Social-media | billso.com

Google has announced that there are over 1 million users for the education version of Google Apps. this doesn’t surprise me at all, as Google is offering very low per seat pricing on these contracts.

It’s always been difficult for universities to manage their email and messaging systems. Email is the lowest common denominator for Internet users, which is one reason why phishers, scammers and crackers target email users. Everyone on the Internet has at least one email account.

University users have adopted social media en masse as an alternative to email. But that doesn’t mean that email is not important. It’s still mission critical for universities.

See this announcement, Back to school with over 1 million users worldwide, for a list of universities and schools that are adopting Google’s enterprise cloud computing solutions.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

9 July 2008: Is email in danger from microblogging?
12 May 2008: Software and services - free or paid?
22 April 2008: It’s 2008 and email is still broken
11 April 2007: Google wants to hear about your university email service
23 February 2007: Google Apps vs Microsoft Office
7 December 2006: Spam is back with a vengeance
22 August 2006: 95 percent of all e-mail is UCE
4 August 2004: E-mail is broken

Tags: cloud, email, gmail, Google, social-media, university, USA

Ryan Ozawa, one of our better-known bloggers on Oahu, invited me to this month’s Manoa Geeks meeting, which will be held at the HMSA building in Honolulu tonight. Details are available here.

This year I’ve set up some landing pages for my social networking services:

A Facebook page with an expanded badge that lists my recent blog articles, and a list of my posts about Facebook
A FriendFeed page that lists my activity on that service and several other social networking services. I have discovered FriendFeed groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, too.
A LinkedIn page with my profile badge and my articles about LinkedIn, the most popular of all the professional social networks right now.

I’ve used social networking services for a few years, but I’ve really expanded my online activities in the last 3 months. I started using Seesmic this week, and I’m also on Plurk. It’s a good way to network, and to recruit new readers for the billso.com blog.

If you’re interested in exploring these services, or you’re wondering what the benefits might be, I suggest reading two articles by Andy DeSoto, a blogger at the College of William and Mary in Virginia:

28 July 2008: Filtering: Why FriendFeed is taking the web to the next level
9 July 2008: An Ultimate Guide to Social Media Simplification

Tags: blogging, facebook, friendfeed, linkedin, network, plurk, seesmic, social, social-media

Rajat and Jayant Aggarwalla have blocked access to their Scrabulous Facebook app for US and Canadian users, according to this NY Times article called Scrabulous Barred to North American Users and anAssociated Press article called Popular Scrabble knockoff suspended on Facebook. There are lots of blog posts available, including my own billso.com post called Scrabble vs Scrabulous, Mashable’s Actually, Scrabulous Shut Themselves Down. Sort of., eFlux Media’s Scrabulous is no more and Marketing Shift’s Facebook Shutters Scrabulous; Hasboro Smiles. (Note: the spelling error was made by Marketing Shift, not me.)

It sounds like Facebook asked the brothers to take this step, after multiple requests from Hasbro.

Some Facebook users really need a lesson on copyright as well. Scrabulous may be fun, but the online groups that are defending the game are displaying their ignorance and contempt for intellectual property laws. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of Facebook Scrabulous players also downloaded unlicensed movies, songs and books from peer-to-peer services. I disucssed textbook downloading on yesterday’s billso.com post called A torrent of textbooks.

Perhaps some Scrabulous users will actually try to play Scrabble in real life, while Hasbro and Electronic Arts try to get their licensed Facebook Scrabble app to run in a reliable manner.

I’m a big fan of fair use and the Creative Commons, but I really hope Hasbro and Mattel pursue their court cases. The brothers are several weak arguments in their defense, and have shown poor judgment by collecting advertising revenue from their web site. A settlement would set an ugly precedent, and encourage more developers to create unlicensed versions of copyrighted works.