The survey was conducted by Northwestern University in Qatar, and involved interviews with more than 10,000 people from Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates (which includes Abu Dhabi and Dubai). Although the Arab television networks Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were the top source of news in most of the countries that took part in the study, on average Facebook was the third most popular.

If you look more closely at the numbers, the average for Facebook is hugely influenced by Tunisia, where more than 50 percent of all respondents said the social network was their number one source of news — in Bahrain, only 11 percent said the same, while Facebook’s ranking in the UAE was 10 percent and in Qatar it was 3 percent. The only countries to mention Twitter were Bahrain, where 8 percent gave it as a top source, and Saudi Arabia where it had 3 percent.

Social media is much more influential

Northwestern journalism professor Justin Martin, one of the researchers who did the study, told the media news site Journalism.co.uk that “if you look at the percentages of internet users who are active on social media sites, it’s much higher than the United States and Australia or Western European countries.” Martin said that this fits with earlier research that shows Arab countries are much more social in their use of media than many Western nations:

“Arabs, maybe more than any other culture around the world, have these anchored communities where they receive and share news and information and they tend to go there often for news and they tend to trust the information from their anchored communities.”

As a number of media theorists have described, social media’s effect on our news consumption is in some ways a throwback to the way news used to be consumed and distributed before newspapers existed — when coffee shops and other social outlets were the main source of information for communities (it’s also not clear from the study how much of what is shared on Facebook is news from a traditional source such as a newspaper or television network).

What is clear from the study is that people in some Arab nations don’t trust the traditional media much at all, which could also be driving them towards social networks as a source of news: in Egypt and Tunisia — both of which experienced revolutionary uprisings as part of the Arab Spring — only a quarter of those surveyed said they thought the media was a credible source.

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written about how social-media use influenced the revolutions in Tunisia and other Arab countries, and how social networks helped to overcome some of the barriers that kept popular dissident movements in those countries from turning into revolutions in the past.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Richard Engel / NBC

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The company was known for its social browser that had tabs for chat and features that would let you know when your favorite sites updated with fresh content. But the company moved away from the idea of building a browser and launched more of a news reader on iPad in October, which Om covered. He wrote about the different ways Rockmelt was challenging apps like Flipboard. Rockmelt then went on to launch an iPhone app and web versions.

The company said the revamped version now has 1.1 million users who have used Rockmelt at any one point, with “hundreds of thousands” active users, although they emphasized that they’re still in the “early days” of the new Rockmelt.

We covered the company’s original launch back in Nov. 2010, and then when it raised $30 million in funding led by Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz in June 2011.

The Android app builds on the new concept of Rockmelt, which shows you interesting stories from around the internet that you can respond to with Rockmelt-specific emotions or share to other social networks.

“We think there should be a social network just for sharing the best things you find on the web,” said Tim Howes, CTO and co-founder of the company.

Which is a legitimate goal, except this space is fairly dominated by Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest. But still, the app surfaces some cool content, and determining the next frontier for social news is still something that people are figuring out.

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The study, entitled “Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat,” was published in the university’s peer-reviewed journal First Monday in May, and used what is known as the Twitter “Decahose” — which is made up of one-tenth of all the messages sent across the network. Access to the data was provided by Gnip, one of the companies that is licensed to sell Twitter’s full firehose, as part of a demonstration project with computer maker Silicon Graphics called “Twitter Heartbeat.”

For that demonstration, the researchers used the Decahose — which streamed more than 1.5 billion tweets from 71 million unique users during the period from October 23 to November 30 of 2012, an average of 38 million tweets a day — to show a real-time map of global discussion about topics such as Hurricane Sandy and the U.S. federal election. As part of that project, the team created one of the largest databases of global tweets with geographic data included, based both on GPS data and user profiles.

In addition to some interesting data about where most geo-located tweets come from (Jakarta in Indonesia and New York City were two of the top locations), the study looked at what the Twitter data shows about the way that social networks have changed the way we communicate. In many ways, the researchers said, networks like Twitter have “created a world in which a person may speak to another on the other side of the planet with just a few millisecond delay, effectively removing the geographic barrier.”

“Users on Twitter communicate with others both near them and half a world away, illustrating that the role of physical proximity in communication seems to be reduced in the era of social media.”

These maps of real-time connections produced for the Illinois study reminded me of similar maps created with Facebook data, such as the one that Facebook intern Paul Butler produced in 2010 (which appears below) — or the one that data researcher Pete Warden created by scraping Facebook user profiles, a fascinating map of connections that he later had to delete after the social network threatened to sue him for breaching its terms of service.

Although Twitter CEO Dick Costolo likes to talk about the service as the “pulse of the planet,” it’s worth noting that most of the world’s population still doesn’t tweet — and even most of those who do aren’t using it all the time: Twitter has about 550 million users, or about eight percent of the world’s population, but the top five percent account for almost half of all tweets sent. Of the sample the U of Illinois researchers looked at, one quarter tweeted only once.

In addition, the study notes that only 8 percent of all users had location data available. About one percent of all users surveyed accounted for more than two-thirds of all geo-referenced tweets, showing that geo-located are created by what the researchers called “an even more extreme subset of users” than overall tweets. They noted that studies relying on these tweets alone would have a “skewed view of the Twitterverse, especially over short periods of time.”

That said, however, it’s fascinating to see tangible evidence of how social networks like Twitter can help to erase geographical barriers and connect users around the globe in real time.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser

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Tango isn’t going to develop games itself — though it has designed a few of those in the past. Rather, it wants to power social communications elements for the gaming industry, and it has already gained traction with one of the giants of the mobile entertainment space in Gameloft.

In the next week or so, Gameloft will launch a title called Candy Block Breaker for Tango, a game which uses the company’s communications platform as its social layer, Tango CTO and co-founder Eric Setton said. Tango is working with a dozen developers and publishers big and small, though the only other partner Setton would reveal was Australian game studio Bubble Gum Interactive.

Tango launched as an video chat app in 2010 at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference, but in the last three years it has grown at an incredible pace, adding messaging and voice capabilities and signing up 120 million users. As Tango’s network grew, Tango began layering on content and social media elements, which became its primary revenue source. Among its popular features were a handful of social games users could play while chatting via text or voice, Setton said. The company is now hosting 20 million games sessions each month.

Social networks like Facebook have evolved into communications networks, and Tango felt that street ran both ways. With a huge user base under its belt, the company could turn its underlying network into a platform for social gaming communication.

It has released an SDK that developers can use to integrate messaging, voice and video chat features into their social, multiplayer and networked games. Bigger shops like Gameloft will still host their own gaming sessions, overlaying Tango’s features on top, while smaller outfits can actually host their gaming sessions on Tango’s network, Setton said.

The idea is that anyone who is a Tango customer will be instantly available over the gaming network, and gamers can use their address books within game sessions just as they would use them in the Tango app. In addition, to communications services, Tango can provide basic gaming social layer features, such as point tracking, standings and leader boards. Tango will make its money through revenue share agreements.

Tango isn’t the first OTT provider to try this model. KakaoTalk and Line have pioneered the concept in Asia, though Tango will be the first tackle it in the West. “In my opinion this is going to the business model for the entire mobile industry,” Setton said.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to charge for communications services, so most OTT providers are forced to give their core messaging, voice and video chat features away for free, Setton said. The only way to make money is to use those networks as conduits for paid content.

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What makes this kind of topic so difficult to discuss is that much of the content Facebook was accused of harboring is unpleasant in the extreme: some of the pages that were mentioned in the complaint by the group Women, Action and the Media advocated violence against women, promoted rape, and made jokes about abuse (one of the tamer examples was a page called “Kicking Your Girlfriend in the Fanny Because She Won’t Make You a Sandwich”). No one in their right mind would argue that this kind of content isn’t offensive.

Facebook decides what speech is free

The larger problem in making Facebook take this kind of content down, however, is that it forces the network to take an even more active role in determining which of the comments or photos or videos posted by its billion or so users deserve to be seen and which don’t. In other words, it gives Facebook even more of a licence to practice what amounts to censorship — something the company routinely (and legitimately) gets criticized for doing.

To take just a few examples, Facebook has been repeatedly accused of removing content that promotes breast-feeding, presumably because it is seen as offensive by some — or perhaps because it trips the automatic filters that try to detect offensive content and send it to the team of regulators who actually police that sort of thing. The social network has also come under fire for removing pages related to the Middle East, as well as pages and content published by advocacy groups and dissidents in other parts of the world.

As Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has pointed out, the entire concept of “hate speech” is a tricky one. In France, posting comments that are seen as homophobic or anti-Semitic is a crime, and Twitter is currently fighting a court order aimed at having the social network identify some of those who posted such comments. The company is resisting at least in part because it has staked its reputation on being the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

It’s an increasingly slippery slope

Some groups have tried to convince Facebook that pages promoting heterosexuality qualify as hate speech, while others have complained that pages making fun of people who are overweight should fall into the same category. Many people would undoubtedly see the kind of content that Women, Action and the Media are complaining about as being clearly offensive in a way that these other pages aren’t — but not everyone would agree.

Where does Facebook draw the line on this particular slippery slope? Is it only the content that draws the most vocal criticism that gets removed, or the campaigns that influence advertisers?

As more than one free-speech advocate has noted, if popular protests about offensive content were what determined the content we were able to see or share a few decades ago, anything promoting homosexuality or half a dozen other topics would have vanished from our sight. There is at least a case to be made that the simplest course of action for a network like Facebook would be to only remove content when it is required to do so by law. But then what happens to the kind of content it just apologized for?

Private entities making their own rules

To its credit, the social network has tried to find other ways of discouraging these kinds of pages — including requesting page administrators to identify themselves (although the company’s “real name” policy raises some equally troubling questions). And while Facebook’s behavior looks and feels like censorship, it isn’t legally an infringement of free speech because Facebook is a corporate entity, and free-speech rules only apply to governments.

And that fact about Facebook — that it is a proprietary platform controlled by private interests — is part of what makes this situation so complex. For large numbers of people, the social network is a central method for connecting with and sharing information with their friends, a combination of water cooler and public square. But like Twitter, it is not a public square at all: it is more like a shopping mall, with private security that determines what behavior is tolerated what isn’t.

That’s not a problem when you want security to remove the people who are offending or disturbing you, or when you agree with the company’s decisions — but it’s quite different when you are the one who is being accused of being offensive or disturbing. And Facebook has provided plenty of evidence that it can make just as many wrong choices as it can right ones.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Hoggarazi

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In a blog post, Twitter said you can now tweet photos from Glass to your feed — the update will include the hashtag “#throughglass” — and see your other tweets by turning on in-Glass notifications. The service is now available and users can activate the Twitter app on Google’s MyGlass portal.

Facebook’s Glass implementation is also live, though for now you can only share photos, not post status updates or view your newsfeed. You can, however, set privacy levels and add descriptions to photos you post using Glass’s speech recognition features.

Evernote doesn’t yet have an app per se, but it is integrating with Glass’s sharing menu, allowing you to capture a picture or short video and save it as a note in your Evernote account. It is also giving users the option of sending notes (from its web app) to the Glass timeline so your grocery list or crib notes are right in your line of vision.

At I/O Google revealed three other companies taking up shop on Glass. CNN’s app will put news alerts in front of your retinas. Elle is providing content from its magazines that can be viewed in the Glass display or read aloud. Tumblr lets you post content to your personal blog and get updates from Tumblrs you follow.

These companies join Path and the New York Times as the only official third-party apps on the Glass. For now Google is being rather conservative in its Glassware efforts, placing restrictions on the level of access to platform and banning ads or any other monetization scheme.

Still, once Google fully opens up Glass, it likely won’t have any shortage of interest. Smaller developers are already clamoring to get on board. For instance, Open Garden wants Google to expose Glass’s networking functions so it can link the headgear to its crowdsourced mesh network.

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That idea isn’t going to work.

Why? In a nutshell, social network-based communication is primarily organized around the concept of a “pull” medium — that is, a medium where individuals subscribe to whichever information sources they prefer and find useful. Traditional business processes, on the other hand, use “push” communications, where whoever created the information gets to decide whom it’s most important to. Simply put, the two parties don’t gibe.

Perhaps more importantly, the nature of work in our era has changed. Most people now have jobs based on non-routine work, where the predefined and fixed roles of business process do not reach.

I recently wrote a report as part of my activities in GigaOM Research, entitled “Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them” (subscription required). In the report, I argue that we are drifting away from a business-process defined culture and towards a social network-shaped, cooperative one.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Above we see the variance between process-oriented organizational cultures and network-oriented ones. I consider this part of the transition from post-modern (1970-2005) to what I’ll call post-normal (2005-present and beyond) economic eras. These cultures also differ in the nature of social affiliation, with a loosening of the bonds that tie people together in cooperative cultures contrasted with collaborative ones. People in cooperative organizations will have a higher number on connections, but the proportion of those that are strong ties decreases relative to collaborative cultures.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Some corporate cultures are stuck even farther back in time because they are based on competition. I don’t mean competing with others in the marketplace, like Toyota competing with BMW. I am talking about a corporate culture based on zero-sum competition among workers, where one person’s advancement is someone else’s demotion. These are cultures strongly based on authority-based decision-making, and really are a holdover from the late modern era: the late industrial era.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

In the report, I discuss the “fit” of different psychological profiles, or archetypes, in these cultures. For example, the Entrepreneur archetype (see above) fits well in collaborative and competitive cultures, and fits the entrepreneurial culture perfectly. But Entrepreneurs won’t like working in a purely traditional, “cooperative” culture, because they like to lead collectives that are managed through consensus. A cooperative organization is too loose for them: It’s a connective, and is based on laissez-faire decision making.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

This is the debut of the 3C model — competitive, collaborative, and cooperative. It’s a psychosocial model of organizational culture, and I hope it helps address some key issues in organizational dynamics in organizations today as social technologies and practices are being adopted. Marshal McLuhan said, “we make our tools, and they shape us.” Keeping that in mind, we see the change that social network-based communication is causing.

Businesses are not making these changes on a whim or because individuals are made happier by cooperative work relationships. The fast-and-loose business is most in sync with the digital realities of today’s world, although most companies are still operating principally in a more traditional mode, and may even have a healthy dose of the “frozen-and-immobile” at the core. Nonetheless, businesses must move towards a more cooperative work environment because in doing so they will successfully compete in today’s fast-paced, digitally focused world. Older cultures that cling to traditional business processes will not.

To read the full report, click here (subscription required).

Thumbnail image courtesy of flickr user ShellVacationsHospitality.

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