Social WebCites/ Article review
Twitter is a social networking and microbloging service that enables its users to send and read text based posts of up to 140 characters and images. It allows quick sharing of information with people that you would not normally exchange emails with therefore opening up your circle of contacts to an ever growing community of like minded people. It is a great way to keep in touch with your friends and quickly broadcast information about where you are and what you’re up to (PR Talk). For business, Twitter can be used to broadcast your company’s latest news and blog posts, interact with your customers, or to enable easy internal collaboration and group communication.
The tweeter posts are displayed on the sender’s profile page, on the home pages of each of their followers and in the twitter public timeline.
Facebook is a social networking service and website where registered users create personal profiles, add other users as friends, and exchange messages and photos, including automatic notifications when they update their profile (Charan). Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists.
Users are able to search for friends and acquaintances by e-mail address, school, university, or just by typing in a name or location for search. When people become friends, they are able to see all of each others’ profiles including contact information. E-mail notifications let users know when new friends have chosen to add them to their list or when someone has sent a message to them within the system. Users have the option to allow only friends to see their pictures or anyone (PR Talk of the Nation). There is an unlimited amount of storage available, which is a major advantage of Facebook’s photograph sharing capabilities.
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site mainly used for professional networking. It allows registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship, called Connections. Users can invite anyone to become a connection. However, if the recipient of an invitation selects “I don’t know”, this counts against the person inviting them, and after five such “IDKs” a member cannot invite another to connect without first supplying their recipient mail address.
Once a list of connections has been established, it can be used to gain an introduction to someone a person wishes to know through a mutual contact, find jobs and employees etc (Cheran). The approach is gated in that contact with any professional requires either a preexisting relationship or the intervention of a contact of theirs as it is intended to build trust amongst the service users.
From the forgoing, though it appears that all services are for social networking and aim at connecting people, they seem to target different audiences or users and they go about it in sharply contrasting ways.
At the moment, Facebook is the leading service but Twitter is picking up at a very alarming rate. This has resulted in Facebook redesigning and adding more products to its users. Since Twitter is just but at its initial stages, it is not easy to guess which of the network services will succeed and which will fail. Both services have received a fair share of criticisms and facebook has promptly dealt with some of its criticisms e.g. regarding privacy.
However, it is likely that Facebook will succeed because it seems to offer all that Twitter is offering plus much more products. It is possible that the two network services will both succeed because most individuals on facebook are also using twitter.
As for LinkedIn, it is quite difficult to assume that it will remain in the market considering the limited products it offers to its users. Again, its target group can access similar products from the two competing services.
Twitter’s short term business model is focusing on improving the service’s infrastructure and not on its revenue so that the service does not keep getting overloaded. Its long term model is to have the service as a new paradigm for how people will find out about and respond to news in the future, with potential revenues to match.
Facebook’s business model is focused on revenue generation through local text advertisements, traditional banner advertisements sold on a national basis and sponsored groups.
LinkedIn’s basic memberships are free but it charges users on the fermium model for upgraded services like job advertisements, display and text advertisements and paid memberships.

References
Lacy S.The Coming Facebook-Twitter Collision. 2009. 28th September 2011 from
<http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc2009034_395864.htm>
PR Talk of the Nation.“’Ev’ And ‘Biz’ See Bright Future For Twitter” 2009.
<www.npr.org>
Charan S. The war of the Social Networking Giants (n.d)
<www.openzine.com/home>
MEMORANDUM
ABC Marketing Company
October 7, 2011
To: Simmons Simon, M.D
From: Joan Rachel
RE: E-Commerce policies prompted by the electronic signature
The world is in an epoch of change, perhaps, reechoing the saying, ‘it is only change that doesn’t change’. Thus, to keep up with the new change, organizations need to adapt for them to thrive. Organizations that make use of e-commerce, and our company falls in that category, need to implement effective strategies, for them to profit dearly from e-commerce.
To take advantage of potential trends societal setting, organizations need to scan the environmental vista by examining, assessing and spread appropriate deliberate factors. For an organization to be viable and successful, concurrently manage different correlations within its setting among them technological, political and legal and social factors. Technologically, the consumers have remarkably embraced the internet as a medium of buying both goods and services. Impulsively, so have a growing number of organizations made the internet a hub of commerce by creating avenues. Developments of cutting-edge hardware and software and to cap it all accessibility of broadband have favored extensive usage of internet. However, technology helps little in making business connections to other areas, thus hindering expansion in business.
E-commerce has been endorsed with the latest legislation in the commerce environment by authorizing both the application of electronic communication and electronic signatures via creation of contracts adhering to the law, a step that has alleviated the main obstructions in the e-commerce (E-Business, 2002). This law is applicable to every business deal in or involving overseas commerce and it is under the E-Signature Act. To avoid exploitation of such a golden opportunity various associations have been formed among them initiated by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) such as the Model Law on Electronic Commerce. With the exception of America and Canada, few other countries have embraced the law. Among the associations that have played a major role in enacting the laws on the e-commerce include but not limited to, the American Bar Association, International Chamber of Commerce and the European Parliament.
Under the E-SIGN, parties are not enforced that they must apply electronic signatures when they come into a contract. However, the E-SIGN does mandate them to do so, when using the electronic means as a medium of communication. The E-SIGN forbids the enforcement of these electronic signatures by nations. Meanwhile, there are laws that advance the laws, for example in the U.S., there a couple of them namely Uniform Electronic State Law (1999) and the aforementioned E-signature Act. The Uniform Electronic Transactions (UETA), aimed at eliminating the obstacles in e-commerce through the creation of documents signed both electronically and manually that it considered equivalent legally. These e-commerce laws prove the ever surging significance of e-commerce and internet that prompts business organizations redesign their company’s business model and esteem their customers and the role of the governments in ascertaining the subsistence of protection and parameters. Nonetheless, the will to form a contract using the electronic media lies in the parties contracting albeit under the scope of the laws put forward such as in exceptions of court orders and court meetings, and in some cases, when dealing with harmful substances.
As in for the managerial implications; both E-SIGN and UETA laws are supposed to be unbiased and to bring about different ways of doing the e-commerce. The laws don’t put out small organizations that would otherwise have not afforded the method. However, a moment may arise when “electronically negotiable instrument” may be needed. Fortunately, a “transferable document” can solve the barrier.
____________________________
Signed

Reference
E-Business, I. A. (2002). Electronic Signature Laws Reshape the Need for Organizational E-Commerce Strategies. Journal of E-Business , 1-8.