Social Media

Now, you never have to compromise your privacy or security again by giving out your real phone number to someone you're thinking of dating. Better yet, if it doesn't go well, you don't have to respond to their texts, either, thanks to an app and a bot that make dating in the 21st century safer and easier. (VIDEO)

Do you know what your kids are up to when they're online or using their smart devices? Do you really know? An app for proactive parenting allows users to monitor their kids for risky or dangerous behavior without having to keep them under lock and key. It even shows you deleted texts and images they're posting. Find out what it's called and what social media platforms it covers.

Need help getting dressed for that big date or job interview and not sure what to wear? No problem! A new app called Posh Peep gives you feedback from social media users turned fashion critics on the spot. Save yourself from embarrassing fashion faux pas and find out more about how it works and which social media platform is connected to it.

A 'write-in candidate is a contender in an election whose name does not appear on the ballot, but for whom U.S. voters have the right to vote for nonetheless. To do so, all they need to do is write in his or her name on a ballot. While these type of candidates rarely win, they often attract sizable followings from groups or organizations they are affiliated with.

Office pools for lottery drawings have been around for almost 100 years. According to a Wikipedia entry: 'the betting pools' concept was first introduced by Littlewoods, a retail and betting commpany in England (1923) and was developed initially for football matches.

Why would anyone be concerned enough to want to predict what happens to a small social network with only 4.7 million followers? Shouldn’t we focus on that which is the largest in the land? Shouldn’t we focus on the largest in the land? With over 1.6 billion users, surely folks would want to know the future of Facebook, no?

Someone has come out with a trip planning site that’s connected to Facebook but works more like Pinterest and Yelp, so you can gather all your travel planning tips in one place on one site.

'Tsuvians,' as they euphemistically like to call themselves — are a hearty lot. When they feel they have been wronged, this small band of social networkers appear much more sizable than they actually are. Seemingly outranked in comparison to Facebook’s 1.6 billion, Tsu founder Sebastian Sobczak’s 4 million users by social media standards is a meager number.

Kaoiro, the Japanese Kaomoji Stamper, allows users to stamp up to 2,000 different ASCII art facial expressions - emoji, in other words - on school assignments, work memos, divorce papers and more. Oxford Dictionaries has named "emoji" their Word of the Year for 2015 so don't get left behind the times!

Facebook enacted a ban on Tsu links back in October. It was an historic position to take, as it pitted a social media Goliath against a young ‘David’ upstart. The words ‘bullying,’ ‘censorship’ and a myriad number of other descriptors have been levied by by bloggers and thought leaders as a result.

The Facebook/Tsu controversy will go down in the annals of social media history as an epic case of a dominant social network bullying another. For those who are not aware what has transpired over the course of the last few weeks, all you have to do is Google search “Facebook Bans Tsu” or “Facebook Censors Tsu” to rifle through a plethora of articles and fan complaints cyberventilating their way across the blogosphere.

Do social media stars make the social network, or does the social network make the stars? If history is to be our road map, it would appear that the latter is the case. Yes, users have to be creative enough to use these ecosystems in innovative ways, but without the platform, these unknowns would have had a much tougher time reaching exponentially wide audiences in such a short period of time.

There’s a movement afoot in the Land of Tsu, the ecosystem many describe as the social network with a conscience. Only on the planet for one short year, this platform has not only scaled over 4 million users, but has also laid a solid foundation for motivating members to give to charities and other humanitarian efforts.

It’s an exciting time for the digerati to be traversing the social media landscape. For many who have tested the waters and drunk the cool-aid of the earlier pioneering networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, we are now witnessing others, which are eager to shake up old paradigms with some intriguing new business models. This month, we take a look at Klink, the newest to arrive on the social scene, after taking some cues . . .

Syrian’s civil war is one of the worst humanitarian disasters of our time. Nearly 12 million innocent civilians have been displaced thus far — escalating impact on neighboring countries such as Jordan.