So I’ve just started Swipping. Yes, Swipping.

Launched this week, Swipp is a social platform that allows you to find out what the world thinks about anything at any given moment. Kind of like Yelp, Swipp is a rating system that provides you with an opportunity to provide your opinion on anything: from your thoughts about the U.S. Congress to Lady Gaga, from McDonald’s to that new restaurant you tried last week, it’s all fair game on Swipp.

The platform is structured around topics instead of people, however you can easily see what your friends are Swipping. Using the ‘explore’ feature on the dashboard, you can see what topics are trending now all over the world. Even better, and appealing to the data dork in me, you can expand each topic to view if your friends Swipped it, its current Swipp score, lifetime Swipp score, Swipp score by male/female and Swipp score throughout regions of the world.perbandingan smartphone

Once enough people start using it, I can see how Swipp could be another tool marketers use to take a temperature check of their companies’ brand or products across the social web. Right now, it’s just fun.

We are just over a week into 2013. Are you sticking to your New Year’s resolutions? Statistics tell us that 36 percent of us don’t make it past the first month, 54 percent past six months. With deflating numbers like that, it’s a wonder 45 percent of us even bother making them at all.

New Year’s resolutions have a long history. Some of the earliest known resolutions were made by the Romans as promises to their god, Janus, for whom the month of January had been named. Appropriately, Janus had two faces: one looked back to past for reflection, the other ahead toward the future.

Still, you would think we could break with tradition given our lackluster follow through. For many of us, however, a new year and its possibilities are too irresistible to ignore. A new year represents a blank canvas, a clean slate, an ‘out with the old, in with the new’ attitude that inspires us to do better and be better. Even artists and cultural icons are not immune to the promise a new year brings. The Atlantic compiled some interesting resolutions by notables here. The most popular for 2012 come as no surprise. You can review the usual suspects, in addition to statistics, here.

We hope that 2013 is a good one for you, wherever your resolutions and adventures take you.

New Year's Resolution generator by Monina Velarde

One of the biggest stories around the world last week was the fact that Facebook became a publicly traded company.  In making this move, there will be a lot of changes that will affect the company, as well as the user’s experience.  Here are a few of the changes below:watch film Spectral now

• Almost all privacy settings are being switched to “public”
• Facebook will have to make money, which means more ads
• Look for Facebook to start acquiring more technologies (Netflix, Spotify, etc) to feed its core business (giving people the power to share).
• Details of the large acquisitions – including the Instagram deal
• Less secrets from the company, including Mark Zuckerberg’s annual pay ($1.5 million in 2011)
• More transparency.  The company will have to report to the federal government agency: the SEC with three reports; one quarterly, one annually and one every three years

For the full story and more details regarding how transparent the company has to be, check out: http://mashable.com/2012/05/20/facebook-gone-public/

And for those of you who are thinking about jumping ship, or moving in a different social media direction, check out this great article on 7 social networks that could replace FB.

Wingsplay is a new company that incentivizes people to share marketers ads with their social networks.  In exchange for individuals sharing these ads and creating more buzz and driving sales and engagement for products and brands, Wingsplay will pay the user.  Wingsplay’s creator knows how heavily people rely on their friends, family and social networks for recommendations, so he believes that Wingsplay’s distribution model is the perfect way for brands to increase their reach, while providing a kick-back to regular individuals.  Wingsplay believes that they are not “spamming” social media, but creating a platform to drive more conversations.

Users are allowed to post four videos per week and will earn money per view.  But, Wingsplay doesn’t provide enough financial incentive to just share any video (and risk annoying your friends/followers, etc.).  For example, if users shared Major League Soccer’s promotion video for their April 14th game, they received 21 cents per view.

The site is still in beta and has done most of its testing with television show trailers (from NBC and Oxygen).  Through these beta tests the site has learned that the best use of this distribution model and technology may be for funny, gripping or out there advertisements, since those seem to get shared the most, create the largest buzz and provide the brands with the most engagement.

For more information, check out: http://mashable.com/2012/04/10/wingsplay/

We want to know what our readers think. Is this a good idea? Bad idea? Invasion of your social network?