This post provides an annotated bibliography of some work on using social media (in particular Facebook) as a pre-registration/pre-university/induction tool. The references given can also be found at my Delicious site. Some examples of the use of Facebook for induction purposes are given at the end.
The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET. The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays. Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period. Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.
Until recently no one had taken it upon themselves to do concentrated, outsider examination of the News Feed - Top News versus Most Recent (both are filtered) - to see what's going on. Tom Weber staged a one-month experiment to unpack the algorithm, and came out with 10 of Facebook's secrets - and if you're crafty, a way to game the News Feed to ensure that you come up more often than others.
In Activity Streams, verbs are their own objects, and the variety of actions that can be represented is limited only by the standard itself. Providers can also use verbs outside the standard, taking the chance that they'll eventually be incorporated, or that a downstream client could parse them anyway. Here's a list of the verbs incorporated in the Activity Streams standard so far:
"Socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote." And that's why we don't want to run a University-wide Tornado server
A US study (http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx) has indicated that younger internet users are losing interest in blogging and switching to shorter and more mobile forms of communication. The number of 12 to 17-year-olds in the US who blog has halved to 14% since 2006, according to a survey for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.