Posted by randfish

One of the people I admire and respect most in the technology, startup world is Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson. A little more than a year ago, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Fred in his New York offices, just as SEOmoz was ending a failed fund raising attempt. The writer I'd come to know and love through his blog and tweets shone through

To mark the 83rd annual Academy Awards on Sunday, Google is allowing users to take a virtual tour of the event via its earth service.

 The Google Lat Long Blog explains. “Take a virtual tour of the Kodak Theatre in Google Earth -- as if you're actually there! It includes the red carpet, paparazzi and even the Oscar statues.”

“If you’d like to take your own trip on the red carpet in Google Earth, download a 3D model of the Red Carpet, Hollywood and Highland Center, and the Kodak Theatre.”

Users can also view Oscar Search trends, see which nominees are being searched and read real-time news articles.

I'm not sure which came first, the idea that social media is killing blogs or social media is killing email. Both arguments are brought up every so often, and both are equally ludicrous if you ask me. Earlier this week, we examined the former, and interestingly enough, the latter was also brought up by recent data from comScore and the Pew Internet Project. 

Actually, it was The Discovery Channel, who looked at the data and asked, "Is email dead?" 

Is Email dying at the hands of social networks and texting? Tell us what you think.

"Overall, when you look at how many teens have ever sent an e-mail, it's most of them, so it's still being used," said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist with the Pew Internet Project. "It just isn't used for communicating with people you're primarily communicating with in your life, namely your friends, and it's absolutely true that text messaging and messaging through social networks has supplanted e-mail messaging to friends."

People might turn more and more to social networks for casual conversations, link sharing, and things like that, but call me when your banking and all your professional communicating are done through Facebook. In fact, call me when you receive notifications from all the social media sites you participate on are sent to your Facebook account (unless you count Facebook's new email service). The jury's still out on Facebook's new messaging system, but let's not forget, it launched with Facebook.com email addresses. 

Is mobile killing email? Not so much. Recent data, also from comScore finds that mobile email usage is seeing significant growth. 

Email will continue to evolve, but it's not going away - at least not in the foreseeable future. If social media's going to kill email, it's going to have to do a lot better than what it does so far. 

If anything, social (along with mobile) is helping email. 

Facebook announced today that it has started a new version of its privacy policy to make it easier to understand. I could've swore they did that before, but now they're going even further. This one is relying on user feedback before the company even considers implementing it. Facebook says if users like it, they'll consider making it the official policy. 

This is an "attempt on what a privacy policy written for you could look like," Facebok says. 

"It's important to note that this draft is outside of even our regular process of notice and comment," the company said in a note. "Because we're tackling a challenge that matters to so many people -- and doing it in a way that is so different from what we've done before --  we’re giving you a look even earlier in the process. If people like what we have, we’ll put it through our regular notice and comment process at a later date."

"Finally, we've tried not to change the substance of the policy but, in our effort to simplify, we have added some new things that were elsewhere on the site (like our help center) and have made some other concepts clearer," the noted added. 

Facebook says the new policy should be easy to understand, visual and interactive, and should focus on questions people are most likely to ask. 



The company says it plans on "more innovations" with regards to privacy in the coming months, but would not get into specifics.