Deciding which social platforms to focus on and which ones to abandon is a tough choice for businesses today. We take a look at the facts and help website owners make a good decision for 2013, besides: an informed choice will yield results that are directly proportional

These days it is so easy to get a presence online without breaking the bank or the need for very advanced technical skills. Thanks to the coding brilliance of hard core programmers, ordinary mortals like us can slap a website together in minutes

A few weeks ago Dick Costolo gave a talk at Michigan State University during which he promised that by December Twitter users would be able to download their tweets. ““By the end of the year I’ve already promised this, so the engineers – when I promised it publicly they’re already mad at me so they can keep being mad at me. Now, again, once again, I caveat this with the engineers who are actually doing the work don’t necessarily agree that they’ll be done by the end of the year, but we’ll just keep having that argument and we’ll see where we end up year-end,”

Twitter finally seems to be growing. After years of promise, the micro-blogging platform finally looks set to reach some of its goals—though some of the loftier ones are far off. Social media and game s has certainly been a huge hit this century.

Mitt Romney must be looking on with Amazement as the Pope fires up his Twitter account and begins his campaign to amass followers. The pontiff and his PR team unveiled the official Twitter profile for Pope Benedict XVI on Monday and barely a day after going live the devoted faithful have logged on and started following.

Twitter users who are keen on storing their activity on Twitter offline will be able to do so by the end of the year. This is the bold promise made recently by the company’s eccentric CEO, Dick Costolo who gave a talk at the University of Michigan. Costolo was speaking at the university’s Ford School of Public Policy and took the opportunity to highlight the role twitter may play in global communications and the continued democratization of information.

Social media needs as much proof of efficacy as possible given the inherent flaws in its way of operating and this isn’t lost on Twitter who has just revealed the findings of a study detailing how brands can benefit from using the platform. The study was conducted in conjunction with Compete.com, the popular marketing and competitor analytics platform and looked specifically at how exposure on Twitter affects retail purchases by its users

Innocent Israeli and Palestinian websites are affected: You couldn’t make it up if you tried; what has started as small scale use of social media and the internet to propagandize a conflict has now become a full scale cyber war. Israel and its defense force have been stepping up its blow-by-blow coverage on Hamas, while the latter party has also taken to Twitter to show that it is no technophobe.