This series is brought to you by HTC EVO 4G, America’s first 4G phone. Only from Sprint. The “First to Know” series keeps you in the know on what’s happening now in the world of social media and technology.

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world today. We’re keeping our eyes on four particular stories of interest today.

YouTube banned in Russia over Racist Video

A Russian court has demanded that a Russian ISP block access to YouTube, as well as the Internet Archive and three online libraries, for hosting extremist videos and writings by Adolf Hitler, respectively.

Russia joins a growing list of governments who have blocked access to the video hosting site, including China, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. YouTube material has also been censored in the U.S. and U.K.

Amazon Releases New Kindle

Amazon has released the Kindle 3, the latest in its e-reader line. The new version is both smaller and lighter, contrast has been improved by 50%, pages turn 20% faster, storage has doubled, and text-to-speech functionality has also improved. Perhaps most impressively, its battery life now lasts up to one month. The device will support a beta WebKit-based browser as well.

The price has also been lowered; the Wi-Fi-only version will cost $139 — $10 less than Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader. The 3G version will retail for $189. The new devices will ship to customers in more than 140 countries and 30 territories beginning August 27.

More Than One Million Android Users’ Info Compromised

At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas yesterday, attendees learned that the phone, voicemail and subscriber identifier numbers of between 1.1 and 4.6 million Android users were compromised by an app called “Jackeey Wallpaper.” The details were sent to Chinese website imnet.us. [via Gizmodo]

Motorola Earnings Beat Expectations

Motorola has released its second-quarter financial earnings report. Earnings were up $26 million year-over-year at $162 million; overall sales were $5.4 billion. On the less cheerful side, mobile device sales dropped six percent to $1.7 billion, and overall revenue declined 1.5% to $5.4 billion which, although a decline, still beat analysts’ expectations by approximately $200 million.

Further News

Recorded Future, a company that monitors the real-time web in order to “predict the future,” is now being backed by both Google and the CIA [via Wired]; Opera Mini is now serving one billion page views per day; Facebook launched Facebook Questions, which we think needs some serious improvement; Cisco apes the Old Spice YouTube campaign, but no one notices.

Disclosure: Motorola is a past sponsor of Mashable.

Series supported by HTC EVO 4G

This series is brought to you by HTC EVO 4G, America’s first 4G phone. Only from Sprint. The “First to Know” series keeps you in the know on what’s happening now in the world of social media and technology.

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Despite the fact that popular smartphones such as the iPhone and Android already have great web browsers, Opera’s Java ME-based mobile browser Opera Mini is constantly growing. According to Opera, on July 25th it served one billion page views.

The mobile browser, which recently dropped the beta tag from the already quite polished version 5.0, has been growing steadily over the past couple of years. In June 2008, it was serving 100 million page views every day; in June 2010, this number was 910 million.

Opera Mini’s distinguishing feature is its compression technology, which compresses web page content up to 90% on Opera’s servers before sending them to the actual device, which saves time and bandwidth.

To try out Opera Mini, point your mobile browser m.opera.com.

Reviews: Opera, Opera Mini

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Today, Amazon announced the newest generation of Kindle, its popular e-reader.

As hardware is wont to do, the newest version of the Kindle has become smaller and lighter while retaining its 6-inch reading area. Contrast on the screen has improved by 50%, and page turns are 20% faster. Storage on the device has doubled, and battery life is up to an entire month. And for you type geeks, new custom fonts and hinting on the device mean that words and letters will be more crisp, clear and natural-looking.

What more consumers will be interested in, however, is the price on the WiFi-only version of Kindle: a cool $139, which undercuts Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader by $10.

Kindle with 3G wireless connectivity will still retail for $189, and Kindle’s larger, newspaper- and magazine-oriented DX model is selling for $379.

The new devices will ship to customers in more than 140 countries and 30 territories starting on August 27.

We last saw some significant Kindle price cuts in June, when the device’s price tag dropped $70 from $259 to $189. At the time, we chalked this move up to a price war with the Nook, which is Kindle’s closest competitor in terms of price and features. Although the iPad is competing with e-readers for consumer dollars and is a popular hypothetical choice among this blog’s readers, single-purpose e-readers are priced to win this particular battle.

And Kindle’s not doing too badly in terms of selling e-books, either. One author has already sold a million copies of his novels in the Kindle Store. And Amazon says their Kindle editions are now outselling their hardcover books.

Given the low new price of the WiFi-only Kindle, would you be more inclined to purchase this device, either for yourself or as a gift, than you would have been previously? Ultimately, do you think consumer demand is broad enough to continually support both tablets and e-readers indefinitely, or will the does-it-all functionality of tablets win out in the long run?

More About: amazon, e-reader, ereader, ipad, Kindle, Tablet

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Google has once again given an excellent new tool to designers and developers (and even CSS-savvy “common folk”) who long for better, more diverse typefaces on the web: a cool Font Previewer that makes adding a new font to your site as simple as copy/pasting a few lines of code.

Back in May, Google rolled out its Font Directory and the Google Fonts API. The idea was that these tools would make it simpler for designers and devs to embed a wider range of fonts in their sites and applications.

The previewer takes a few steps out of that process by giving you an idea of how a given typeface will look on your site; letting you adjust the font size and weight; letting you tinker with the leading, kerning and tracking; generating a number of drop shadows if you require them; and generating the code you need to make the magic happen.

It’s pretty hot. Here’s what it looks like:

If you click “Toggle controls,” you can see what the typeface looks like sans-grid, sans-controls on a plain white screen.

Once you’re done tinkering, you’ll see a dynamically generated code sample beneath the preview area. Your code will look something like this:

Then, just copy and paste the stylesheet link and the CSS into your pages. That’s it; you’re done, and your site has a lovely, interesting new font. We tried it out ourselves, and it worked even better than expected.

All the fonts in Google’s library are open source. Previously, Google’s Font API could be integrated into websites using HTML or a JavaScript WebFont Loader that the company co-developed with Typekit.

Give the Font Previewer a try, and let us know what you think in the comments. We’re particularly interested to see if any of our readers can find bugs in this new tool.

Reviews: Google

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Facebook’s newest feature, Questions, has the potential to bring social Q&A into the mainstream. But like most beta features and apps, Questions is somewhat fragmented, and suffers from usability issues and apparent bugs. It could also benefit from a more seamless and connected integration across the social platform.

Perhaps most notably, the feature could be more effectively integrated with Facebook Pages, which are used by millions of users and brands worldwide. To better engage their audience and customers, brands and publishers will look to take advantage of the feature with their pages – a place they have built their following, their social Facebook hub. Though Facebook told Mashable’s Ben Parr that brands will eventually be able to answer questions using their pages, the current functionality is limited and disjointed.

Because the new feature is still in beta and not yet available to all users, we thought we’d provide feedback on what the feature is missing and how some of the gaps could be bridged. We’d love to hear what you think of the feature, its strengths and its faults in the comments or by answering our Facebook Question, “How do you think Facebook Questions can be improved?”

1. Easy Publishing to the Wall The feature would be better if it was integrated with profile and page walls. Right now, if a user posts a question, a small link referencing the question shows up in the “recent activity.” At the moment, Facebook Pages are not able to publish the questions onto their walls, a place that showcases all of the page’s activity and is a resource for users. Being able to publish questions to the wall will let everyone to track a questions more easily and will feature questions in a familiar setting for easy interactions.

Before this feature was released, questions on Facebook were being asked by users in the form of status updates, which would be represented as the stationary status of the user or page, but also as a post on their walls for users to interact with. Following similar protocol for questions would make the experience familiar for users.

2. Responding to Questions on the Wall and News Feed For seamless integration, users not only need to be able to see the questions in familiar places, but also respond to them in those places. This means being able to respond to questions on the Wall or in the News Feed without having to click-through to an unfamiliar Questions page. This will not only make interaction with Questions easy, but likely result in a lot more of the Questions being answered. Currently, Questions are teased in the form of a link, similar to the way links are often displayed.

3. Asking and Answering Questions Through the Tab Feature The Questions feature enables users and brands to add a tab that organizes its Questions activity. Users navigating to a brand page are able to ask questions related to the page in the Questions tab, which holds the prompt, “What do you want to know about______?” However, the tab suffers from issues similar to the ones we’ve outlined above; your interaction with the question is limited to clicking through or commenting (and you can only comment if you’re connected to the user in question).

Also, when an administrator of a page posts a question, it currently lives elsewhere. This might simply be an issue of beta functionality. However, it would make more sense when a publisher posts a Question on their page that it would be referenced in the tab. As of right now, the questions shown in the tab are only questions from users, and not all user-generated questions are displayed. Also, publishers are not able to post questions through the tab feature at all yet, which is a feature we’re expecting will be released soon.

4. Commenting On and Liking Answers Like any content on Facebook, users will expect to be able to comment on Questions and “like” them. Users are able to mark questions as either “helpful” or “unhelpful,” and these notes are tallied next to each question. But it isn’t the same as the familiar “like” functionality. Commenting is especially crucial, but is limited to answers of users your are friends with. However, users may want to interact with a specific answer or follow up with another question to a specific answer, but this sort of experience is currently fragmented. Because Questions is a more open product of Facebook, commenting would be more useful to extend beyond just a user’s immediate friends.

5. Analytics and Improved Search Analytics will especially be important to brands using the feature on their pages, and we’re guessing it will be listed among the interactions in Facebook Insights. Brands will want to track and learn how to best engage their audience with Questions and most effectively use the feature. This would include tracking the number of people who responded to a poll question, how many followers a question received and similar metrics. Brands will also look for administrative control over answers to their questions, similar to comment moderation controls on a Facebook Page.

This also ties into an improved search within the Questions product. Questions and topics are difficult to locate through the current search functionality, which often shows empty results despite the availability of relevant questions and answers. For example, even searching for questions related to Facebook turned up zero results.

Conclusion Because the feature has just been introduced to beta testers, it’s unclear how long it will take for some these issues to be resolved and how long Questions will be in beta. And you won’t yet find an answer to this inquiry on Facebook Questions either.

However, it’s clear that the product does have a lot of promising features, such as being able to create a poll or toggle between your personal profile and a brand page in answering a question or the predictive search function for when you start typing in a question. These are features that reflect a vision of a product that is being pieced together. We do believe Questions are a useful feature for Facebook, and we hope this feature can be executed effectively and seamlessly across Facebook.

Reviews: Facebook

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A court in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Russia has demanded a Russian ISP block access to YouTube because the site hosted “Russia for Russians,” which was judged to be an extremist video.

The court’s decision also applies to the Internet Archive and three online libraries, Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru, all of which were found to host writings by Adolf Hitler.

With this ruling, Russian authorities join a long list of governments that have blocked access to YouTube at some point or another, including China, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. YouTube material has also been censored in the U.S. and U.K.

Generally, these bans are instituted because the videos on the popular hosting site show something a government would rather its citizens not see, from state police brutality at a protest to unflattering depictions of its leadership to “immoral” or sexual content.

However, this particular ruling stems less from a desire to protect a country’s internal PR and more from a desire to keep Russian media — including citizen-generated and social media — free from the possibly harmful influences of ultranationalist, racist and xenophobic speech. The phrase “Russia for Russians” itself is a slogan of hatred used against the multi-ethnic society that exists in Russia today, and searching for the phrase “Россия для русских” on YouTube will return a number of disturbing videos typical of the white nationalist movement around the world.

But intentions aside, this ruling still constitutes what many other governments would consider a prohibition or restriction of free speech.

The owner of Rosnet, the ISP affected by today’s decision, is Aleksandr Ermakov. He spoke to media today, saying essentially that the court had thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

“All of mankind is using this website. And providers like ours do not violate Russian law. But we are still being forced to close the website so that our users can not log on and watch the videos. This is absurd! According to this logic, we have to demolish all buildings that have swastikas on the walls. Or when two people are discussing a bomb over the phone, we have to take away the phones from all people across Russia.”

More on Rosnet’s legal position can be found at this website.

Moreover, a Google rep told the Moscow Times, “To limit access of Rosnet users to the whole YouTube.com site, not to a particular video, breaches the right for freedom of information, guaranteed by Article 29 of Russia’s Constitution.”

What’s your opinion of the court’s ruling? In attempting to safeguard ethnic diversity, did they go too far in the direction of inhibiting free speech and free information? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Reviews: Google, YouTube

More About: ban, russia, trending, youtube

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Android users, rejoice! Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg will now be forced to feel your pain.

The Android app for Facebook could be charitably described as less functional than the iPhone app. We’re sure there are good reasons for this, the greatest of which is likely market share. With iOS-running phones composing more than half of all smartphones, according to recent research, it’s in Facebook’s best interest to focus on this segment first.

Still, for the ever-growing number of Android device users who also would like a little Facebook mobile action, the pared-down feature set of Facebook for Android makes us feel neglected — the redheaded stepchildren of Facebook mobile users. But now that “Zuck” is one of us, all that’s about to change… right?

Historically, Facebook has made fairly few gestures toward the Android platform. It launched its official Android app last fall and rolled out an SDK for Android devs just a couple months ago.

But Facebook’s iPhone work, which began with an official app launch in the summer of 2008, has been nothing short of fantastic. iPhone users can chat, watch videos and more all from within the app. Recent patents suggest even deeper app/hardware integration. And the app keeps up with Apple’s iOS updates, too.

For reference, we polled Twitter users on what they specifically would change or what they currently dislike about Facebook’s Android app.

The app’s notification system was by far the most-cited annoyance. Another common complaint was the app’s redirects to Facebook’s mobile touch site rather than having more in-app functionality. Users are having a hard time clicking and launching the links posted by their friends, let alone sharing links and items. One user said he’d like to have an easier way to view Pages, and several noted the lack of Facebook Chat features, which the iPhone app does have. Also, a few folks complained that the app is slow and prone to frequent crashes.

As a personal aside, and with my heartfelt apologies to the developer team working on Facebook’s mobile offerings, I have never found that the usefulness of the Facebook for Android app outweighed the frustration of trying to use it, and I’ve lately avoided using the app altogether.

So, returning to our original question: Will Mark Zuckerberg like the taste of his own dogfood? And if he doesn’t, will Android app users see fast-tracked changes and upgrades to the Facebook for Android application?

That’s really not a question we can answer, unfortunately. While we’d love to optimistically assume that Zuckerberg will find the current version of Facebook for Android as tedious and troublesome as some of its users clearly do, we can’t assume that he’ll demand immediate fixes and all Facebook’s other development will be sidetracked accordingly. But we are certain that Zuckerberg will continue to do what’s best for Facebook as a business, something he’s excelled at consistently.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment, but in the event that our questions aren’t answered, we’ll still be keeping an eye out for any releases to this particular application.

And hey, Mark, welcome to “the dark side,” and enjoy your new phone!

Reviews: Android, Facebook, Twitter, pages

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: MyDunkTank

Quick Pitch: Anyone can do a dare to raise money for a cause they support, and their friends and family can vote with their dollars for the dare one has to do.

Genius Idea: There are already plenty of sites like JustGiving out there that help you get donations for a cause by hosting events or just straight up asking for dough, but MyDunkTank makes things more fun and lighthearted by making it into a dare.

It goes like this: You go to the MyDunkTank website and name the charity you want to raise money for and how much you want to raise, then make a short list of dares that you’re willing to do. Tell your friends, family and colleagues about it, and they’ll each vote with donations on which dare they’d like to see you do.

Go through with it after the dare’s been selected, and the money will go to the organization you selected. Founder Blake Jennelle did the very first dare on the site. He dressed up as a cowboy for a whole month to raise money, and documented the whole thing by posting YouTube videos to his Tumblr blog.

There are already several dares and fundraising campaigns in progress at MyDunkTank, and you can track the site on its Twitter account and Facebook page. Do you have any great dare ideas? Let us know in the comments, then go do them for charity!

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pinktag

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Reviews: PHP, Tumblr, YouTube, iStockphoto

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Microsoft is working on a new technology, dubbed Street Slide, aimed at reshaping the street-level mapping space currently dominated by Google Street View and Microsoft’s Bing Streetside.

The company plans to present the technology at SIGGRAPH 2010 later this week. The big advantage of Street Slide is that it allows users to position and change the viewpoint of the camera, rather than relying on the limited view panorama that current technologies utilize.

Multi-perspective is the name of the game with Street Slide and looking at the demonstration video, the difference between the old method and the new method is immediately apparent.

Check out this Street Slide video:

While the improved contextual viewpoints of Street Slide could be useful in any context, the real benefit is on the mobile side. MIT’s Technology Review spoke with the founder of EveryScape, a startup that captures panoramic imagery of buildings, who has already created a version of Street Slide that is compatible with the iPhone. According to EveryScape’s tests, Street Slide helped people find places on unfamiliar streets 17 seconds faster on average than on Google’s StreetView.

We look forward to seeing Microsoft’s full paper and presentation at SIGGRAPH, and hope that some of this technology makes its way into Bing Streetside soon.

What do you think of Microsoft’s latest take on street-level mapping?

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BP may have been able to cap the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, but cleanup efforts are really just beginning. In an interesting intersection between technology and social activism, QR codes could prove instrumental in helping ensure that the Gulf is fully restored.

Nonpartisan activist group Women of the Storm is rallying public support around Gulf restoration. They’ve started the celebrity-backed Be the One campaign to get signatures for their petition, which states: “I demand that a plan to restore America’s Gulf be fully funded and implemented for me and future generations.”

ScanLife, makers of mobile barcode scanning technology, has stepped in to support the cause and they’re bringing QR codes to the rescue.

ScanLife created a QR code that, when scanned, directs users to a mobile site where they can watch the Be the One video (embedded below) and sign the petition. Plus, a giant version of the QR code was put on display on the Thomas Reuters billboard in Time Square last week to help outreach efforts.

The code is also being distributed online and on t-shirts, the latter of which people can buy to further support the cause. To date, the petition has garnered more than 117,000 signatures with the help of the QR code call-to-action.

As QR codes make their way to mainstream audiences, we think action-oriented campaigns of this variety will go a long way in making the technology relevant to the average smart phone user.

More About: be the one, bp, gulf oil spill, Mobile 2.0, QR Codes, scanlife, women of the storm

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Composing an e-mail is kind of like making out: Everyone assumes they know what they’re doing, but in reality plenty of people could use some pointers.

We’re all pretty much constantly sending missives around the web. In 2009, worldwide e-mail traffic amounted to 247 billion messages per day, according to market research firm Radicati.

But practice doesn’t make perfect, and myriad senders are horrifying recipients every day. Here are three big e-mail mistakes you’re probably making. (Sorry, we can’t do anything about your iguana-like kissing skills. Drag.)

And so begins my most recent Netiquette column over at CNN, which I write with Stuff Hipsters Hate co-blogger, Andrea Bartz. Check it out!

Check out the column at CNN.com >>

image courtesy of iStockphoto, hayesphotography

Reviews: iStockphoto

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Hey, did you guys know that Cisco tried to replicate that super popular Old Spice video campaign yesterday? Neither did we.

The other week, Old Spice launched a genius campaign in which Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice Guy, made personalized videos for bloggers, fans and random folk on the Internet. The undertaking was a mammoth success — it was one of the fastest-growing online video campaigns of all time, helping increase sales 107% in the past month. At the end of the whole thing, we predicted that a wave of copycats would start rolling in. Well, here’s one of the first.

Yesterday, Cisco published a blog post titled “Cisco SP360 SPice Social Media Event: Get to know Ted From Accounting,” in which Director of Strategic Communications Doug Webster introduced the campaign thusly:

Basically, Webster and Co. were impressed with the Old Spice campaign, and decided to test out the method, which worked in much the same way as the deodorant/body wash company’s endeavor — except Cisco’s mascot was not a hot man in a towel, but the rather dour-looking “Ted from Accounting.” Cisco fans were encouraged to visit the Cisco Twitter accounts — @CiscoSPMobility, @CiscoSPVideo and @CiscoSP360 — and tweet at Ted with the hashtag #CiscoSPice. They could also comment on the blog in order to get a personalized video. In total, Ted made 18 videos, which got around 4,000 views in total (by my last count).

As Megan O’Neill at Social Times points out, there were a lot of issues with this idea: the fact that it was split between myriad Twitter accounts, the fact that it didn’t ape the original enough (i.e. the parody didn’t go far enough), and the fact that no one knew that it was happening because no one knew who Ted was.

I would assert that within her last claim is a major missed opportunity. Yeah, Cisco is not exactly known as a super sexy company or a major voice in the viral sphere — at least for the most part — but it could have ridden the coattails of a pre-established star, in much the same way as Old Spice. Who? Well, remember Greg Justice, a.k.a. “The World’s Most Interesting Intern”?

Justice made a rap video about working at Cisco about a month ago. Although the vid only has around 76,000 views, Justice is a heck of a lot more visible than some new character named “Ted.” Also, Cisco could have come out swinging — like Old Spice did — by posting videos to bloggers who had mentioned both Cisco and Justice in the past. (The company did make some response videos to writers who had covered Cisco.)

Honestly, we wouldn’t expect Cisco to reach the viral heights of Old Spice with this campaign — Old Spice had been building toward that fireball since February when the first Old Spice Guy commercial premiered. Still, Cisco could have utilized its assets a bit better.

Check out a sampling below — the rest of the vids are on YouTube — and let us know what you think: How could Cisco have maximized its viral success?

Reviews: Internet, Twitter, YouTube

More About: business, cisco, MARKETING, money, old spice, twitter, viral video, youtube

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T.A. McCann serves as founder and CEO of Gist. His past experience includes Vulcan Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, where he was an entrepreneur-in-residence. Prior to Polaris, he held senior positions at Microsoft.

To quote Eric Clapton: “It’s in the way that you use it!”

In the constant back-and-forth arguments about Millennials joining the workforce, we’ve heard countless times that managers think social media is a distraction and ultimately a productivity killer in the workplace.

In response, the social media community has fought back by saying that these tools actually help them get things done faster, or bring other value to the business. But there have been few substantive conversations about precisely how social media might help you get things done.

Beyond Millennials, the “new workforce” is being defined by a work style that blurs personal and professional time. That development has spawned professionals that craftily use social media to get things done. Yes, the initial draw was networking, but as those relationships become more essential to your professional responsibilities, social media becomes an area where you can get a lot of work done too.

The trick is to realize that it’s not about the tool itself, but your ability to step back and analyze the tool’s real value in helping you accomplish tasks. If you’re not evaluating the way that you’re using social media to get things done, then you’re probably becoming increasingly inefficient because of it.

Without further ado, here are a few areas where social media can make you a productivity rock star, if you use it well.

Scalable Networking

Ten years ago, “networking” was done in restaurants, bars, on the phone and at conferences. Today the majority of networking occurs online, in tweets, e-mails, LinkedIn invites, and more. To put it bluntly, the difference between networking in 1995 and networking today, is about two hours less face time.

For instance, you can initiate a relationship with a mere tweet on Twitter or a comment on a blog post that shares an opinion or compliments someone. The tweet or comment only takes a matter of seconds, and you’re off and running with the start of a new relationship. The other party will remember you, and is beginning to value your opinions.

There is a lot of time saved when networking is done online, and the process scales rapidly with today’s tools. You can meet hundreds and thousands of people online, forge relationships in a matter of minutes, and maintain them long-term with much less effort.

Actionable Information is More Valuable

Information overload isn’t a new problem, and some folks would argue that Twitter and other tools have only made information overload more of a problem. But the truth is that if you carefully use tools like Twitter, Yahoo Pipes, RSS readers, Google Alerts and bookmarking to discover content that’s pertinent to your job, you can become extraordinarily efficient in finding, consuming and cataloging an enormous amount of information in a very short period of time. The key to staying productive is to distinguish your personal time spent with social media from your professional use of it.

Think about financial advisers reviewing stock information, market trends and news on important companies. Imagine their advantage if they were to systematize their information discovery through social media and better leverage communities like StockTwits. They would find content that is recommended by trusted friends and professionals in real-time, rather than relying solely on proprietary finance software and what surfaces on Google.

And it’s not just about finding the information; it’s about finding actionable information. Google alone doesn’t always reveal actionable information — only relevant links. But real people participating in social media surface incredible amounts of actionable information, with limited barriers to acting upon it quickly.

The recent phantom crash on Wall Street was initiated by a series of minor errors in a matter of seconds. Trades were happening in milliseconds, but news coverage scrambled to catch up to what was going on. Imagine if your adviser was tapped into real-time feeds to stay ahead of the game.

The application of this concept is obvious for any employee in the services world. Knowledge is everything, and social media used properly, is a tool to find, consume and act upon the most relevant, reliable information on the web in real-time.

Social Data Means Collaborative Freedom

One of the challenging things about collaboration is that while in theory it’s a huge productivity booster, it’s equally as likely to be a productivity killer when abused. Collaboration is also closely associated to the tools and applications built to support it. So if you’re collaborating with a group, and some people don’t like or simply can’t get the hang of a tool, then it’s a huge problem.

That being said, the beauty of modern social media and embedded social functionality in applications is that they are built for easy data portability — the message doesn’t always have to be tied to the medium. Twitter and Facebook feeds can be dumped into an entirely different application that’s more suited for your personal taste and work flow.

Twitter and Yammer clients might be the very best example of this. Anyone can use the service without having to live with an application that doesn’t suit their tastes and needs. In another sense, FriendFeed was quite successful at tying together almost infinite services and displaying them in one easy to use location.

In a world where collaboration is most often supported by some type of software, social media can provide the functionality to make sure that everyone can be productive while using the tool that works best for them.

It’s Not What You Use, but How You Use It

As with any tool, there are benefits and there are drawbacks. But the question isn’t about the tool. It’s about you.

Map out the various social media apps and tools that you use in your daily work life and rank them in order of importance to you. If you could only keep one of them, which would it be and why? Ask yourself which tool helps you accomplish the widest variety of tasks on a regular basis. Is that the same tool as the one you couldn’t live without?

I’m willing to bet that after doing this, most people would find that their “can’t live without” tool is not necessarily a tool that helps them accomplish the widest variety of tasks, but it’s incredibly important to their single, top-priority task.

Social media has more potential distractions than your inbox, and that can become a huge problem if you’re not taking a step back to analyze and optimize your social media work flow to be productive.

Take the time to see the forest for the trees, analyze how you’re using these tools, and make the most of it. Social media can be a double-edged sword, and it’s up to the user to determine how it all plays out.

Disclosure: Gist is a sponsor of Mashable

More Productivity Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Ways to Reduce Social Media Distractions and Be More Productive
- HOW TO: Improve B2B Sales Productivity with Social Media
- 5 iPhone Apps to Boost Productivity
- HOW TO: Give Your Inbox a Master Cleanse
- 4 Steps for Managing Social Media Attention

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, borisyankov

More About: business, facebook, friendfeed, linkedin, productivity, small business, social media, social networking, twitter, yammer

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Twitter has begun testing User Streams, a new Streaming API that will finally give Twitter desktop apps real-time capabilities and streams.

According to Twitter Developer Advocate Taylor Singletary, Users Streams is now in “a limited testing period for desktop clients.” This is the first time that the User Streams API has been in the wild since its launch at Twitter’s Chirp conference.

The Twitter Streaming API gives desktop apps the ability to auto-update with new events as soon as they happen. It covers not only real-time Twitter updates, but retweets, direct messages, mentions, favorites, following and search. We saw the demo of this feature at Chirp back in April, and it certainly made TweetDeck and other desktop apps a lot more useful.

The second part of Twitter’s announcement focuses on TweetDeck and Echofon: They will be the first apps to test the new User Streams feature. However, “more desktop applications will follow with their own testing period shortly,” Singletary said.

There was one more gem in the announcement, though: a new Streaming API product called Site Streams. It will give developers the ability to consume and serve multiple user streams simultaneously. The company says that there will be releasing more information on Site Streams soon.

Reviews: Echofon, TweetDeck, Twitter

More About: api, echofon, tweetdeck, twitter, User Streams

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Social recommendation service GetGlue has just announced a new partnership with HBO that will let fans of shows like True Blood, Entourage and Hung earn stickers and rewards when they check in to the programs using GetGlue’s new iPhone app.

GetGlue launched its new iPhone app [iTunes link] last month as a way for users to rate and recommend items on the go, as well as see their friends suggestions, but with the added social element of checkins. However, unlike traditional location-based checkin games, the GetGlue app has users check in to types of media — like TV shows, music, movies and books.

The new app really adds a new layer to the GetGlue service, which we’ve always praised for having a fantastic recommendation engine. Since the mobile app was released, GetGlue usage has skyrocketed, with more than 4.5 million ratings and checkins taking place across the network in just the past month.

GetGlue has a history of partnering with media brands with its Guru Giveaways, but with the new mobile app users can earn special content-specific stickers and also earn rewards. Basically this lets brands identify their most passionate users and rewards those users and fans with free stuff.

The partnership with HBO starts on Sunday, August 1 and stickers can be earned in a variety of ways. Some stickers can be won just by checking in to a show a few times, but other stickers will need to be unlocked. HBO will be offering hints as to how to unlock these stickers via its Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Check out the stickers for True Blood and Entourage:

What we love about GetGlue’s sticker program is that it’s not just about virtual stickers. Users will be able to order free physical copies of the stickers they earn from GetGlue.com. Offering a tangible reward really encourages continued use of the service.

Using Mobile to Reignite a Service

As mentioned previously, we’ve always been big fans of GetGlue’s recommendation engine, and we like that we can rate and comment on items across the web with the browser extensions; however, the service has sometimes felt too top heavy. What’s so brilliant about the iPhone app (Android and iPad apps are currently in the works right now) is that it makes using the service fast and easy, adds a new dimension of usability (earning stickers and rewards), and also makes it easy to see recommendations and what your friends are getting hooked on while on-the-go.

Brand tie-ins also now make a lot more sense to us. It’s easy to pull out your phone and check in to a show before watching it on TV or a movie before you enter the theater. That makes rating the type of content you consume away from the standard web browser much more feasible, thus giving the semantic recommendation engine that much more useful information.

Have you used the GetGlue iPhone app? What do you think?

Reviews: Android, Facebook, Twitter

More About: getglue, hbo, iphone apps, recommendation engine, semantic web, true blood

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Facebook has begun the rollout of a new feature, Facebook Questions, which will allow users to get answers to their queries from the entire Facebook community.

Similar in concept to Yahoo! Answers, Quora and Mahalo, Facebook Questions gives users the opportunity to ask questions just by clicking the “Ask Question” button on the homepage. Questions is also available on friends’ profiles just as you would post on someone’s wall.

We first learned of Facebook’s Q&A feature two months ago, when the company started asking for volunteers to beta test the product. The world’s largest social network even went so far as to promise beta testers a trip to Facebook’s offices to meet with the Q&A team.

I had the chance earlier today to discuss the new feature with several Facebook employees. Questions has several defining features:

• Photo questions: For example, if you take a picture of a bird, but don’t know what species it is, you can post the picture on Facebook Questions and get your answer.
• Polling: If you’re simply looking for the answer to Which city is better: Chicago or Dallas?, you can get your answer by creating a poll.
• Tagging: The company seems to be placing a lot of emphasis on tagging questions based on category or topic. The goal seems to be to make Q&A discovery an easier and faster process by making it simple to look up questions on cooking, photography, San Francisco or a variety of other topics.
• Topic exploration: Facebook described this as a roulette-type feature that allows users to browse Facebook’s eventual mountain of Q&A. Under the “Questions about” drop-down menu, there’s a feature called “Everything” that allows users to browse the company’s catalog of questions.
• Following: You can follow specific questions for updates and new answers.
• Updated homepage: Facebook Questions does actually change the homepage, adding a new bar at the top of the page where you can choose to update your status, ask a question, add photos, or post a link.

There was one more thing that Facebook made clear to me: Facebook Questions is not an advertising product. While brands with Facebook Pages will eventually be able to answer questions, it’s not meant to be a promotional platform; it’s meant to be a useful and insightful product for users.

Facebook Questions will roll out to a limited group of beta testers today, but the company promises to “bring this product to all of you as quickly as we can.” The entire feature is public, so we don’t suggest posting those awkward bedroom questions on Facebook.

Will Facebook Questions prove to be more useful than Quora or even Twitter as a Q&A platform? We think so, if only because it the biggest advantage of them all: 500 million users.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

More About: breaking, facebook, Facebook Questions, trending

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More women than men across the world visit social networking sites and spend 30% more time per month using them.

As such, in the “Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet” report, comScore concludes that women are the digital mainstream, a group of savvy Internet explorers who are more engaged than their male counterparts, and are the primary drivers of online and group buying.

comScore analyzed the Internet behaviors of women everywhere and found that while women make up a little less than half of the global online population (46%), their online behaviors drastically distinguish them from male Internet users.

The detailed report, available for download, delves into everything from women’s entertainment predilections (they really like puzzle games) to search behaviors, mobile preferences to video-viewing activities (they watch a lot of YouTube). What follows is a closer examination of their social media and online retail activities.

Women and Social Media

On average, women spend more time online per month, 24.8 hours compared to 22.9 hours for men. But, when it comes to the social web, there’s an even bigger rift between the sexes.

“Nearly 56 percent of adult women say they use the Internet to stay in touch with people, compared to 46 percent of adult men,” according to the report. comScore pinpoints higher activity levels in social categories such as social networking, instant messenger and e-mail.

Those behaviors equate to women spending an average of 16.3% of their online time per month on social networks, a percentage that continues to rise month-to-month. Men spend just 11.7% of their time on the same activities.

Interestingly enough, comScore identifies middle-aged women, 45 plus, as the group most responsible for growth in social networking site usage. Fifteen to 24-year-olds, however, are the heaviest users and have the greatest reach. When it comes to Facebook in particular, the younger crowd use that site more than 350 minutes per month on average. That data seems to line up with an Oxygen Media study showing that more than a third of young women check Facebook first thing in the morning.

In terms of country breakdowns, 9 out of 10 North American women visit social networking sites, making them the group with the highest reach. Latin American and European women are practically equals in this category, with 83.6% and 83.4% social networking participation respectively.

Women and Twitter

comScore found that Twitter’s reach is only marginally higher among women than among men. Women also outpace men in the adoption of Twitter, but only marginally as well.

The slight differences between the sexes doesn’t accurately highlight the actual disparity in how the two sexes use the microblogging platform.

In a U.S. consumer survey conducted in April 2010, comScore asked men and women how they use Twitter. Responses demonstrate that women use Twitter more for finding deals, following celebrities and their own self-defined purposes than to post tweets or read tweets from the people they follow.

Women and Retail

Men and women visit retail sites in practically equal amounts, but women spend 20% more time on those sites. That time equates to more money spent in most retail categories, as women buy more frequently than men do.

Women spend significantly more money on apparel and accessories, with their dollars accounting for 71% of all dollars spent in that category in the U.S. for February. They also spend more on books and music, toys, and even video games and consoles.

comScore concludes that women are also driving growth on group-buying sites. They compromise a majority of the U.S. audiences on both Groupon (62%) and LivingSocial (67%). Women also make up 67% of the visitors to Gilt Groupe’s flash sale site.

What do you find particularly interesting about the findings?

[img credit: TheSeafarer]

More About: ComScore, facebook, social media, study, twitter, women

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Everyone should know at least one woman who can code her way out of a wet paper bag.

While women developers, computer programmers and hackers of all stripes are by far outnumbered by men in their field, they’re hardly nonexistent. They blog, they tweet, and they do fantastic work to keep the Internet afloat. We’ve chosen to highlight 15 reader-recommended tech women here; if you know of others who should be on our radar — specifically women with coding skills — please do let us know about them in the comments section.

Some of the women on our list are “Internet famous.” Some, less so — for now at least. Some have worked at big tech companies like Google and Apple and Adobe. Some are startup employees or fly solo. Some are hardcore hackers, some are web design-focused. We’ve even got a hardware geek on our list.

With a big hat-tip to all our friends on Twitter who recommended these women, here are 15 technically skilled women (in no particular order) to follow.

1. Pamela Fox

Pamela Fox is a graduate from the University of Southern California Computer Science Department, where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees with minors in 3D animation and linguistics. She lives in Sydney, Australia and works for Google as a Wave API Developer Advocate.

2. Jeri Ellsworth

This woman is a self-taught computer chip designer and expert electrical and mechanical engineer. She taught herself to program as a kid by reading Commodore 64 manuals. Ellsworth lives in Oregon, works as a consultant, and has a serious penchant for pinball machines, of which she owns 60 or so.

3. Emily Chang

Emily Chang lives in San Francisco and works at Ideacodes, a web dev/design shop she co-founded with husband Max Kiesler. She’s a nationally recognized expert in user experience and interaction design. In addition to her Twitter account, we also recommend her personal blog.

4. Hilary Mason

This data-loving lady is a computer science professor with a thing for machine learning. Mason does research at Johnson & Wales University and also works as a scientist for Bit.ly. She occasionally posts code on her personal website.

5. Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is the Wikimedia Foundation’s CTO. She’s also a huge open-source advocate; in fact, she’s affectionately known as “The Open Source Diva” in certain circles. She worked for the Peace Corps, on the floor of a stock exchange, and even at a law firm before making the move to tech, where she began at Apple in 1991.

6. Leah Culver

Leah Culver is a software engineer specializing in web apps and Django development. In 2007, she co-founded Pownce, a social networking site, and sold it in late 2008. These days, she’s a freelancer in San Francisco, where she cranks out applications and speaks on a number of topics relevant to web devs and designers. Culver is also an open-source advocate; we recommend checking out her blog.

7. Amanda Wixted

Amanda Wixted is a game programmer and an iPhone tech lead at Zynga. In fact, she’s the one responsible for FarmVille for iPhone. Before she went to Zynga, she was a lead programmer for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man for iPhone. And how’s this for street cred: Each of the iPhone games Wixted has worked on has been in the Top 10 Free Apps in the App Store.

8. Sarah Allen

Sarah Allen has helped to develop such products as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video and OpenLaszlo, a development framework for web apps. Formerly an employee at Apple, Adobe and Macromedia (pre-dotcom crash), she now acts as CTO of mobile startup Mightyverse, does some consulting on the side, and reaches out to women in the Ruby on Rails developer community. You can keep up with Allen’s goings-on via her blog.

9. Jenn Lukas

Jenn Lukas says she loves three things in life: Coffee, kittens and XHTML. Judging from her website, we’d guess that unicorns are a close fourth. She’s done web design projects for such big names as ESPN, Johns Hopkins University, United Healthcare, ABC Sports and Microsoft. Lukas lives in Philadelphia and works at Happy Cog, a web design and UX consultancy.

10. Nicole Sullivan

As a performance engineer and international evangelist for Yahoo, Nicole Sullivan does as much communication and research as she does actual app building. She’s an engaging, readable, and regular blogger, and a CSS expert to boot. Sullivan lives in Menlo Park, California.

11. Laura Thomson

Laura Thomson is an “Internet engineer,” a self-applied job title we don’t see thrown around too often. But given her position as a senior software engineer at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, we can’t argue with the description. She’s a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) advocate, and she wrote the book on PHP and MySQL web development. She’s an Australian who lives in Maryland.

12. Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer was one of the first 20 engineers at Google; in fact, she was hired in the same month that Google got its first round of funding. Currently, she’s the company’s VP of search product and user experience, which means she basically green-lights every product that gets released to the general public, including Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps and many other apps and features.

13. Sara Chipps

This software developer is one of the minds behind Girl Develop IT, a low-cost program for women who want to learn how to code. Chipps posts regularly on her personal blog, including code samples, and she’s particularly skilled in .NET development. She lives in New Jersey and works on contract.

14. Alison Gianotto

Alison Gianotto has been blogging for 15 years, give or take — that means she started out before blogging was called “blogging.” She co-authored a few books on PHP/MySQL, too. Gianotto is currently working in New York City as the director of information architecture at a creative agency.

15. Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani is a programmer, but she’s perhaps best-known for founding Lifehacker, a blog that we at Mashable like to read, ourselves. She tapered off her Lifehacker leadership in January 2009 and recently wrote a thorough guide to Google Wave. She’s currently developing ThinkTank, a web-based platform for crowdsourcing insights via social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. Trapani resides in San Diego, California.

BONUS: Women Developer Lists on Twitter

Fifteen geeky, nerdy, technically talented women not enough for you? Check out these Twitter Lists of women developers and engineers:

• Terri Oda’s Technical Women
• Anita Borg Institute’s Women to Follow
• Grace Hopper Celebration’s 2010 Speakers
• Nicole Sullivan’s Grrl Geeks
• Jolie O’Dell’s Coding With Ovaries
• @DevChix’s Dev Chix

Series supported by Rackspace

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[img credit: johncarney, briansolis, 4nton, adactio, allaboutgeorge]

Reviews: App Store, Australia, Facebook, Firefox, Gmail, Google, Google Earth, Google Maps, Internet, Lifehacker, Mashable, PHP, Twitter, Yahoo!, adobe AIR, bit.ly, blogger, iPhone

More About: designers, developers, female, gender, hackers, programmers, technology, web development series, women

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The Microsoft Mac team has posted the first in a series of videos that show off some of the new features in Microsoft Office for Mac 2011.

The next version of Office for Mac, which includes the valiant return of Outlook for Mac, is due out by the end of the year. The Mac Office team has been posting about some of the new features and some of the changes to the interface.

This Mac release is a big deal because it will finally put the Mac and Windows versions of Office on more equal footing. In addition to bringing back Outlook (no tears will be shed over the death of Entourage), the next version of Office for Mac will include the ribbon interface first introduced in Office 2007. Although Office for Mac 2008 had some of these elements, the next version will really take things a step further.

Additionally, some of the newest features from Office 2010 — like conversation view for Outlook — will be coming to the Mac version. Even better, the new database system for Outlook for Mac will be compatible with both Time Machine and Spotlight. This is actually a pretty big deal because one of the problems with Entourage is that it doesn’t work well with Time Machine.

You can check out the video of the Office for Mac team explaining some of these new changes below:

Reviews: Windows

More About: mac, mac software, microsoft office, office for mac, software

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When Apple released Safari 5 earlier this summer, one of the new features included the ability to (finally!) install third-party extensions; today the company has released Safari 5.0.1 and, with it, an official extension gallery.

The Safari extensions gallery includes extensions built by Twitter, MLB.com, Bing, eBay, Amazon and more. Developers have also submitted their own creations to Apple over the last few weeks and the best and brightest are now available for one-click installs.

To install a new extension, all you need to do is click on the “install now” button under an extensions description. You can access the official Safari Extensions Gallery by clicking on the Safari menu (or File, for Windows users) and selecting “Safari Extensions Gallery.”

That’s it. While waiting for the official solution to appear, other repositories like the newly revamped Pimp My Safari and SafariExtensions.Tumblr have cropped up as a way for developers and users to find some ways to improve their browsers.

The official gallery contains some of these same extensions, but it also has some brand new offerings like the Twitter for Safari extension. This extension lets you create a tweet that links directly to your current tab, and also includes real-time trends and information for every page you visit. You can also easily access Twitter Search directly from the toolbar.

We’re excited that Apple has finally given developers an official way to add to the browser without having to jump through hoops and use things like SIMBL. If many of the Safari extensions look similar to those made for Google Chrome, that’s because they have a lot in common. Chrome, which like Safari is also based on WebKit, also uses HTML, JavaScript and CSS to create its add-ons. The APIs themselves are different, but how they interact with content and how they are loaded into the browser is more similar.

While the ability to install extensions and plugins is one of the features that really made Firefox a must-have for web enthusiasts, over the years the strain and bloat of some of those plugins has hindered overall Firefox performance. Firefox’s Jetpack project, which allows developers to create add-ons for Firefox even if they have limited programming experience, is similar in that it is also lightweight and based on CSS/HTML.

Although Apple hasn’t made any announcements about the mobile extensibility of Safari Extensions, the fact that extensions are built in HTML and CSS means that it is at least conceivable that extension support could hit Mobile Safari. The ability to bring some of those tools to the iPhone or the iPad could really open up possibilities.

What do you think of the Safari Extensions gallery? Do you have any must-download favorites?

Reviews: Amazon.com, Chrome, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Twitter, Windows, eBay

More About: apple, mac, mac software, safari, safari extensions, web browsers

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