Media Socialist is a blog about, and a testing ground for, social media online.

That means we're gluttons for blogs, social networks, social bookmarks, wikis, user-generated video, photo-sharing, and everything Web 2.0.

Archive for December, 2008

Update: Angry Customers Online Force a Price Change

Thursday, December 18th, 2008 by Griffin Hammond

Intuit, the company behind TurboTax software, has removed a tax filing fee, after customers protested online. Customers flocked to Amazon to penalize the product with one-star ratings, responding to a price hike and a contentious $10-per-tax-return fee. It looks like the price has fallen $5, and according to a press release, ...

One-star reviews flood Amazon in protest

Thursday, December 11th, 2008 by Griffin Hammond

Social media inherently gives power to the community, and new social structures like Facebook and Twitter are revolutionizing the way people fight against the injustices of their world. But in the last couple weeks, the biggest groundswells have come out of a much older social media system: product reviews. Search "Grand Theft ...

Google Adds Social Media Avenue to Search

Thursday, December 4th, 2008 by Griffin Hammond

On the same day Google announced their virtual world, Lively, would shut down at the end of the year, they unveiled their latest search engine technology - SearchWiki. Not a fully public, editable wiki in the sense of Wikipedia, the Google Blog reports that SearchWiki is "a way for you ...

New Facebook Video Lights Up the World

Thursday, December 4th, 2008 by Griffin Hammond

The Facebook Blog reports one of the fruits of their most recent "Hackathon" (an all-night coding extravaganza) is a cool visualization system that displays all the interactions between users on Facebook. Check out their nifty demo video to see what "Palatir" is all about.

Twitter: Perfect for your secrets

Thursday, December 4th, 2008 by Griffin Hammond

Jake and Amir, my favorite online comedy duo, produced a video called "Twitter," giving me the perfect excuse to share their unique brand of humor on this blog. Read Amir's Twitter page here: "jakeandamir" In case you're unfamiliar with Twitter, it's not "an online place that you keep your secrets." In fact, ...