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On May 25, Google released Google Correlate – and statistic nerds everywhere spent the weekend playing with it.

            Google Correlate is the math-nerd cousin of Google Trends. With Google Trends, you can input and compare any given websites or keywords and phrases. You can see spikes in search and web traffic, see where the most traffic is coming from geographically, and other details. But you’re not really working with any raw data and you certainly don’t need to know what r is.

            Google Correlate, however, is a more statistical analysis of keywords and trends – telling you the correlation between your keyword and other keywords based on either time or geography. You still don’t have to be a stats junkie, but it might help.

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A third party client for access Twitter is now becoming part of Twitter. Rumors have been surfacing for weeks that Tweetdeck was going to be purchased and now the rumors appear to be true. Unnamed sources at several technology/money websites including CNNMoney and The Next Web have reported the price will be near $40 million when the sale is finally announced. This price will include a combination of private stock and money.

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In some ways, technology can make it easier to control your finances.  However, some people fall into the tech trap and use whatever programs and applications that they come across to keep a tab on their finances. Unfortunately, new and cool does not necessarily mean useful and time saving.  Some programs and services offered by banks, credit card companies or third parties can actually make things more confusing and complicated.  Truly streamlining your banking process and gaining greater control over your finances and information about your finances requires a bit of planning and choosing those few programs, services and smart-phone applications that can work together to make your financial life easier.

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Apparently it seems that Comcast has blocked access to the PirateBay, which is a well known and still defiant bittorent site. There is a battle going on here but for the moment the rules regarding net neutrality still hold. Although as a writer this person does not submit to the iron hand of Comcast, many publications are free to make their strong statements. For example Doug Aamoth claims he is being actively denied as a Comcast subscriber. In Boston where he is located he can not get access to the site.

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Did you ever feel the need to tag the picture of a coke can which you are holding on your picnic on Facebook? It is now possible to tag the pictures as the social network allows tagging Pages in Facebook photos.

Starting from Wednesday, Pages for Brands & Products as well as People can now be tagged by the users in their Facebook photos.

Instead of the Page’s Wall, the tagged photos will be shown in the Photos tab of a Page, and a page can be tagged by anyone even if the user has not liked it. Photos from the tab can also be disallowed by page admins by going into Edit Page > Posting Options > and unchecking “Users can add photos.”

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In what is likely to cause increased doubts in the viability of cloud-based servers and systems, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) crashed last week. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. Which is to say, computer systems have crashed before. Web servers have gone down and web sites have become inaccessible. Email servers have gone down and customers have been without their electronic mail for extended periods of time as a result. In fact, in the days of network television (as in ONLY network television) broadcasters had their signal go out and the channel would go dark for a period of time. So the idea that a company might suffer an outage and we would lose signal for a time, that is not new.

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Social media has been transforming the internet and the way we communicate over the past few years. In the past, communication was limited between people far away, and the internet was reserved mostly for finding information. Finding a job has transformed right along with the onset of social media. Gone are the days when the best way to find a job was through the newspaper alone.

Facebook stores have really picked up over the last year and this is because more and more people are using the service and are prepared to part with their money on it. The big bonus of having your favorite brand on Facebook is that you can buy from them whilst talking to your friends and don’t even have to leave the social platform!

With this in mind here are some of the best and most popular Facebook stores currently on the web.

It’s not all fun and games in social media today. The original social media platform, MySpace, is hemorrhaging up to 10,000,000 visitors per month at the moment and News Corp, who bought the site 5 years ago for $580,000,000 are currently looking for a buyer.

The site, which in many ways taught its supersedents how not to do social media dropped web traffic from 73,000,000 to 63,000,000 between January and February this year. In a report released by comScore it was found that the social entertainment site cum social media platform cum social entertainment site again was experiencing about half the traffic it was a year ago.