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 the ‘Reviews’ Category


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New Facebook design with real-time news feed

Thursday, March 5th, 2009 by Kyle Welter

Once again, Mark Zuckerberg is rolling out another Facebook redesign.... and shockingly enough, it seems to mimmick Twitter even further! Announced today through the Facebook Blog, the new changes are quite extensive and are definitely the largest we've seen since the creation of the news feed. The first update is the creation ...

Top URL Shorteners

Thursday, February 12th, 2009 by Griffin Hammond

Any constant Twitter user knows the value of a URL shortener, because some of the most fascinating links don't conform to the 140-character restriction of many micro-blogging services. But some of the best URL shorteners are overshadowed by the titan, TinyURL. Below I've compiled a list of the nine most popular ...

Politics Remixed!

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 by Griffin Hammond

I apologize for going so long without a post. A new website, Remix America, has kept me busy. It's like YouTube for the political realm, but with some advanced features. You can either upload original video content, or remix other works. The site organizers have amassed a collection of contemporary and ...

2008 Olympics Embrace Online Video

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 by Nick Bodmer

This years Olympic events are, for the first time ever, being provided in full on the internet via NBC's website. This is truly great for someone like me, who in years past has had a hard time keeping pace with the Olympics. Every event. In full. High quality, and streamed right ...

A brief overview on the Facebook Redesign

Thursday, July 31st, 2008 by Kyle Welter

At 6:32 pm on July 21st, Facebook released the highly awaited Facebook redesign. As written on the official Facebook profile previews page, the goal of the effort is to create, “a redesigned profile aimed at making things simpler, cleaner, and more relevant, while still giving you control over your own ...

Ex-Google employees create search rival, Cuil

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 by Nick Bodmer

Cuil, a new search engine created by many former Google employees, recently went live. Cuil (pronounced like "cool") is a search engine that differs from Google in two very important ways. First, page ranking is not determined by popularity, but instead by content analysis.  (Google's algorithm relies on how often other ...

WordPress releases iPhone application

Thursday, July 24th, 2008 by Nick Bodmer

WordPress, the free software that powers this blog (and many others), has released a free iPhone application that allows for mobile blog posting. WordPress could not have made it easier to make quick updates on the go, however this comes at a cost of losing some of the more advanced ...

Facebook’s Facelift

Monday, July 21st, 2008 by Griffin Hammond

Today The Facebook Blog announced their new user interface will be launched soon, and in the mean time, you can try it out by going to www.new.facebook.com. Read on for my detailed look at the new Facebook, or, for those of you who will simply check it out yourselves, let me ...

Plurk traffic grows 9x in June

Friday, July 11th, 2008 by Griffin Hammond

Compete reports that Plurk, a new micro-blogging site and competition for Twitter, saw a 929% increase in traffic in June, probably due to all the downtime Twitter users have experienced in the past month. I figured I should try out Plurk, but when I first went to the site, it was down. ...

Animoto

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 by Nick Bodmer

Here is a cool new use for all those pictures we all have on our various social networking sites. Animoto.com is a web application that creates MTV-style videos with the click of a button. Users simply choose a song and images. Animoto then automatically generates a unique video for them. No two ...