Have you heard of the term flash mobs, coined not too long ago in the US, to represent groups of people gathered at any public place to perform acts of entertainment? Well, such displays are becoming more and more commonplace with each passing day. Not that it would be too much of a problem if those gatherings were peaceful, but in some cases, the participants do get violent.

In August 2011, participants of a flash mob in Philadelphia were accused of beating up pedestrians and robbing them, forcing cops to deal with them. However, that was just a single situation. How can the police possibly keep up with the dozens of flash mobs that can be organized quickly and silently, using e-mail and social media websites? The answer is, well, using social media, of course. Simply by observing tweets and churning through Facebook updates posted by citizens of a particular region, police can accurately predict when a mob might gather. After that, all the cops have to do is to show up and make sure the participants do not violate laws and regulations applicable in the state.

Social media has been helping law enforcement officials perform their duties efficiently for quite some time now. In the coming days, the usefulness of this medium can only be expected to increase even further.



Citizens of Singapore have been known to remain more active on social media networks (like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube) than people of many other technologically advanced countries. However, the question remains – just how social media savvy are they? In a series of recent studies, some interesting facts and figures have been revealed, regarding the social media usage of Singaporeans. Here are just a few of those facts:

1. 82% Singaporeans using Internet have personal accounts on social media networks, and share photographs via those networks on a frequent basis.

2. There are more than 2.4 million Facebook users, who claim to be from Singapore.

3. More than 13% of Singapore citizens who browse the Internet on a regular basis visited Twitter in January 2011.

4. Citizens of Singapore have uploaded more than 250 million videos on various online multimedia sharing websites. The combined length of those videos would be more than 25 million hours.

These are just 4 of the facts about Singaporeans, who actively use various social media networks on a regular basis. The citizens of this Asian nation are among the most active social media users across the globe, and in the coming years, the world is pretty likely to witness major boosts to these statistics.

For all those of you who thought Google+ is just another social networking platform, there’s actually a lot more that you can do with this service. Besides communicating with your peers and business contacts, G+ gives you the option to integrate any existing Google Tools, which you were probably using, with the social media platform. So, there you go. For using Google’s latest offering to social media, you don’t need to familiarize yourself with any different set of tools or any such applications.

Integration between Google’s already-popular tools, Gmail, Google Docs, just to name a few, and G+ is seamless. With this feature, commercial entities do not need to change their way of conducting business. It’s more like, you keep doing what you have been doing till date, but results just seem to multiply manifold. As for social media enthusiasts outside the  commercial world, G+ comes as a gateway to more online engagement. Grouping contacts becomes easy if you use one or more Google Tools, and then there’s G+ Circles to make the entire process easier.

Will Google Tools and other productivity applications, required and used by us each day, get their own versions of G+? Well, this is something only biggies working in Google can answer. But the way things are poised, it looks like the G+ team will certainly roll out separate versions of tools and productivity applications powered by Google, sooner than what you may have anticipated. Now, here’s something coming straight from the officials at Google -

Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product for Google Apps, has said, “the demand for Plus to integrate with Google Apps is the single biggest bit of feedback we got.”

There you have it, all in a nutshell for you. Put on your thinking caps and start speculating.

And, of course, come back to us for more updates on G+!

Could cops be able to protect citizens better by using social media networks in their line of work? Well, it certainly seems like that, if the recent trends prevailing in the UK are any indication. As we all know, just a few days ago, London, and many other nearby cities were being torn apart by forces of armed rioters. That was when victims and concerned citizens found that using social media would allow them to get in touch with police quickly when necessary, and chose to use it in order to inform law enforcement officials about any act of hooliganism they survived, or even witnessed.

The result of the decision was that social media networks, particularly Twitter channels of many police stations showed a steep rise in the numbers of followers. In London only, the Twitter channel of the Metropolitan Police Force gained followers at 674% faster rates than usual. In the nearby Debfordshire, the rate was around 540%, which is another unbelievable spike!

Does this indicate that in near future, citizens might just be able to file FIR-s from the safety of their homes? Well, it might be a little too early to predict that, but the concept is nevertheless quite promising, don’t you think?