayed across any device with a modern web browser. Say goodnight, Flash.
• The battle for control of your home media will continue to heat up, with traditional cable providers, TV manufacturers and digital media providers all vying to become the dominant player.  Traditional cable services will roll out home media servers which will stream media to all your WIFI enabled devices, including TVs, tablets, smartphones and laptops.  TV manufacturers will aggressively add new channels and services to their internet-ready TVs and blue ray players.  And digital media devices (Google TV, Apple TV, Roku, etc.) will aggressively market their devices to try and build market share.
• Watching movies on smartphones while driving will cause as many car accidents as texting or talking on a mobile phone.
• The successful holiday sales of Amazon’s Kindle Fire will begin a price war for tablets.  Look for a major player (HTC, Google, etc) to launch a full featured Android-based tablet priced well below the iPad.
• Google will build a tablet that will surpass or at least compete with the iPad.
• RIM/Blackberry will not survive the year, most likely getting acquired by another equipment manufacturer.
• Image sharing will create broader and deeper social networks based on design and aesthetics (such as pintrest and instagram). Dually, this will spark controversy based on ownership and creative control over personal work.
•  The Facebook Timeline is going to be the straw that nearly breaks Facebook’s back.

Will we be right or wrong? Only time will tell. And on that note, we’d like to wish you all a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2012.

Our holiday experiment in giving back proved that the holiday spirit is alive and well. iMedia gained more than half our original number of Facebook friends in a matter of days as word about the vote spread and as our new friends encouraged their friends to “like” us and vote for a charity.

In addition, it was clear that FSMC, an organization located in our own Morris county, was  the early and consistent favorite. Word of mouth, especially amplified through Facebook and Twitter, favored the hyper-local choice.

In the coming year, look for more iMedia Facebook tabs reflecting our services, new offerings, and more. Don’t like us yet on Facebook? What are you waiting for?

And if you’d like to learn how to make Facebook tabs work for your organization or business, email us at info@imediainc.com.