Were You Affected by the Facebook Outage? by Erik Sass

Western civilization collapsed briefly yesterday when Facebook became unavailable to many users for periods of up to several hours. The outage, which the company hasn't deigned to explain, enforced an unexpected period of social media "cold turkey" similar to recent "no social media" experiments conducted by colleges -- albeit unannounced and obviously on a much larger scale. ...Read the whole story

Controversies Swirl Over Purity Of Social Games, Microsoft's Jab At 'Nerds' by Shankar Gupta

Earlier this month, Microsoft hosted several press events to introduce its Kinect motion control product to fashion and lifestyle press and bloggers, aiming squarely at the casual set to sell its $200 competitor to Nintendo's profitable domination of the casual console market. The message Microsoft wanted to send was that Kinect was for the cool kids, and decidedly not its core gamer audience. ...More

  • The HuffPo's Hiring of NYT's Peter Goodman Is More Significant Than You Think by Catharine P. Taylor

    If you aren't in journalism, you may have no idea how big this is: but it's huge, absolutely huge that The New York Times' economics reporter Peter Goodman is joining the Huffington Post, in a shift that was announced yesterday. Trust me, in the macro-sense of the word, this is much more important than the news that Howard Fineman just left the decimated Newsweek for the HuffPo. The Goodman shift is the more important move of the two because of why Goodman says he's leaving. And it gets to the heart of how social media has changed the news busin ...More