“140-character status updates to a network of followers.” That makes Twitter sound simple. But in fact, the social information platform has grown to be much more complex than its 140 character-limit suggests. The site not only connects people, but has also become an intricate information resource for everything from news to shopping deals.

Yet in many ways, the site’s actual functionality hasn’t exactly kept up with user interactions. Twitter’s interface has remained simple, which is why a lot of tweets take place through third-party sites and applications that make the experience more useful.

We’ve compiled a list of the top 20 third-party websites for making your Twitter experience more useful and easier to manage. Although this does not include the many desktop or mobile applications that are available for Twitter, we hope that it will make your browsing experience more enjoyable as you dive into the Twittersphere. Also, as a one-stop shop for Twitter apps, check out OneForty. We’d love to hear what’s missing from this list, including sites that you find useful in the comments.

Web Applications: HootSuite and Brizzly

With its recent update and HTML5 support, social media dashboard HootSuite has become one of the most useful Twitter web applications not only for individual users, but teams managing several accounts. In some ways, HootSuite has the look and feel of TweetDeck with the big differentiator of it being a web-based application, not requiring any downloads.

HootSuite enables you to update to multiple accounts at once, and supports Twitter, Facebook profiles and pages, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace and Foursquare. Similar to TweetDeck, these features make the application useful for maintaining your overall social presence. Moreover, you can allow other users to jointly update an account, integrate Google Analytics for your stats and schedule tweets and updates ahead of time.

The HTML5 interface enables you to easily include an image or file with your update by simply dragging it from the desktop into the message box, which will automatically upload the file with an “Ow.ly” shortener for sharing. The fast loading of the dashboard is perhaps one of the most notable improvements, making the site more usable for users who manage dozens of accounts. If you don’t like Hootsuite, you should also check out Seesmic, which has a lot of similar features, but a different interface.

Brizzly has a different functionality from Hootsuite, but may be more appealing because of its simple interface. Brizzly is specifically focused on Twitter and no other networks, which makes the experience somewhat less distracting. It also includes subtle, but worthy features like automatically expanded URLs, which shows you exactly where you are going if you click, and displays replies and direct messages in a threaded form, making it easier to follow the conversation.

Filtering Through the Noise: TwitterTimes and Paper.li

After you log in with your Twitter username, The Twitter Tim.es creates a page that displays stories by filtering through what the people you follow have tweeted the most in a more presentable stream that is updated regularly. Though the design of the interface isn’t the best, The Twitter Times is effective in showing you who has tweeted the story along with the story headline and blurb to give you an idea of what it’s about. In some cases, the site shows you the full text of the post. It also gives you options to view popular stories on Twitter from media sources and Twitter Lists.

The site helps you filter through the noise and keep up with what is trending among the people you follow. If you’ve been off the grid for a couple hours, you can get a sense of what people are sharing and the news that is important among your Twitter community at any given moment.

Paper.li has similar functions but a different presentation. Users can create their own “newspaper” based on who they follow. Users can also create newspapers based on a Twitter hash tag or a Twitter list. Instead of a stream, Paper.li presents content by creating a custom homepage that separates content based on popularity and topics. The site does a great job of making the content visually appealing by including thumbnails, YouTube videos and blurbs.

Trends: TweetMeme and Trendistic

TweetMeme is best recognized for its bright green buttons on websites (like this one), enabling users to easily tweet the article they’re reading. All of the information is collected at TweetMeme from across the web, giving a good sense as to what is trending on Twitter. The site enables you to filter by categories and topics (entertainment, gaming, etc.) and to showcase the most retweeted links. You also get a brief blurb from the link being shared and are able to filter by news articles, images and videos.

Trendistic also works well, but specifically for bigger Twitter trends and how they have performed over time. The site gives you an idea of current trends and presents them in a graphic format, showing you the percentage that the trends account for at any give time. For example, on July 8, “heat” accounted for 1.8% of all tweets at 9 p.m. during LeBron James’ big announcement that he would be joining the Miami Heat. You can also sort the trend based on timeframe, and get a code to embed the chart on your site.

Twitter Lists: Tlists and PubliTweet

Tlists is a Twitter Lists directory where you can search by list topic, view popular lists, and create your own lists. Users can also apply to join a list, and the creator is then notified and can approve them to join the list depending on whether they are a good fit. Lists are a great curating tool in rounding up like-minded tweeters in one place. It functions not only as a directory, but also as a stream of useful information around a specific subject. But after you have that list, how can you make it more presentable?

PubliTweet takes your Twitter Lists and makes them a lot more useful. It does this by providing a nice embed code that presents the lists in a handy stream that includes the text of the tweet, headline, thumbnail and blurb of the article they are sharing. You can take the code and plant the list anywhere on your site. Not only does PubliTweet make your Twitter Lists more useful visually, the tweets are also more shareable through convenient Twitter, Facebook and e-mail share buttons.

Hashtag Stats: TwapperKeeper

TwapperKeeper and Trendistic are great tools for getting some basic stats on how much a specific hashtag on Twitter is performing. Though there are several other sites that give you more options (often for a price), these two sites are simple to use in getting a general overview. TwapperKeeper lets you create an archive for tracking a specific hashtag, keyword, or username and collects the data and the number of mentions. If you’re interested in getting a sense for how many times a specific hashtag was tweeted, it gives you a total number, along with the ability to search precisely through the archive that you created, listing the recent tweets that have been tracked. The beautiful part is that you can also export the data and analyze it to your liking.

Embedding Tweets: QuoteURL

Though Twitter released a script that allows interactive tweet embedding, the code has had some issues and isn’t always ideal. QuoteURL seems to be the best option for creating embedable tweets. The app enables you to add multiple tweet URLs and embed them into a post. You can also embed an individual one, but if you want to get a stream of tweets to embed, this is the tool to use.

The application gives you a nice, clean embed such that users can see the text of the tweet, but it also preserves the interactivity of being able to reply, click on the username, or any links within the tweet. Essentially, it mirrors the experience a user has engaging with individual tweets on Twitter. This makes your tweets a bit more useful than just a screenshot, however, many sites and blogs have yet to adopt it because the embed doesn’t show up in blogger’s RSS feeds.

Location: MapMash.in and Monitter

Though Twitter has launched its own location feature with Twitter Places, which will likely be expanded in the future, there are several other sites that showcase location-based tweets. Local Twitter Trends displays trends in major cities and allows you to click on the keywords to see what people are talking about. It’s very simple and to the point, giving you an easy way to track the conversation in a specific place.

However, if you want to track news on specific topics, monitter might be the better choice. This site allows you to not only search for a specific location, it also lets you track three specific searches within that area — in real time — and displays the results in an easy-to-view, three-column format. You can also adjust the radius of the area that you’re searching.

Discovery: WeFollow and Twellow

WeFollow is a Twitter directory from Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, that emphasizes topics that users associate themselves with. Anyone can easily add themselves to the directory by simply tweeting out the hashtags that will make their usernames searchable in the directory. The site is great for discovering new users that you might share common interests with. It also enables you to view the top users in each category.

Twellow’s tagline is the “Twitter Yellow Pages,” and aims to be the directory to search for Twitter users based on industries and topics like biotechnology, food, home and garden, etc. In a lot of ways it is the ultimate directory for Twitter, also enabling you to search for users based on area. It also offers a very useful search engine.

Influence: Klout and TwitterCounter

Type a username into Klout and you can get a sense for how influential that user is on Twitter and their behavior. Klout gives you a score out of 100 based on reach, amplification and network after being compiled from numbers like the total retweets, message reach, unique mentions, retweeters, and more. The cool feature is the influence matrix, which defines the user and gives you a brief description of their behavior on Twitter. Klout also tells you who the user influences and is influenced by, as well as a topic summary of their tweets.

TwitterCounter tracks the top accounts and lists on Twitter based on how many followers they have and gives you some more basic numbers of influence based on growth and rank of the user’s account. The site provides some basic graphs tracking the number of the follower, following, and tweet growth over time, even setting a predicting number for where you will be in the future based on your average growth. It also enables you to easily compare several accounts at once, and build a handy widget for your site that tracks and displays recent Twitter visitors to your site.

Photos and Videos: TwitPic and yfrog

Among the first sites to make sharing photos on Twitter easy and popular, Twitpic is still one of the best. It’s also useful to browse through the public timeline of photos uploaded, and now you can even tie location to the photos you upload. It also lets you group photos into events, which is great for organization.

Yfrog lets you not only upload photos, but videos as well. The site is also extremely useful and easy to navigate. One simple Yfrog feature that Twitpic fails to include is a site search. Yfrog allows you to sort videos and pictures based on popularity, and showcases top search trends on the site. You can also easily share the photos across platforms and get an embed code for the image. Here’s an example of Glee star Mark Salling’s Yfrog post about a recent big catch:

Polls: PollDaddy and TwtPoll

PollDaddy has an easy integration for creating a quick poll that can be easily distributed on Twitter. The setup is easy. You create a poll question, select the answers (multiple choice, etc.) and the order you want them to appear, enter your username and post it to Twitter. The site sends a nice clean tweet with a link to the poll where users can vote. After setting the poll up, it is also quite easy to embed the poll into a post. It’s also worth mentioning PollDaddy has a great WordPress plugin that enables you to easily create polls within the content management system.

TwtPoll is similar to PollDaddy but has a different interface and allows users to answer questions through different formats, such as text, images or videos, Twitter handles or addresses.

Texting isn’t just for late night convos and killing boredom. Short bursts of instant communication are connecting some isolated African communities to vital information.

Because of widespread poverty in Africa, the technology culture there has followed a different path than the West. Because computers are so expensive, affordable mobile phones have become the ubiquitous form of communication. Between 2003 and 2008, Africa had the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. On average, more than one-third of the African population has a mobile plan, with some areas reaching almost two-thirds market penetration.

Non-profit organizations have seized on this unexpected opportunity to bring lifesaving health care information, quality K-12 educational curricula, and advanced farming techniques to millions. Here’s a look at some of these mobile awareness efforts.

Health

It’s impossible to overstate the health care crisis in Africa. Over 5.6 million people are stricken with HIV/AIDS in South Africa alone; upwards of 30% of the population in some age groups. Many are unaware that medical care is even available. Perhaps even more heartbreaking, the multi-million dollar efforts to provide antiretroviral drugs are in vain for those without proper instructions and monitoring.

Cell-Life Aftercare, a joint project between the University of Cape Town and Peninsula University of Technology, can remotely monitor 15 to 20 patients per heath care worker, provide supplemental medical information and relay information back to a central database all via mobile technology.

“The single greatest risk [to effective patient monitoring] is the lack of resources to roll out [antiretroviral therapy] effectively,” said Ulrike Rivett, founder of Cell-Life. “The areas with the highest prevalence of HIV have a shortage of skilled medical personnel, lack of good nursing and management staff and have limited financial resources.”

Instant communication combined with an eagle-eye view of disease demographics has already prevented at least one outbreak of typhoid in Uganda. The U.S.-based non-profit Academcy of Educational Development – Satellife developed a program to relay information through networks via personal digital assistants (PDAs). “The outbreak was contained because we could see that something was amiss,” said Holly Ladd, Director of AED-Satellite. “This would not have been possible with paper and pencil reporting, which is much more time-consuming.”

While we are far from stopping the serious health care issues that plague African communities, these early projects seem like an important and promising technological step.

Instant Education

With so many young eyeballs fixated on mobile devices, educators saw a great opportunity to reach kids who have traditionally struggled with formal education. MXIt, a mobile messaging and social networking client, reaches 40% of South Africa’s population according to a company spokesperson, and has teamed up with scores of organizations to provide educational information on everything from mathematics to driving instructions.

For mathematics, MXIt partners with cities and school districts to provide personal tutoring and curricula for use inside and outside of the classroom. For schools, teachers are given established curricula and student performance results to help them tailor future lessons. Outside the classroom, students can get answers to burning math quandaries through direct access to a real-life tutor. They can also refer a struggling friend.

MXit seems pleased enough with the initial results to extend the program. According to materials provided by MXit, a new project partnership with Nokia that began with 260 learners has been expanded to over 3,000 and will soon cover two more South African provinces.

Other educational projects include the aptly-titled “m-novels,” which aims to provide mobile-formatted novels to fiction-hungry teens (as of this writing, only one such book, Kontax, seems to be in circulation).

Finally, for young people striving for a driver’s license, MXit beams instructional videos and driver-knowledge questions to help them ace their test. According to material provided to Mashable  by MXit, over 85,000 people utilized the program in the first month.

Agricultural Education and Equality

For many in the industrialized world, so-called “price dispersion” is a mere inconvenience — we might splurge for a $9 bagel on New York’s 5th Avenue even if we could buy one for 99 cents further downtown. For people in low-income countries, however, price variance across markets can mean one less meal for a entire family.

Fortunately, research finds that cell phone permeation can help smooth out price variation across markets. One study shows that for the fishing industry in sub-Saharan Africa, mobile phone penetration reduces waste, increased profits by 8%, and decreased consumer prices by 4%. “[With a cell phone], I know the price for US$2, rather than traveling [to the market], which costs US$20,” said one grain trader in Zinder, Nigeria to researcher Jenny Aker.

Mobile phones also provide access to global markets and crop-saving weather forecasts in developing areas around the world. Ross Biddiscombe reporting for the Guardian found that:

“…using the Reuters Mobile Light (RML) mobile phone service, one grape grower in Maharashtra state, India, began sending his product to Russia for a higher price after subscribing, while a maize grower received an SMS message about bird flu in West Bengal which would cut his sale price, so he decided to store his produce, selling it for an increased profit when the market improved a few weeks later.”

Pocket-sized technologies are making the age-old uncertainties of agriculture somewhat more manageable for many in Africa and other developing regions. And for those with meager savings to buffer a crisis, it’s little wonder farmers are taking advantage of every opportunity to avoid them.

Conclusion

Cheap and efficient mobile technologies are significantly changing the lives of people in developing areas who are burdened by unequal access to resources and information. Health, education and agriculture are all benefiting from the collective I.Q. of a mobile nation, and cell phones are bridging the gap between isolated African communities and a global market eager for knowledge and talent.

According to Facebook, more than 100 million photos are uploaded daily - a statistic that looks to rival that of YouTube's 24 hours of video uploaded every minute. In addition to the sheer volume, there is barely a person on the social network that hasn't been part of the photo uploading process, with 99% of the more than 400 million users having uploaded at least one photo. What Facebook's new product manager for photos Sam Odio is trying to point out here in his blog post is that uploading photos is massively popular and in need of some streamlining, likely to the benefit of Facebook's servers.

Odio was the founder of Divvyshot, the company behind the facial recognition technology that was acquired by Facebook two months ago.

For now, facial recognition will identifiy that a face is present in an uploaded photo, asking the user "Whose face is this?" According to Facebook, the feature is in limited testing, so you may not see it yet, but this and more will be coming for all soon. "Stay tuned," Odio writes, "for future posts about other work on browsing, uploading and tagging."

We're hoping this does help to clearly tag photos, rather than ending up with names popping up between two people when you mouse over their rubbing elbows.

While others, such as Endgadget's Tim Stevens, lament that the facial recognition won't go as far as saying who's face the software is seeing, we have to say we're glad Facebook hasn't taken this leap. And surely, when they do, we'll see a privacy setting for whether or not we want our face to be identified on any and every photo uploaded to its service, right?

To much media fanfare, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg removed his signature hoodie at D8 conference Wednesday, revealing a strange Illuminati-like diagram printed on the blue silk lining. Interviewer Kara Swisher took one look at the bizarre garment and remarked, "What are you in, some kind of cult?"

The notion of some sort of secret seal struck a chord with the D8 audience -- and raises larger questions: The image is impossible to find on any open Facebook marketing materials, or online at all. When contacted by SF Weekly, the official channels at Facebook held that they had no details on the insignia, despite the fact that they could have just written it off on an over-enthusiastic design team.

Using blown-up photos from the conference, we created a mock-up of Zuckerberg's "Mission Statement Seal" hoodie. The design itself represents the three key parts of Facebook's strategy for 2010 (hence the 2010 in the middle):

• The bi-directional arrows indicate that each part generates inbound and outbound sharing;

• The labels on the arrows -- GRAPH, here represented by the "friend requests" icon, STREAM, represented by the "messages" icon and PLATFORM, represented by the "notifications" icon -- represent the three prongs of Facebook's strategy for 2010, as revealed at F8 conference;

• The blue ring is the interface or Facebook's wall around user data --
  the permeability of which remains a major point of controversy;

• The motto on the upper half of the blue ring,"Making the world more open and connected" is, according to Zuckerberg, Facebook's obviously unofficial "Mission Statement."

If the logo was an open piece of marketing fodder, it would just be discounted as a silly Illuminati-looking logo, on par with the Facebook quail. It's also easy to write this off as Harvard attendee Zuckerberg being a little too keen on secret society machinations. And we are sure conspiracy theorists will try to decipher this, remarking on how the intersects of the arrows produce a slightly off-kilter Star of David in the center.

However, a source familiar with Facebook tells SF Weekly that there's never been evidence of secret Facebook rituals aside from the usual team-building exercises. In all fairness, the graphic was probably made quite innocently; people at Facebook are so unaware of how they're perceived that it just didn't occur to them that an insignia like this could come off as childish and creepy -- especially when accidentally revealed during a cold sweat.

EFF has posted documents shedding light on how law enforcement agencies use social networking sites to gather information in investigations. The records, obtained from the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice Criminal Division, are the first in a series of documents that will be released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case that EFF filed with the help of the UC Berkeley Samuelson Clinic.

One of the most interesting files is a 2009 training course that describes how IRS employees may use various Internet tools -- including social networking sites and Google Street View -- to investigate taxpayers.

The IRS should be commended for its detailed training that clearly prohibits employees from using deception or fake social networking accounts to obtain information. Its policies generally limit employees to using publicly available information. The good example set by the IRS is in stark contrast to the U.S. Marshalls and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Neither organization found any documents on social networking sites in response to EFF's request suggesting they do not have any written policies or restrictions upon the use of these websites.

The documents released by the IRS also include excerpts from the Internal Revenue Manual explaining that employees aren't allowed to use government computers to access social networking sites for personal communication, and cautioning them to be careful to avoid any appearance that they're speaking on behalf of the IRS when making personal use of social media.

The Justice Department released a presentation entitled "Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites." The slides, which were prepared by two lawyers from the agency's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, detail several social media companies' data retention practices and responses to law enforcement requests. The presentation notes that Facebook was “often cooperative with emergency requests” while complaining about Twitter’s short data retention policies and refusal to preserve data without legal process. The presentation also touches on use of social media for undercover operations.

Over the next few months, EFF will be getting more documents from several law enforcement and intelligence agencies concerning their use of social networking sites for investigative purposes. We'll post those files here as they arrive.

The ability to write well is very useful for our personal and professional lives. It helps students, business people, politicians, writers,  bloggers, marketers and everyone who has ever needed to arrange words together to convey ideas or opinions. The written word has become an essential means of social communication: mastery of it helps you to enthrall and  persuade an audience that would look upon you favorably in return.

It goes without saying that learning how to create compelling content is a part of one’s success as an online publisher. Reading widely and deeply while consistently honing your writing skills helps a great deal in bettering your prose. Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to read a few stylebooks/essays on writing by professional teachers or authors.

One of these essays on writing is Paul McHenry Roberts’s How to Say Nothing in Five Hundred Words, a brilliantly humorous introduction on writing college compositions. I discovered this essay today and read though easily in one sitting, possibly because it was so well-written and entertaining. It’s a perfect example of the writing techniques listed within.

Here’s a quick summary of the 9 main points mentioned. I’ve extracted some of the key paragraphs from the text but be sure to read the full essay because these points are elaborated in much greater detail with some excellent examples.

1. Avoid the obvious content.“Say the assignment is college football. Say that you’ve decided to be against it. Begin by putting down the arguments that come to your mind. Now when you write your paper, make sure that you don’ t use any of the material on this list. If these are the points that leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone else’s too. Be against college football for some reason or reasons of your own. If they are keen and perceptive ones, that’s splendid. But even if they are trivial or foolish or indefensible, you are still ahead so long as they are not everybody else’s reasons too.”
2. Take the less usual side. “One rather simple way of getting into your paper is to take the side of the argument that most of the citizens will want to avoid. They are intellectual exercises, and it is legitimate to argue now one way and now another, as debaters do in similar circumstances. Always take the that looks to you hardest, least defensible. It will almost always turn out to be easier to write interestingly on that side.”
3. Slip out of abstraction. “Look at the work of any professional writer and notice how constantly he is moving from the generality, the abstract statement, to the concrete example, the facts and figures, the illustrations. For most the soundest advice is to be seeking always for the picture, to be always turning general remarks into seeable examples. Don’t say, “Sororities teach girls the social graces.” Say, “Sorority life teaches a girl how to carry on a conversation while pouring tea, without sloshing the tea into the saucer.”
4. Get rid of obvious padding. “Instead of stuffing your sentences with straw, you must try steadily to get rid of the padding, to make your sentences lean and tough… You dig up more real content. Instead of taking a couple of obvious points off the surface of the topic and then circling warily around them for six paragraphs, you work in and explore, figure out the details. You illustrate.”
5. Call a fool a fool. “If he was a fool, call him a fool. Hedging the thing about with “in-my-opinion’s” and “it-seems-to-me’s” and “as-I-see-it’s” and “at-least-from-my-point-of-view’s” gains you nothing. Delete these phrases whenever they creep into your paper. Decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible, without apology and in plain words. Writing in the modern world, you cannot altogether avoid modern jargon. But you can do much if you will mount guard against those roundabout phrases, those echoing polysyllables that tend to slip into your writing to rob it of its crispness and force.”
6. Beware of Pat Expressions. “Other things being equal, avoid phrases like “other things being equal.” Those sentences that come to you whole, or in two or three doughy lumps, are sure to be bad sentences. They are no creation of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the community soup… No writer avoids them altogether, but good writers avoid them more often than poor writers.”
7. Colorful Words. “Some words are what we call “colorful.” By this we mean that they are calculated to produce a picture or induce an emotion. They are dressy instead of plain, specific instead of general, loud instead of soft. Thus, in place of “Her heart beat,” we may write, “her heart pounded, throbbed, fluttered, danced.” Instead of “He sat in his chair,” we may say, “he lounged, sprawled, coiled.”
8. Colored Words.. “When we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the situations in which we have heard it before. The word mother, for example, has, for most people, agreeable associations. When you hear mother you probably think of home, safety, love, food, and various other pleasant things..The question of whether to use loaded words or not depends on what is being written.”
9. Colorless Words. “A pet example is nice, a word we would find it hard to dispense with in casual conversation but which is no longer capable of adding much to a description. Colorless words are those of such general meaning that in a particular sentence they mean nothing…Slang adjectives like cool (”That’s real cool”) tend to explode all over the language. They are applied to everything, lose their original force, and quickly die.”

Learning how to create content using concrete, lean, colorful and vivid prose with unique perspectives will help you to get more readers, customers and supporters. But bear in mind that its not just about writing in a fancy way to entertain. It’s also a conscientious way of differentiating yourself from thousands of similar writers/thinkers in the same field.

It's fun to use social networking sites, but where does your data go after you die?

According to Forrester Research, 55.6 million adults in the United States have a social networking account with a site like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. More people join social networking sites every day. For some users, online networks serve as the primary means of staying in touch with friends and family. Social networking sites let us post our thoughts, pictures, videos, music and other content. But what happens to all of that when we die?

It's a sobering problem. As we invest more of ourselves into our online presence, we become more affected by the things we see and do on the Internet. We also affect our online friends. It might seem like worrying about what happens to your online presence after your death is a trivial matter but it's becoming more important as time goes on.

Part of the reason for that is the Internet provides a place for people to express thoughts and feelings as they grieve a loss. Your social networking profile could become a spot where your friends and family can share memories of you. People who might not otherwise hear of your passing may learn of it through your profile page.

But maintaining a presence online after you die has its share of problems as well. Mean-spirited people -- called trolls in the online world -- might take the opportunity to leave insulting or inflammatory comments on your page just to stir up trouble. Who guards your profile after you're gone? Can someone request access to your accounts to act as custodian to your online presence?

The answer varies from one site to another. As of yet, there is no law in the United States with rules about how to handle an online presence after someone passes away. Each company creates its own policies. Some, like MySpace, do so on a case-by-case basis. Others, like Facebook, establish rules that allow friends and relatives to transform a normal profile into a memorial.

Facebook After Death

The Canadian government's concerns over user privacy helped shape Facebook's policies on memorial accounts.

Facebook instituted a policy a few years ago regarding how to handle the profiles of deceased individuals. Family members could choose one of two options: close the account -- Facebook will delete an account permanently upon the family's request -- or converting the account into a memorial profile. Facebook's policy states the company will never release login information to anyone other than the account holder, even after death 

Before making any changes, Facebook requires proof that the user has died. First, someone must use an online form to report the user's demise. Within that form is a space to include a link to an obituary or news report confirming the death. Facebook employees then review the user's profile to verify there has been no recent activity. Only then will the company begin the conversion process.

A profile undergoes several changes when switching into a memorial. Facebook removes sensitive information from the profile. This includes contact information and addresses. The company also removes status updates to protect the privacy of the deceased user.

Facebook changes the profile settings so that only friends can find the profile and post information to the user's wall. This lets other members visit the profile and use it as a place of grieving and healing while preventing digital vandalism from trolls. Searches for the deceased user on Facebook's search engine will not list the memorial page.

The company will also deactivate the user's login information. This prevents anyone from guessing the user's password and logging in to cause mischief.

If no one contacts Facebook to alert the company of the user's passing, his or her profile will remain active indefinitely. Facebook doesn't delete inactive accounts without notification. Depending upon the user's privacy settings, people will still be able to search and visit the profile and leave comments.

Not every site has established a policy for dealing with death. Some will obey whatever the family wishes as long as the company receives proof of the user's passing. A few won't take any action without a copy of a death certificate. Other companies won't make any changes at all. But as the issue pops up, more online social networks are adopting rules to handle the situation.

Preparing Your Online Life for Death

What can you do to help your family or friends manage your online presence after you die? Depending on your level of activity online, you may have dozens of different accounts. And some sites may not have policies in place to deal with your account after your death.

One thing you can do is designate someone to be in charge of your online accounts after you die. You'll need to create a list of your user names and passwords and put it in a safe place. A few companies will store that information for you, usually for a fee.

One of those companies is Legacy Locker. The company offers three plans. You can create a free account and store up to three assets (e.g., login information), designate one beneficiary to retrieve those assets should you pass away and write a Legacy Letter. Legacy Letters are messages the company will deliver to designated recipients after verifying that you've died.

Or you can set up a paid account. For $29.99 a year, members can store an unlimited number of assets and designate as many beneficiaries as they like. There is no limit on the number of Legacy Letters they can create. They can also use an online document backup system and upload videos to the site for others to watch after they pass on. For a one-time fee of $299.99, members can create an account that will remain active without the need for yearly payments.

Besides Legacy Locker, here are other companies that will store information for you and release it to designated individuals upon proof of your death. And while online services offer convenience, they may not be as secure as you would like. After all, you're storing all of your login information with one service. If a hacker should get access to the company's files, he or she would be able to access all of your login information you've stored. That might include everything from social networking profiles to online bank accounts.

You don't have to rely on a third party if you prefer to maintain your own list of login information. In fact, there are several ways to encrypt your data, and you could give the decryption key to people you trust. You could also designate an executor to your online property in your will.

So, what to do with a dead user's information remains a tricky subject. Most social networking sites allow users to post comments and messages to each other, but who owns that data? Is it the recipient, the sender or the company? If you've left a message for someone and they pass away, can you retrieve it? These are questions most sites have yet to address.

Even though companies are beginning to acknowledge the problem of what to do with your data once you die, most of the responsibility falls to you and your family. It's not a lot of fun to think about but a little consideration could save your loved ones from experiencing hours of frustration on top of their grief.

Want to know how many people are microblogging in Australia? Or uploading photos online in Brazil? Or writing blogs in the Netherlands? There’s a map for that — literally.

TrendStream, who publishes the Global Web Index, has created a fantastic visualization that shows the penetration of different social technologies in major markets around the globe. The research is based on interviews with 32,000 Internet users in 16 countries.

A few of the findings they report:

“The massive impact of China: The vast Internet population coupled with hugely socially active set of web users, makes for a massive volume of content creators. However due to the inward looking nature of Chinas internet economy combined with the language mean that this volume of content does not impact the broader Internet

Low engagement in Japan: We also associate Japan with technology innovation, and actual while you might not think it, the low engagement is indicative of progress. Why? Our map shows PC activity and we know from this research that a huge number of Japanese users are bypassing PC altogether and using mobile devices to access social platforms and create and share content. Just over 34% of social network users only accessed through mobile in the month of the research, this is compared to 3% in the UK, a staggering indication of where the future is heading.

The low level of microblog engagement: Despite the Twitter hype, microblogging is still not a mass social activity and nowhere near the size and scale of blogging.”

Here’s the full map for your viewing pleasure (blow it up to full screen):

Ben Stiller pulled out all the social media stops today when he launched his semi-satirical charity initiative, Stillerstrong, via Facebook, Twitter and a branded Web site.

In Ben Stiller’s world even charity is ripe for parody. Such is the case with Stillerstrong.org, the newly launched website for Stiller’s partnership with Save the Children. The site will feature a series of viral videos aimed at raising money and awareness for the Save the Children’s Ceverine Community School Project in Haiti. In the first video Stiller takes on his friend, and uber-fundraiser, Lance Armstrong  — directly asking the Tour de France champion to wear a Stillerstong head band in support of his charity. Stiller also has a spot on the site with Owen Wilson, where the actor begrudgingly takes one of Stiller’s goofy headbands for himself–and his dog.

The whole thing may feel really jokey but Stiller is serious about raising the money. He says, “With Save the Children, because I assume they know how to save kids, we are raising money to expand the school, dig a drinking water well there, and set up a self sustainable crop field to help the residents keep the school going for years to come. It’s only one school, but hopefully our efforts will lead to greater awareness for the education needs of the children in Haiti.

Stiller provides a myriad of ways for users to contribute: via PayPal, text message or by purchasing one of those sweet headbands. The actor has recently been getting hip to the new trends (remember when he taught Mickey Rooney how to use Twitter?), so perhaps the headgear will take off in the same way Armstrong’s bracelets did — at least among the tragically ironic set.