Social Media Round-up of the Week – 4th April

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top five:

1. Google has launched its +1 button, aimed at allowing internet users the option of recommending sites, products and services to their nearest and dearest. The new feature, which is being hailed by some as the next step in social search, has been likened to the ‘like’ button on Facebook. Third party websites will also be able to embed the button.

2. Facebook has removed a controversial Intifada page that called for the killing of Jews. The page, which managed to attract the support of over 340,000 fans before it was removed, was highlighted when Israeli public diplomacy minister Yuli Edelstein wrote to Facebook urging the page be closed on the grounds of incitement.

3. Mozilla has announced that there have already been more than 50 million downloads of its new browser – Firefox 4 – equilvalent to about 2000 downloads per minute. According to Net Applications, about 3.6% of all Windows 7 users were running the IE9 web browser, just slightly ahead of Firefox 4 with 2.8%.

4. Facebook has scrapped its old approach to mobile phone social networking and has launched a brand new mobile web experience that can be used on any device. “Every time we launched a new feature, we had to build it multiple times across different code bases: once for facebook.com, then again for m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com, and in native applications as well. Honestly, we weren’t very good at doing this, so certain features were missing on different devices,” said Facebook product designer Lee Bryon.

5. With the rise and rise of mobile devices, it’s understandable that more and more money is directed towards mobile marketing and advertising. More than 1 billion of the world’s 4 billion mobile phones are now smartphones, which offers a massive opportunity for marketers and advertisers alike (see right).

Don’t forget – if you see anything that really impresses you, why not let us know by emailing on social@umpf.co.uk and perhaps your suggestion will make the cut next week.