By Tom Simonite It’s not unusual to have user profiles on multiple social networks, or even separate accounts on sites like Twitter–one for work and one for play. But Kyumin Lee at Texas A&M University has 60 Twitter accounts, and not because he’s popular. Lee’s accounts are “honeypots,” designed to attract the attention of the spammers that increasingly use ...

Big-name companies increasingly recognize the importance of discussions about their products on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. But keeping track of so many conversations in real-time is a daunting challenge. A startup called Viralheat, based in San Jose, CA, has launched an analytics package designed to allow in-depth analysis of the tenor of this back and forth. The company hopes ...

In the 1960s, families gathered in the living room to watch Bonanza. In the 1980s, friends met at the water cooler to speculate about who shot J.R. In 2010, mom watches HGTV in the bedroom, dad cheers for the Longhorns in the living room, and the kids laugh at the new episode of Glee on Hulu.com in the study. In an effort to “make TV social again” and to bring even far-flung family members ...

Are you ready to share with the world select bits and pieces of your life, 140 characters (or less) at a time? I suspected as much. This means that you’re ready to get started with Twitter, the microblogging service that’s taking the online world by storm. In this chapter you begin, appropriately enough, at the beginning by learning how to set up and sign in to a Twitter account. Even if you’ve ...

Facebook’s new personalized usernames and URLs could be a boost to online marketers, but is it a lost opportunity for the social networking site? One minute after the stroke of midnight on Saturday could usher in a virtual land grab for vanity URLs on Facebook, with the social networking site poised to enable members to create usernames for personalized online addresses. Currently, the URL for ...