What We are Reading: Social Media

Round out your professional reading with these suggestions, contributed by members of the Federal Social Media Community of Practice. Today, we have 8 headlines to share.

Mashable: Designing for the Hidden Dangers in Big Data - Use of sensitive information creates the potential for enormous risk.  If something goes wrong, it can spread in minutes on Twitter, Facebook and blogs, which reach all of a company’s critical audiences.

ReadWrite: California’s New Mobile App Privacy Guidelines Go Beyond The Law - California Attorney General Kamala Harris released a 22-page report on mobile privacy intended to strengthen user protection and regulation. The document specifically calls for readable privacy policies, transparency when it comes to alerting users if third party vendors collect their personal information, and an end to unnecessary data collection unless it is critical for the app to function.

TechPresident: The Library of Congress is Archiving 170 Billion Tweets — on Tape - When the Library of Congress teamed up with Twitter in 2010 to archive four years’ worth of activity on the microblogging platform, the aim was to preserve a slice of early-millennial life to future researchers. Now the two-hundred-year-old institution is grappling with the resulting 133 terabytes of data, a bundle that includes every 140-character message sent out from Twitter’s six-year-history, from its inception in spring 2006 to December 2012.

Mashable: 5 Trends Entrepreneurs Will See in 2013 - Entrepreneurs are in for some big changes in 2013. That’s the prediction of Ingrid Vanderveldt, Dell’s “entrepreneur in residence” who works with the Dell Center for Entrepreneurs. Here are the rest of Vanderveldt’s predictions for this year.

Harvard Business Review: How Deloitte Made Learning a Game - By using gamification principles, Deloitte has seen use of its Deloitte Leadership Academy (DLA) training program increase. Participants, who are spending increased amounts of time on the site and completing programs in increasing numbers, show almost addictive behavior. Since the integration of gamification in to Deloitte Leadership Academy, there has been a 37 percent increase in the number of users returning to the site each week.

ReadWrite: New Twitter Search Capabilities Will Rule Breaking News - Twitter Tuesday announced new search capabilities that give it the upper hand as a breaking news destination over basically every other news organization on the planet, from newspapers to cable networks to websites and everything in between. When a new search begins to trend on Twitter, Twitter’s new API will send the query to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, where humans will categorize it to help make it more relevant to readers. Then Twitter can populate its Discover section with live, topical streams of news.

ReadWrite: Innovating The Email Inbox – Without Deleting All -  Progressive designers at AOL have come up with an innovative email client, called Alto.  Alto allows you to quickly create “stacks” for certain emails, click on “snooze” for others and connect your social media.

Holy Kaw!: How organizations structure social media teams [infographic] - Most companies have jumped on the social media bandwagon, but business owners out there might still be wondering exactly how their colleagues across the board are organizing this particular branch of their business. Go-Gulf.com has the inside scoop on how much staff is devoted to this task, how it’s being used and what companies are looking for in a social media expert to provide a peek behind the curtain.