Yahoo is shutting down Maps.

Nearly three years into Yahoos reinvention under CEO Marissa Mayer, formerly a high-ranking Google executive, the company is shuttering some services including Maps. In a second-quarter progress report posted on Tumblr on June 4—Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013—chief architect Amotz Maimon announced that Yahoo is closing down its Maps site at the end of June.

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There is a very easy-to-use workaround that will give you instant access to Twitter RSS feeds, although it may only be a matter of time before Twitter kills that off too.

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With the widespread use of major social media platforms, it can be hard to understand why new ones keep being created. Could this be because each social network actually only fills one or two specific niches for users?

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We live in an age of information overload. With all the stories from news, blogs, social media, and other sources, the amount of information about any given subject can be overwhelming. It is hard enough to keep up when you are just a consumer of information, but what about when you need to curate content for a target audience?

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What if you want to see a particular news feed on your home screen... say, one that does not connect with the built-in news feed tools?

You turn to RSS. That is right, we are going old school.

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Feedly has become one of the best ways to keep up with your RSS feeds. One key feature that’s been missing, however, is the ability to bulk share a collection of sources. Now, Feedly is adding this feature to Feedly Pro.

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When it comes to telling search engines about the content on a website, webmasters might be wondering if they should submit sitemaps or just setup RSS or Atom feeds.

Googles answer? Use both.

For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS or Atom feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index. Note that submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.

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While there are certainly dozens of insightful takeaways that could be gleaned from Buffetts 50-year career as an investor, I think everyone can benefit from learning more about one of his core principles that have guided him through good times and bad.

Reputation matters
One of my favorite all-time pieces of advice from Buffett is this: It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'will do things differently.

In many ways, the sheer simplicity and common-sense nature of that statement belies its profound implications for modern-day life. Throughout his career, Buffett has used his reputation sparingly to turn around a failing business or to gain a tactical advantage.

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Did you know companies with happy employees outperform their competition by 20 percent?

LinkedIn has carried out research to say that 58 percent of employees are proud of their company and are glad to tell others about it, especially on social media.

This is great news, as happier employees means happier customers, because they pass on their energy & passion in everything they do, including customer support.

But how can you create happy employees on social media?

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A man suspected of a double murder was on the run, and a lot of people turned to the Knox County prosecutors Facebook page to find out about it.

Posts about the killings of Sandra Lee Stelk and Jaime Barber — who were found shot to death in a rural Knox County home on Sept. 30 — and about suspect Travis Bonham were each shared hundreds of times and reached more than 100,000 people.

This was good news to Prosecutor Chip McConville and his legal assistant and communications manager, Emily Morrison, who have worked since January to find ways to use social media that are helpful to the public.

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Facebook has released a new application called Notify that will allow its users to receive push notifications about breaking news, new movie trailers, and more.

The move into real-time news is significant because could help Facebook achieve two goals: It could make the company more important to the media, and it could increase the traffic it sends to publishers. Now, whether the app will be successful or just something that clogs up your phones notifications feed is another set of questions all together.

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Android does not have a built-in RSS widget for your home screen. For that, we have to turn to the Google Play Store. The widget I happen to prefer for this is called RSS Widget. This app is free, does not have any ads, and does a great job of presenting your RSS feeds cleanly.

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The Internet is a big place. Really big. With more than a billion existing pages and thousands more being created each day, there is a wealth of great sites offering fantastic content free of charge. But with such a massive torrent of media being produced each and every day, it can often be tough to keep up with all your favorite websites. So, how do we alleviate this problem? Easy.

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Charities are turning to online stars with large YouTube audiences, following an approach increasingly used by big brands to reach new donors and volunteers.

The Make-a-Wish Foundation, for children with life-threatening illnesses, DigDeep, the non-profit organisation focused on water, and Los Angeles-based anti-poverty group United Way are among the charities using a new technology platform designed to let this new kind of minor social media celebrity do their marketing for them.

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JustCast is built as a simple way to create a feed for your own podcasts without dealing with hosts, but it is just as good for making your own private feeds of various audio files you need to listen to.

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The ethics guidance interpreting Attorney Advertising rules in the social media context continues to evolve, but this time the evolution appears to be for the better, taking into account the realities of the growing use of social media. As you may recall, early last year, the New York County Lawyers Association weighed in on the ethical implications for lawyers using LinkedIn and suggested that attorneys using the self-proclaimed Worlds Largest Professional Network needed to beware that their posts on that site, even the most casual, did not run afoul of the attorney advertising rules.

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Social media is driving our lives right now. You may say that is untrue, but I say you are in denial unless you are one of those emasculated men who share a Facebook account with your wife or you are part of the 1 percent who spends little to no time online. This is 2016 and Facebook has more than one billion daily active users. One billion. Daily. Active. Users. Amazing.

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On average people check social media every 6 and a half minutes,thats about 150 times a day.

And that habit is creating phantom phone vibrations in some people.

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The greatest change over the last few years in promotion and advertising is the use of the Internet.

Our websites are a platform to blog and promote our business. In addition links to social media are vitally important.

The use of Twitter and Facebook has grown considerably – every business, no matter what size, can enjoy the benefits of social media.

We have focussed on Twitter and Facebook a lot over the last 12 months. Gradually we have increased our activity and developed what we think works best for us.

On Facebook we have a business page. We regularly post technical articles about current accounts and taxation topics. These prove popular and often result in questions and contact from current clients.

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I previously analyzed their 2013 report and their 2014 report and came to the same conclusion each year. Most companies still do not get social media as a customer service channel.

Six years ago, I did my own tiny social media study. That is back when the Starbucks Twitter profile said that some guy named Brad did the tweeting. Things are pretty much the same as even back then. (Except for Brad. I am not sure what happened to him.)

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We live in an age of information overload. With all the stories from news, blogs, social media, and other sources, the amount of information about any given subject can be overwhelming. It is hard enough to keep up when you are just a consumer of information, but what about when you need to curate content for a target audience?

Thankfully, there are tools that can collect and organize information from a large number of sources, making that task easier. One such tool is the PressForward plugin for WordPress.

PressForward is a multi-user, collaborative RSS feed reader that integrates with WordPress' publication work-flow and provides users with the ability to curate content for a target audience.

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You turn to RSS. That is right, we are going old school. For those who don't know, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It's a very easy protocol that allows feeds to be pulled from websites to serve up a collection of story summations that the reader can then click on and enjoy the full read.

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Although consumers want brands to use social media as a two-way communication channel, the vast majority of businesses are not adhering to those desires, according to a study from social media management software provider Sprout Social. On average, businesses send out 23 promotional messages for every one consumer response.

Social media is now the No. 1 way consumers interact with businesses. The research revealed that 34.5 percent of consumers turn to social media first when they have a problem, compared with just 16 percent who call and 5 percent who visit a store in person.

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Not so long ago, customers were isolated. Their ability to voice their dissatisfaction with the service they received from business was severely limited.

The once feared television show Fair Go was just about their only option.

Today they can air their gripes instantly on Facebook, Twitter or other social platforms and build alliances with similarly disgruntled customers. They can take pictures wherever they go and record or even film their interactions.

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Twitter has eradicated RSS feeds from its web interface once and for all, following an update to the sites search page today.

When Twitter launched its redesign late last year it subtly removed RSS feeds for users tweets. And while RSS feeds are still available, you have to be willing to jump through some extra hoops to access them.

Of course, there was some suggestion that their removal was accidental, but some 10 months  later this seems not to be the case.

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Two years ago, I wrote a story about Nextdoor, a private social network that requires users to register with proof of both their identity and address. Once accepted, you belong to a neighborhood and can see and speak with any nearby users who have signed up. It's trying to build a local graph to complement the social graph, and it has quietly grown into one of the largest social networks in the US, with over ten million registered users spread across more than 100,000 neighborhoods.

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On June 29, Facebooks algorithm change rocked the content world. The social media giant announced it would start prioritizing posts shared by friends and family over content from publishers and brands. That’s bad news for brands that have come to rely on social media sites like Facebook as a major web traffic driver.

Facebook accounts for 41.4 percent of referral traffic to news sites, according to Parse.lys April 2016 Authority Report. But not all is lost. While brands may be in trouble, content published and shared by individuals could gain even greater traction. That’s good news for industry influencers and budding thought leaders.

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Imagine if you were an entrepreneur in the late 1980s, or even 10 years ago. It may be hard to believe, but at that time — and in all other eras of business history except now — social media did not exist. You relied on word of mouth, paid advertising, and old-fashioned grunt work to get the message out about your business.

All of that is still necessary — any savvy entrepreneur knows you should not rely on social media alone to promote your business. Despite its pervasive reach, social media still only reaches a limited and largely distracted audience. For that reason, you have to take care with your social media promotion. Unfortunately, you can’t flood your account with random tweets and sell huge volumes of product.

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It is absolutely crucial for brands to keep a crisis management plan handy. Ideally, this plan gives an idea of who internally should lead the response and what stance they should take. An effective crisis management plan (or lack thereof) can have a substantial impact on your business.

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If you want to generate more B2B leads you need to look into how you’re going to make social media work for you. This guide is going to introduce you to how your B2B firm can use social media to its advantage.

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Despite the huge popularity of social networking among teens, more respondents reported using Gmail than Snapchat or Facebook, June 2016 research uncovered. The only site used more than Gmail was YouTube, which is not surprising given the plethora of content and influencers available on the video-sharing site.

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This summer, the American Civil Liberties Union of California requested records from 63 police departments, sheriffs and district attorneys across California. Of the records they received, 40 percent of the agencies (20) used social media surveillance tools, and most of them started using them within the last year.

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Social media monitoring services such as Geofeedia rely on bulk data access to be able to search far larger volumes of social media posts, and more efficiently, than the average user.

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Threats to humiliate an intimate partner by sharing explicit photos or video is an old problem with a new digital twist, a new study finds.

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A Chicago company has marketed a tool using text, photos and videos gleaned from major social media companies to aid law enforcement surveillance of protesters, civil liberties activists say.

The company, called Geofeedia, used data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as nine other social media networks, to let users search for social media content in a specific location, as opposed to searching by words or hashtags that would be less likely to reveal an exact location.

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The Internet is a big place. Really big. With more than a billion existing pages and thousands more being created each day, there is a wealth of great sites offering fantastic content free of charge. But with such a massive torrent of media being produced each and every day, it can often be tough to keep up with all your favorite websites. So, how do we alleviate this problem? Easy. Here’s a really simple explanation of Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

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Many information junkies keep up with their favorite Web sites by subscribing to their RSS feeds, pulling the latest updates from those sites into a central location for efficient perusal.

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Twitterfeed is Going Away – Dlvr.it is Here to Stay. Now that I got that out, lets talk about social media automation and RSS feeds. Keeping social media accounts active is one of the most important components of having success with social media.

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Specifically, all three companies granted access to a developer tool called Geofeedia which allows users to see the geographic origin of social media posts and has been employed by more than 500 law enforcement organizations to track protesters in real time.

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In the past two years, investors have spent more than $10 million on social networking apps in India. And a growing number of them are focussing on niche segments — from students to Hindi speakers and parents to high networth individuals.

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Lets travel back to a simpler time, shall we? It’s November 6, 2007, and Facebook has just launched something called Pages. Now, companies can have an official presence on the network, just like real people! The first day, 100,000 Pages launch, with brands from Coca-Cola to Verizon and Blockbuster getting onboard. In the years afterward, millions of companies raced to build up audiences they can reach directly and on-demand, through the sheer magic of social media.

Fast-forward to the waning months of 2016, and the magic is a little harder to feel. Certain corners of the social world have become uglier places, with some in the business world calling for a draw-down.

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The US government has begun requesting foreign travelers to submit their social media information to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) before traveling into the country. The practice is claimed to be part of broader efforts to identify potential terrorist threats.

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In 2006, I set out to brand myself. I had an idea that I shared with the owner of the small company at which I was employed. I called it Publish or Perish, and despite the lack of originality, the idea was simple, but purposeful: We needed to elevate the name recognition of our company -- quickly.

The company had made a fortune working with a niche client, but unwisely, it chose to fly under the competitions radar. In other words, it did the opposite of marketing for fear that if competitors knew how much money it was making from this niche client, it would face stiffer competition.

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No matter how popular your blog is, it won't make money if you do not monetize it. And even a well-designed and monetized blog can not make money if you do not know how to promote it. Too many recent posts on this topic have failed to point out that what works for the rich and famous is unlikely to work for your small business.

When Neil Patel writes about how to create a blog and mentions that his site earns over $1 million dollars a year, I hope people realize that even when he did this with a brand-new blog, he is still the well-respected, world-famous Neil Patel.

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Facebook is under quite a bit of pressure of late. It's trying to fix the rise of fake news and clickbait on its News Feed and, more recently, it's had to deal with the Zenimax lawsuit against Oculus. But all of that hasn't eaten into Facebook's bottom line. As its Q4 2016 earnings report shows, the company once again raked in cash hand over fist, with $8.8 billion in revenue and $3.56 billion in profit.

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The internet is a big place, to say the least. With more than a billion existing pages and thousands more being created each day, there is a wealth of great sites offering fantastic content free of charge. But with such a massive torrent of media being produced each and every day, it can often be tough to keep up with all your favorite websites. So, how do we alleviate this problem?

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When it comes to social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, I am guarded when it comes to whom I friend or follow. I use Facebook almost exclusively to connect with friends, family or business acquaintances. I use Twitter mostly for news and commentary that's of interest to me personally.

But there is another social media site I use a lot, and that is LinkedIn. LinkedIn differs from Facebook and Twitters generalized social interactions by focusing on helping people make and maintain professional connections. LinkedIn was purchased last year by Microsoft for $26.2 billion, and has become Redmonds foray into social media.

Social Media Security

Many information junkies keep up with their favorite Web sites by subscribing to their RSS feeds, pulling the latest updates from those sites into a central location for efficient perusal.

I rely heavily on RSS to keep me abreast of the latest tech news. I am also addicted to political sites during this years bizarre presidential election, and I have tapped into a host of feeds to keep me up to date on the latest antics from the candidates.

Feed Hawk Is Useful But Not Essential for RSS Junkies

Facebook anonymously launched a photo-sharing app in China in a new effort to make inroads in the worlds most populous country.

Facebook Anonymously Launched Social Media App In China

What if users did not have to come to your WordPress site in order to read your articles? That would certainly make it easier for users since they would not have to navigate to ten of their favorite blogs and news sources to get their daily information. It would also be nice for the website owners, since it would allow you to distribute your content in a more efficient manner, delivering the content to where the customers want it to be.

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