A lot of us don’ t always have a real purpose as to why we visit social media sites other than to kill some time and put an end to boredom. There is one organization, however, that is using Facebook to try and accomplish something with a real purpose. Bring Abducted Children Home (BACHome) is an organization working to bring home U.S. children that have been abducted and brought to Japan. According to their web site, BACHome.org, “no child kidnapped to Japan from any foreign country has ever been returned since 1952 when the Japanese sovereign government was established” and “in the past decade, more than 230 American children have been kidnapped to Japan”.

This morning NBC’s Today Show ran a story on Chris Savoie, just one of the many parents trying to locate and bring home their children from Japan. Savoie’s two children, Isaac and Rebecca, were both abducted and brought to Japan by their mother after she and Chris divorced last year. Chris warned U.S. courts that his wife intended to bring the children to Japan, however the judge ruled that a restraining order on his wife would not be necessary after she swore under oath that she didn’t actually plan on doing it. Unfortunately for Chris and other parents in the same situation Japan does not abide by an international agreement to return children abducted by parents back to their home nation. When Chris attempted to get his children back himself he found himself him Japanese prison and was only allowed to return to the U.S. after promising not to pursue his children any more.

BACHome, which leaves the ‘K’ out of their name because the kids are missing, lists 14 active cases on their web site. The organization’s goal is to influence our government and governments of other nations around the world to pressure Japan into doing everything in their power to locate and return abducted children. They utilize a Facebook page to share stories, information, and organize meetings. Currently there are over 650 people who ‘like’ the page.

The reach of Social Media extends far beyond bored teens. Organizations, like BACHome, are great examples of how social media can be used for a greater good.

Mashable reported on their site today that Adobe was spotted at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Fransisco showcasing Flash on Android devices as well as an Android tablet device much like the iPad. While it is no secret that Google’s next version of Android, 2.2, will support Flash it was a big surprise to everybody that there was an Android-based tablet. The fact that it can support Flash already gives us reason to believe it will be able to give the iPad a run for its’ money. According to the Zedomax blog Adobe says that there will be several Android Tablets available by the end of this year, although names of companies working on building the tablets weren’t released. Adobe Air, also not supported by the iPad, runs flawlessly on the new Android devices, as well.

The option to have Flash will surely be a big advantage for tablets running Android since there are many web sites and applications, such as YouTube (which is owned by Google), which require Flash to work. You can check out videos of the Android tablet prototype on the Zedomax blog.

All I have left to say is this: With the promise of Flash-enabled tablets on the way, I’m glad I didn’t go out and spend hundreds of dollars on the iPad.

Simply search for the name of the show you are looking for, then click the “Show options” button above the results. From there you can narrow your search to videos and again narrow the results even further by Season and Episode!

This feature will probably seem new to most people, however Google wasn’t the first to come up with the idea. Clicker.com has been offering the same abilities for months. Clicker, a “TV Guide for television content online”, has indexed over 400,000 episodes from 7000 television shows for you to search from and they even index premium content from Netflix and Amazon.

Source

“With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful.

[...]

Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period.”

As of right now you can search for tweets going back to February 11th, 2010, but Google tells us that pretty soon you’ll be able to search for anything all the way back to March 21st, 2006 when the first tweet went out.  My first search? Let’s replay the excitement from when Steven Stamkos scored his 50th goal for the Lightning .

Google Changes its Name

In an effort to win over Google and get their coveted new broadband internet technology the city of Topeka, Kansas changed its name to Google for a month. On April 1st internet users were probably a little confused when they visited their favorite search engine and saw “Topeka” in the middle of their screen. The April Fools prank was a response to Topeka’s name change, but according to Google is not an indication of what city will get their new high speed internet.

Ferret Powered Broadband

The guys at Telegraph Media Group reported that a new and unlikely delivery method was now being used to bring high speed internet to people living in rural areas. According to the article on their website “The animals have been used by Virgin Media for over a year to help lay cables for its broadband service”. Finally, a better way to close the digital divide!

Prescription Windshield

Finally the seeing impaired people of the world can drive without the hassle of wearing eyeglasses! A video popped up on April Fools Day touting the new and innovative prescription windshield that brings everything right into focus.

You Scream, I Scream, Lick Your Screen for Ice Cream

Ben & Jerry’s had one of the most original April Fools pranks this year with the world’s first virtual ice cream. Simply activate the ice cream on their web site and lick!

This QR code links to our Facebook page

According to the guys over at TechCrunch Facebook has started to roll out the implementation of QR codes, or Quick Response codes, on personal pages and fan pages. QR codes are like bar codes, only they can store a lot more information and can be read by most modern camera phones. They can be used to link to your facebook page, a photo or video, text, product price, or something else. They’re meant to be a way to link people to information through mobile devices. Want to be able to instantly share your Facebook link with people on your business card? Print a QR code on it so people can snap a photo with their phone and open up the link!

Anybody can make QR codes for free with online QR code generators. The future might be filled with buses, billboards, print ads, and other things having QR codes printed on them. People will be able to get more information about those things just by reading the QR code. This is called ‘mobile tagging’.

On Facebook the links to create QR codes have been appearing on your page under your profile picture. We’re not sure how long it will take for everybody to get this link, or if it’s just them testing out the concept, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

Myspace got about half the number of mobile visits as Facebook, with 11.4 million users. The number of people who accessed Myspace on their mobile phone actually dropped compared to January of 2009, when they got visits from 12.3 million people. Facebook surpassed Myspace’s mobile browser audience size in February of 2009, 3 months before it overtook Myspace’s visits via personal computers.

A big reason for such a huge increase is the increased popularity of smartphones like the Droid, iPhone and Blackberry. 30.8% of smartphone owners accessed social media sites with their phones in January compared to just 6.8% of people using feature phones.

comScore says that the real number of people accessing social networking sites on their phones is actually even higher. This is because their figures do not include data from the 6 million people using mobile applications to get on social media sites; It only includes data of people accessing the sites with a mobile web browser.

Facebook announced on their developers site that early 2010 would bring about a major change for applications to the popular social media site. All facebook applications will be excluded from pages, profile boxes, application info sections, and the Boxes tab leaving tabs as the only way to integrate. This means saying bye bye to annoying notifications from applications, posts on your profile wall from friends taking social quizzes, and that top friends box sitting on the left of Jane’s profile page. For many this will come as a relief; the popularity of facebook applications has grown so rapidly that it’s hard to weed out the trash and find the real information you’re looking for.

Of course, some applications you may have become very fond of such as the memorable web address or dogbook (yea, you know you love it – or at least some people do – they have 957,410 monthly active users). In order to keep those applications on your profile you’ll need to add a tab to your profile for that app. Memorable web address sent out a notification with a diagram on how to do this as well as a request to email you notifications from now on as all contact with users through facebook will be cut off.

What do you think of the new change to facebook applications?

And it’s not just Joe Schmo using the web platform; The world’s biggest celebrities, most prominent politicians, and largest corporations are using Twitter. According to Business Wire 65 percent of Fortune Global 100 companies have an active account. Politicians like Al Gore (@algore) rely on Twitter to reach their followers and keep them informed. Many news stations, schools, and local governments use Twitter to update their followers of emergency situations. And the celebrities… where do we begin? Are you a fan of cycling? Follow Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong). More of a basketball guy? Maybe Shaq is a big enough celeb for you to follow (@THE_REAL_SHAQ). Jimmy Fallon (@jimmyfallon), Dave Matthews (@DaveJMatthews), Britney Spears (@britneyspears), Snoop Dogg (@snoopdogg), Kevin Smith (@ThatKevinSmith), Eli Manning (@elimanning), George Lucas (@George_Lucas)… that’s quite the clientele for such a young company. Some big name users actually have their staff manage their accounts, like Barack Obama, however all of the ones listed here tweet for themselves.

Twitter is also becoming extremely involved in global events. Currently Twitter is working to help the people of Haiti; They have made a deal with mobile carrier Digicel to bring free SMS tweets to Haitians. Previously they were charged fees each time they tweeted so now they should be able to communicate more freely and easily with people in other countries.

There are projections that by the end of 2013 Twitter will have 1 billion users and $1.54 Billion in revenue. For comparison, the Facebook monster currently has about 350 million users – which is about 50 million more than the population of the United States.

It is amazing how popular Twitter has become in such a short period of time. Whether they can continue their growth and hit their projected figures is still uncertain, but the way things have been going I wouldn’t bet against them. Now let me go tweet about this blog (@thatsus).

What I found best about the commercial was how nicely it integrated social media. The boy in the commercial states that he created a group on facebook for people who dunk their Oreo Cakesters and the father’s rebuttle is that he will create his own non-dunking “face space group”.  While I can’t locate the TV commercial online, you can watch the shortened version of it presented on their facebook page (you can also watch it here).

The facebook page engages visitors to interact by answering the question: “Do you dunk oreo cakesters in milk”? You then can choose to side with the boy and be on team “Dunkers” or on the father’s side, team “Non-Dunkers”. No matter what side you choose, all that talk about Oreo Cakesters really makes you want to go out and grab some to try them out!