All Things Digital

Skip to main content.

Voices

Voices

from other Web sites

Friday, September 18, 2009

Viral Loop: What Are Your Facebook Friends Worth?

Adam Penenberg

Feel guilty whiling away hours on Facebook? Now you can tell yourself it’s worth something–to Facebook.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Understanding Users of Social Networks

Sean Silverthorne

If the ongoing social networking revolution has you scratching your head and asking, “Why do people spend time on this?” and “How can my company benefit from the social network revolution?” you’ve got a lot in common with Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Friday, April 10, 2009

The Stream

Nicholas G. Carr

“Controlling the stream” is not just one of the major life-challenges facing elderly gentlemen; it is the center of industrial competition on the realtime social network that we once termed “Web 2.0.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Social Media Networks Are Music’s Curse and Salvation

Eliot Van Buskirk

In the golden age of the record album, friends would gather around the hi-fi system to share the latest music, most of them not paying a cent.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Friday, March 27, 2009

Micro Disruption Theory and the Social Effect

Brian Solis

Relationships are so much more than the mere act of following or friending someone on Twitter or any social network for that matter. It’s the balladry of transcending online connections into real world relationships. It’s the cadence of interaction and the poetry of conversations that empower the human network and the escalation of the Social Economy.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Friday, December 12, 2008

Virtual Goods Bubble Looming?

Dave Rosenberg

The buying and selling of virtual goods is an extremely nascent market that seems to be heating up dramatically. Almost daily there are announcements pronouncing large virtual good revenues on the horizon and new forms of payments and rewards for the intrepid user.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Griefers Attack Muslim Virtual World Already Awash in Users

Nate Anderson

The idea for a virtual world focused on the Islamic lifestyle began five years ago, when CEO Mohamed El-Fatatry moved from Dubai to Finland in order to attend university. Raised in Dubai, El-Fatatry wanted wider horizons and a chance to see more of life.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

12 Great Tales of De-Friending

David Spark

De-friending has always been awkward. Social networks offer one click “remove a friend” options, but it still doesn’t make the decision any easier.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power

David Carr

In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face. Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Monday, October 13, 2008

The Bell Now Tolls for Social Networks

Kevin Kelleher

I blame David Hasselhoff.
Everything was going fine for the Web–the financial world had been unwinding its overleveraged excesses for nearly a year with nary a ripple into Silicon Valley–until the launch of HoffSpace, a social network revolving around the oogachaka-ing, burger-wagging actor.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Monday, August 18, 2008

Meet Ivy Bean–The World’s Oldest Facebooker, Age 102

Clare Bates

Ivy Bean is a great-grandmother with a difference. At 102 years old she has joined the social-networking revolution and become the oldest person on Facebook.
The former mill worker, who was born in Bradford in 1905, showed an interest in the Web site after hearing care workers at her home talk about the phenomenon.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Friday, June 6, 2008

Plurk “Overlord” Loses Control of His Own Blog Hype

Melissa Gira Grant

The best thing with which to mock a company that shouldn’t exist is a company that doesn’t actually exist. And San Francisco’s Internet hipsters won’t just snicker about your start-up behind your back; they’ll do it where your vanity Google Blog Alerts will find it. Plurk is only the latest target–a start-up that lets users post short updates to the Web, as Twitter does, but adds a timeline. Plurk’s faux nemesis: Pheltup, “the first social network that not only tells you WHO is doing WHAT; but also WHY.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Is Facebook on the Way Down? Depends on Who You Ask

Vasanth Sridharan

There are plenty of folks waiting for concrete evidence that Facebook fatigue has set in. So each new data point offers up a new opportunity to prove that college kids, or grown-ups, or core users, or casual users, or whoever, have gotten bored with the social network. This year we’ve already seen drops in the site’s traffic from December through February, a move we chalked up to seasonal affective disorder.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Monday, April 28, 2008

House Set to Grill Military on “Human Terrain,” Social Network War

Noah Shachtman

The House is set for hearings on one of the hottest–and most contentious–topics in Pentagon research today.

Every arm of the Pentagon’s vast research complex is scrambling to figure out how to turn social and cultural networks into military advantage. Social scientists are being embedded in combat brigades, to explore Iraq and Afghanistan’s “human terrain.” Computer labs back at home are trying to model foreign cultures like the weather and predict the next epicenter of unrest. But all of these projects are loaded with controversy. One of the biggest academic groups in social science has condemned the Human Terrain System program as unethical; prominent researchers and officers think the prediction project is pie-in-the-sky, at best.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Thursday, April 17, 2008

How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It

Glenn Derene

Search is dead. Or at least that’s the opinion of one tuned-in venture capitalist I’ve been getting to know this year. We were recently discussing the drawn-out Microsoft-Yahoo-Google showdown and its larger implications when my fellow futurist issued his bold statement as a sort of summary dismissal of the whole multibillion-dollar battle. In his opinion, Silicon Valley’s Big Three are fighting over the scraps of the last decade of innovation while there’s a sea change taking place in the way people use the Internet–one that may leave the Web’s biggest players holding all the cards to a game nobody wants to buy into anymore.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Latest Videos

More Videos »

About Voices

This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."

We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.

The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.

That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.

So here is exactly what we do:

Read more »

About the Site

Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.

Read more »