CITS

Twitter continues to grow and grow!

CITS now as a Twitter account as well. Follow UCSBCITS.

A few recently Twitter highlights:

- The Pew Internet and American Life Project released new data this week:

"As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others."

Academia.edu is a social network site that aims to show "academics around the world structured in a 'tree' format, displayed according to their departmental and institutional affiliations" and enable "academics to see news on the latest research in their area - the latest people, papers and talks".

There is a genealogy-like setup to show adivsors and advisees.

More interesting, however, is the news feed feature that shows upcoming conferences and new publications.

Could this work? Will it catch on? Time will tell. It could certainly be useful.

Facebook now has 150 million users. "If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria."

So is there anyone left that isn't on Facebook? Farhad Manjoo of Slate says: "There is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook. The site has crossed a threshold—it is now so widely trafficked that it's fast becoming a routine aide to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant."

Slate has an article on the netbook craze. Netbooks are $200-$400 laptops designed for websurfing.

Simple devices designed to do one thing well (a la iPods) are growing in popularity.