Today, when we open Google.co.za we don’t see the usual Google banner but the S.R. Crown Hall which is the main building of the College of Architecture, Planning and Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Behinde the glass front we see the Google characters in its typical colours blue, red, yellow and green.
The Crown Hall was designed by famous german architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and was built between 1954 and 1956. The building is counted among the most significant buildings of modern architecture and one of the main works of Mies who would have turned 126 today. The architect died on August 17th of 1969.
Although we are living in the 21st century, the bloody and horrifying “work” of brutal poachers is leaving its traces in South African game reserves and recent estimates have shown that by 2015 all rhinos will be wiped out of their natural habitat if people do not start reacting on the increasing number of criminal and hideous poaching acts.
The latest case from the 2nd of March 2012 concerns two rhinos, Themba and Thandiswa, who were left to death with their de-horned bodies in the Eastern Cape Kariega Game Reserve.
Luckily, the two of them were found still alive by veterinarian Dr William Folds who fights for their live since then and sets an example: since the two rhinos have been found, the eager veterinarian uses facebook as a platform to inform and educate others about the misery and struggle of the rhinos and to update a large community about the treatment and progress of their health.
At the moment Google Plus is only available for private persons. As more and more business owners create private Google+ accounts for their brand, Google now asks them to wait until business pages will be officially launched.
In this context Google Product Manager Christian Oestlien approached business owners and asked them not yet to create profiles for their company or brand. At the moment Google only targets private persons and features for business pages are still in development, Oestlien says. Google will start to test these features with selected companies. If you are interested you can apply for the test of business features here. Google already has started to delete profiles which were not connected to real persons.
In May 2011, Facebook “only” counted 3.797.180 users in South Africa. But this doesn’t mean that FB users deleted their accounts. If we talk of “users” we always mean “active users” who logged in to Facebook at least once within the last 30 days. We don’t know the exact reason why in May 100.000 less users logged in than in April. Most probably people in South Africa rather enjoyed the last warm days at the beach and on their surfboard than spending their time surfing on the web
But finally we can tell that Facebook South Africa has more than 4 million active users:
User numbers increased by almost 300.000 over the May-July period, pushing the country’s total user base to 4.095.280.
Pixable, an US based startup that offers sleek social photo creation and categorization tools for Facebook, recently created an infographic which shows what happens when people upload photos to Facebook. Pixable states that more than six billion photos are uploaded to Facebook every month and that this number will further increase.
The infographic describes the life cycle of a photo from its birth to his death on the digital image cemetery:
Social media becomes more and more important. Most big beauty brands already have jumped on the bandwagon and have leveraged social media to engage with customers and prospects and build worthwhile relationships. But how do they integrate their social media strategy into their marketing mix?
First of all you need to ask yourself what your overall aims and objectives are! On her blog Jenni gives a few ideas on how social media can help to meet these aims and maximise activity:
Once again Twitter offends the sensibilities of developers of third-party applications such as Twitpic, yFrog and others with the announcement to launch its own built in image sharing service.
“We need to remove the friction from adding photos to Twitter,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said.
Costolo also announced that users of the new service “will own their pictures” what means that they will keep the copyright for their uploaded images. Twitpic just changed it’s terms and conditions and now has the possibility to sell their users’ images in cooperation with the english image agency WENN.
We already analysed South Africa’s most popular cities by looking at the number of fans on different city fan pages. Today we want to look into the official Facebook user numbers by South African cities.
It turns out that Johannesburg has the largest number of active Facebook users with more than 816.000 users logging in to Facebook at least once a month. Cape Town is second, Pretoria third. These three cities have almost the same numbers of active users and unify most of South African total user numbers.
Durban ends on the 4th place with 189.360 users and P.E. on the 5th place with 64.360 users. Check out the Top 15 of South African Cities using Facebook:
