Soraya Darabi is the founder of social networking food site Foodspotting. The site lets you find and upload specific dishes as opposed to restaurants. Foodspotting allows you to take a picture of the dish you’re eating and upload it to the website as well as giving you a chance to find some interesting dishes when visiting someplace new.

Soraya seeks her success through social media as shown by her career to date.

Soraya founded Foodspotting less than a year ago (at the time of writing), in December 2009 and has seen rapid growth on the website. The site is one that can only get better, as the more people join the more enriched range of foods and locations will be available. Foodspotting is great for casual and passionate users and has a twitter style follow option as well as a points system.

Prior to Foodspotting a 23 year old Darabi found herself with a job at The NY Times where she implemented social media integration for The NY times including a presence on Facebook and Twitter. Her social media prowess led her to winning first prize at the INMA Awards for excellence in marketing.

This determined young entrepreneur is pushing the way forward for other young female entrepreneurs, “We need more young women starting companies” she says, and with over half a million followers on twitter there are plenty of people listening.

Soraya was given the accolade of 53rd place in the top 100 most creative people in business 2010 list. She is the social media queen and always seems to know where the social media trends are, why?

“I get information from my peers,” Darabi says simply.

The carbon footprint of Twitter users is set to be dramatically reduced after the social networking site began integrating a simple “retweet” button to save users having to exert the extra energy necessary to type the letters “RT”.

Retweeting is when users can share interesting tweets made by people they follow, with their own following, using the syntax RT.

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Staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year, a report has said.

Over half of those surveyed admitted using social networking sites during the working day for personal use.

On average those people spent 40 minutes per week on these sites.

IT services group Morse, who commissioned the research, said that such online behaviour clearly had a “productivity strain” on firms.

The survey questioned 1,460 office workers.

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Twitter is working on a way to automate its retweet process to enable smoother and more comprehensive access to information across the popular micro-blogging site, according to a new blog posting.

Biz Stone, co-founder of the site, wrote yesterday that the firm intends to “formalise” the process of retweeting so that users do not need to manually copy and paste tweets to share them with their own followers.
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“Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be,” he wrote.

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TwitVid.com , lets iPhone 3GS owners post videos they’ve taken directly from the device.

Users can record a new video, or choose from an existing one in their libraries. It also features a handy upload bar to let you know how far the video has to go before it’s done. The big twist is that TwitVid’s got some technology running on its end that lets your followers start watching the clip before it’s even done uploading.

Has anyone tried it yet?

According to reports from Reuters, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, are in no hurry to let go of Myspace. The group bought the networking site for $580 million in 2005. However it has since then faced strong competition from other networking alternatives such as Facebook and of course twitter which is speedily becoming more popular. The News Corp chief executive has however warned against investing in twitter.

“Be careful of investing here,” he said of Twitter. it seems the site has yet to show serious ways in which it could bring profits for investors.

When speaking on Facebook he stated “Facebook is like a directory, How they make money is another matter.” The opinions of many investors may differ though, as Speculation at the 27th Sun Valley conference were still running rampant over which company might want to buy Twitter.

The service, which lets people post to Web what they are thinking or doing in 140 characters or less, is growing in popularity. While Myspace in recent months has had to cut jobs in both the United States and abroad, it is deemed that figures reaching around 30 per cent of the Myspace international staff have been laid off. Murdoch’s confidence however could prove enough to sustain the venture.

Reported by Michael Adeyemi

Australia are to use two most popular social networking site in warning people about bushfires, especially resident of towns in victoria state where 173 people were killed from the devasting incident where they said they had no warning of the attack.

Victorian state premier John Brumby says social networking sites on the internet will help to improve advice to households.

“We’ll be providing more information to the community, like Twitter and Facebook – alternative means of communication to get the information out to the public,” Mr Brumby said.

“So that they’ve got better information from a variety of sources and if they need to make a judgement to go early, they will go and they will go early,” he added.

Facebook will be allowing its members to set and adjust their privacy settings for any piece of content they post on the site.

The changes follow the recent announcement of new settings for publishing content that allow you to choose to post items that everyone, not just your friends, can see. Many see both moves in part as Facebook’s attempt to blunt the rapid rise of microblogging service Twitter.

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Check on facebook’s Blog for more info

Mark in the video talks about the new facebook office, How technology is changing the way messages are being sent around with facebook, twitter and blogs…
He also talks about the competition facebook faces from competitors such as: Twitter, and friendfeed.

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