Are you familiar with the huge headache that comes with trying to sell your house? Instead of taking some Ibuprofen, try using Pixloo instead. This company is designed to help both realtors and individuals sell houses by taking advantage of the internet and the recent explosion of social media. Signing up for Pixloo gives home sellers the opportunity to upload information, pictures, and videos of their home.  The site will then send everything to major online real estate sites like Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com, etc. free of charge. If

you want more than a free basic package (one tour and five exports) you can upgrade for a cost, but most can do it with the basic startup.  What is unique about Pixloo is that it is also connected to the social media sites.  Your information will appear on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube which helps your information reach a broader market.  It is so broad of a market that it even reaches worldwide, though most of the business is focused on the United States.

Pixloo is pleased with their current standing: they had 500 customers signed up even before the press released anything on the company.  One thing Pixloo understands is the importance of social and mobile media.  They plan to expand into the cell phone world by having a mobile support as well as sending text messages about new listings which will only make it easier to connect home buyers to home sellers.  This could change the entire outlook people have about selling their home.  The normally painful headache has turned into an easy relaxing task thanks to the help Pixloo provides by connecting homeowners with good realtors and the ability to figure out just how much your house is worth.  With the great amount of stress already in day to day life, you don’t need any more if you’re thinking about selling your house.  Pixloo can help.

After digging around Uncrate a little more, there were a couple neat features I found -

Uncrate followers have the ability to create their own Uncrate.com page to add products they’re interested in. I believe this is extremely helpful for frequent followers because many of the products on Uncrate are expensive, so this allows them to save products and buy them later when they’ve made it big.

I know this feature would be extremely beneficial to me. There are many times I see a product I want to buy but can’t afford it. If a product has a save button, I believe the chances of me going back to buy that product increase significantly; otherwise, I might forget all about it.

Another feature I liked on Uncrate.com was the VIDEOS tab. This tab is linked to another site called Devour.com, which sifts through the videos on YouTube to pick out the best ones.

I’ve been to Devour before, but I didn’t know it was connected to Uncrate. I thought this was very interesting. When you’re done looking at Uncrate, move on over to Devour to check out the latest and greatest videos.

Last week, Facebook and current CEO and creator Mark Zuckerberg made it official along with the SEC to have Facebook stocks be sold to the public. Though this maybe the most anticipated IPO (initial public offering)  in the history of the stock market, there is a lot of speculation of how this will affect Facebook. The stocks will most likely not be available to the public until May, but the $5 billion has been raised to allow Facebook to put their stocks up for purchasing.

Facebook already has huge popularity and has been one of the most successful businesses of the 21st century, so why the change? Mark Zuckerberg answers that question with this:

“There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, in a letter that accompanied the filing. “The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.”

Facebook already has 800 million users across the world (that is about 1/7 of the world’s population) and Zuckerberg wants to expand even more! The big issue with Facebook going public will be that advertising is going to be the main money maker for Facebook now. That means Facebook is going to have a more YouTube-ish look to it. This may not seem like a problem to us here in the US, but that is because most users of Facebook in America have personal computers, laptops or tablets; but, across the world the majority of users have mobile devices and advertising on mobile devices is much harder to accomplish and still have that social media effectiveness of Facebook that they have always had.

With that said, I personally see this as a very mature move for Facebook to go public. It is the right move for them, but it might have happened a little too late with the current stock market. Time will only tell how effective this move will be for the current leader of the Social Media Market.

What is this new Policy Shift?

Google recently announced that they are going to be eliminating a significant number of their privacy policies across their different services to make way for a single new privacy policy. This policy states that on March 1 of this year Google will begin integrating information from each of their different web services in order to develop a profile for each user. Google states that these profiles will be used to “tailor” search results and provide advertisements that each user will find more relevant. If you aren’t already worried about this policy, you should be.

Who Should Care and Why?

Just about everyone. Anyone who uses any form of Google web service (i.e. YouTube, Gmail, Google+, and Google’s search engine) and enjoys some level of privacy. The new policy becomes much more frightening in conjunction with the fourth privacy principle of the Google company philosophy:

People have different privacy concerns and needs. To best serve the full range of our users, Google strives to offer them meaningful and fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information. We believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are committed to building products that let users export their personal information to other services. We don’t sell users’ personal information.

This means that as of March 1, any online activity that you perform with some degree anonymity using one of Google’s services will be public knowledge that is associated with your name, your face, and your phone number. This should be particularly off-putting to android phone users whose real-time location, Google Wallet data, and much more will also be available.

The Take-Away Message?

So what can you do? Not much really. There’s no way to opt out of this debacle. If you plan on continuing to use Google’s web services, you’ll simply have to submit to these policies and the fact that all personal information you share or indicate with them being available to anyone who cares enough to know. Ultimately you’ll just need to reevaluate using Google’s services instead of their alternatives. Time to break out the pros & cons charts again!

Vimeo

Pros

• Beautiful interface for watching videos
• Use of menus at the top of the page is extremely useful
• Easy and quick to upload, even if your internet connection is slightly patchy.

Cons

• Less awareness / general audience
• Selection of videos on home page is less compact

Youtube

Pros

• Most well-known video platform online
• Large volume of videos on all different topics
• Easier to share videos with other platforms

Cons

• Recent upsurge in ‘censoring’ the music/sound of videos
• Quality of videos is diluted because of the large amount of content

Conclusion: Youtube is clearly the larger platform. On the other hand Vimeo gives off a more professional feel.

This social media youtube video gives everything you need to know about using social media in every aspect of your life. From personal, to small business, to big business. This video gives a good visual aid which I am not able to achieve just using blogging, so learn and start developing your social media skills.