A trio of social media stocks is getting pummeled this week, a sign that Wall Street may be unwilling to overlook missteps at some of its Internet darlings.

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When Anil Chawla built a start-up that uses software to archive social media posts, he never imagined that his biggest clients would be government agencies.

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The most significant marketing change in the past decade was brought about by social media. Before Facebook or Twitter, brands could not dream of building such close connections with their audiences or

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Apple recently sent a mass email to news publishers to introduce them to Apple News, an upcoming Flipboard-inspired app for iOS 9 that will deliver curated news and magazine stories with custom layouts, photo galleries, videos and animations optimized for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

The email has ignited some controversy in the news and blogging community over the past week, according to the BBC, which reports that some writers are disappointed about Apples decision to automatically include a websites RSS feeds in Apple News unless they specifically opt out by replying to the email.

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Create a social network or risk everything.

That was the original pitch for Googles Facebook rival, Google+, a refrain hammered over and over by the social network's chief architect, Vic Gundotra, in meetings with the companys top brass.

Gundotra, described by colleagues we spoke with as charismatic and politically-savvy, eventually persuaded Larry Page, the Google cofounder who returned as CEO at the beginning of 2011 after a decade behind the scenes, to turn the company upside down for this cause.

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Consider your brand across all visual touchpoints, suggests WebDAM. Include logos, typography, press kit, photography, and icons.

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As hundreds of visitors line up to write prayers on strips of cloth at the Knotted Grotto art installation at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, 18-year-old Cassie Sadie has a message of her own, typed in 140 characters or less.

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If you have noticed the apparent omnipresence of cell phones, as most of us surely have, it likely will not surprise you that about 86% of the worlds roughly seven billion people have access to a mobile phone, or that 80% of cell phone owners use their devices to send and receive text messages. You may also be unsurprised to learn that the vast majority of texts are sent by teenagers under eighteen, and that the average teen from this group sends over 3,300 texts each month.

Is Text Messaging Ruining our Youth?

In this article, I am going to cover four of the best tools to deliver RSS feed updates directly to your desktop, either through RSS tickers, or from alert boxes that display feed information right inside and scroll automatically. This way, during your workday, you can just glance over at the streaming updates and if a topic catches your eye, you can click on it and bookmark the article to read later, during your lunch break or after work.

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I remember saying that if I could ever figure out how a person could be in two places at once I would retire a billionaire.

And then, I figured it out.

Because being in two places or more simultaneously is exactly what social media allows us to appear to do. With a nearly endless supply of apps designed to cross-post anything we can enter into a digital device, you would think the impossible had finally been achieved.

Certainly a lot of innovative people have ensured a comfortable retirement by making that illusion easy to create. But what is it costing entrepreneurs who fall prey to it?

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A recent analysis conducted by a University of Florida educational leadership scholar indicates the lack of concrete policy on the use of social media by teachers and other school employees is increasing the potential for misuse and inappropriate teacher-student relationships online.

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RSS has taken some big hits recently. Of course, people have been announcing the death of RSS pretty much since it came into existence, but when Google Reader bit the dust on July 1st, 2013, many were ready to place a wreath at the headstone and walk away.

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Are you tired of Facebooks trending section in your News Feed? Celebrity news getting annoying? Would you rather have legitimate news? Introducing Fluffblocker.

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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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Feeds are added one after the other to Munch which is the program's greatest shortcoming, especially if you have an opml file full of feeds already that you would like to import.

This means that you need to add feed after feed manually in the application which is a problem considering that you need to get hold of feed urls first somehow to do so.

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Even though legal publishers, both law firms and traditional media, put a lot of time and effort into publishing, their publishing platforms are often outdated, deficient or broken. Worst of all, the publishers have no idea.

Like many people I use Feedly, a news aggregator, to stay abreast of news, information, developments and commentary. Others use Manzama, Zama, Flipboard or corporate-installed news aggregators. I liberally share what I read directly from Feedly to Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook and LinkedIn.

Social sharing like this is how news moves today, lots of people read and share. We call it social media.

Most of the items shared are shared by a select group within particular industries. They are called the influencers.

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Twitters Moments feature lets users step back from their rapid-fire feeds and see what hot topics are dominating internet chatter. From news to funnies to trending subjects, Moments blend media and commentary into curated, bitesize overviews.

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Slow Feeds organizes your subscriptions into different lists. Theres a stream for low-volume sites that do not update terribly often (sites that update, weekly, for example, but when they do, you want to read them), a stream for the remaining high-volume sites that you can check more regularly, a stream specifically of the most-linked webpages in your feeds, and even a special feed just for articles you have starred to save for later, or review in order which is great if you are starring a bunch of articles on a specific topic, for example..

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One of the first things some people do after a major life incident is to post on social media, and sometimes those life incidents are rather personal for such a public venue. This has repercussions in two different ways.

First, people create their own liability by posting online.

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The U.S. Digital Registry was announced Jan. 29 as a one-stop shop for the social networking needs of government departments who are actively engaged on such platforms as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Unlike official government websites that end with .gov or .mil, profiles created through third-party platforms can often look deceptively authentic, but are used to mislead the public and steal personal information.

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Social media narcissism is on the rise. The team behind Psychology Today compiled research to show that millennials could be the most narcissistic generation in history. Social media is one of the exemplifications of the problem. That is not to say that everyone on social media is a narcissist, but it is where these people tend to hang out.

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Social media is the primary battleground for the most controversial presidential campaign in modern history. Here is what real-time data says about each campaign.

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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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It is difficult to get real-time alerts about articles with specific headlines on specific subjects from specific websites.

News reader applications like Feedly or Flipboard are great for browsing and even searching through news items, but they lack the ability to send notifications proactively.  Emails from Google Alerts can be tardy, and at other times, articles can slip by completely.

Never fear!  Used together, two web applications, IFTTT and Feed Rinse,  solve this problem easily.

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Are you tired of Facebooks trending section in your News Feed? Celebrity news getting annoying? Would you rather have legitimate news? Introducing Fluffblocker.

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The federal government has confirmed that it will start targeting social media posts by prospective employees as part of its review process for security clearance.

The new policy, which will allow investigators to scan an applicant’s history on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other similar sites, will be adopted soon, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

The guidelines make clear that agencies can target publicly available social media posts, if they deem it necessary, but cannot force individuals to hand over their passwords for private accounts, or provide pseudonyms for any profiles.

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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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Most people with a smartphone are constantly tapped into some form of social media. Sharing cute pictures of kids and pets is simply a routine part of life these days. Some people even use social media to vent frustrations or look for advice.

In a divorce case, however, shares on social media can create ample evidence that can be used against one or both parties to affect alimony, child support, child custody, and more.

Email and Text Messages
Email and text messages are admissible in court and can even be subpoenaed. If one party in the marriage reveals something about a new job or an upcoming bonus that has not been revealed in court, this can be used as evidence that the person is not being honest in his or her financial declarations.

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Mobile users spend little time viewing web content on their mobile browsers, preferring to read most of it through their social networks. As a result, publishers are losing control of their content, and users are overloaded with content sources.

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Facebook has 1.6 billion users. Inevitably, a sizable portion of those people pass away, leaving behind a number of inactive social media accounts.

Last year Facebook took a major step forward in how to deal with the 8000 plus deceased accounts that appear on the social network each day.

Its Legacy contact scheme helped make dealing with the death of a loved one easier on the world's largest social network.

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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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Places you can submit your RSS feed to.

RSS Feed Submission

I had never heard of Nextdoor when I lived in New York City. Social media services catering to individual neighborhoods weren’t useful in an apartment building where most tenants lasted a year, and longtime residents kept to themselves.

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RSS Feeds for humanitarian emergencies, crises and disasters

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Everyone realizes the importance of social media marketing. Businesses are tapping benefits of using networks created on social sites to sell products.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is using social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and many of the social media tools to create awareness about products. It is an approach where business can reach their customers. Many customers interact with brands through social media. A company that has a high social media-marketing plan can thus tap into the opportunity and increase their customer base.

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Use a Conversational tone On Facebook
Facebook is probably the only site that still holds that perfect mix of business and pleasure. In order to not upset that balance and lose followers, your posts and updates should blend in perfectly with your fans and encourage more click-through. While repurposing Facebook for marketing, make sure to use a conversational tone to sound less spammy.

Follow the 80/20 Rule
Just making your presence felt over social media is not enough, it has to be worth following in the first place. Make sure to post valuable, productive and useful content instead of just promoting your company. The most useful tip to keep in mind is the 80/20 rule, where 80 percent of all your posts should be of value to your audience and 20 percent will be self-promotional.

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The Amazon Kindle is a great ereader, but it is not particularly feature-rich. Reabble is a simple little RSS reader optimized to work inside the Kindles experimental browser to make reading articles less of a chore.

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RSS was first invented by Netscape. They wanted to use an XML format to distribute news, stories and information. Netscape refined the version of rss and then dropped it. Userland Software to control of the specficiation and continued to develop it releasing a newer version. A non-commercial group picked up RSS at the same time and based on their interpretation of the Netscapes original concept of RSS they too released a new version. UserLand was not happy with the non-commercial version and continued development of their own version of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), eventually UserLand released RSS v2.

The History of RSS

Social networking is pretty marvelous, but it isn’t the end-all-be-all for making business connections. There are actually times when you’d do better to look elsewhere.

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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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Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter have all been the target of passionate groups of users claiming that the sites have embraced censorship.

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Registering to vote just got a whole lot easier for tens of million social media users in the U.S. At least six major social media apps are launching voter registration drives to meet young voters exactly where they spend much of their time: on their phones.

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Most people in the tech industry, as well as avid consumers, marketers, and business owners, are always on the lookout for the next big thing.

In the social media world, we have seen a ton of developments over the past decade or so. Apps have become more friendly to mobile devices than desktops, content has become more visual and more immediate, and borderline gimmicky apps have risen to almost inexplicable heights of popularity.

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Good questions. First, here is why you should care.

Unlike getting website updates or ezines by email, RSS feeds give you absolute, 100% complete control over the situation.

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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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Until recently, social media platforms have needed to build and remain inside their walled gardens to avoid sharing their competitive intelligence.

However, Facebooks recent announcement that it would collaborate with third parties to verify its viewing metrics signifies the inevitable and long-awaited validation phase of social media.

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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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1. Avoid use of headlines and writing of tweets that misrepresent and/or oversimplify the content of linked-to articles. Headlines matter as they frame the stories for users.

2. Call racism racism.

3. Call sexism sexism.

4. Call terrorism terrorism, and be consistent in the use of the term regardless of the ethnicity, religion, national origin and ideological motivation(s) of the perpetrator(s).

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Teens spend more time in front of screens than they do sleeping.

According to a 2015 report by Common Sense Media, teens spend upwards of 9 hours a day consuming media on screens. And while the National Sleep Foundation recommends that teenagers get a 9 and 1/2 hours of sleep each night, the average American teenager sleeps around 7 hours each day.

A lack of proper sleep has been connected with reduced cognitive functions and lower academic performance. Teens may be tired because instead of sleeping soundly they are sleeping with their smartphones.

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Most of us think of Search Engine Optimization as a feat of technical wizardry, and it can be. From using proper keywords to using tools to automate publishing to social media, being tech savvy plays a big role in getting traffic. The mistake is forgetting that readers do not just have favorite blogs; they have their specific interests. Taking your content and commentary beyond your blog can help build authority and drive a lot of traffic your way. Thats where guest blog posts can be an effective tool. In 2014, Googles Matt Cutts declared guest blogging dead because it had become too spammy. So why do it? Because Google rewards quality, and a comprehensive, high-quality guest post that links back to your site is at least equally good for SEO as a great post on your own site.

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