Lower than expected usage rates have forced NASA to decommission its three-year-old social networking website Spacebook. NASA plans to shut the site down on June 1 and archive all user accounts and content uploaded to the website, according to an internal email sent to employees last month. “When Spacebook came, we were on the initial cusp, but with Facebook and MySpace…the marketplace is a far more challenging space,” Sasi Pillay, NASA’s chief technology officer for information technology, said during a telework event inWashington. “Even getting some tools adopted internally is hard.” NASA launched Spacebook in June 2009 to facilitate collaboration…
Browsing: social networking
This fall, the federal government is going to launch a new social networking site called FedSpace. This site is intended to be a kind of Facebook for federal employees and allow them to collaborate through blogs, wikis and other forms of social networking. What do you think about this plan? How would you use a fed-focused social networking site? Would it make it easier for you to collaborate across agency lines? What kind of dangers or pitfalls might come with an official social networking program? Also, how have you used social networking tools in the past to do your job? Are…
Slate.com is running a remarkable series this week on the hunt for Saddam Hussein, and how enterprising soldiers used their passion for social networking theory to track down the fugitive Iraqi dictator. According to Slate, the US Army didn’t start making progress on the mission until they stopped looking for the high-ranking Ba’ath party bureaucrats on the infamous deck of cards and started hunting for cousins, in-laws, and fishing buddies of the people who were hiding Hussein: The reason social network diagrams are essential to counterinsurgency, [Army interrogator Staff Sgt. Eric] Maddox says, is that they help you predict what will…
The Army is at the forefront of social networking, offering Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages to connect the public with soldiers in uniform. And while the military enjoys broad support online — the Army’s Facebook page has 173,000 fans — that doesn’t mean it’s immune from inappropriate posts from those who take issue with the military or politics. Policing racist, sexist or harassing comments is important to maintaining the military’s integrity, but deleting too many comments may make users suspicious of censorship, said Staff Sgt. Josh Salmons, emerging media coordinator at Fort Meade’s Defense Information School during a Feb. 24…